Dropping Bombs on Moms

"The next few days are critical," said the news man on CBS Nightly News this summer, my baby sleeping beside me as I watch what's happening with North Korea and Kim Jong-un joking about little presents he'll send out to the world for us, the U.S. My baby naps, the only things she knows is the warmth of love and safety, while men talk of nuclear weapons sandwiched between hurricane slices of bread.

Boys play at war, and at 3:00 in the morning, all I can do is lie sleepless in the horror and helplessness of it.

Any woman who has looked at her baby knows the depths of loyalty, the humanity that binds us.  I think about another mother like me, maybe past her prime birthing years but still blessed with a baby, maybe in North Korea, looking down at her baby at 3:00 in the morning, wanting nothing more than to not be thinking about anything but the love of motherhood.  Maybe she is in the middle of fear, too, tracing the outline of her baby's soft cheek, the reality of war not a thought experiment but an actuality because of boys.

Any woman who has looked into her baby's eyes could also consider the absolute real chance of death, for her, for this baby. These men cannot really know that it doesn't matter where one lives: a mother and her baby are sacred, and no mother with a baby would drop a bomb or even joke about it on another mother with a baby. Let's get real: that's what we're talking about here.

I cannot think of a cause that would supersede the love I have for my children. What mother would sacrifice her baby willingly for a cause dreamed up by men?

There is only the safety of children. That is the only thing: the safety of children. Mothers know this. Fathers, you too, but there are too many of you who forget and choose to take up other causes, which makes me think you don't know in the same way mothers do.

Of course there have been so many mothers throughout history who have sacrificed their children to war. All who die fighting--these are heavy sacrifices for the mothers. But did the mothers choose that? No. Mothers will always choose safety for their children in the hopes of happiness, and it is only through the force of circumstance that a mother must submit to acceptance of the sacrifice of a child.

These boys masquerading as men who are toying with war would do well to listen to the mothers, to think about the safety of all children, no matter where those children live.

No matter where those children and their mothers live.

It's 3:00 a.m. and I'm with my baby.  I don't want to drop a bomb at 3:00 a.m. on another woman with her baby, tired but so in love with the miracle of that small life.  It's enough to make me want to deliver a spanking to the men who are even thinking of messing with this sacredness anywhere on this Earth. Even those men who are old enough to be my grandfather cannot hold in their bodies the wisdom I have now because I am a mother, because any mother knows that safety is paramount. People can live where they live and believe what they want, but Lord, please, mothers must be allowed to live in safety with their children and then men would do well to keep their ideas about bombs that kill mothers and their babies to their damned selves.

Plot Dissection: Me Before You

In an effort to become less of an idiot regarding plot structure and, in general, how stories work, I have embarked on a journey of discovery: reading fiction and sussing out their plots through my careful note-taking.  

The second book: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Spoiler Alert: The plot is completely revealed below.

First, a quick review:

Me Before You kept me reading.  I found myself cheering for Lou, wanting her to succeed in her quest to save Will from his suicidal plan. It was an easy read and had some light politicization regarding euthanasia, but it was mostly a love story that even got this hardened husk of a woman to shed a tear at the end. Moyes knows what she's doing.  Four stars on GoodReads--it's not fine literature, but it was good.

Now, for the dissection.  First, thank you to Jane K. Cleland's Mastering Suspense Structure and Plot for the following initial factors to think out when considering plot:

Protagonist Motivation: Lou; to make Will ant to live

Antagonist Motivation: Will; to die

Narrative Question: Will Lou save Will and, by extension, herself?

Theme: Choosing to live

Setting: Small town England

Structure: Chronological, over six months

Pace: Steady

Suspense: Will Lou and Will fall in love?  Will Will (I know, but I didn't name the character!) find a reason to live? Will Lou find herself?

Next, the plot analysis, with plot points as outlined in the webpage The Eight Sequences compliments of ScriptLab.  Now, there are lots of different names for these major plot points, but I found this one easy to follow and relevant for novels, even though it's for script writing.  Here it is:

ACT I

Status Quo: Prologue of Will before the accident.  In the present, Lou loses her job.  There are many complicated factors at home (she lives with her mother, father, grandfather, sister, and nephew), the biggest of which being money problems.

Inciting Incident:  Gets a job caring for Will

Predicament: Things are complicated for Lou: she doesn't know what she wants from life.  As for Will, he's attempted suicide.

Lock-In: We find out Will wants to exercise his right to die (28% into the book).

ACT II

First Obstacle: Lou quits the job--she can't be a part of this. Will's mother convince her to stay.

Raising the Stakes: Lou will stay and launches a plan to make Will want to live.

First Culmination/Midpoint: They go to the horse race track, and it's pretty terrible.  Will is angry that no one ever asks him what HE wants. (43% into the book)

Subplot: Flashback to Lou's rape.

Rising Action: Good times happen (the symphony, her birthday party, getting tattoos, bonding over the maze when Lou tells Will about the rape, go to a wedding together, and decide to go on vacation together).  There are complicating factors, too, such as Lou's love life with her boyfriend, Patrick, and the overriding sense that time for Will is running out.

Main Culmination: Lou admits her feelings for Will to her sister, and Lou and Patrick break up.

END of Act II: Will lands in the hospital with pneumonia (80% into book).

ACT III

New Tension: They go on a tropical island vacation.  It's amazing.  Lou tells Will how she feels about him.

Twist: Will still wants to die and wants Lou to be there with him.

Resolution: Lou refuses to go but on the day of, gets summoned there by Mrs. Traynor.  She sees Will and they share a tender time, but she's accepted his decision to die, and he does.  She starts her new life.

THE END.

Plot Dissection: Good in Bed

In an effort to become less of an idiot regarding plot structure and, in general, how stories work, I have embarked on a journey of discovery: reading fiction and sussing out their plots through my careful note-taking.  

The first book: Good in Bed by Jennifer Wiener

Spoiler Alert: The plot is completely revealed below.

First, a quick review:

Good in Bed is the second book I've read authored by Wiener, the first being her recent memoir, Hungry Heart, which I loved.  I was shocked reading Good in Bed and how closely it paralleled Wiener's own biography, from her fat-shamed self to her father issues and lesbian mother to her slacker boyfriend and seriously attention-seeking sister.  Of course, there were differences, but the novel itself felt about fifty pages too long.  I gave it two stars on GoodReads.  A little harsh, yes, but honest.  It just wasn't that good (in bed or otherwise) because it was too slow.

Now, for the dissection.  First, thank you to Jane K. Cleland's Mastering Suspense Structure and Plot for the following initial factors to think out when considering plot:

Protagonist Motivation: Cannie; to get Bruce back (find love)

Antagonist Motivation: Bruce; to move on

Narrative Question: Will Cannie learn to love herself?

Theme: Growing into self-acceptance

Setting: Philadelphia

Structure: Chronological: over a year or so

Pace: Steady (a bit slow)

Suspense: Will Cannie get Bruce back?  Will she learn to love herself and, in turn, find love?

Next, the plot analysis, with plot points as outlined in the webpage The Eight Sequences compliments of ScriptLab.  Now, there are lots of different names for these major plot points, but I found this one easy to follow and relevant for novels, even though it's for script writing.  Here it is:

ACT I

Status Quo/Inciting Incident:  Cannie, newly single, reads an article in a magazine by her ex about their (ahem, sexual) relationship that mortifies her.

Predicament: She still wants to be with Bruce.  She also feels terrible about about herself and has a complicated past (and present!) with her family.

Lock-In: Bruce's dad dies (23% into the book).

ACT II

First Obstacle: Bruce and Cannie have a one-night stand after the funeral.

Raising the Stakes: Flashback of serious father issues.

First Culmination/Midpoint: Bruce is dating another woman.  Cannie is pregnant (45% into book)

Subplot: History of Cannie's mother and her partner, Tanya; spending Thanksgiving with the family.

Rising Action: Decides to keep the baby.  She tells people and writes a letter to Bruce (with no response), but things are looking positive.

Main Culmination: Goes to California after selling her screenplay and has a great time, but then she sees and is disappointed by her father who abandoned his family long ago.

END of Act II: Back in Philadelphia, Cannie sees Bruce and the new girlfriend in the airport.  They have a fight, and she falls and blacks out (83% into book).

ACT III

New Tension: The baby is born prematurely; will she live?

Twist: Cannie is experiencing serious depression.

Resolution: Dr. K and Cannie fall in love, and they live happily ever after.

THE END.

The B.S. of Busy

I am so busy.

I teach college, which means that I deal with a lot of students every semester, and each student has his or her particular issues.  I am expected to work with and past these issues.  This makes me busy.

I teach writing, which means that I have many, many essays to grade over the course of the year.  Each essay presents its own set of problems that I have to not only explain but also suggest ways to work though and then assign a grade to it.  Oh, and I often let the students rewrite the essays, and then I have to grade them again.  This makes me busy.

I have a family.  If you have a family, you know how much busier that makes me. If you don't have a family, you're not as busy as me, so don't even try to say that you are.  I was without a husband until I was 32 and without a kid until I was 35, so I remember very well what it was like to not have a husband or a child, and I thought I was busy then, but I definitely wasn't, so no thank you, you singles.

Did I mention that I have other obligations at work?  Did I mention that I work out to take care of my body and my mind?  Did I mention that I'm in two bands?  Did I mention that I have to read at least a half hour before I go to sleep each night so I'm able to slow my mind down enough to be able to drift off?  Did I mention that I am susceptible to anxiety?  Did I mention that I am a people-pleaser and a perfectionist who has to fight against the tendency to believe that I am not only NOT doing enough, but I'm also not doing it WELL enough?

I am SO busy, and SO WHAT?

There's this association we make with the word busy.  We connect it with the word stress.  If we're busy, we must be stressed, and we'd be less stressed if we weren't so busy.

I'm going to throw down the "Are you kidding me??" gauntlet in two ways.

First, being busy is doing life.  We do the things we do because they are choices.  I work, so that takes time out of my day.  I must work, yes, but I chose to teach English, and if I wasn't grading essays, I'd be doing charting as a nurse or running through quality control protocol on a product.  The nature of work is that there is work involved.  People get real philosophical about making work their passion or finding meaning in the work they do.  I'm not saying that's not possible or that it's not good to find your work to be meaningful.  What I do reject, though, is when we are somehow surprised that when we're at work, we're working, meaning that we're busy.  That's what work should be, right?

And what about other aspects of life that don't include work?  These things are about choices.  I chose to have a family.  I choose to be in bands.  If I get down on myself because I think I'm not doing enough, that's something I am doing to myself.

Of course, there are things that happen that are out of our control.  My kid gets sick and needs to stay home.  I have an anxiety attack.  My car breaks down.  Yes, I get stressed about that stuff because I prefer to be in control, but I have to reframe it.  I take care of my kid.  I take care of myself.  I get the car into the shop.  I do what needs to be done because that's what living is.

Now, let me say that I live a comfortable existence with a good job, a home, a car, and a healthy family.  If you do not have those things, I'm not talking to you.  Don't get offended.  I'm talking about people like me who, when complaining about not being able to decide between going to the Olive Garden or Applebee's for lunch, someone should maybe hit us upside the head with the ubiquitous "First-World Problems!" hashtag.  It's not tough on the streets for us, and we need to stop conflating "busy" with "stress."

And that's another thing.  I get more stressed when I'm NOT busy.  I like having things to do.  I am akin to a toddler: we enjoy structured time.  It helps us be productive.  I know this because I am a teacher who has had summers off in the past.  These summers have led to:

1. One summer searching for and ultimately buying both a house and a dog.
2. One summer searching for and ultimately dating the man I ended up marrying.
3. One summer having a total meltdown because, I honestly believe (in part) I didn't have enough structured activity keeping me busy and because I am, at my heart, lazy, all my plans that depended on keeping myself accountable went out the window.

People think that teachers have it so easy with our summers "off."  No.  First, we spend summers getting ready for the school year, and second, we do the stuff that we can't otherwise do when school is in session, like make major life decisions or finally have a minor mental breakdown that made me understand what I need to do to take care of myself.  Now, I either teach during the summer or I have a specific schedule of events I follow that get me out of the house and participating in life (or, as most would say, BUSY).  

So I would like it if folks could let go of the idea that busy equals stress.  It creates a hostile environment regarding getting work done, and it's also not true for many people like myself.  If I feel like I'm getting stressed because of all the choices I've made that have led up to the stress, I don't make everyone else miserable by talking about how so very insanely busy I am.  

I make a different choice because, dammit, I can, and so can most of us.  Maybe if we lived in a society where there was no audience for people who want to cry about how stressed they are because of how busy they are because of the choices they've made, they might make better choices to begin with.  Seriously.  If I worked in a place where it was actively discouraged to complain about busy-ness, maybe there would be less stress and more, well, just doing things.  So instead of me asking someone how they're doing, instead of saying, "Oh my god, I'm just so busy!  I'm up to my eyeballs!" they'd say, "I'm doing the stuff of work," and I'd say, "Cool; me too," and maybe that would lead to more conversations about baseball, how to best serve students, or even leave room for complaining about stuff that might actually be solved because of the complaining.  Complaining about being busy is not useful.  Everyone else is also busy, and it doesn't make the work get done.  So, just do work.  Save your feelings for stuff that can benefit from them.  

My Little Pony

There's a scene in a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Elaine go to a 50th anniversary dinner for a distant relative of his.  Over the course of the dinner, the group starts talking about horses, and the conversation quickly turns to ponies, at which time Jerry states that he hated anyone who had a pony when they were growing up.  Of course, the script was written by the king of foot-in-mouth-remarks, Larry David, and the guest of honor at the party, Manya, is insulted:  "When I was a little girl in Poland, we all had ponies. My sister had pony, my cousin had pony... So, what's wrong with that?" (credit to "The Pony Remark" on Wikipedia).  She ends up getting so upset that she leaves the table...and dies soon thereafter, because Larry David needs to take it to the extreme.

It's a cliche, these kids who have ponies.  Probably every little girl (and probably lots of little boys, too) has had the fleeting thought that it would be awesome to have a pony. I wonder how many times the mall Santa has heard this request from a little girl, who really maybe just wants a realistic-looking pony stuffed animal, but decides that it's Santa, so what the hell, go for broke.  I'm not sure if kids these days are into asking for unrealistic animals for Christmas; I should ask my five- and six-year-old nieces.  My brother might be irked for planting the seed, but that's what he gets for sitting on me when I was little and playing typewriter on my chest.

Girls were obviously into Barbies when I was growing up in the 80's, but there were much cooler toys to be had.  I experienced the advent of Care Bears and Pound Puppies and Purries.  I was generally obsessed with stuffed animals, but my favorite toys of all were My Little Ponies.  Those pastel horses with their soft plastic bodies and neon hair and tattooed rumps were the best, man.  One Christmas I got the My Little Pony castle which nearly sent me into cardiac arrest.  My friends loved My Little Ponies, too, so we would get together and create a whole world of these things, getting them into dangerous and/or amorous situations, all accompanied by high-pitched whinnying.  At home, though, this was a lone pursuit as my older brother and cousin were much more into Transformers, He-Man, and Star Wars.  I'd get in on that, too, but always got stuck with Battle Cat while my brother got Optimus Prime (we mixed all the toys together in a game called "Secret Wars").  No, I could never convince the boys to play My Little Ponies with me, the sexist jerks.

We also lived sort of out in the country, meaning we had land, but we also had neighbors all around us.  Country-Suburban?  Subountry?  Anyway, we had enough land behind our house to build a big enclosure for, that's right, horses.  My mom, hearkening back to her own childhood where she lived in the legit country and had horses, bought a big brown Quarterhorse-mix named Brandy and, not long after, got another, slightly smaller brown horse with a black mane and tail named Rusty for my brother to ride.  Despite my love for the My Little Ponies, Brandy and Rusty were terrifying.  I never wanted to ride them, preferring instead to pet their ears and feed them carrots until one time Brandy inadvertently nipped my hand and I then avoided him.

I had a job with the horses, and that was to collect strings of twine from the ground that had been cut from the bales of hay.  I'd get paid a nickel a string, and one time, I fibbed and paid myself an extra twenty-five cents (my parents, not really giving a crap, took my word on whatever I said I picked up).  So I'd do that job, but I never reaped any real rewards from having the horses.  In fact, on several occasions, they'd get loose, which would unleash a flurry of frantic chasing and general melee that left me feeling anxious and exhausted.

My main fear of the horses was how tall they were.  I was afraid of heights ever since I fell down a flight of stairs as a toddler and my dad, hearing the bumping and rushing to catch me, broke my fall enough so I didn't crack my head open on the basement floor but didn't actually totally prevent me from hitting it.  I never let him pick me up after that, and heights freaked me out.  Despite this, I was jealous of the horses and that my fearless older brother would go ride with my mom and I was left at home. It stood to reason that I would perhaps like a horse, but maybe one that wasn't so tall.

So, a pony.

As the fates would have it, my brother had a friend who had just the pony, a small gray mare named Flicka.  I met Flicka and loved her, and my mother, happy to grant my wish, bought her for me.  I have to kind of blame her, though, for what happened next as she didn't take the most logical first step: have me ride Flicka before she bought her.

I was thrilled; upon Flicka's arrival, I busted out the curry comb and gave her a good brush down, fed her some hay and water, and was ready to ride. Mom saddled her up and got me up there, and as we ambled through the empty lot next to our house, the saddle slipped over to the side and I fell, very slowly, off my pony, reliving a primal trauma of the stairs incident, but in slow motion.

Friends, that was it for me.  I was fine, of course, and it was no fault of Flicka's, but I did NOT get back on that horse.  We walked her back and I told my mom and myself that I needed to gather my wits and we'd try again the next day.

Of course, the next day never came.  Well, it literally did, but my days of horse riding were over after the slow-motion slide-off of Flicka.  My mom would encourage me, my brother would tease me (my dad said nothing--he took a hard pass on anything having to do with these beasts, being raised in a house with a father who said all animals belonged in the barn), but get back on that pony I would not.  I don't know how long we kept Flicka, but it must not have been for more than a couple of months before she was sold, and I didn't even feel bad about it.  I had more affection for my hermit crab.

I hadn't been on the back of a horse since Flicka.  Why tempt fate?  I don't need a horse to get around; plus, it's not like I've had convenient access to one...until I did.  As a grown adult finally moving back to my hometown, I hooked back up with some friends from high school, notably a gal who was still obsessed with horses long after I moved on from My Little Ponies and started wearing men's polyester shirts and thinking it was cool to simultaneously smoke clove cigarettes and eat pork fried rice out of the carton.  This friend made her obsession her living, managing a horse barn in our little hometown.  She lived right upstairs from the stables, so when we'd get together, we met the horses.  I decided that it would be a fun activity for my boyfriend and I to do together, to ride horses, and set a date.

I wish there was a hilarious-in-hindsight story to tell about my adult experience of horse riding because that would make for a great climax here, but I'm afraid it was simply fine.  I wasn't bucked off, and I didn't experience a sense of revelation, having made it past a childhood trauma.  It was fun, though, kind of like being on vacation and riding a jet ski for the first time might be fun, but my mind did not get blown.  I didn't feel like a badass, but I did feel like a woman on a horse who wasn't freaked out by it.  I gave it a go, kind of like when I gave oil painting Bob Ross-style a go, but I didn't fool myself into thinking I was going to then buy a set of paints.  Sometimes you do things just to say you've done them, period.  It's taken me growing up to realize that it doesn't mean the next logical step is a Flicka in my backyard.

I'll Wave YOU Through...

I am fifteen, behind the wheel of a Ford Taurus with a driving instructor next to me.  He's guiding me through our busy downtown, telling me to take wrong turns down one-way streets to test my awareness. I do well, only getting fooled for a second one time.  My hands are death-gripping at 10 and 2, my back ramrod straight.  We practice parallel parking, and then he guides me back on the freeway, encouraging me to go the 65-mile-per-hour speed limit.  I feel like I'm flying and have the most excruciating tension headache when I get home.

When I'm sixteen, it takes me two tries to get my license.  The first time, I would have passed with a 95 but I hit one of the poles parallel parking: an instant fail.  The second time, I passed with an 80 and have never felt happier to earn a low B.  Besides a few deer hits and an epic snowstorm navigation incident, driving has ranged from a pleasure to...nothing, kind of like walking.  I am a good and safe driver.  I go a bit above the speed limit, but never at unsafe speeds.  I do not text while the car is in motion.  I get from point A to point B.

My husband, however, would claim that I have a bit of the road rage.  I find this preposterous.  Road rage is when people flip the bird or even get out of their cars to belly buck each other in intersections.  Yes, there have been times when I've spoken loudly to myself about what some idiot is doing that is endangering me, my family, and my vehicle with their stupid brain and stupid vehicle, but I wouldn't call that rage.  I would call that social commentary.

One thing, however, really chaps my hide, and it's a bummer because the perpetrator is actually trying to be nice, which is a double-whammy: it's irritating AND I'm a jerk because I find it irritating.  Allow me to expound.

Let's say I'm approaching a four-way stop at the time time another car is to my right.  It's just me and this other car, and we get to the stop signs at the same time.  What do you do??  Easy.  If you get there at the same time, the car on the right goes first.  Why?  Because the Driving Gods say so.  Don't be a pain in the ass about it; that's just how it is.  

Who doesn't know this rule?  I know this rule, and I don't even pay attention to these kinds of things.  I don't even know the difference between a sweet potato and a yam, but I know that the person on the right has the right-of-way in an arriving-at-the-four-way-stop-at-the-same-time scenario.  So if a village idiot like myself knows this rule, I get a little irritated when others don't.  

Here's what happens that makes me feel crazy: the driver on the right waves at me.  He's saying, "Go ahead.  Go ahead through, person on the left."  

I hate that, you guys.  First, no.  This isn't polite society.  This is the road, where homo erecti are manipulating molded tons of steel and plastic at high speeds on four skids of rubber.  Because of this, and second, there are rules that should be followed. Otherwise, we become selfish assholes.  Just look at Black Friday at Walmart when they're selling 60-inch flat screen TVs for 250 bucks.  A guy DIED from being trampled because people couldn't wait to get that cheap TV, yo.  Even in super-polite northern Minnesota, we are jerks without rules.  Third, it actually takes more time to do this silly waving than if the person simply went because they have the right of way.  It's 7:56 in the morning, sir!  I know you have to be to work at 8:00; why are you wasting time with the parade princess wave??

Most of the time, if I get waved through, I'll go, momentarily disoriented (because this makes no sense!), replaced quickly by frustration.  I refuse, however, to wave back.  That would make me complicit in the game, as though I somehow approve of these rule-bending shenanigans.  Do I feel a little guilty for not matching niceness for niceness?  You bet your sweet ass I do.  Mama didn't raise no ingrate.  But I simply cannot encourage the other person creating MORE confusion for others in the future by acting happy about their "generosity" now.  If the person can see my face, they'll likely register irritation and think to himself, Hmm.  That woman seems irritated.  Perhaps I should have followed the civilized rules of the road and gone first.  Or, he thinks to himself, Jerk.

Sometimes I get so irritated I refuse to go.  The person will wave, and I will point him and then sweep my finger in the path that he should follow with his car, clearly saying, "No. You. GO."  They usually do, and I watch with a shaking head as they make their way through the intersection.

There have been times when I've done that, and they don't go, instead waving again.  God forgive me, I have, at times, taken my hands off the wheel and crossed my arms in front of me, defiant in what is a life-altering situation here in my first world of a full belly and several hundred dollar Frye boots.  Sometimes, another driver will show up at the intersection, and now there are spectators to the showdown.  The waving driver will see my crossed arms and will know that 1) I'm a piece of work and 2) I'm not going, so they'd better because this is getting stupid.  In response, I think, You already made it stupid, buddy.

Long story short, I do not have road rage.  I do, however, have a pet peeve that involves following the rules when at four-way stops.  Oh, and signaling.  Also, when people pull out into the middle turn lane to then merge into traffic because it scares the crap out of me.  And those LED headlights that are only a notch dimmer than the sun on a cloudless day.

Don't get me started on people who try the wave-through when they arrive first at the four-way stop.  Just don't. 

For the Community

Election day, 3 p.m.  I am sitting in my early American literature course.  We've just had a guest speaker leave; he's an incredibly powerful advocate for equality in our city and is a former colleague and friend of mine.  He's also a large, African-American guy with an infectious smile who embodies kindness.  He was there to talk about the legacy of slavery in our country and, more to the point, our city, the students just having finished reading Frederick Douglass's powerful autobiographical Narrative of the Life of an American Slave.

During our conversation, the issue of Black Lives Matter arose.  Our guest discussed the idea that it's truly about all lives mattering.  As I was half-expecting, a white student described a situation in which he went to a party in southern Iowa where he and his friend were the only white people there.  He cleaned up the story for class, but afterwards, he told me that it was worse: he and his friend felt threatened to the point of near physical violence until they left.  Back in class, though, he made his point: can't black people be just as racist as white people?  I looked at our guest and imagined the inner turmoil he must have been feeling.  As a person who refuses to play poker mostly because I don't have the face for it, I know my feelings were clear for anyone who looked at me.  There's a difference between racism and prejudice! were my first thoughts.  Our guest, however, still radiated kindness as he said, simply, "I'm very sorry that you had to go through that experience.  It sounds scary."  Ah, perspective.  This student wasn't wrong; his experience was his experience, and our guest acknowledged that.  Another student jumped in with an experience she had and we moved on.

After he left, I thought about his response as we continued our conversation, and, though no one talked overtly about the election (and I didn't encourage it, not feeling ready to put on an unbiased mask), one student, a woman in her 30's, said, "You know, we can talk about this stuff, but what difference does my one voice make?"

I looked around and saw other people nodding, and I said, "You know what?  NO.  I patently reject that sentiment."  The students laughed; they'd heard me "lay down the smack" like this before and knew I came from a place of respect.

Then I asked, "How many of you have been out in the world working before coming back to school?"  Over half of the students raised their hands.

"How many of you are still in high school?"  Two students.

"Listen.  What this is all about is choices.  You made a choice, and not an easy one.  Those of you who were working?  You made a radical choice that you wanted more.  Those of you still in high school?  You wanted the challenge of being among minds who are taking on complex problems, so you made a choice.  Even those of you 'traditional' students are here because you chose to be.

"You probably are in this class because you needed literature credits.  When you signed up for the course, did you imagine that we'd be sitting here, having such deep conversations not just about the symbols and characters in the literature, but about life?  This is happening because of YOU, because of your willingness to make a new choice and be open to creating a community in this classroom.

"And me, as an English teacher.  Do you really think that I'm here because I want you to learn how to write a thesis statement or not use 'they' when you really mean 'he or she'?  NO!  I'm here to get you to think more deeply about things, and when you're willing to engage in that because you've said 'YES' to broadening your thinking by taking these types of courses, I am inspired.  As an educator, the experiences we have here have a profound effect on my ability to do this work every day.  It's my hope that you will keep saying 'YES' to learning more and thinking deeply and creating community because that's when you'll see how much your one voice matters."

If I was holding a microphone, I would have dropped it.

I got emotional during my speech.  Tears came into my eyes and I told them I was feeling these emotions because they were giving me hope.  I was proud of them and the community we made.

I didn't know what I would be feeling the next morning after a restless night sleep and the news that Trump had won, forcing me out of my bed at 5:30 for a hard run to clear my mind.  As I headed up a hill, my legs felt it but kept moving, and I thought about the student who had a bad incident with a group of black kids.  It occurred to me that what my student walked into was not an angry hive, but a community of people that had formed to hold on to each other, to be a safe space in a world that hasn't seemed safe to them.

Our guest speaker's words echoed in my mind: I'm sorry you had to go through that experience.  It sounds scary.  I felt those words in my heart: "It sounds scary."  The antidote to fear is knowledge, and collective knowledge creates power.  Later that day, I met with people from my larger community, people who think deeply about issues and who care for one another and are reaching out to all people.  It wasn't right that my student felt fear in his experience at the party; it indeed sounds scary.  But it's scarier to allow a bad experience, either his personal bad experience or what many of us feel is a bad experience of this election, to close us off from still reaching out, reaching out and connecting and creating the community where all feel safe.