Sometimes love comes around and it knocks you down

So, while I was in Arizona, and developing since I returned here, my youngest sister is in the process of making herself largely vegetarian. This is a decision she has come to all on her own, based on research and predictions about the damage that raising animals to eat is doing to our environment. While I don't see myself joining her ASAP, I've agreed to some solidarity with her by no longer buying beef and pork products, limiting my meat intake to poultry and fish, at this point. And I'm impressed with little Deborah. She's really taken what she's learned from her classes, her reading, and her experiences, and turned it into action.

I'm sort of wondering when I stopped caring about things like that, again. While I was in school, social justice, environmental issues, political and economic debates mattered to me! I would actively look for ways to learn more and/or do what I could to make things right. You don't get to be co-leader of Justice Matters for nothing! :) But then I graduated, started working, and essentially lost a large part of it.

There are moments when I feel that familiar swelling of desire and hope for tomorrow - talking to Deborah about being involved in a community garden at Calvin, seeing my students begin to understand and take ownership of the concept of recycling, reading the stories of friends who are offering valuable services to people in far away lands, listening to the black grandmothers at church give tearful thanks for the graduation of their grandchildren from high school, making a meal from locally grown foods - some out of my backyard.

I realize that, as a middle school teacher, I am (or have the potential to be) an instrumental and valuable part of the network of people around the world who are actively seeking to make it a better place. I went through this over a year ago, but I feel I need to keep reminding myself that teaching children, not to mention underprivileged children in a rough part of Chicago, is no less cosmically important than digging wells in Africa or immunizing children in South America or rescuing slaves in Bangladesh. Maybe the problem is that it is, by and large, so very thankless. But then I get frustrated with myself for needing thanks. Why do I feel like I need a pat on the back, or a thoughtful gift, or a good word put in to my superiors?

I'm here because this is where the action is. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, these kids are on the front lines of an all-out war being fought in their city and in their culture. Ironically, fighting on these lines with them, I have become deeply embedded in a culture that could care less about things like becoming a vegetarian because meat's bad for the environment, or whether or not these peaches were grown organically and locally. Maybe that's the real tension here.

Maybe I'm not revisiting my post-college identity crisis, maybe I'm just coming to terms with the fact that I am trying to be equally a part of two different cultures: the culture of my students, with its hyper-sexual beat-based music, intimate family values, and love for Flamin' Hot Cheetos, and the culture of my sister and much of my college experience, with its organic/local/homespun emphases and global vision for change. In reality, both of these cultures want to see the world become a better place. Absolutely, right at the core, I believe that my students and my sister have the same vision.

I'll keep you posted on my mission to become one of the first hip-hop hippie chicks. I sort of ignored it last year, but I think it might be my destiny. :)