Getting something off my chest: Why we can't stop warring and being control-freaks, reason #2

I'm talking to heterosexual men now, because that's what I am. If we aren't initiated, we succumb to respecting elders who don't deserve our respect. We want to please them and this makes it that much harder to ever step into our personal power. If we fall under the shadow of uninitiated men then we deny ourselves the chance of finding someone who can actually help expedite our individuation.

(1969) I remember when brother Dave and I were walking down the hall of our high school together. It was the last day of school, (for me), a half day, and I was cleaning out my locker. Dave, who had graduated two years ahead of me, was there for some reason. Not sure why, but there we were, feeling kind of cocky and giddy and out of his room on the right at the end of the hall, steps Mr M, who taught both of us Social Studies. We were about to exit the hall through a side exit that was coming up, and this teacher, shouts out, "You two think you're different from us, but you're going to turn out just the same as the rest of us." At the time I was shocked. He was laying down a challenge to everything I stood for. (I knew in my gut that I would never be anything like him!) I remember feeling a surge of a new feeling. It was like this teacher's rebuke. turned on a switch in me that I didn't know was there. I was about to face off with the draft. I didn't know it at the time but, within 5 months I would be on the Navaho Reservation, in the desert, and this same teacher would be writing me a letter asking "OK hero, what do you need?" He was offering to send used books to Navaho Community college where I was volunteering. My response to him (by letter) was, "Navahos like new books." I was no longer really in his world. He had his chance to influence the man I was becoming and now that I was in the world, he had become tiny. It was time for him to learn from me. Within 3 months I was a card carrying conscientious objector, and no longer a boy.