Web Log
Oct 9, 02:03 AM | Author: head zoo keeper | Category: 2004 campaign
inspiration
Tonight, I went to flyer at the Living Word Festival and stayed to watch the show with Carolyn, Beau and Nancy. I was going more to support my friends and a great organization, but ended up being incredibly inspired and rejuvinated.
Campaigning is hard. I am in the best part of the campaign, the field portion (which I will talk about in another entry), but it can be disillusioning. You realize how hard it is to change political structure to represent the voices of young people, people of color and progressives, even in SF… and especially in the race for school board. You get tired of being the only one (or one of the few) that really think that youth have a valid opinion in their own education, that armed police officers do not belong on school campus, that teachers need more freedom in the classroom and that education is more than reading and math, but about learning to be an educated civic participant in our society and empowering/enabling young people’s minds. Students want art, they want to be creative, they want to think criticially and ask questions, they want to learn about their community and history. They want to be engaged with their education.
It is amazing the number of adults in education that are AFRAID of young people. San Francisco just a got a $4 million federal grant to put armed police officers in our MIDDLE SCHOOLS! And people in public education are excited about this. (Read SF Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/article/index.cfm/i/091404n_police) As one police officer said in the article, the more time they spend with them during middle school, the less likely they will have to “deal with them down the road, in any criminal manner.”
If you are afraid of young people, if you don’t know how to work with 6th graders with potential behavior issues, DON’T work with young people. We don’t need you.
Hearing young people bust on the mic tonight, you hear the frustration, anger, and sadness of young people. And also their incredible perceptiveness and intelligence when they are given a forum to express themselves. And you feel like you are fighting for a reason. Depression, suicide, low self-esteem and isolation is increasing among youth and our public education system needs to adjust to serve and not just educate our youth.
The icing on the cake was Jimmy Santiago Baca… wow:
(excerpt of his poem tonight)
“Let us celebrate the Quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival and not taste the bitterness
not recognize the insatiable appetite for more blood, more land, more money, more power.
Let us rise in every quarter of the country on platforms and give testimonials on how we must hate ourselves
and how we must teach our children to be ashamed of thier past…
let us kiss the bullets that bring peace to us
let us love our povery and be fearful of speaking our native language in public
let us bear our pain in silence and bow before the perpetrators
let us call rabble rousers those who dare to speak up…
let us pray we remain cowards with no honor….”
This last line got me. Sometimes, you feel so unsupported by the larger political system running for local office and a lone voice, it makes you want to no longer run. But I was re-affirmed tonight—we need to continue standing up, talking and staying involved. I refuse to feel shutdown because electoral politics doesn’t welcome and support our voices. If I stop standing up for what I believe in realms that are uncomfortable and hostile to what I see and say, I will be a coward.
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