Somebody asked me the other day if I ever learn anything here. I told the truth, I learn things everywhere I go, offline or online, and most times, what I learn makes a significant contribution to my knowledge of the immensity of my ignorance.
I learned something today, thanks to bughouse canuck, who pointed out one of those very simple truths that are in front of your face, but unnoticed. Or at least it has been unnoticed by me.
The context was the heroism of Miss Rosa Parks, for those who don’t want to click and read the whole thing, here is bughouse canuck’s money line:
who’s going to dare to think they could be a hero? Let us see the truth, that you can do things with the support of a movement that you could never do alone, and our heroes will spring up.
Now that really made me think.
I knew that there are children who do not know who Miss Rosa is, there are children who do not know a lot of things about the civil rights movement in the US, but I did not realize that the organization and planning behind her courageous act had been suppressed.
I did not realize that there are people who sincerely believe that it somehow takes away from the historic and even moral value of Miss Rosa’s “NO” to discuss all the brave acts of the many people, most of whose names and faces are not known, who went out into the woods and cut wood, carefully chopped it and stacked it to be ready for the spark.
Are there people, even Americans, who do not know what it was like to be non-white in the US, especially the southern US in 1955?
Have so many people, black, white, and every shade in between, failed to tell their children and their grandchildren what it was like to live under apartheid?
Do they just gloss over it, tell them about Miss Rosa, and of course, Dr. King, as if this were some thing that just happened one day, that these brave people called the nation’s attention to it and it was promptly corrected?
bughouse’s observation that organization is scary makes sense if we are talking about governments and corporations, but has that view filtered down into the population, so that today, who dares to think they could be a hero?
Not just the hero that stands in front of the tank, but the hero who opens their home for the meeting, the hero who obtains a copy of the tank schedule, the hero who alerts the media, the hero who stacks the wood, ready for the spark.
Today, the organization is apparently so scary that when it is covered at all, it is demonized.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of TV coverage today about Cindy Sheehan. Having heard a couple of her speeches on C-span etc, I can see why. She may not have the telegenic charisma of Dr. King or Hugo Chavez, but she does not mince words. Instead of the startling beauty and quiet, regal bearing of Miss Rosa, Miss Cindy has the face and the bearing of the American soccer mom next door. And her rhetoric is not. Her speeches have the same no-nonsense tone one can imagine her using with Casey when he needed to be set straight, and sent over to the neighbor’s to offer to mow the lawn for free to pay for the ball-broken window.
Maybe that is why she is even scarier than the Montgomery NAACP, even scarier than her own “organization.”
It is hard not to look at her and think, hey, I could too dare to be a hero!
as just “one tired old lady”…
Today I asked Danni if her teacher mentioned Rosa Parks today. No. I asked her what she knew of her. “A lady who wanted to sit in the very front of the bus”… ACK
So we talked and will make it a point to go to the library.
By the time I was her age I knew of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman…
This is my fault as much as the schools. Plus our age of info-cation. It’s not what you know but how many times you hear it repeated.
Today haven’t been able to think much of anything else but Cindy Sheehan. But then to do that you think of all the other mothers… sisters… wives… aunts…. then brothers, sons, fathers…
That’s what scares them too possibly?? That we call can in some way connect with her.
She is real.
She’s defanged if she’s a middle-aged, tired seamstress who spontaneously refused to stand.
It’s a lot more dangerous for her to appear as she was: active in the NAACP since the mid-1930s, someone who refused to give up her seat several times during the 1940s, friend of Malcolm X…
Thanks for the hat tip, DF. Now you, in turn, have made me think — about what educates people, and what changes them.
Here in British Columbia, a 2-week illegal strike by the public school teachers just ended. The teachers were out on the picket line over the issue of class size and class composition, and to restore their own collective bargaining rights. (That was the illegal part: when bargaining foundered, earlier, the government simply brought in legislation extending their current contract to the end of next June.)
I was out on the picket line a couple of times, and I was amazed by the resolve and solidarity of the teachers. My best friend is a high school teacher who’s also a second-generation red diaper baby. She’s pretty different from her colleagues: most teachers are quite conventional people, with the mortgage, the car, the kids, the nice sensible middle-class life.
But during this strike, people changed. My friend saw it every day, in the teachers she picketed with. They were willing to break the law, go without strike pay (the court froze the union’s funds, so they couldn’t pay strike pay), see their union fined half-a-million dollars for contempt of court. They stuck together, and didn’t break ranks.
And because of their resolve, they got a huge amount of public support, from parents, and from other unions. And while they didn’t get a settlement that gave them anywhere near what they went out for, they did force the government to bargain with them, and they changed the framework for the discussion of public education in this province.
In my mind, they’re all heroes. And they’ve learned something from collective political action they could never have learned any other way.
My friend teaches high school English. Her plan for the first week back in the classroom was to discuss civil disobedience with her students, using Thoreau’s classic essay and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Here’s to continuing education.
Absolutely spot on about the teachers. I’ve been following it on CBC from ON and was amazed at all of the other unions who stood with them, from industries far and wide. And the parents were on their side. It was inspiring indeed.
I was impressed as well with the coverage CBC gave to Rosa Parks. They talked about her membership in the NAACP. They talked about how she ended her years in poverty. They didn’t gloss over the fact that: the more things change, the more they stay the same… at least in terms of race relations & poverty in the states… that is educational as well and I thank them for it.
We all need to recognize that alone we make ripples, together we can change history.
and we don’t know ourselves. we don’t know our neighbors.
we certainly don’t go into that other scary neighborhood where “they” live.
what is our future if we don’t see now?
Being here in Detroit over the past several years, with Rosa Parks here and visible, there seem to be two things at work, both having the effect of making not what she was.
The first is exactly that suppression of her background: No telling of the years of quiet and not-so-quiet activism. No mention of the Highlander School. One person said to me “That makes it sound like what she did was deliberate. Like she wanted attention for what she did”.
So what? The conditions of that day demanded attention. Whether by her or by someone else, that stupid, oppressive memorial to slavery needed to be called out for what it was. What’s wrong with being deliberate about that?
The second is the denial of her ordinariness. “Rosa Parks is a saint. She is not like the rest of us. A regular, normal person could not have done this. We could not have done this.” Of course, had Rosa Parks’ gesture failed somehow, this perspective would also have permitted her being written off as a crazy person.
Both of these things perspectives seem to function to keep more individuals from doing the small things that make a difference. Preparation and the importance of individual action are written off.
They conceal the days and months and years and that can go into a movement before big change occurs. I think of the abolitionists and the suffragettes who died before they saw their goals reached. Were they foolish to spend their time in something that did not come to pass in their lifetimes?
And ordinary gestures are seen as not enough, not “touched by God”, not grand enough. The truth is, it’s the ordinary that is more touching. Cindy Sheehan’s grief-stricken face is more compelling than a Madison-Avenue image of attractive young Americans back ed up by a flotilla of waving flags. She looks exactly like what she is: a mom, an ordinary, middle-aged woman who grieves for her son. No one can deny her that grief. If she stands beside the road, or in front of the White House, or wherever, she is not being airbrushed or buffed up to sell something.
Certainly she wants attention – but she’d be happier if she had never been in the position to want it. Son alive. No stupid war. And surely she has had to think, to prepare, to consider how to get attention, to keep more sons and daughters from dying.
That does not diminish her, or her actions. Nor those of Rosa Parks.
I have to say, Ductape, you are one of those folks here who always makes me think, and sometimes even act. Thank you.
I don’t know what I said that deserved troll-rating.
And will see this and correct it. It is easy enough to do when people are in a hurry!
I broke my rating moratorium and gave you “4” on both your comments to raise the number.
And I would have done that even if you had not paid me such a nice compliment, for which I thank you.
The cocaine will be in the usual place. :>
Thank you. Ordinarily I’d make some defensive statement about you should not have, etc. but this has been a hard week and a small bit of cheer is much appreciated. Tomorrow I have to go into class and talk about cultural differences in approaches to moral development. Given this country and the terrible mess we have made of things, I’m not looking forward to it, especially with my students, who come from many many different countries and cultures. On the other hand, it will be a good lesson for some of my more reactionary chicklets, so it will have a lot of good effects.