PERSPECTIVES: In Praise of Comfort Zones

James C. Johnston Jr.

The
term, “Comfort Zone”, has become an idiom of the English language
during the last few decades. It erupted on the public consciousness
like a rising phoenix, and I wanted to know exactly where the term
“Comfort Zone” came from. Its connotation has become somewhat
negative, and I wondered why. After a simple search, I discovered
that management theorist Alastair White was the author of the phrase.
When asked about the meaning of his famous phrase, he defined
“Comfort Zone” as, “A psychological state where individuals
feel familiar, at ease, in control, and experience low levels of
anxiety.”

Now,
is that not altogether a beautiful thing? Don’t we want to spend
the better part of our lives seeking the sort of ideal peaceful state
as defined by Mr. White’s “Comfort Zone” by engaging in such
activities as: study, working diligently, and saving money in order
to construct an ideal de
facto “Comfort
Zone” in which to live our lives in peace far from “The Maddening
Crowd” and or in a general escaping the pernicious atmosphere of
“High Anxiety”?

After
all, I was born in 1944 when the world was facing certain
destruction. and the greatest personification of unalloyed evil ever
in the person of the most evil man who most likely ever lived, Adolf
Hitler. Hitler was the author of the worse war in the history of the
world not to mention “The Holocaust.”

The
horrible reality of Hitler was followed by the horrible reality of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then this was followed by the horrible
reality of the “Cold War” and threat of thermonuclear
annihilation. This new reality, in turn, was reinforced by weekly
Atomic Bomb Drills in the Franklin Public Schools System of my youth.
This series of events was more than enough to damage the psyches of
generations of children wholesale between 1933 and 1963.

I
know that when I was a little kid, faced with all of these various
prospects of certain death and general destruction, that I wanted a
perfect “comfort zone” to inhabit, and now Joseph Stalin, as de
facto Czar of all that was Evil, and
officially
The General
Soviet Party Secretary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
Stalin set about absorbing all of Eastern Europe and a significant
part of Central Europe into his unholy sphere of influence. Party
General Secretary Stalin promised to bury the West and bring the
whole world under the domination of the Communist System. Stalin also
aided and abetted Mao Tse Tung, the Communist leader of “Red China”
in becoming leader of the largest single political unit on earth. In
1949, Mao, became master of the huge Chinese Nation and the third of
a trifecta of giant bad-men to dominate my nightmares in my world now
filled with justifiable paranoia on an industrial scale.

Later
North Korea and dozens of other new Communist entities emerged as
sovereign, semi-sovereign, or puppet states solidly in the Soviet
sphere of influence which were dedicated to anti-democratic
oppression. With The Soviets getting the Atomic Bomb in 1949 and
having the will to use it, the whole world trembled at the very real
prospect of mutually assured destruction of world civilization as we
then knew it. Now The “Cold War” began.

This
was truly a new age of anxiety embracing the whole world. As
children, we were reminded of this new reality every day in school
when we practiced for the terminal eventuality of our own demise in a
horrible cosmic mushroom cloud of death in that all destructive bomb
which was going to be dropped on us someday by the Russians. The idea
itself was not always clearly articulated, but the palpable threat
was always there just under the surface of the fabric of our lives.

Years
later, I can remember college kids protesting that they wanted to be
issued suicide pills, most likely potassium of cyanide, in case of a
thermonuclear attack on the United States so that they would not have
to suffer as had the poor unfortunate victims of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki who had nothing to promote war!

My
neighbors who lived next door to me in Unionville belonged to The
Franklin Skyway Patrol.
They followed a regular routine schedule when they took turns in the
tower of the Franklin Fire Station scanning the sky for Russian
bombers with binoculars looking for the Soviets heading to Franklin
with their Atomic Bomb loads, at the ready, to drop on us. Once in a
while, Soviet aircraft were actually reported as flying over the
town. As it turned out, it was just Bob Howe in his little
open-cockpit mono-plane. That was my world in the 1950’s, and it
could be a scary place to live in.

I
might point out that these fears were sometimes legitimized and
reinforced at Mass on Sunday at St. Mary’s Church where Stalin was
mentioned in sermons as the ultimate force of evil in the world. I
remember the priest loudly condemning Stalin as the proud sinner who
would ultimately fall before the vengeance of a jealous God. That was
in 1953, and a very short time after I had heard that sermon, Stalin
was reported as being dead. What power did this priest have I
wondered?

Who
would not wish for a comfort zone in 1953 especially if you were a
nine-years-old and the Atomic Bomb drills, accompanied by their
screaming siren sounds, had moved you out of the classroom and into
the central halls along interior walls into a
“crouching-space-of-safety”, in order to avoid flying debris
altogether when the bomb went off. To this day, I wonder what genius
thought that one up?

Decades
later, after growing up in a world of advanced paranoia, I did make a
very nice world for myself in my ancestral antique house which I
filled with things that I liked to look at and share with my chosen
community of friends. This was my “comfort zone”, in which I can
do as I wish, when I wish, in the company of my chosen friends, or
where I am free to enjoy my solitude with my music, books, and have
the freedom to think what ideas that I wish to think, write what I
wish to write, enjoy television-viewing [mindless and otherwise],
also indulge in telephone conversations, emailing, or just the
enjoyment of relaxing in the luxury of sublime, quiet enjoying the
equally sublime pleasure of being absolutely alone with my thoughts.

Spelled
out like this doesn’t a “comfort zone” sound deliciously
subversive? I love the “Comfort Zone” which I have made for
myself. It has contrasted with that earlier reality of the years of
my “coming of age” in the 1950’s when “Ducking-and-Covering”
was the very dominate gruesome reality of our lives. How many people
have suffered from generalized feelings of loss-of-innocence, grief,
and undefined abstract fears and never fully realized why.

Here
in my “zone of sublime comfort” I have become a fully
self-actualized member of the Human Race, and I am frequently
wonderfully happy and generally satisfied with life devoid of
fear-induced stress. There is no reason for any rational person of my
years, or of any age to be dragged from this wonderful “zone of
comfort” against their will to be forced to endure some activity
that some other person thinks that you ought to be exposed to. If we
choose not to be “discomforted”, that is our choice as a member
of a free society.

Leave
me alone in my “comfort zone”. I have worked hard to get to the
point where I have constructed this uniquely appointed “comfort
zone” for my own selfish benefits and pleasures. In a democracy, do
I not have the right to be selectively selfish? These anti-comfort
zealots, who think that everybody should face their supposed fears
and demons, would rip us from our wonderful “zones of comfort”
“For our own good.” Should these disturbers of the peace not be
told to mind their own damned business?

I
have always liked my “pet-fears” and “demons” just the way
they are. I know them well and really don’t have to face them,
because we are old friends and understand each other. I started
collecting my “pet-demons” back in the 1940’s and 1950’s,
just like most kids did. I hunted them out in the deep recesses of my
over-active juvenile imagination. I let these fantastic monsters
dwell under my bed and in my closets. On the whole, they were a lot
nicer, and far more rational, than Hitler and Stalin, and I had
negotiated real treaties and agreements with them. Such articles were
negotiated that if I kept to my side of the sheets, and not invade
any area beyond my allotted space either under the bed or in the
closet at night, all would be well, and we, that is the monsters and
me, could count on each other to keep the conditions of our
peace-treaty arrangements. When you think of it, this was very
rational thinking for the “Cold War Period” by a person aged five
to nine, and unlike Hitler and Stalin, the monsters possessed the
integrity to keep their word. We still had to go to school and learn
to hide under the desk, because our teachers told us so when the
warning sirens sounded and we crouched under the desks in mortal fear
until we were told that the danger was past and we could rise and go
back to our study of the doings of: Dick, Jane, Sally, and
Puff-the–Cat, and Spot-the-Dog in our reading lesson. God, I hated
school.

After
Stalin passed from the mortal scene in 1953, a few years passed an, a
little bald fat guy emerged as the ultimate Soviet Leader of The
Union if Soviet Socialist Republics, after some other bad guys who
proved to be less capable tyrants than he came and went. This new
Party Secretary of the Russian Communist Party had the most
improbable name of Nikita Khrushchev. Somehow he seemed a little
less threatening than Comrade Stalin had been. NIkita also had a
jolly fat little wife, who appeared never to have had a thought in
the whole of her life beyond: feeding live-stock, pitch-forking hay,
cooking, cleaning, and mending socks, and she also looked like
somebody’s grandmother on a windy washing day all dressed up in her
work clothes dressed to hang out the self-same wash in a
sixty-mile-an-hour gale.

Mrs.
Nikita and Nikita were not as scary looking as Stalin in his uniform
as a Marshall of the Soviet State had been. Nikita was actually kind
of funny with his toothy peasant grin. When he went to the United
Nations and showed his contempt for what was being said by taking off
his shoe and banging the desk in a fit of temper that really was
interesting. I knew the feeling that motivated him I think, and that
made me sympathetic. Now wasn’t he just a jolly old peasant! I
don’t know if I knew at the time that he had been just another one
of Stain’s henchmen in the old days responsible for killing
thousands of people in Stalin’s purges. That fact didn’t seem to
enter my thought process at all at the time I must confess. But that
too eventually changed.

When
Nikita Khrushchev almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear
war during the fall season of 1962, when the Soviets put ballistic
missiles in Cuba, he didn’t look quite so “Jolly”, but then we
were fortunate to have a genuine hero for a president who had
performed real acts of physical courage and consummate heroism in
World War II. This young man had the right strength of character to
face the Soviets down, President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s
powerful personality prevailed in this awful crises when the end of
civilization was threatened, and even Khrushchev was afraid. In
ordering our fleet to turn back the Soviet ships bound for Cuba with
the Soviet Missiles aboard took real resolve, and Kennedy had it.
Khrushchev was also forced to remove those weapons of mass
destruction which had already been positioned in Cuba from our
hemisphere. Kennedy had ordered obsolete missiles removed from Turkey
some months before. Somehow dis order was not carried out. As it
turned out, this was a happy accident, because we could help out our
pal Nikita save face by doing it as part of a deal making everybody
look good

During
those days in October of 1962, I personally observed the men in my
dormitory praying on their knees, en-mass, in the commons-room for
deliverance from thermonuclear war. That afternoon and evening I went
for a walk around the college town. It was a chilly Sunday, a typical
October evening, and I was looking at the phenomenon of mass-fear
gripping the wider community. I knew that I was looking at history.
My perspective never was quite like everybody else’s, and I wanted
to know how fear of utter destruction looked as reflected in the
faces of ordinary people in October of 1962. Here was my chance. Now,
sixty-three years later, I am sharing this with you most of whom were
not even alive then.

The
churches of my college town were crowded to the doors with standing
and kneeling worshippers all praying for peace. I was an historian,
and I was an observer solemnly charged by my mission as a historian
to walk all over this little New England college community watching
the reaction of the people of 1962 to this huge and frightening
challenge to world peace, and more importantly to the lives of their
children and themselves.

These
people were really frightened-very badly frightened. The “Cold War”
looked as if it could get “very hot” very quickly. I would have
loved a “Zone of Comfort” to crawl into at that moment myself,
and yet I was oddly captivated by the historical significance of what
I was seeing right in front of me. All the fears inculcated into me
over the entirety of my very short lifetime of eighteen years, by a
very paranoid society, and even the certainty of a thermonuclear
Gotterdammerung did not dim my need to witness history. All the fears
if my lifetime were coming to a total fruition before my eyes. This
was history in the making and disturbingly fascinating to me. I would
not be anywhere else at this moment. It was strange that here at the
edge of doom, I was never more alive.

As
I have mentioned, my experience of twelve years of school in those
days, was now realized. All of our fears of the Russians were
reaffirmed and reinforced. Yes, all of those hundreds of times that
we had instantly dove under our desks seeking safety or ran out into
the interior halls with our hands clasped over the backs of our necks
so that the flying debris from the exploded bomb would not be as
likely to sever our jugulars or decapitate us as the atomic blast
shot lethal shards of loose material into the spaces that we
sheltered in seemed strangely validated now in October of 1962. I had
often wondered what our shielding hands would have looked like after
being shredded by the razor-sharp glass which was capable of cutting
our heads off after the fiery holocaust resulting from the
thermonuclear explosion that we knew for certain would come someday
for us. Was now that time? October of 1962?

From
1949 until the early 1960’s we all knew that life during the “Cold
War” could be a very temporary affair. By the 1960’s I also
suppose it was natural to become just a tad hedonistic under the
circumstances of expecting a total loss of life, and America was,
after all, a very materialistic place. Like most of my
contemporaries, I was inclined to be a good and healthy “crass
materialism” as a true son of America. In the 1960’s, we went a
bit wild with a sort of abandonment, and why not? There was a good
chance that we might all be snuffed out. To add to everything else,
we now had this war in Viet Nam, and again death was a nasty reality
which was very close to us especially if you were not in college, and
watching the “Weekly Body Count” on T.V., but that is another
story altogether.

In
the 1950’s “Cold War Era” we were not really very nice to each
other on the domestic level. The ideal thing to be in those days,
sociologically speaking, was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
Christian. Down South that meant you could also join the Klan! Being
pure-being in “Lllly-White America” was just the ideal thing to
be to fit-in with a true “Leave-It-to-Beaver-Sort –of Way.”
That “WASP” thing was the truly the “Beau-Ideal” thing to be
all right with American Life according to the sociological
authorities, like Cleveland Amory, who really understood the America
of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Indeed, he was a “Must-Read”!

In
reality, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, we had an American cast system
in mid-century which was largely unofficial. This was true even
outside of the South where the cast system was frequently enforced by
law if not by strong social convention. If you were a Black child of
fourteen years, like Emmet Till of Chicago, visiting your Southern
cousins, you better not “Wolf-Whistle” at a white woman or you
might end-up very tortured and very dead before you ever saw your
fifteenth birthday! Big tough older white guys, “Real Heroic
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”, liked to kill young Black Kids who
had no real idea of what they were doing back almost seventy years
ago in the Good Old Post-Confederate South in regards to
local-custom-and-usage if they were out-of-area visitors to
Deep-Dixi. Any advance by a man of Color on a White Woman was
punishable by summary execution by the Righteous.

We were brought up to “Respect” the rights and cultural
differences of people who were not like us by my parents in Franklin,
Mass. My father hated “The Klan”. This business of racial
equality was supposed to be true, at least in theory, in the North
more so than in the South. But underneath it all, we were not nearly
as nice as we should have been to our fellow citizens, who were not
White Anglo-Saxon Americans. In regards to respecting individual
differences, I myself had seen a huge positive growth in the area of
racial relations beginning with the seminal Brown
vs. the School; Board of Topeka Kansas decision
of the United States Supreme Court in 1953.

This
was the first time since the Plessey
vs. Ferguson decision
in 1896 that racism was even addressed by the Supreme Court since the
heyday of the Abolitionist Movement and Civil War. And Plessey
was hardly a
huge victory for Civil Rights. In Plessy
vs. Ferguson, the
best language that the Court could muster was a stupid sort of parity
in the wording of the decision, “Separate but equal…” in
relationship to the nation’s Black and White schools.
Realistically
“Separate ” can never truly be“ Equal and we all know that, but
The Supreme Court dared not go further than that in 1896.

The
Civil Rights Movement was very much a “comfortable zone”
personally for me to inhabit and embrace from the nid-1950’s down
to this very day. I ran into some problems expressing my opinion on
the subject of the evils of inequality in the mid-1950s and some of
my relatives were confirmed racists, and threatened my behavior which
they considered rude. My mother was very protective, but my father
had muscles of iron from working in his foundry, and he brooked no
interference with his kids who were allowed to express what they
thought. My mother had educated us from infancy that human equality
was absolute regardless of color.

I was very surprised to learn that this view on racial matters was
not always shared by my classmates in good old Franklin, Mass. At
times, this fact became a cause of friction between some of us, but
backing down was not something I did as anyone who knew me back then
knew well. This discrimination was unfortunately true in 1952 in my
classroom at the Old Ray School. I remember when migrant laborers
came to Franklin around 1952, and during the decades before that, to
help with harvesting on the few big local farms that were still in
operation seventy-some years ago.

The
few poor children, who came to Franklin with their folks to help
taking-in the crops mostly Mid-Westerners, and Southerners who could
barely read and write, also came into our school for a few weeks as
students, because they were under the age of sixteen and required to
come to school under the provisions of The Keating-Owens
Child Labor Law of 1916.
Massachusetts was very serious about enforcing the law’s
provisions, and these poor kids, who were housed under the most
primitive conditions, were frequently dirty and under-fed. I tried to
be friendly with them, but they were scared and mis-trusting of us
Northern folk. My classmates avoided them like they were barn
animals.

I
had a beast of a second grade teacher at The Ray School who made this
one tiny migrant-labor-kid’s life miserable. He was dressed in
dirty bib overalls, an obviously dirty shirt, and had a dilapidated
straw hat, and to top it off, he was wearing no socks. Miss Cleary
made this poor kid sit up in front of the class, facing the class,
because poor little kid could neither read nor write. This horrible
woman, who taught second grade at the Ray School, shamed him with
smugly cold malice because he was poor and un-schooled. So, I took my
chair and put it next to his and sat beside him thus also becoming an
object of derision. I was frustrated, because that was all I could ho
at age seven to protest this obvious injustice. I too became degraded
in the eyes of my classmates, but I didn’t have much respect for
the bourgeois opinions of these shallow kids in my class that day
anyway, and well they knew it.

After
that horrible day, I never saw that poor kid again. I hate to think
of the hatred he must have grown-up with as a result of that awful
treatment. Things were pretty bad back then if you did not conform. I
really hated school with a passion. It was a pretty awful place to be
most of the time. The myth of the “Good Old Days” is just that-a
myth, but things were on the path of reform.

In
1953, we had a Great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the person
of the former Republican Governor of California, Earl Warren, who led
the Court for eighteen years in a very enlightened manner. We had a
great President in Republican and World War II leader Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower who enforced desegregation in the South during the first
days of integration by sending the 101st
Airborne Division into the South to uphold the Supreme Court’s
decision integrating public schools, and he also nationalized the
National Guard to protect students of color going to schools against
the opposition of Governor Orville Faubus. Warren and Eisenhower were
my heroes.

I
was addicted to the national news as reported by John Cameron Swayze
in those distant days on our 1952 Admiral 21-inch T.V. which was the
envy of the neighborhood. I learned that freedom is never free, and
even in these days, we had all better beware of that fact and that
real dangers are now posed to our civil rights and privileges as
members of the Human Race in a free society in the democracy known as
the United States of America.

The
point I am making is that we have all come of age in a place and at a
time where real danger of total extermination was and is not
unthinkable. We live in a time when we could see all of our civil
rights, and human rights, and freedom just disappear before our eyes
motivated by irrational fear of “The Other”. The great disparity
in the possession and holding of wealth in this country has never
been greater, and greed seems to be justified at the expense of
ethical behavior at every turn.

Do
we sometimes need a “Personal Zone of Comfort”? Oh yes we do. I
might invite you into my “comfort zone” and share it with you for
a while, but do not make an effort to pull me out of it any time
soon. I will not go without a fight. Mr. Alastair White defined just
what a “Comfort Zone “ is, and it is a place in which I intend to
spend a lot of good quality time away from as much ugly reality as I
can. And for this, I make no apology.

[A prior version of this article appeared in Observer a few weeks ago]