David McElroy

When John Lennon was 15 years old, the smart people in authority at his school didn’t see him as a world-changing artist.

The headmaster wrote this on Lennon’s report card that year: “He has too many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often misplaced.” (Click the graphic above to see a larger version.)

Although he was seen as intelligent, a science teacher wrote, “His work always lacks effort. He is content to ‘drift’ instead of using his abilities.”

In math, he missed the final exam and the teacher wrote, “He is certainly on the road to failure if this goes on.”

His teachers clearly didn’t think much of him. By the accepted standards of the world, he was heading toward failure. Surely he would become a nobody — because he refused to fit into the box that the world was trying to push him into.

Because of his work with the Beatles, though, Lennon turned out to be a pivotal cultural figure of the 1960s. He will be remembered long after everyone has forgotten those experts who judged him.

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It’s one thing to read articles over and over about police harassing innocent people for taking photos in public. It’s quite another to experience it yourself and have an angry cop threaten to seize my camera, but that happened to me Saturday.

It’s all for the children, you know.

I was at the Buck Creek Festival in Helena, Ala., taking photos on a freelance assignment from a newspaper. The managing editor of the paper had asked me to get “candid shots, photos of kids enjoying the event’s attractions, etc.” In other words, it was very typical photography for a public event. It wasn’t a big deal.

After I’d been shooting a little more than an hour, a police lieutenant from the Helena Police Department approached me. He said that he had received reports that I was taking pictures, including pictures of children. Considering the fact that I’d been walking around with my Canon T3i for the past hour — openly taking pictures and talking to random people — it’s clear that this wasn’t exactly something I was trying to hide.

I acknowledged it and asked what the problem was.

(In recounting the narrative from here, I am reconstructing it to the best of my memory’s ability, but since I didn’t take notes or record it, the details might be jumbled or out of order, mostly because I was rattled by the incident. The essence of the narrative is correct, though.)

The cop said he had gotten four reports that I had been taking pictures — including pictures of kids. He said he hadn’t done anything about it the first three times it was reported, but he had a duty now to find out what I was doing and “send you on your way.”

I asked why that was and what law I was supposed to have broken. He couldn’t answer that, but he didn’t like me asking. I told him that I was shooting pictures for a newspaper and I told him which one. That shouldn’t have mattered, because public photography is perfectly legal whether you’re a newspaper employee or just shooting pictures for yourself.

It was about this point that he threatened to seize my camera.

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If you drop a leaf into a moving creek, the leaf will be carried from place to place downstream by the water. The leaf has no will of its own and no input about where it goes or what happens to it.

It’s pure chance about which leaves will be crushed or destroyed quickly and which might make it for hundreds of miles before breaking apart.

Life is the same way for most people.

They’re dropped into the stream of life and have no real thoughts of their own about where they’re going or what they’re doing. They simply act as others around them act, waiting for fate to carry them to a destiny and then to death.

It’s a very easy and peaceful way to live, but it’s meaningless and random. Becoming self-aware enough to know that you don’t have to be a passive leaf in the stream of life is a struggle, but even getting to that point makes your life far more difficult, because it’s the beginning of something much harder.

If you become aware that you don’t have to gently float to whatever fate random chance has in store for you, you’re forced to either panic from that realization or else start fighting to change your course.

The simple realization that you have choices doesn’t necessarily give you understanding of what the choices are or what your life means. You’ve just awakened enough to know how desperate your situation is and then you have to start figuring out how the entire ecosystem of the stream works at the same time you also try to teach yourself to think and to act.

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