Civil Tears

Okay, I wasn't going to write about this -- it's an uncomfortable subject for me -- but it's more substantial than most things I've written lately and I think it needs to be said.

I cried yesterday.

Let's start with the beginning of the day. In sociology, we've finally gotten to 'race.' I spoke up for the first time all year, commenting on the "one-drop rule" and why it existed (historical reasons). We heard a "the man is holding you - at this point, the minority, or "person of color" - down" lecture, as usual. He talked about the historical relationship between blacks and whites in this country, and how it is so uncomfortable. When I left, I was still jittery and slightly pissed because I commented.
Keep these things in mind.

I went to U.S. history immediately after that. I'd forgotten we were watching "Eyes on the Prize," a documentary about the Civil Rights movement. Here's where things started getting tough for me. I've never really had an in-depth teaching about the Civil Rights movement; my history classes tended to get stuck about WWI-ish and rush through to the Cold War, brushing history along the way. We'd talked about it, sure, and we all surely also nodded our heads and praised Martin Luther King, Jr., and that was the end of it.
The movie started talking about Albany, GA, where SNCC had been organizing the small town against segregation. The group soon got in over their heads, and MLK came in to help. However, they were up against Police Chief Laurie Pritchett. Truly a sadistic racist if there ever was one. This man, interviewed on the tape, had read King's book to cull ways to stop him. He therefore made sure he never filled the prisons, and didn't use brutality...he essentially cut the movement at the knees. MLK, at a loss for what to do, leads a protest himself and gets in jail, determined to stay the whole sentence to prove his point. The Police Chief convinced some mysterious benefactor to pay MLK's bond, so that he would be forced to leave.
MLK leaves Albany, essentially defeated, and moves on to Birmingham, AL, known as the heart of the segregation war. They try the conventional methods, prisons get filled to beyond capacity. Black business owners start to panic; so many people are in prison, they are losing huge amounts of money. So the movement changes; high school (and I think maybe middle school) black students are pulled from school to march. The first day, all are arrested. The next day, hundreds, HUNDREDS, of black students skip school to march. Before they can even get started, the police chief brings out the police dogs, the fire hoses with pressure so high it's stripping the bark off trees.

I'd never seen those images before. I've seen pictures, but these were videos, and we could see the contortions of pain of these children, hear them screaming as this water pelted them.

I feel like I might cry again even thinking about it.

...I left class, tried to calm myself down. I was shaken, but I hate to cry, especially in front of other people. I take deep breaths, and try to think of other things.

At lunch I'm reading my book, 'A Handmaid's Tale.' One of my absolute favorites. But it makes me even sadder, because I happen to be on a part where we learn that the main character's young young daughter is taken from her, forcibly, screaming, and that she doesn't even know if she is dead or alive. This happens, we learn, because of the extremist Christian (sortof) government in power.

I got home, and started to cry. It just shocked me so much, so terribly much, that all this could have happened. That firefighters, people trained to save lives, could intentionally turn a firehose on children at close range when they had no chance to escape, when they are just walking down a street in protest. I thought about "A Handmaid's Tale" and how that might be possible; how that is happening in other places.

I cried for humanity. I couldn't even write it off as crazy people from way back then who just were misguided...I'd heard the man who ordered these attacks speaking about it and his rationalization for it in his calm, controlled voice. He obviously was not a heretic, not a madman. He seriously believed he was right.

Maybe I'm just a weakling, but it hurt me, idealistic as I am, to see that people can just be bad, downright bad sometimes, and not even see it.

....those images were so powerful...

*muses....*