There is a specific kind of shock that isn't loud. It doesn't announce itself. It moves through you quietly, like something cold dropping through water, and by the time you know it has happened, your understanding of the world has already shifted and will never quite shift back. I have felt that shock twice in my life before the age of eighteen, and both times it was a classroom that delivered it.
The first time I was seven years old, sitting at a wooden desk in a second-grade classroom approximately half a mile from McChord MAC (Military Airlift Command) Air Force Base in Parkland, a suburb south of Tacoma, Washington, being told that the desk itself would protect me from a nuclear bomb.
Think, 1950s "Duck and Cover" nonsense.
The second time I was seventeen, spring 1973, sitting in civics class taught by one of the finest teachers I would ever encounter, being told that the political party that wins an election gets to redraw the voting map to help itself win the next one.
Both times, the institution I was sitting inside told me something that was factually untenable. Both times, the adult at the front of the room had no real counter-argument. And both times, I walked out of that room carrying something I had not brought in: the knowledge that the systems I had been raised to trust were capable of something worse than corruption. They were capable of requiring everyone to look directly at the corruption and agree to call it normal.
I want to tell you about Eleanor Wotton. Because she is the reason I am thinking about all of this today.
Mrs. Wotton taught social studies, civics, and world problems at Lincoln High School in Tacoma. I had her for world problems in the first half of the 1972-73 school year and for civics in the second half. She was energetic in the way that only genuinely smart and curious people are, not performed enthusiasm, not the theatrical brightness some teachers deploy to keep rooms from going catatonic, but the real thing: a woman who found the world actually interesting and could not entirely conceal her impatience when she suspected you might too.
She was also not an ordinary social studies teacher in her background.
Somewhere in the years before I knew her, likely the late 1960s, she had worked in some capacity with Chiang Kai-shek, likely in Taiwan where he had lived already for two decades. Chiang, who had lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan with the remnants of his Nationalist government, was by then presiding over the Republic of China from Taipei while the mainland burned under the Cultural Revolution.
Mao, that regretful bloated monument to self-worship, had by the mid-1960s decided he was less a leader than a cosmological force, enshrining his own thoughts in "Mao's Little Red Book" and distributing it to a nation he was simultaneously destroying, purging intellectuals, crushing dissent, setting China back a generation in the name of raising up "The People."
The people, as usual in such arrangements, being the last to benefit and the first to suffer. Sound familiar?
It has the distinct smell of something we recognize today. The cult of singular infallibility. The little book replaced by a social media feed. The intellectuals replaced by scientists, journalists, judges. The enemies of the people rebranded but performing the same function. Mao thought he was a god.
Trumpism doesn't bother with the theology. It just acts like one.
Not at a remove, not through some academic intermediary, but directly, as part of a commission or advisory group, developing curriculum and programming around world politics and international civics. I did not know this when I sat in her Civics class. I pieced some of it together later from things she said and from what happened the spring of 1973.
My girlfriend at the time and I bought her a poster as an end-of-year gift. It was a photograph of Chiang Kai-shek, smiling broadly, giving what appeared to be the peace sign (likely he intended as a "V" for victory, novelty popularized by some company in a poster). That same two-fingered V that our generation had made the universal emblem of the antiwar movement. For us it was a little irreverent, a little funny, a little affectionate. We found it somewhere, maybe at the Tacoma Mall and thought she would get a kick out of it. We did not fully understand what we were handing her. But she loved it. She was very proud of her work with him and the group that had brought them together. She said that group had developed a game to help teach issues of relevant issues to enhance the world's understanding of our all living in the world together.
A useful point of reference, though not necessarily the model for what Wotton and her commission developed: Risk, the global strategy board game that became a fixture in American households, was invented in 1957 by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, better known for the classic short film The Red Balloon.
Originally titled La Conquête du Monde, The Conquest of the World, it was designed to distill the mechanics of global conflict into something a family could play at a kitchen table, strategic enough to reward thinking, simple enough to hinge on a dice roll. What Lamorisse understood, and what made Risk endure, was that the abstraction of world power into game mechanics didn't trivialize geopolitics.
It made geopolitics legible. A teacher developing curriculum around world politics in the late 1960s, working within the orbit of a government-in-exile watching the mainland convulse under the Cultural Revolution, would have had every reason to think along similar lines: if you want students to understand how nations compete, how alliances form and fracture, how territory translates to power, make them play it out. The game is the lesson.
Other games of the era explored similar terrain: the board game Diplomacy, created in 1954 by Allan Calhamer and famously played by President Kennedy, replaced dice with negotiation and alliance-making to simulate the mechanics of great power competition; and Harold Guetzkow's Inter-Nation Simulation, developed at Northwestern University and published as a classroom kit in 1966, placed students directly in the roles of decision-makers for fictional nations navigating the full architecture of geopolitical conflict. Neither are what Wotton helped develop, but both speak to the moment: the late 1960s belief that if you wanted students to understand how the world actually worked, you made them play it out.
The following year, when I went back to visit her at Lincoln in her classroom, she proudly opened her closet door. There on the inside of the door was Chiang's smiling face, gesturing, right where she would see it every single time she reached for anything in that closet. She was proud of it in a way that was not small.
She had kept her poster, privately, not as classroom decoration but as something personal. That image, for her, was not a joke. It was layered. It was the man she had worked with, refracted through the exact cultural moment her students were living inside. Two teenagers who had handed her something that connected those two worlds without knowing it, and she had understood that immediately and treasured it.
That tells you who she was.
I had a somewhat troubled school life in my K-12 years, where high school was better but still problematic. I had noticed three teachers I considered our brightest and many did. It was those three who saw me differently and took their time to guide me in ways few other had ever done. Mrs. Van Arnum in 6th grade at Horace Mann Elementary school comes to mind. Mr. Selfors in Mechanical Drawing in 9th grade at Stewart Junior High, was another.
The Watergate hearings had been unfolding across the months of our Civics class, and Mrs. Wotton could barely contain herself. She told us we were living through a genuinely historic moment in American civic life, that the mechanisms of democratic accountability were operating in real time, teachable time, visibly, on television, and that we would be watching.
So we watched, in class, on a television she brought in. She folded it into our civics curriculum. This is how it works. This is what the system does when it tries to correct itself. Pay attention.
She was right about that. The hearings were extraordinary. And the belief she was modeling for us, that the system could and would self-correct when sufficiently pressed, was not naive. It was historically grounded.
Nixon eventually resigned. The process worked, in its grinding, painful, imperfect way.
But there was something else in her curriculum that worked differently on me. Something that did not resolve.
The Gerrymandering lesson arrived the way the best lessons do: not as a lecture but as a fact dropped into the room that I could not leave alone.
Mrs. Wotton explained the mechanics of it. The party in power after a census gets to redraw the congressional and state legislative districts. They can configure those districts to concentrate opposing voters into as few districts as possible, or to spread them across many districts so they never constitute a majority in any of them. The result is a map that looks like a democracy and functions like a lock.
I remember absorbing this. I remember the specific quality of the silence in my own head as the implications assembled themselves. I'm seventeen. Not particularly interested in caring about anything. And yet something in me will not let this go.
I raised my hand and said, "So wait. The party that wins gets to redraw the map to make it easier for themselves to win again?"
She said, "Yes, that's essentially correct."
I said, "But that's ridiculous. How's that a balanced democracy? That's...cheating."
She did not argue. She said it has always been that way.
I said it shouldn't be. That should be ended...right now.
She looked at me for a moment with an expression I have never entirely stopped thinking about. It was not the expression of a teacher who has heard a student say something incorrect. It was something closer to the expression of someone who has just heard something they already knew spoken out loud by someone who had no reason to protect themselves from it.
She agreed with me. She said it was a fair point. And then, gently, with the practiced accommodation of someone who has made a long peace with maddening facts, she moved us on.
I sat there stunned, trying to catch up, to move along with the class.
No one else in the room seemed particularly troubled. My girlfriend, who was smart, either got it in the moment or we worked through it together later. Because I couldn't let it go. The other kids heard it, processed it, and filed it somewhere in the category of things that are unfortunate but are just...there. Mrs. Wotton's acknowledgment that it had always been this way was enough permission to let it rest.
For me it was not enough.
I spent the rest of that class period only partially present, my seventeen-year-old brain turning the thing over and over. The winning party redraws the map. The winning party redraws the map. I kept expecting to find the angle at which this became acceptable, the principle I was missing that explained why this was actually fine, and I could not find it. Because it isn't there. The logic is exactly as stupid as it looks to a seventeen-year-old who doesn't know enough yet to have learned to look away.
This mental explosion had happened before. The nuclear bomb drill was ten years earlier, 1962, second grade, I was seven
The night before, my family had watched a television program about how nuclear weapons work. How the blast expands, sideways. How the heat travels. How the pressure wave moves outward at speeds no shelter of wood or brick or flesh could meaningfully interrupt within the relevant radius.
Ironically the next morning, we had a bomb drill. The teacher told us: OK kids, alarm goes off, now carefully and quickly, get under your desks.
I got under my desk. And then, when she asked if there were questions, as we reseated ourselves, I said I had one.
We went back and forth. I said, this won't protect us. She asked why? She explained that the desk was protective to things falling from the ceiling. I said, but the bomb blast goes sideways and that's part of its destructive power. I explained that, as clearly as a seven-year-old can explain physics. We were also half a mile from McChord AFB. That the desk was made of wood. These facts did not coexist in any meaningful way with her premise. I explained what I had watched the night before, on TV. The definitive source back then.
Obviously flustered, she finally said, at a loss for words: "You're scaring the other children."
Ever noticed how close the word "scaring", "to scare", is...to "scarring", "to scar?"
I looked around. She was right.
Some of the kids, mostly girls, but some guys, had frightened faces. Others just seemed confused. So I stopped. I dropped it. I was frustrated. Something was wrong about all this. Not because she had answered me. Because I chose, at seven years old, to absorb the cost of the truth rather than make the other children pay it.
Our teacher was responsible for giving us incorrect information. I didn't think she knew the truth either, only realizing it when I stated it out loud, plainly, clearly. Then she had turned it onto me, I was now the one causing issues, scaring children. Scarring them, perhaps. But mostly I realized as I looked around the class, no, they weren't absorbing what I was trying to say, just...a few.
I walked out of that room that day knowing something I had not known when I walked in. The institution required participation in a fiction. This was something that decades later would become a joke and a shock to the nation when old videos of the rather ridiculous duck-and-cover public service announcements were rediscovered.
The adult in the room that day had no counter-argument.
The system, whatever system this was, the school, the teachers, the government behind the duck-and-cover program, had decided that the fiction was preferable to the truth, their only fast recourse, and expected everyone to cooperate.
I was seven. I did not have the vocabulary for what I was understanding. But the understanding was real and it was accurate and it has never left me.
Mrs. Wotton was one of three teachers in my entire K-12 education who saw me as something other than a problem. The others were my English teacher and my individualized reading teacher. Generally considered at our high school to be our three smartest teachers, our of however many teachers across my formative twelve years of school? Well, there were a few others over the years, but not many.
What I had in common with them, I think, was that I was not bored in their rooms. Not because the material was always easy or always thrilling, but because they were genuinely engaged with ideas, excited about them. And when you are genuinely engaged with ideas you are better at recognizing when someone else is, even when that someone else is wearing the mask of a disinterested seventeen-year-old who acts like he doesn't care.
The symmetry is not coincidental. The students those teachers noticed were the students noticing them. Mrs. Wotton did not miss the gerrymandering moment. She knew exactly what had happened in that exchange. She carried it, I believe, alongside the Chiang Kai-shek poster on the inside of her closet door, as something that had connected, that had meant something, in the way teaching rarely gets to mean something that visibly.
Now it is 2026, and I am listening to NPR, and there is a movement of people trying to do what I said should be done in 1973.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi on rising issue of gerrymandering
Nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Independent bodies, structurally removed from the party in power, using neutral geographic and demographic criteria to draw district maps. Not perfect. Nothing in politics is perfect. But meaningfully, structurally different from allowing the winners to design the game board for the next round.
It is working, in the states where it has been implemented. California, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona have all moved in this direction to varying degrees and with varying results, but the underlying principle is sound and the data supports it.
This, is not a healthy drawn district map. That red tri-formed district on the left, is toxic. Disingenuous. What this does is aid one party over another. What that does is make our country into exactly what we are seeing today. Gridlock. Partisan. Toxic.
Maps drawn without partisan intent produce legislatures that more closely represent the actual distribution of political opinion in the population. This is what democracy is supposed to do.
This, "Win at any or all costs regardless who it harms as long as it's not us" mentality has got to STOP!
The resistance to fixing this is ferocious, particularly from the MaGA Republican movement, which has perfected toxic politics, toxic capitalism, toxic gerrymandering into an instrument of what amounts to minority rule into a kind of "American apartheid": legislatures that vote against policies the majority of constituents support, because the maps were drawn to make the majority structurally irrelevant.
This is not a side effect. It is the point. It is the feedback loop I identified at seventeen made into a governing philosophy. Win the election, redraw the map, entrench the win, use the entrenchment to win again, use the second win to redraw the map again.
Mrs. Wotton told me it had always been that way. That, was stunning to me. Shocking.
She was right. Both parties have used it when they had the chance. But what we are watching now is something quantitatively different, gerrymandering deployed at a scale and with a precision, aided by computational modeling, that the architects of the practice in previous decades could not have imagined.
THIS IS PARAMOUNT: technology has made the cheating more efficient without making it any less what it is.
What I said in her class remains what I believe: it should be ended. It is not a moot point. It is one of the central structural pathologies of American democracy, and the fact that it has always been that way is not an argument for its continuation. It is an argument for its urgency.
I think about Mrs. Wotton and the closet door. I think about the Generalissimo's smiling face and his fingers held in a V that meant victory to him and peace to us and something private and layered and irreplaceable to her.
I think about a woman who had worked at the highest levels of international political life and then came back and taught seventeen-year-olds in Tacoma about how the world actually works, with enough honesty to confirm that yes, the cheating is built in, and enough humanity to agree when a student said it should not be.
She was proud of her work with Chiang. She was proud of the poster. And I believe she was proud of the moment in that classroom, the kid who looked at gerrymandering and refused to normalize it.
I was stunned into a kind of cognitive shock that day that I have never entirely recovered from. I don't want to recover from it. The shock is correct.
It's a kind of schema rupture, the specific cognitive shock that occurs when a foundational belief you didn't know you held gets suddenly invalidated. Clinical terms referring to it you might know: cognitive dissonance, disequilibrium, or what trauma theorists call a rupture of the assumptive world.
I didn't know I believed democracy was inherently self-correcting until the moment I discovered it wasn't, and the desk went quiet around me while my seventeen-year-old brain tried to process what had just been said.
We're seeing this play out today with Donald Trump as twice our worst president in history. What he has proven true in his ignorant bull in a China shop orientation, or failed CEO running a nation foolishness is that he is showing us where our democracy has been running pretty well from the beginning so we have not bothered in recent times to take the time and effort to fix what needed to be trimmed or enhanced.
We have allowed the presidency to become exactly what our Founders feared: a demagogue lacking ethics or knowledge, empathy or historical perspective outside legacy, who would bypass institutions, concentrate power in the executive, and convince the people that he alone could fix it.
The system is as stupid as it looks to someone innocently, objectively seeing it clearly for the first time. The only difference between seventeen and now is that I have fifty more years of watching it compound.
Eleanor Wotton would, I think, not be surprised by any of it.
She would probably just say: it has always been that way.
And I would still say: it shouldn't be.
To that today maybe she would say, then we need to change it.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.
