First Keys
One of the first lessons I learned as a Boy Scout leader back in high school was that keys represented power. I became the Senior Patrol Leader (SPL) of Troop 819, the “head kid”, and with that leadership role came keys. One key opened the basement door to the Church where our troop met. A second opened the pad lock to the wooden door in front of our Scout Room, the meeting place in what was the crypt of the main church.
Keys meant a couple things. It allowed me to have meetings with other Scouts without the formal “permission” of the adult Scout leaders. It let me do “my job” with the troop Quartermaster (another Scout) as we prepared equipment for our monthly campout. And we had other projects that were part of the Troop annual calendar. Looking back on that, it was actually a lot of responsibility to put on a sixteen year-old. And I’m not sure that the Minister of the Church knew what our Scoutmasters were allowing.
I knew the responsibility I had with “the keys”. I made sure the door was locked, and that no Scout got left behind. Getting trapped in the Church basement between the Scout room and the storage was scary for a twelve year-old. When I moved from SPL to become a Junior Assistant Scoutmaster, they let me keep my keys. The Scoutmaser made another set for the next SPL. I remained part of the Troop, through college, and until I moved away from Mom and Dad in Cincinnati. Somewhere, in a drawer, I still have the keys.
School Keys
So when I went to work at a public high school, having a “key” was a deal. Getting into the building in the evening, or on the weekend with a team, you had to have some way to open a door. And soon enough, I had the key to a locker room door, and the key to my classroom. A mentor of mine taught me an early dubious lesson. If you get access to a key, and don’t make a copy, then it’s your own fault. Keys meant access for what you needed to do your job. We acquired them like medals on the battlefield.
We needed keys to tractors to maintain the Cross Country course, keys to the press box and gates to run track meets, keys to storage to access our equipment. And we always needed keys to get into the building. That was especially back in the day when the only access to a phone was a “hard line” in an office somewhere. The kids had to call for rides, and, when necessary, we needed to be able to call for an ambulance.
Just like when I was a Scout, having keys meant getting access, responsibility, and “power”. And the ultimate key to have was the “building master key”, the one key that opened every door. You know you “made it” when you had the one key to get everywhere.
Giving Up
I worked in the school district for forty years. There were generations of keys. I had keys for buildings that no longer were standing, and keys for obscure locks that were buried deep inside storage areas or closets. Ther were my “working keys”, the few that went into my pocket every day. And then my “occasional keys”, that I would use once a year during a special event.
When I finally retired from coaching and managing cross country meets at the school, it was time to turn in the keys, at least most of them. The ones that no longer opened anything I pitched, and a few were passed onto the next generation. But the “big ones”; the master keys, gate keys and equipment keys, were on my ring, and on the secretary’s desk.
Giving up my keys was giving up my “power” in the school. It was the final act, disconnecting from forty years of work and fun. I left behind all of the successes and tragedies, things accomplished, and getting into “good” trouble. Of all the goodbyes, setting my keys on Barb’s desk (the Athletic Secretary) was the second hardest. The first, of course, was saying goodbye to the kids.
The President
Donald Trump is a man who gets what he wants. It’s hard to tell whether he truly believed he won the election of 2020 at the beginning, but at the end, it’s clear that he convinced himself that was true. But while the President doesn’t have a “master key” to the United States (in fact, he doesn’t have keys at all, someone else always does), he has the “master secrets”. And in the days between January 6th, the Insurrection, and January 20th, the Biden Inauguration, Trump struggled mightily with the idea that he actually had to leave the White House.
Bunches of papers were hurriedly thrust into boxes. Classified confidential, secret, top secret, top secret compartmented information: all were stuffed in boxes and shipped to Trump’s home in Mara Lago, his “winter White House”.
There’s lots of ways to look at that. Maybe he was just keeping them to show that he was “still powerful”, like keeping the master key to the building even after you retire. Or maybe he had confidential information he could use, “kompromat” on others to get them to bend to his will. Or the worst case scenario: maybe he saw some financial gain to be made with all of those secrets. But one thing is for sure: Donald Trump became President for power, and wasn’t will to give that up, even when the National Archives demanded them, and even when the FBI came for it.
He wanted to keep his keys.
