Tomorrow, I'll go to school for the first of the obligatory teacher days, something that happens at the beginning of every new school year. It won't, however, be just another year. It's the start of the first year at a new school.
Usually at this time, I have acid in my stomach and a headache on the horizon, worried about whatever new challenges and assignments were going to be waiting on me, dreading the hours of meetings that served little purpose. This time, though, I'm actually looking forward to all of it.
That feeling of optimism has been missing for longer than I care to consider. I have always been ready to see the students again, but to be honest, for about the last three years, the other parts of going back ground me down a little more each time.
This year, something is different. Someone asked me the other day if I were ready to go back, and, with a big silly grin on my face, I said, "Actually, yes." I may be the only teacher in the history of time who has said that, and at the end of the day tomorrow, I may feel like I have been run over by a bus, but for now, here on the edge of something, I am hopeful.
And that's everything.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Friday, July 08, 2016
Insomnia and Facebook Hate
(Strong language is contained herein. If that bothers you, go elsewhere.)
I wasn't going to write anything anywhere about recent events. It didn't seem that there was anything I could add to the discussion that hadn't been said better by other people. My Facebook feed is largely split into two camps of people, neither of which seems to be able to understand the other at all. One camp posts nothing but "strike down all cops" and "all white people are evil" while the other is nothing but "it's mostly your fault." Both are wearing me slam-damn out, to be honest. Today, I have started to see a new variation saying, "If you don't post anything (about the shootings by the police), then you must be a racist, and we know it, and we're going to unfriend you now."
Imma call bullshit on all of this.
I haven't written anything because I am numb. For three days, I have been walking around in a daze wondering what happened to this country. Last night, I was struggling to get my mind to calm down enough to get some rest when the BBC and CNN apps on my phone started notifying me about Dallas. After that, I just cried. There didn't seem to be anything else left possible to do. Around 1:30, I took some Zzzquil and fell into a nightmare-haunted sleep that made me sicker than no sleep at all would have done.
No matter what might have been going on behind the scenes, I don't think it is possible to say that the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were in any conceivable way legitimate responses to the situations. Did the two men behave absolutely textbook perfectly when the police showed up? I don't know. I haven't watched the videos and will not because I can't carry that around in my head without it destroying me. I doubt it. I doubt it was possible. It sure as hell wouldn't have been for me. I got stopped for a traffic violation and was shaking like a leaf when the patrolman came up to the car with his hand on his sidearm. Even though I am a white woman (the opposite demographic from those slain recently), I kept worrying that I wasn't being still enough, that I would do the wrong thing. When we get scared, we sometimes don't remember the drills we were taught, the advice to keep our hands on the steering wheel, fingers spread. I will say this, though. Unless those men took out a gun and pointed it at one of the officers, I cannot see that the officer response was the right one. There had to have been some other path.
My social media feed is filled with posts from former students who are angry and scared. I think that feeling is totally legitimate. Every time I think about that little girl watching her father be shot and killed, I want to scream. That my students have to worry about this, have to read posts on social media, have to listen to elitists who diminish their concerns and say, in essence, the modern version of "well, you know how it is with *those* people" as if someone's skin color diminishes their value as a human being or their protections under American law, breaks my heart. One of my precious formers posted simply, "My life matters. My life matters. My life matters." That anyone as bright, capable, charming, and full of potential to do great good things as he is has to say this to himself should break everybody's heart.
This is not my country. This cannot be my country. We have to be better than this.
And then there are the police. Most of the people I know who are a part of law enforcement genuinely want to make people safe and protect them from harm. Their job is increasingly terrifying. Heavy weaponry is everywhere. The most fundamental concept of civilization, an agreement to abide by certain concepts for the safety of everyone, is crumbling as everybody focuses on whatever they can grab for themselves instead. I can't imagine being police or highway patrol and knowing that I was going to be putting my life in danger every day. I deeply respect their dedication to protecting us.
That being said, not everybody who is behind a badge is flawless, and we are going to have to accept that and deal with it somehow before all the wheels come off this thing altogether. I have grown up personally acquainted with the idea that law enforcement can be quite a mixed bag of things due to issues of corruption locally. Every profession has those in it who fail to live up to its demands. There are teachers who are terminated for varying kinds of misconduct all the time, doctors who lose licenses for addiction or malpractice. Becoming a member of law enforcement does not magically confer perfection any more than becoming a member of any other profession, and while I support them and am grateful beyond belief for the sacrifices they make, I really think we are all going to have to realize that there are problems that must be resolved before the entire system collapses.
And maybe this is the thing that both of these camps on social media are missing. They are lumping huge swaths of humanity into big, stereotypical groups. That which is Other is by definition both Wrong and Evil when it is approached this way. When we start dealing with people on the macro level, we lose the detail that allows us to appreciate each other. It becomes easy to pick up that first stone and fling it at a mass of anonymous faces instead of having to step up to that one individual separately, look him or her in the eye, and take aim. Stop saying "all you people" whether you are pointing a finger at the cops or those who have been shot. In fact, any time you find yourself thinking something like, "Well, *they're* all...(WHATEVER)," some kind of mental alarm needs to go off. No group is universally any one thing or another.
Instead, why don't we try, just as an experiment maybe, to say, "If I were in that situation, how would I feel? What would my reaction be?" Don't get up on your high-horse saying, "Oh, but that would *never* be me." Instead, do the cliche and see if you can't walk in those shoes in some degree even for the smallest amount of time. Recover the basic human quality of empathy for another.
Is power being abused? By some in many places. Is fear slowly killing us all? Every damn day. Certain media outlets stir it up to get ratings. Politicians use it as a sharpened goad to drive us hither, thither, and yon. I don't know what the answer is. People far wiser than I have pondered this for longer than I have been alive, and you see the state we're in. These are upsetting times. It's okay to be afraid. It's natural to be upset. That being said, we cannot keep letting it make us savage toward each other. Appreciate the value of the fragile and irreplaceable humanity around you. Quit being sure you know what's what. For the love of the tiny baby Jesus, quit making blanket statements about entire sections of the nation, be it a profession or an ethnicity.
I guess I am going to fall back on an old personal axiom, then. I've had it up in my classroom for a long time, "Be Nice or Leave." I'm not going to throw stones or post hostile statuses. I'm just going to sit over here, grieve for our hurting nation, and pray for some change. Anyone who might want to join in with that is always welcome.
I wasn't going to write anything anywhere about recent events. It didn't seem that there was anything I could add to the discussion that hadn't been said better by other people. My Facebook feed is largely split into two camps of people, neither of which seems to be able to understand the other at all. One camp posts nothing but "strike down all cops" and "all white people are evil" while the other is nothing but "it's mostly your fault." Both are wearing me slam-damn out, to be honest. Today, I have started to see a new variation saying, "If you don't post anything (about the shootings by the police), then you must be a racist, and we know it, and we're going to unfriend you now."
Imma call bullshit on all of this.
I haven't written anything because I am numb. For three days, I have been walking around in a daze wondering what happened to this country. Last night, I was struggling to get my mind to calm down enough to get some rest when the BBC and CNN apps on my phone started notifying me about Dallas. After that, I just cried. There didn't seem to be anything else left possible to do. Around 1:30, I took some Zzzquil and fell into a nightmare-haunted sleep that made me sicker than no sleep at all would have done.
No matter what might have been going on behind the scenes, I don't think it is possible to say that the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were in any conceivable way legitimate responses to the situations. Did the two men behave absolutely textbook perfectly when the police showed up? I don't know. I haven't watched the videos and will not because I can't carry that around in my head without it destroying me. I doubt it. I doubt it was possible. It sure as hell wouldn't have been for me. I got stopped for a traffic violation and was shaking like a leaf when the patrolman came up to the car with his hand on his sidearm. Even though I am a white woman (the opposite demographic from those slain recently), I kept worrying that I wasn't being still enough, that I would do the wrong thing. When we get scared, we sometimes don't remember the drills we were taught, the advice to keep our hands on the steering wheel, fingers spread. I will say this, though. Unless those men took out a gun and pointed it at one of the officers, I cannot see that the officer response was the right one. There had to have been some other path.
My social media feed is filled with posts from former students who are angry and scared. I think that feeling is totally legitimate. Every time I think about that little girl watching her father be shot and killed, I want to scream. That my students have to worry about this, have to read posts on social media, have to listen to elitists who diminish their concerns and say, in essence, the modern version of "well, you know how it is with *those* people" as if someone's skin color diminishes their value as a human being or their protections under American law, breaks my heart. One of my precious formers posted simply, "My life matters. My life matters. My life matters." That anyone as bright, capable, charming, and full of potential to do great good things as he is has to say this to himself should break everybody's heart.
This is not my country. This cannot be my country. We have to be better than this.
And then there are the police. Most of the people I know who are a part of law enforcement genuinely want to make people safe and protect them from harm. Their job is increasingly terrifying. Heavy weaponry is everywhere. The most fundamental concept of civilization, an agreement to abide by certain concepts for the safety of everyone, is crumbling as everybody focuses on whatever they can grab for themselves instead. I can't imagine being police or highway patrol and knowing that I was going to be putting my life in danger every day. I deeply respect their dedication to protecting us.
That being said, not everybody who is behind a badge is flawless, and we are going to have to accept that and deal with it somehow before all the wheels come off this thing altogether. I have grown up personally acquainted with the idea that law enforcement can be quite a mixed bag of things due to issues of corruption locally. Every profession has those in it who fail to live up to its demands. There are teachers who are terminated for varying kinds of misconduct all the time, doctors who lose licenses for addiction or malpractice. Becoming a member of law enforcement does not magically confer perfection any more than becoming a member of any other profession, and while I support them and am grateful beyond belief for the sacrifices they make, I really think we are all going to have to realize that there are problems that must be resolved before the entire system collapses.
And maybe this is the thing that both of these camps on social media are missing. They are lumping huge swaths of humanity into big, stereotypical groups. That which is Other is by definition both Wrong and Evil when it is approached this way. When we start dealing with people on the macro level, we lose the detail that allows us to appreciate each other. It becomes easy to pick up that first stone and fling it at a mass of anonymous faces instead of having to step up to that one individual separately, look him or her in the eye, and take aim. Stop saying "all you people" whether you are pointing a finger at the cops or those who have been shot. In fact, any time you find yourself thinking something like, "Well, *they're* all...(WHATEVER)," some kind of mental alarm needs to go off. No group is universally any one thing or another.
Instead, why don't we try, just as an experiment maybe, to say, "If I were in that situation, how would I feel? What would my reaction be?" Don't get up on your high-horse saying, "Oh, but that would *never* be me." Instead, do the cliche and see if you can't walk in those shoes in some degree even for the smallest amount of time. Recover the basic human quality of empathy for another.
Is power being abused? By some in many places. Is fear slowly killing us all? Every damn day. Certain media outlets stir it up to get ratings. Politicians use it as a sharpened goad to drive us hither, thither, and yon. I don't know what the answer is. People far wiser than I have pondered this for longer than I have been alive, and you see the state we're in. These are upsetting times. It's okay to be afraid. It's natural to be upset. That being said, we cannot keep letting it make us savage toward each other. Appreciate the value of the fragile and irreplaceable humanity around you. Quit being sure you know what's what. For the love of the tiny baby Jesus, quit making blanket statements about entire sections of the nation, be it a profession or an ethnicity.
I guess I am going to fall back on an old personal axiom, then. I've had it up in my classroom for a long time, "Be Nice or Leave." I'm not going to throw stones or post hostile statuses. I'm just going to sit over here, grieve for our hurting nation, and pray for some change. Anyone who might want to join in with that is always welcome.
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