To Err Is Human

Anger.

Hate.

Uncontrollable rage.

These are just a few things that describe what kept clinking around in my skull kingdom when I lived in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado as a teenager. It was around the time my parents decided to end their attempt at emulating June and Ward Cleaver. Their marriage, much like their finances, eroded with each passing month after my parents formally separated and later divorced.

I was enrolled in classes at Dulce High School around January 2007, just after completing my first freshman semester at Pagosa Springs High School back in December 2006. Things were weird, to say the least. Dulce High School’s main building belonged to a long list of condemned buildings you’d expected to see in places that didn’t matter to the rest of the world. I’d seen plenty of them, and I knew no one cared about Dulce, which was fine because it was far enough away from Pagosa Springs. This place was an attractive alternative to what I’d been exposed to in Colorado. In Colorado, I lived on the bottom rung, where I’d been tolerated because my folks lived in Archuleta County, and the school district was the only one offering a free public school education. Aside from that, I was an unwelcome student, someone who reminded people of the county’s poverty, its people who lived on the edge, trying to survive paycheck to paycheck.

The funny thing about Colorado was that it hid its poverty better than most. It denied its existence entirely when it was easy to do so. As a poor kid growing up in a tourist town, whose rich and well-off despised the ugly, unfinished homes of their poorer neighbors, I understood where my place was: I had none. I remember, not long before I left Colorado permanently, a coworker of mine from a now-defunct Victoria’s Parlor, a touristy restaurant, shilling tea, light meals, and a cozy middle-class atmosphere, being evicted from her trailer home.

My co-worker had lived in town for decades. She’d been known, to locals and those at the restaurant, as the crazy cat lady. I knew her as someone who washed dishes, was grumpy, and preferred felines to human beings, who seemed to look down at her every chance they got.

The crazy cat lady, as I knew her (I didn’t know her name at the time), was forcefully evicted from her rental home, in handcuffs, and made to watch someone bulldoze her home (and many of her unclaimed belongings) into the dirt. This was the real Colorado I knew. The one that plays nice, until they want something from you. In small Colorado towns, the elites act like the old Grecian and Roman families: Their ways of life, their lifestyles, and their worldviews are supreme. Telling them otherwise is dangerous, for your family, your belongings, and your person.  

Dulce didn’t hide much. Dulce was raw in what it displayed to the world. It was poor. Abuse, drug use, rape, and even poverty weren’t unknown there—much like anywhere. What Dulce didn’t do was cover it up like Pagosa did. People knew these things existed. They attempted to do things about it, and some didn’t, just like anywhere. What Dulce didn’t have was the privilege of hiding the existence of these human realities. The reasoning for this is simple: Dulce sat atop a First Nations reservation, owned, operated, and inhabited by a proud and (often) lost people, the Jicarilla Apache.

When I say lost, I don’t me they were lost in the world. Instead, if you were to ask any Coloradoan or New Mexican about their existence, their history, and their rich cultural heritage, you’d think the Jicarilla Apache never existed at all. They were lost to others, unknown, and (to many) not worth knowing, which is entirely unfortunate. Some of these very best people I know called (and still call) this place home.

The Jicarilla Apache was the closest I’d ever been to a lost people, a people largely ignored by most of those living next to them. Outsiders knew the reservation existed, but they never acknowledged the existence of a group of people, whose history, culture, and beliefs stretched back to the First Nations of North America and the first human beings in the Western Hemisphere. The Jicarilla Apache taught me something else as well.

When I took classes at Dulce High School, I was tossed into classes that satisfied my mother’s need to make sure I got an education. These classes were often taken with her closest colleagues, so she could keep an eye on me, for various reasons. One such class was offered by J, a jack-of-all-trades teacher, who taught German, history, and even Chemistry. She was an amazing spirit, even if I didn’t realize it when I took her classes and gave her a hard time.

During those German classes, I dozed off and repeated boring conversations and vocabulary constructions. A friend of mine, who had Internet at home, something I’d later convince my mom to get, told me about a German band by the name of Rammstein. He’d seen some of their videos on YouTube, which was just starting to become a thing back then. Rammstein, he said, was the best music he’d ever listened to. It was the only reason he chose to take German in high school. This, of course, scratched my brain, and I began searching, high and low, using the school’s Internet, and its computers, to find what I could on Rammstein.

What I found was eye-opening: Rammstein’s beats and their lyrics were worth being called music, yes, but they also spoke to that dark side of my being, the side that’d grown in recent years as my parents began their trench war against one another, lobbing volleys of insults, threats, and hatred at one another via telephones. Rammstein said things that were profound to a teenager like me, but they weren’t necessarily profound for most adults or those living in Dulce.

My German teacher called Rammstein trash and even called them out for their guttural German and their bastardization of good and wholesome things. Her condemnation only brought me closer to Rammstein. What the fuck did she know? Nothing, I’d reasoned.

I watched (and re-watched) their seemingly scandalous  “Amerika” on YouTube so many times I memorized both the lyrics and the video’s intimate scenes. I could close my eyes and see the music, see the messages, and pretend that I, too, was Rammstein.

Rammstein’s music broke through the confusing world, and it told me that I needed to fight being left in the dust, left in obscurity. I needed to fight against the extinguishing of one’s existence, value, and footprint on history. I needed to look at everything around me, at everything I hated and cherished, and try to understand why. I needed to know why I, like so many on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, weren’t worth knowing.

Rammstein broke through the angst, the rage, the hate, and Rammstein forced me to come to terms with my realities. Rammstein forced me to move away from being nothing, a no one, to someone who mattered, even if the world (and those who inhabited it) didn’t care who I was.

Fast-forward the clock about fifteen years, give or take, and I am getting ready for Rammstein’s new album, Rammstein. I listened to it after the midnight release, and I felt disappointed.

I feel the angst, the darkness, the sadness all gone.

I stop listening.

A few weeks later, I began looking up the lyrics, as I usually do, and I began listening again, watching their music videos as well. Then it happens: I see something, something else. A world changed by hatred, violence, indifference, and stupidity.

I get that beacon of light, shining, cutting (really), through the dense fog of the post-Obama era. I come to realize that Rammstein, despite its controversies and its edginess, it, too, has grown old, and bitter, and yet is still a bit hopeful, despite evidence suggesting otherwise.

Rammstein, to me, broke through the haze, the self-hate, the disgust at one’s image and being, and its lyrics and musical sounds told me to keep moving onward. The music of Rammstein, while not necessarily worth knowing for many, saved me from a path of self-destruction that we all know leads nowhere. Rammstein’s music also encouraged me to try to hold out, to act as a stubborn bulwark against the forces (and peoples) who would rather plant you in the ground, with no memorial or second thought, so you can be forever forgotten.

Rammstein, while trash to some, is a treasure to many who’ve struggled to make sense of a world that refuses to explain itself. While Rammstein’s music is far from being earth-shattering or even insightful, it was the first band, for many of us, that was accessible, weird, fun, and, if we’re honest, gentle enough of a kick to get us thinking about the world and our place within it.

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To Err Is Human is a blog by G. Michael Rapp (and visiting writers and content creators). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. However, if you're using any content to add to an ongoing conversation, for teaching purposes, and/or for furthering the hobbies of gaming, storytelling, and worldbuilding, feel free to pull what you want from this blog, so long as you give credit to the original website (https://toerrishuman.xyz) and the author(s)/content creators in question.