What middle school does to us all...

My Monday afternoon tea spot has just been overtaken by the local school children. Braces, sneakers, silly bands, body odor, cell phones, neon sunglasses, squealing. It's a terrible sight. I'm not the person who looks back on middle school or high school with sincere disdain. I didn't mind it really, I wasn't completely cast aside and never had to have braces. Sure, I made the perm mistake once and certainly had to deal with the fact that my arms and legs grew much more quickly than the rest of my body, but all in all, it was fine.

That was, until George W. Bush was elected. I had fit in quite well in my crazy Dutch town, I was tall and blonde, I have Van in my last name. There was no question Jesus loved me; I was, after all, a pastor's kid and religiously attended our youth group events weekly. No one ever questioned my morals, values or beliefs. Until I started talking about them.

That was likely my first mistake. See, 14 year olds don't talk about Meet the Press, or listen to Neil Young, or correct their teacher for using the phrase "pro-abortion". People started to look at me differently...they started to wonder.

Then we invaded Iraq. I was no longer just a tall, blonde, Van, pastor's kid....I was also a, gasp, liberal. I was a pacifist. I didn't like G.W. and I was pro-choice. I told people. I told people I wanted to educate them. I told people they were wrong. My second mistake.

It's easy to believe that your internal feelings and what you've learned at home is exactly how the world should operate. It's not even wrong to believe that, but there is a level to which you can adequately influence those around you. I, unfortunately, was the only one who believed what I believed. I became a heathen and people told me they were praying for my salvation.

It would have been easier to eliminate myself completely from the ignorant presence of those around me, but I recognized early on, that I would be a lot better off if I spent all the time I could around these people, my friends, but my political and theological strangers [enemies?!]. I endured their blank stares, their mocking, their laughter....I peeled the Bush '04 sticker off my car and replaced it with my Habitat for Humanity sticker. I let them be who they were, I listened, I disagreed and I never shut up.

It's so easy to surround ourselves with people just like us. People who worship like us, vote like us, listen to the same music as us. There is value in that type of community, but more than that, you've got to throw yourself into the most uncomfortable situations to gain your own identity. I loved all of Eboo Patel's book, but the section that spoke most to me was as he was trying to convince the leaders of various religious organizations to let their youth engage in conversation with youth from other religious backgrounds. Before Patel could explain his own reasoning, I was outlining what my own response would have been. I wouldn't have my own secure identity politically [and well, theologically] had I not exposed myself to the other side. I need the other to determine in fact, who I was. We need the other. We might not agree with the other, we might not even understand the other, but if we both agree that we need each other [or more realistically, that neither of us is going away], then we can better build a society based on community, conversation and mutual respect.

It took a long time for me to get my crazy Republican friends to respect me. I think they do now, but even when they make silly comments on the HuffPost links I put on my Facebook wall, I know they want my opinion, and hell, they need it. [Or at least that's what I'll keep telling myself.]

Soundtrack of my Life

More than any other artistic medium, music motivates me, allows me to remember, comforts me and pushes me forward. Since I was young, I have clung to certain songs or artists as a way to encourage me or affirm my thinking, reminding me that I was not alone, but supported by thousands of others.

These are just a sampling of songs or voices that I have found integral to my place in the world. The power of the election of Barack Obama, the strong voice against the Bush administration and the Iraq War, the importance of religious inclusiveness and an understanding that my life and work is not complete without a vision of something larger than myself.

Music can reach the depths of a persons soul, make them cry out in sorrow, throw their hands up in joy, or shout with frustration. Reaching a person's most inner-self is the first best step towards action, change, or simple consideration of something new. Music, like many other artistic mediums, can so easily slip into a person's everyday life and change them with little notice. Is music an effective means of social change? Completely.

Can the military be an effective means of social change?

These are some of the beautiful children I got to work with in Athens, Greece at the Athens Refugee Center. From Afghanistan, these children, along with their mothers (and if they were lucky, their fathers) were traveling along the refugee highway, away from the violence that plagued their nation and disrupted their lives.

I heard so many stories of life back in Kabul. Stories that will haunt these children for the rest of their lives. If they were without their father, it was likely that he had been killed by the Taliban, and even worse, that they had been the ones to find him.

I don't promote war. I promote peace. I don't desire violence. I desire stability. But as I got to know these children and listened to their stories, their desire to stay living in their homeland, their desire to live in peace, their desire to remain a family, I couldn't help but feel that the US military had an important role to play in their lives. They needed such a large and quick movement to make the violence and the injustice stop. They needed protection. They needed people to care about their existence.

Before I went to Athens, I spoke strongly against the wars and even protested a few times. Nothing changed. I wasn't going to impact the war, the military, even US foreign policy. Instead I put my energy into writing letters to my classmates serving overseas and learning about the plight of those forced into displacement. And that helped me feel like I was influencing a more positive outcome of this war, but it's not enough.

My generation has come to expect the singing of God Bless, America for the troops in the 7th inning stretch. We expect to see the names of those military personnel lost in the past week on Sunday mornings. We expect to pray for our troops. War has become normal, it's part of our life, it doesn't sting like it should.

We should constantly be weeping at the thought of men and women forced from their families, both as military and as civilians in a war-torn country. We should not want war to last forever. I've come to the conclusion, as Capt. Casey mentioned more than once that the ability of these professionals to impact a very negative situation can be a good and even necessary thing. We need to reign in the length of time and money spent in our endeavors and also recognize a more abstract and strategic approach to how we impact people.

But for me, no matter what, these children deserve to be protected and their life deserves to be valued.

Can the courts be a catalyst for change?

I've always been more sure of what I didn't want to do with my life than really understanding what I did want to do. I didn't want to be a pastor and I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a change, I wanted to positively impact society, but for some reason, I knew there was going to be a different road than the traditional judicial or spiritual approach. I looked heavily into public policy schools, knowing my love for politics could easily translate into the makings of a good policymaker, but I realized that I believed more in a combination of a quantitative and qualitative research, not the almost completely statistical nature that public policy schools bring home. I want it to be both/and, not either or.

Before class today, I expected most of my reflection to be based around the idea that perhaps the abortion legislation has hijacked the whole women’s rights movement, but then class discussion steered more heavily into the realm of quantitative data, statistics, the very thing I wanted to steer clear from. Worse par t is, I found myself defending its use, especially for legislative purposes.

To be clear, I understand completely that statistics require a critical eye and careful interpretation. We must be fully aware that no research can be completely comprehensive and its more than likely that no answers will come from data, as it easily becomes outdated. All of this said, I believe very strongly in the use of numbers and quantitative research in order to make moves towards justice.

If we expected our legislators, our judges, our leaders, to base every decision they make on their own personal experiences or based on the experiences they have heard from others, I contend that our already slow and arduous law-making process would become even slower, even more obsolete. We need certain data to tell us which areas of town need public transportation more heavily than others, we need the census to tell us how best to distribute monetary funds, we need numbers to tell us which children are struggling in school. We need numbers and statistics as much as we need emotional stories of heartbreak and heroism. In order for our political system to function at a high level, we need to be fully aware of the demographics that exist in our country as a whole. Especially if there are parts of this country crying out for change.

That said, I still don’t want to be a lawyer. If Rosenburg’s The Hollow Hope reinforced anything for me, it’s that the judicial system takes a much larger stand after public opinion has already been swayed. They follow; it’s the people who lead. This does not make the judicial system at all unnecessary or never capable of creating change, but it puts a large emphasis on the understanding that all political bodies need to be at work, and preferably all at once. We need an organized community, armed with personal testimonies and empirical data alike, to inform and encourage our legislative bodies, who then create policies to fulfill the people’s need. Those policies need to be interpreted by our judicial body and then enforced through the executive branch. And going further, we need people to respond and criticize the policy measure and let the whole process begin again.

I do believe that politics and quantitative research have an important place in our desire for change. Meshing with the qualitative and passionate aspects of society, chances of success will be high. It’s mixing of the black and white that makes such an approach so appropriately gray.

Mary Beth Rogers, Cold Anger

"After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." -- Ann Richards, 1988 Democratic National Convention

Mary Beth Rogers, a longtime political ally and colleague of Ann Richards, likely shared the same sentiment Richards shared at the DNC. A star in the realm of Texas women's politics, Rogers became an activist, author and political leader, paving the way for many women.

Richard's quote may come off as cute and even a bit silly, but in reality, it was likely instigated by a bit of bitterness, and possibly even a bit of anger. Women had been forced into the back seat when it came to US politics, waiting to be given the right to vote and still waiting to hold the highest office. Women have to enter into this new, once off limits arena with a plan, and with, well, a greater motivation.

Rogers' book, Cold Anger, isn't about the women's political movement, but her motivation to write about social change through the eyes of the Industrial Areas Foundation and COPS, likely stemmed from her own personal encounters with people who made her flat out angry. She was able to work through those experiences when she it was likely suggested that she couldn't make it as a woman and now she examines the motivates of Ernesto Cortes through literature, which he suggests is one of the most important factors to one's life.

For both Rogers and Cortes, their anger, their drive, their motivation, came from early experiences where they either experiences inequality, disrespect or a lack of power or had an emotional attachment to someone who did. Rogers generated books and public policy from her anger; Cortes generated community movements and social change from his.

Rogers takes an ethnographic approach to social movements in Texas, learning from those involved, their motivations, their hopes. It seems as though most people involved in making change had significant moments in their life where there was nothing more to feel than anger. It takes an emotion so strong to make one change how they approach life, how they approach society and how they approach change to make things really happen.

In most cases, it's one or a few people who share their anger with others and are able to create a community ready and willing to fight for something so meaningful. If correctly put to use, these leaders can generate a group of people ready to fight for something meaningful, within the correct boundaries and without getting too out of control. However, anger, used incorrectly, can reverse the initial hopes and motivations and instead create a whole other set of motivations for the opposing side.

Anger, both hot and cold, is necessary for social change to get started. Someone has to have a strong emotional attachment to the issue and make that relational to others around them. Even more importantly, those with the initial motivation, needs to keep it reigned in so as to not watch it run out of control.

Mary Beth Rogers and Ernesto Cortes are both great examples of using injustice experiences to work towards a greater good.