Sin in the Lost City

All those people in the book were Catholics, except for the suburbanites. The way I remember the Catholics was they believed what they were told to believe. If the priest said it was wrong, then it was wrong, ipso facto case closed. It would never have occurred to them to question the priest's judgment, or even to look in the Bible to see if they got a different interpretation than the priest had gotten out of a particular passage. It was easier to get forgiveness than permission anyway. It was no big deal, just go to Confession, say a bunch of Hail Mary's, and they were free to go out and sin again so they would have something to confess next week.

With the Protestant suburbanites, it was the same only different. They didn't use the word "sin" much but, to them, anything that they did differently than their neighbors was wrong. It would never have occurred to them that their neighbors might be wrong, or even to look around and see if people in other neighborhoods had different moral values. They weren't so concerned with forgiveness because they just didn't do anything "wrong" in the first place or, if they did, they didn't tell anybody about it.

I'm with you on the part about accepting responsibility, though.

I never paid much attention to the right side of my report card where all the checks went. I never had any checks on mine except for my stupid year, and then I don't remember what they were for. I seem to remember that most people got checks for talking out of turn or being otherwise disruptive in class. I don't think there was even a category for that, but they must have made it fit in one of the other categories.

I think I said previously that, when I got out of the army, I was disappointed to discover that real life was like the army in some ways, but I don't think I could say that about school. As I remember it, school was nothing like real life at all, which is one reason I didn't re-enlist for another four years of it. Looking back on it, I'm sure that I learned stuff in school that was useful later in life, but I never saw anything like the school culture until I went to work for the Cheboygan schools decades later. When I was subbing for one of the custodians at the high school, I saw a list of classroom rules on the wall. One of the rules was "Keep your hands, feet, and comments to yourself." I understood the "hands and feet" part because it was a constant battle trying to get those kids to keep their hands and other body parts off each other, but I thought the "comments" part was ironic because the sign on the door said this was a public speaking class. I think I know what was meant, and I suppose all the students did too, but only in school would you ever see something like that posted on the wall.