a year ago i was teaching an American history and government class for immigrants interested in learning the material for the Citizenship Exam. not everyone in the class was eligible for citizenship, some were undocumented, some waiting for green cards, some on student visas. but universally they wanted to learn the history of this Promised Land, wanted to learn it with a fierce intensity.
at the same time, as you will recall, under the fear, the paranoia, engendered in and by the Justice Dept, the creation of the Homeland Security Dept, elements of this history were being repudiated, disassembled, disregarded. my supervisor in the Adult Ed department (a rightwing Christian Republican) remained in the room, at her desk and computer, while i taught the class. and right outside the door was another office inhabited by a department (not mine) head who kept an autographed photo of Shrub, in hunting gear holding a shotgun, on his always open door. this guy routinely commented to me on how much he liked to hear me teaching my citizenship class, how much he could tell i cared about my students. so i knew he was listening. my freedom to ad lib my thoughts about current history was seriously limited. i made it thru the semester as best i could and at the end i told my boss i couldn't teach that class again, at least not without my own editorial input. and i told her why. to her credit, she understood. to her credit, as a Constitutionalist she even agreed with me. then i could only wish i had talked to her much earlier. in any case, i'm not teaching citizenship this year.
i wrote the poem in the following entry while anguishing over how to deal with the situation.
3 comments:
It's strange to feel frightened to tell the truth. There are murmurings of detained journalists, citizens deported to torture in another country, ordinary people questioned about reading materials, a fenced in area called "the free speech zone".
But we have managed to make ourselves heard, and as a result, people are listening, change is slow, but I believe that change is coming.
PS. thanks for keeping us up to date on the environment, can you give us the lowdown on the Energy Bill?
tank gurl, as far as i know right now it's still languishing in congress, with a vote coming up at any moment. see my entry #291 here for a link to a petition to your......oh, wait, you don't have a senator, living in DC. use your work postal code and send it to the MD reps.
We have become a police state and it will not change unless we change our country's leadership. We still have the power to alter the course of our nation's future, and by the looks of it, many are waking up to the insanity of this administration. Let's hope and pray!
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