Question?????

I've been asking questions since I could talk. I thought everybody did. I thought that was why we were here. My sense of the curious has carried me on many a journey of the mind. One thing leads to another to another to another. 'Why this? What about that?' and my favorite...."Yes, but...". It's gotten me into trouble a few times: with school teachers, with Sunday School teachers, with authority figures in general. It's no accident that even as a teacher myself, I drove an old VW bug to school in the 80's that had a 'Question Authority' bumper sticker on the back. Maybe I am like the Elephant Child of the Rudyard Kipling story. But here is the sad part, the part that almost broke my heart. I thought everyone was like this. I thought everyone was born with a yearning to seek, to question, to understand the universe and why we are here. Boy, was I naive! There was a distinct moment in the early 90's when I shared an office with three other teachers at my high school. As is my nature, I was free-associating in a James Joyce kind of way, so I asked some typical question I usually do. Not anything deep but more in the nature of: "I wonder who the first person was who decided to pluck a mushroom and eat it. Did they die if it was poisonous or did they decide they should saute it and put it in an omelette?" Now you would think that a fellow teacher would love it that someone was curious in this way, but instead this person looked at me incredulously and said "You are so so weird. Who thinks of things like that?"  Then all my childhood memories came flooding back of other children ridiculing me for being different. I don't think the word 'nerd' had been invented then so basically it was my introduction to being criticized for thinking too much. As Steve Martin expressed so eloquently back in his early comedy years; "Well, excuse me!" I will continue to ask questions until the day I die. I will never accept anything based on hearsay or popular opinion. I will never mouth slogans and cheap shots from politicians. I will never state a 'fact' without researching it first. I will never accept any religious dogma or government edict without long soul searching. I will read and read and read and never let my brain grow lazy. Why??? Because.........
(TV reference: I remember a 'Simpson's episode where Lisa Simpson, the brains of the family, asked a very pointed question in class and the teacher surreptitiously reached behind her desk and pushed the "Independent Thought" Button to alert the administrators she had a problem. Funny in a sad-but-true-way in our teach-to-the-test-world.)