How I Learned to Distrust Authority Figures

Cecelia, Deborah and Jennifer Holland, 1954, Metuchen New Jerey

It was 1956. Atom bomb tests and Elvis twerks shocked the western world. I watched both on our black and white television set. I was nine years old trying to make sense of the world.  

I heard a yelp of agony, ran out the front door of my antebellum house in the borough of Metuchen, New Jersey, to find a dog dying in the street, hit by a car which had sped off, never stopping. I was outraged. I felt helpless and very sad. How could an adult be so heartless? 

Not long before my new little fluffy puppy named Kathy had gone missing. I was very worried. She’d followed my father, briefcase in hand, as he walked to the train station to get to work at 30 Rockefeller Center in the City. “I couldn’t miss the train so he couldn’t bring Kathy home.” he’d later tell me matter of factly. Instead, my father had thrown a rock at her to make her go home. All this I found out when my father returned from work. Kathy was gone. I was upset, frustrated, angry and powerless but I had to suck it up. There was no consoling me. No remorse expressed. No help making sense of my feelings. It was the 50s. To my father, emotions were a sign of weakness.

So when the dog was hit by the car, I was already learning that adults didn’t care about animals’ safety. So I went to the top writing a letter to President Eisenhower. I was pretty sure our president would understand that this heartless act was an injustice. His job was to make a law to punish adults who were reckless in their actions. That was the point I made in the letter. 

President Eisenhower, of course, did not write back. 

The decade that followed saw an accumulation of events when adults’ in charge consistently disappointed me.  I developed a distrust for authority figures and a rigid view of law and order. However, I had also found these negative role models were useful, actively looking to see what I could learn from observation. What not to do, how not to be.

This ultimately made me into an independent thinker.