Game Changer

by Neal Shusterman

You know how some people see a stereotype, and just become it? The path is there, it’s wide, and it’s well trod. It’s easier to follow that path than to defy it. Some people follow that path all the way into the box that’s waiting for them at the end, where the sermon is rote and the flowers are plastic. And so it is and ever shall be, the quarterback and the cheerleader, in every school, in every town, now and forever, amen.

They say that misery loves company. That never rang true for me. But I do know that when you’re facing a vast unknown, company is the only thing that makes it bearable.

Did you know that “all-American” is often a code word for “white”? Leo had told me that. I didn’t believe it at the time; I thought it was just Leo being Leo—but I was now giving everything he had ever told me a whole lot more credibility. “Your ignorance is like a layer of stupid-ass sunscreen I gotta scrape off just to expose you to the light,” Leo had once told me.

It made me wonder how many important causes were crushed not by opposition, but by lukewarm support. And also by useless measures.

All I saw were people showing support. But he saw people who thought giving a thumbs-up to protesters was the full extent of their civic responsibility—as if acknowledging that Black lives mattered was all it took to clear their consciences. And later, when the news chose to focus on scenes of mayhem, and fires raging in every major city, I remember thinking, Is this what Leo wants? As if there weren’t a million choices between honking your horn and burning it all to the ground.

“I’d rather live in a world where hope’s alive but sick, than a world where it’s already in the morgue.”

ignorance is a cockroach you can’t kill no matter how hard you try. It hides in dark, fetid places, then darts out into the open.

“Disappointment isn’t about the things a person is,” my mom said. “It’s about the things they do.”

You might think your own personal apple has fallen far from the tree, but that tree has roots you don’t see until you trip over them.

Fallacy #4: Hindsight is twenty-twenty. False. There’s no truth in that at all. What you see in the rearview mirror of your life is never what actually happened. You’re just inventing explanations that let you sleep at night. Hindsight, at best, is Coke-bottle glasses, with lenses that distort everything. It’s why they say eyewitness accounts at crime scenes are the least accurate kinds of evidence. What you firmly believe you saw is rarely what you actually saw. In that way, we’re all creating our own realities.

We vilify the difference in others; we glorify the differences in ourselves. We put “them” in a box, then create our own boxes. To define ourselves so we don’t get defined. To find our tribe and defend it from the others. But that basic human need for identity is, and has always been, a double-edged sword. Because the closer to our feet we draw that line in the sand, the more we see everyone else as the enemy.