In this digression, Crabbe thinks about people's intolerance of difference. He remembers that in school, people who were different and who refused to go along with the system were labeled as behavioral problems. Rather than being problems, these students were independent-minded, Crabbe thinks, a trait that made teachers see them as rebellious. Crabbe chose to conform to the system but wishes he had been more like them. 

Crabbe also believes that the students themselves participate in enforcing conformity by attacking anyone who is different from them. He compares them to “a wolf pack, snarling and snapping at everything ‘alien’”(176).The viciousness with which students at his school treated an eccentric professor who rode an old bike to school, was vegetarian, and refused to drink alcohol illustrates this point for Crabbe. The teacher was naive enough to respond sincerely when students asked him questions about his values, earning their contempt and a cruel nickname (“The Veg”). 

Because the teacher was different, they treated him as if he were crazy. Crabbe receives the same kind of attention from the hospital staff, he believes, because they label his difference and his wounds as strange. This is the reason why he believes he was made to go to therapy with Dr.