CHAPTER 3: SECTION 1

CHAPTER 3: THE REPRESSION OPPRESSION EXPRESS


I drove down Highway 10 from Phoenix to Tucson on an oddly cloudy Arizona October morning. My coffee was steaming in the drink holder of my friend Michelle Dill’s car and from my Ipod Jeff Buckley was telling me he can’t help from looking outside for a guarantee. I realized I was more screwed up than normal with the time zone switch. Arizona, I thought, was 2 hours behind eastern standard time. On the plane I was informed that Arizona does not participate in daylight savings time and is therefore 3 hours behind eastern standard time half of the year and then 2 hours behind the other half of the year. Who knew? Maybe McCain really IS a maverick!

I must concede and say I was wrong about the desert. The plant life is bizarrely wonderful and abundant and even amazingly colorful although very different from my hometown of Michigan. This place wasn’t just a bunch of sand and cactus plants after all! Desert wildflowers and crazy, wiry, scraggly plants with branches like long gnarled witches fingers were rather enthralling. Most of the plants seem to have some sort of thorn or needle as well. Others looked like zig zags on steroids. Anything to stay alive.

I was enjoying the desert landscape. This stretch of the highway had plants along the side of the road that were so wiry, so corkscrewed with that electric shock look they reminded me of 1970’s green afros mixed in with some 1980’s mall rat hair; boofy, big, fuzzy. But of course desert plants have to be survivors, unlike my lush Michigan foliage which drips of moisture. Sometimes survivors look a little mangled.

I admittedly began to notice the lack of roadkill. I know, an odd thing to detect, but in Michigan, it’s well, everywhere in almost every season; deer, raccoon, opossum, skunks, squirrels. Sorry for the visualization. Not being versed in desert knowhow, I figured that some of the desert creatures are better to meet in their post life instead of during their alive and well stage where my ankles could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had to admit I was looking forward to seeing a gila monster or maybe a scorpion the size of a small beaver.


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“Clap if you can hear me. Clap twice if you can hear me. Clap three times if you can hear me.”

It was 8:30am. KIVA was beginning.

The school day begins with a 15 minute gathering of all the students. The kids all gathered around, some casually on the floor, some crashed out on pillows in the corners. JoAnn, the co-founder of the school, opened up the forum after a greeting of all the students.

“Good morning everyone. Did everyone enjoy the long weekend?”

Nods of approval, grunts of positivity.

“Before we get into our morning discussion, Jade*** has an announcement about her Learning Lab. Jade?”

Jade stood up and explained to the rest of the class that she was researching Henna, a flowering plant that is used to dye the skin and give somewhat of a temporary tattoo of traditionally beautiful spiraling patterns that adorn the hands, feet or arms. She had permission slips to hand out to any student that wanted to get Henna.

Learning Lab is a very unique aspect of the Paulo Freire Freedom School of Tucson Arizona. Learning lab is an independent project where the student can choose any subject that they are interested in. Under the guidance of a supervisor, the student develops their project during a specific time slot set aside two times a week during the regular class schedule. In an educational climate that is feeling the pressure to take away classes that are not the standard math, history, english and science, this was an innovative way for this public school to encourage students to research an area they have an affinity for or who may be gifted in areas other than the ones the government tests have expressed are important, High five Paulo.

Paulo Freire is a public school that opened its doors in 2005 to twenty two students. By the end of that year, they doubled that. They have a complete open door policy and will only turn away a student if the capacity of their building is reached, after which time they would conduct a lottery for all of the applicants. Of course at that time they would hope to find new facilities so that all children could have the opportunity to be a part of their school.

“Does anyone else have any announcements?” asked JoAnn.

“Well, this weekend, there was a whole mess on my street.” The voice of Damien in the back. “I guess some guy beat up his girlfriend and we had the cops there and then there were some shootings too.”

Despite the horrible nature of Damien’s announcement, I found his candidness refreshing and an example of the comfort that he felt amongst his peers and the school. Many studies are being conducted these days of the stress that kids are under and how they are having trouble knowing what to do with all of the pain and anguish they witness or hear about. By giving him a chance to express what was clearly bothersome enough to bring up 2 days later was to me an almost therapeutic outburst.

I found the encouragement of solutions a very striking difference from what our children, even us as adults, are bombarded with day after day. Mainstream media irresponsibly reports the negative, which in turn is making us a culture of scared patriots which just can not work in a world that is increasingly global. If you can hop a plane to Mumbi or teleconference Höfuðborgarsvæði, then we as a society need to rise above fear that is at times blown out of proportion.

Yet, I guess I can’t blame the media. They wouldn’t report devastation over devastation if everyone was like, “Oh, not this again, this is awful, I’m not watching this tripe!” But the TV stations get their ratings and they basically report what we tell them is interesting to us.

Who knows who should be the bigger person in this case. Should we the viewers turn off the talking heads or should the talking heads do a horror movie-esque spin and start telling us the amazing things that happen every day. I don’t know, but someone should make a move. That’s what you have to do to get to first base - in baseball, in the bedroom, or in change.

JoAnn expressed her empathy for what he had been through and moved on to her next point. “What I’d like to discuss for KIVA today is about the Supreme Court. We have had a historical event on our Supreme Court. This is the first time in history that we have three women on the highest court in our nation. As I was thinking about this, I was trying to name all of the other Justices - does anyone know how many Justices there are on the Supreme Court?”

“12!”

“7”

“9!”

“Yes, that’s right, 9. Now I was trying to name them all and I could only come up with 8. Can anyone here name a Justice
of the Supreme Court?”

After a small period of silence and girl raised her hand. “Judge Judy?”

JoAnn did not miss a beat. “No, Judge Judy is not on the Supreme Court. She is a judge though.” She calmly went on to explain how one gets on the Judge Judy court show on television and not once did she ridicule the girls answer or make her feel silly for thinking a TV personality was a Supreme Court Justice. She took the opportunity to discuss it and explain what the difference was.

Once all the Justices had been named, JoAnn went on with her morning thought.

“The Supreme Court is going to be deciding some major cases these days and I would like to discuss one of those cases. This one is about the First Amendment. There has been a group of people that have been protesting at the funerals of not only openly gay people, but also gay military servicemen and women that have died in action, as well as service men and women who in actuality were not gay. The defense that the protestors are using is that they are protected under the First Amendment right of free speech. What does everyone think about this? Do these people have the right to protest and hold up anti-gay signs at someone’s funeral?”

Hands flew up. Let me introduce the Paulo Freire students.

“My cousin died in the war, and while we didn’t have protestors there, when I think about it and I think of how my aunt and uncle were grieving, I can’t imagine them having to deal with that kind of thing at the same time.”

“Um, well, couldn’t it be an issue of disturbing the peace?”

“I understand that, like, they may be protected under the first amendment, but, like, I think it is an abuse of this right.”

“I’m sorry, but that is just disturbing that people would protest at someone’s funeral, no matter what they think about their life. It’s just not right.”

“You know, while I think it’s disgusting and immoral, I have to say that they are probably protected by the first amendment.”

Kight, one of the Paulo Freire staff also chimed in. “We should also think about the fact that these people have been protesting at the funerals of gay people long before they ever protested at the funeral of the military men and women, but that the media finally became interested in it after the fact.”

The children continued. “What about gay people’s rights? Aren’t these people infringing on gay’s rights to free speech, I mean, they came out as gay, right? That was their right without having to get abused by others for it.”

“Yeah, like people have the right to say what they want to say, like these funeral people, but people have a right to be gay too.”

These are 11, 12 and 13 year old kids.