Powerful Words

Image: AI generated image of words

When my daughter was eleven, in the fall of 1999, she was given a school assignment to write and illustrate 'a scary story.' She was a very imaginative kid, so she did the best she could, penning a story about a murder and illustrating it with a drawing of a bloody knife. She was very excited to turn in her assignment because she was sure that she had aced it. And she had. She scared the hell out of her school and was suspended until we had a psychologist interview her and determine she was not a risk to herself or anyone else.

She did not think, as an eleven-year-old, that the Columbine School shooting had just happened six months earlier, or that her school, like most across the nation, had instituted a zero-tolerance policy. She just wanted to write a scary story. She was lucky that the psychologist laughed out loud when she saw the finished assignment and asked the school principal what they had thought they might get by asking kids to write scary stories, so she was back in school in just a couple of days.

The problem was not really what she had written, nor what she had drawn. It was that the teacher, and the principal, and the superintendent could not forget what they had learned after Columbine. It was no longer possible for adults to pretend that some students were not a risk for the rest of the school.

(Writer's note: if you have to write on a deadline and offer something new every week, just wait for the Trump administration to do something stupid and you are guaranteed to have a new topic.)

This week, while most of us were trying to gauge whether or not retirement would even be possible after Trump crashed the stock market, the Washington Post reported that the National Park Service decided it was time to rewrite their website on the Underground Railroad. You might have learned about the Underground Railroad, even in your systemically white school system, because it was seen as a courageous effort to help escaped slaves make their way to freedom. My children grew up learning about Harriet Tubman, excited by her willingness to risk her life to save the lives of others.

As reported by the WP, the revised website greatly reduces the focus on Harriet Tubman, removes a quote from her and changes language about fighting slavery to calling the Underground Railroad 'one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.' Yes, but!

Do they forget we all know this? Do they think we will let our children and grandchildren be taught false histories that support a whitewashed view of how this country evolved? The truth is difficult sometimes, but that does not mean that shying away from the truth benefits anyone. If learning our real history makes someone feel anxious, or bad, or shamed, they are not powerless. They can commit that during their lives they will not support that behavior from our government.

We cannot abide cruelty.

Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to https://readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway/love/1 you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!