Back in high school I had this grizzled old shell of a history teacher who was about 20 years past believing he could ever teach bored and apathetic teenagers much of anything. On most days, rather than explaining the course of North American events since 1776, he just showed black and white films of the maligned renegade anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl heroically sailing across the Pacific Ocean in the flimsiest of vessels, proving that First Peoples could have traveled further, faster and much earlier than any smug Euro-centric types could ever think possible.

The few times he did lecture - whether it was about slavery, native rights, women's suffrage, the IWW, or the red scare - there were always the same two enduring themes. The first was to reiterate that the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America only puts forth the right of people to pursue happiness, and that nowhere does it say, as some might fuzzily glean, that anyone actually has a right to be happy. And the second point was to drive home the basic feeling of those on the losing side of things. As the clock approached the end of the period, the ringing of the class bell imminent, and the narrative having exhausted its portent, he would tighten his fists into angry balls, his face would flush red with the enmity and injustice of those who believed themselves wronged, and he would wail as loud as he could, over and over again like a demented fearful siren, "IT'S NOT FAIR! IT'S NOT FAIR!! IT'S NOT FAIR!!!" This display, I believe, we were to understand as not only the central motif of history, but also the essential conundrum of life.