The Day the Future Walked Into Our High School

How a smooth speech, a quiet teacher, and forty years changed what I thought value meant.

______________________

Luck doesn't announce itself. You notice it later. That may be the only difference between lucky and not.

This is a story about a few of the moments I found mine. And what they added up to.

Before the Gym

In 1968, I was staying with a friend and his wife in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. He was an independent reporter. That night he told me to stay home. Too dangerous. I didn't know what was happening outside. I didn't know history was being made a few miles south while I sat in their apartment. He came home bloody, skull cracked.

Chicago 1968 was the moment a generation discovered the system had limits on how much it would tolerate being challenged. The whole country watched. I was there and didn't see it. My friend brought it back with him.

The Gym

General Electric sent Ronald Reagan to speak at my suburban high school.

We packed the gym. Bleachers full, sound bright, that particular electricity a crowd gets when it senses something important is about to happen. He didn't arrive like a politician. He arrived like a promise. Smooth. Certain. The edges of the world sounded clean when he talked. He had that rare skill of making the future feel simple — like it was already decided and all you had to do was step into it.

And I felt the pull.

Not manipulation. Not a trick. Genuine excitement. The adult world arriving to tell you it's going to be okay. That everything adds up. That there's a place for you in what's coming.

I applauded. I meant it.

That's the part people miss when they tell stories like this later. I wasn't fooled. I was included. The room was being invited into a narrative, and it felt good to be invited. It felt like belonging. It felt like relief.

For a moment, I could imagine a life where everything makes sense.

The Classroom After

I walked into the next room still warm from the gym.

The air was different. Smaller. Four walls. Chalk dust. Desks. The ordinary world again. But I was carrying something — a glow. A sense of having touched the future.

Dr. Dickhouse asked what we thought of the speech.

The room answered the way a room answers after a good speech. Animated. Positive. Still inside it. Still grateful for the feeling of certainty.

Then he opened the hood.

Not mocking. Not angry. No performance. Just quiet and precise, like a mechanic who respects machines enough to tell you what they really do. He started showing the working parts behind the beautiful surface. The assumptions. The hidden levers. The places where the story turns into a rule without announcing itself.

And something shifted.

Not dramatically. Not like a movie. More like a key turning. A small internal click that changed what the same words sounded like.

Two things landed before the moment closed.

One: not everyone had this. Same day. Same school. Same speech. Most students walked out with the glow and kept it. I walked out with the glow and then walked into the warning. That isn't virtue. That's luck.

Two: this wasn't cynicism. This was care. Dickhouse wasn't shrinking my horizon. He was protecting my mind while still letting me dream. He was the same man who had looked me in the eye and told me to think big. He gave me the horizon and the warning, and both were acts of love.

I left that room changed. Not because I rejected the future. Because I learned something rare.

A story can be beautiful and still carry a mechanism. Once you see the mechanism, you can't unsee it.

The Textbooks

Years later, it happened again. Not in a gym. Not with applause.

It happened in a quieter room, with fluorescent lights and a syllabus. Colorado State. Business Administration. The future wasn't delivered by a speaker this time. It was delivered by paper. By what counted as serious. By what got printed and assigned and tested.

Textbooks don't argue with you. They don't persuade you with charm. They sit there and announce, without raising their voice: this is how the world works.

I noticed the swap. The center of the story moved from society to the market.

Keynes faded. Friedman arrived. The market stopped being a tool and became a verdict.

Not announced as ideology. Presented as common sense.

And because it was school — because I wanted to learn, because smart people around me were treating it as neutral — it carried a special authority. The authority of the printed page. The authority of the test.

I didn't have a counter-argument yet. I didn't even have the full language. But I recognized the temperature change.

The same internal click I'd felt with Dickhouse happened again, just quieter.

A society doesn't only get shaped by laws and leaders. It gets shaped by what the next generation is taught to treat as reality. And once an idea becomes reality in the classroom, it doesn't need to call itself an idea anymore.

It can simply run.

The Conversion

It didn't happen like a betrayal. It happened like a drift.

I knew people from those years. Not abstractions. People I'd shared meals with, stood beside, felt the same urgency with. People whose frustration with the way things were organized felt as real and grounded as anything I'd ever witnessed.

And then, slowly, they weren't frustrated anymore. They were winning.

Not all of them. Not in the same way. But enough that the pattern became impossible to ignore. I'm not naming names. I'm naming a pattern.

The blue jeans stayed. The language of independence stayed. But the operating system underneath had quietly swapped. The market became the new arena, and they learned its rules the way serious people learn serious things — completely, fluently, without apology.

I don't say this with contempt. I say it with recognition. Because the system didn't crush them. It recruited them. It found the ambition inside the rebellion and gave it somewhere profitable to go. And once you're winning, the rearview mirror gets harder to look at. Not because you're dishonest. Because forward is where the energy is.

That's the conversion. Not from good to bad. From we to me. From belonging to advantage. From moral fire to market skill.

The rebel uniform, blue jeans and army coats, the look of someone who couldn't be bought, got absorbed. First acceptable. Then fashionable. Then profitable. The outside still said independence. The inside quietly learned a new religion: performance, competition, position.

A system doesn't only survive by crushing what resists it. Sometimes it survives by recruiting the resistance, rewarding it, and letting it forget what it was resisting in the first place.

The room is still the same country. But the rules have been swapped.

The Handoff

That swap is what I've come to call the handoff.

It's like someone changed the gravity in the room.

The center of gravity moves, quietly, without a vote, without an announcement, from shared responsibility to private survival. The market stops being a tool we use and becomes the judge we serve. Winning starts sounding like virtue. Falling behind starts sounding like personal failure.

And because it isn't named, it's hard to fight. You can feel its consequences everywhere, but they arrive as separate events. A job lost here. A town hollowed out there. A family under pressure. A public service that degrades. A person quietly blaming themselves for forces bigger than any one person.

The handoff is how a whole culture can change its story while still using the same words.

Freedom. Responsibility. Opportunity.

Same words. Different gravity.

Once you see that, you start noticing where the handoff is hiding in plain sight. In the slogans. In the common sense. In the way people learn to judge themselves. In the way they stop expecting to be held and start expecting to be measured.

And in the way they learn to call that normal.

Why I Started Designing Cormunity

I didn't start with a political position. I started with a design problem.

If a culture can quietly hand off its center of gravity like that, the individual gets left holding the weight alone. Self-worth becomes conditional. You're valued when you win. You're invisible when you don't. And when the rules are hidden, you don't even know what you're being judged by. You only know the feeling: pressure, comparison, and the private suspicion that something is wrong with you.

Something in me refused that as a foundation for a human life.

That's when Cormunity began in me — not as politics, not as theory, but as a simple reversal. What if a community could be structured with a clear duty to safeguard the individual's self-worth, the way institutions claim to safeguard assets? What if the point of the structure was to protect becoming, not reward domination? What if value included what markets tend to erase: care, presence, creativity, teaching, repair, and the quiet labor of holding each other up?

Later, Manifestinction became the larger mythic language for the same concern — what consciousness loses when worth gets reduced.

I didn't have all the pieces then. I still don't. But I had the direction.

Dickhouse gave me the horizon and the warning. The handoff showed me what was being lost. Cormunity began as an attempt to build a container where that loss wouldn't be inevitable — where a person's worth didn't depend on whether the story running through the culture happened to include them.

The Close

I'm not writing this to win an argument. I'm not writing it to relitigate the past or assign blame to people whose drift I watched and sometimes understood from the inside.

I'm writing it as a witness. One person, looking back, trying to name a pattern that's still running.

Because the tools have changed. We're in a new wave now: systems deciding things people can't see or appeal. But the feeling hasn't changed. Invisible rules. Silent doors. And the old reflex of self-blame when the system won't explain itself.

The handoff is still happening. It just has new clothes.

What I learned from Dickhouse, from the gym, from the long arc of watching a generation's energy get converted into market position, is this: the story you're handed is not the only story. But you have to be lucky enough to be in the right room when someone opens the hood.

Cormunity is an attempt to build that room deliberately. To make the luck structural. To create a container where a person's worth is protected before the story gets to them.

A culture can be redesigned without announcing it. A culture can also be redesigned on purpose.

That's the whole thing.

Take what helps. Leave the rest.

For decades, Campbell Auer made art at The Railroad Ranch Studio. Now he makes words.