August 14-20, 2003
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The Kids Are All Left
 Gimme sheltered: Marc Sand hopes his book will be incorporated into school curriculum. Photo By: Michael T. Regan  |
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Marc Sand -- local teacher, musician, activist and now author -- on turning youth passion into youth action.
Throughout the city, they wander like living ghosts. There's the woman with crimson lipstick smeared across her face, the man with a megaphone, Woody Allen glasses and trash-covered cart, the mumbling drunk with a wiry ponytail and filthy jacket. They are the forgotten, disowned by society long ago. And most people couldn't care less.
"The moment you do something wrong or lose your job, you are implicitly blamed for it," says musician, author and activist Marc Sand, as he watches tourists and passersby from a park bench behind Christ Church. "You are an unproductive member of society and, intrinsically, a bad person."
Cynics may dismiss such talk as the words of the bleeding-heart liberal, the unrealistic American who bitches about the way things are and always will be. But Sand has channeled his discontent into Sheltered (Sketch, $5.95), a novel for young adults that translates "Hell no, we won't go" protesting into an informed invitation for social change.
"If you are willing to grapple with issues and talk about them in a way that's respectful, you may be able to open your eyes," Sand says. "I hope this book is a resource for someone to say, 'The next time I see someone who is homeless I am not going to degrade them.'"
"If you are coming in from a suburb to the city for a day and people are begging for money, you see that as the face of homelessness," Sand says. "You think they are just drug addicts and the mentally ill. But homelessness is a larger issue related to the structure of society and how we support our people and value them. Fear should not guide our actions."
Scrutinizing social constructs sounds like the fodder of college texts, and it often is. So Sand decided to introduce leftist thinking to the untapped demographic of teenyboppers who wouldn't know Howard Zinn from Howard Stern. Sheltered may be the only book in the young-adult section that forsakes fluffy plotlines for touches of social justice, resistance and health care reform. It may sound heavy, but at 80 pages, the story of a Main Line teenager's brush with activism is a light, informative read.
Some area educators have already expressed interest in integrating Sand's novel into class studies. He says this is one of his main goals, to facilitate open discussion of untapped issues in schools. Fame and even the slightest fortune are far from his expectations for the novel. He cut costs by sending the manuscript to a digital printing house and hopes to slowly infiltrate Philadelphia through word of mouth.
"You feel like you are the only person who knows about it, sitting in a room somewhere with a box of books next to your bed," he says of going indie. "You hope that they will dwindle, but the next day they are still there and before you know it, you are giving books away as paperweights and Christmas gifts."
Sheltered's central character, Dylan Reiner, could be any kid who hates the world but doesn't know what to do about it.
"I tried to create the kind of book that I would have wanted to read when I was a 14-year-old, sitting in my room listening to Fugazi," Sand says. "In some ways I wrote this for the kid in the Philadelphia suburb sitting in his or her room, thinking, 'Things are difficult, the world is not the way I want it to be.'"
Fifteen-year-old Nat Zorach doesn't quite fit Sand's demographic. According to his mother, Cecile, he attends an urban public school with a minority population of 70 percent and more than half of the student body falling below the poverty line. Still, he uses Sand's book as a basis for everyday decisions.
"The book doesn't make that much of a statement itself, since it's too short to have a really deep foundation," Zorach says, returning home after 13 hours at band camp. "But it's one book I have referred back to mentally as I thought about doing various things in life. It's made me think twice whenever I have an opportunity to change something."
Sand maintains that he wrote the book to address weighty issues that are often bypassed in favor of long division and the periodic table.
"What are you in school for?" Sand asks. "To learn how to be a productive member of society, and one of those ways is to examine issues. I wanted to contribute another resource in dealing with just that: race, gender, all of the difficult issues together."
So, is this 26-year-old music teacher out to turn America's children into foot soldiers for the leftist revolution?
"In my view, it presents some of the challenges and ambiguities of social [and] community activism and does not brainwash young people at all," says Cecile Zorach, a German professor and director of international studies for Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. "If anything, as a child of the '60s who keeps hoping for more activism among young people today, I was a little disappointed that the protagonist in the end chooses to pursue more 'mainstream' avenues of social change."
Sand defends his work as an initial step in changing a young person's view of the world, rather than a piece of dogmatic propaganda.
"I wanted to value young people and say they can think about these issues," he says. "They aren't going to be brainwashed into breaking into a building to start a protest, but they will have a critical vantage point in the future."
Sand's leftist leanings were hatched at an early age over mashed potatoes and milk. "When other kids were talking about sports at the dinner table, we were talking about how to manage nonprofit agencies," he says, with a gentle laugh.
Sand describes his family as a "liberal household," his mother a Russian studies teacher and his father a champion of nonprofit groups. He is quick to add that they were encouraging rather than radical or preachy.
"My dad would say, 'I'm left-wing, but anyone to the left of me is just crazy,'" Sand says.
Before he knew it, however, Sand was the one leaning more to the left and analyzing his father's lifestyle.
"I had a political awakening and said to him, 'The way you are living your life is not appropriate,'" he explains, pointing his finger. "I was critical in a nonproductive way. Everyone who was poor in the world or didn't have health care was my responsibility."
Typically, Sand's pessimism blossomed in college, where he earned a B.A. in American civilization and a master's degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania.
"I have more perspective now, but some days I feel like I know nothing and my brain is made of Jell-O," he says, laughing again as the sun breaks through the shade.
To keep himself sane, Sand balances his time between activism, his indie-rock band, The Sand Family, and teaching music in community centers around Philadelphia. He even has a rock opera planned for November with his brother called Broken Hipsters, a saga of senior citizen riot grrls who fight "social injustice with guitars."
"I don't want to have a relationship with that," Sand says, illustrating his avoidance of a 9-to-5 job by pointing to a Ride the Duck boat of quacking tourists. "Or the people who dress up like Betsy Ross and others from the Revolutionary War. They sort of weird me out."
As a smile spreads over his lips, he adds, "But maybe I am the one who needs to learn tolerance."
Marc Sand will read and discuss Sheltered Fri., Aug. 15, 6 p.m., free, Design for Social Impact, 525 S. Fourth St., 215-922-7303. Order the book at www.indybook.com or www.shelteredthebook.com, or purchase at Wooden Shoe Books, 508 S. Fifth St., 215-413-0999.
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