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I should be in bed. I wish I were in bed. But I think I really need to write about this now, before I go to sleep and the need to write about it dies.
I went to a panel discussion thingy tonight about "ethnic hatred" ....which when you hear it like that sounds fairly boring, at least to me. But I read a description of it and decided I had to go. (I went by myself, by the way.) It was basically four people telling their personal stories about surviving ethnic hatred. The first person who got up and talked was a lady who survived the holocaust. She was 17 when the war started and was in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. She basically told the same story I've heard a hundred times before, only it was the first time I ever heard anyone tell it in person. It was a lot different to have her standing right there reliving everything she went through right in front of us. I think the second person who talked was the most interesting.... she's black and in 1963 she was 13 living in Georgia and her and about 100 or so other 12 and 13 year olds organized this peaceful demonstration for civil rights. They didn't get very far before the police got there and told them to "disperse." ....they didn't, and she said it was instant pandemonium. The police started clubbing people... she got clubbed on her head... and they turned a fire hose on them- it blew her shoes right off and I don't think she ever got them back... and they set dogs on them who were in there tearing peoples clothes and nipping at them. Then they started throwing those kids into paddy wagons. They took them to jail where they separated the boys from the girls, and then they took the girls- 35 twelve and thirteen year old girls- to a stockade. It was built for the civil war and hadn't been used for a hundred years. They locked them all in there with no running water, no toilet, no beds, no mattresses, and no blankets. They had to sleep on the cement floor and use a shower drain for a toilet. For the first three days I think she said they got no food or water and after that they each got one hamburger a day.... and she didn't say specifically, but I got the impression they didn't give them much water. It was the summer in Georgia and they all got dehydrated. The police kept them there for forty-five days. They didn't inform their parents, they had no kind of due process.... they just locked them in this big old dirty stockade and kept them there. The lady who was talking had her head wounded when they clubbed her and she bandaged it with her dress. She wore a flour sack the entire time they were there. They were there for 45 days without being able to wash anything or change their clothes or brush their teeth. She said cockroaches and bugs climbed on them at night. And the guards were brutal too- the girls kept singing freedom songs and the guards threatened them and once they threw a rattlesnake in with them, and it just stayed there. I can't even imagine that happening. That lady is younger than my mom. The third person was a refugee from Burundi. I have very little idea what happened to him because his English was really bad. But I did understand that there's a war there between the Hutus and the Tutsis, which are two ethnic groups. And his parents had a mixed marriage so he was really both and could have chosen either side to fight on but instead he refused to pick a side. And because of that he ended up in jail and they did something to his wife and children and he ended up fleeing to the United States. The fourth person was a student, basically my age, from Bosnia. He talked all about how when he was little everyone just lived together and there was no difference between the different groups. Only then there was. And he talked about bombings and how there were bombings most every day and in school everybody sat away from the windows in case of shrapnel. He talked about how once most of his friends went out into town to the cafes and places and he decided to stay home that night. And they bombed the city that night and how it was the worst sound ever but even worse is the silence after the bomb. And they carried the scene on live TV and there was blood and body parts all over and one woman called in and said, "please, this can't be happening, I just saw my daughter's head." ....and she meant that she'd her daughter's head not attached to her body. The guy who was talking- his name is Emil and he started crying. He said it's still like that there today and the way I understand it, his family, minus his dad who couldn't leave, went as refugees to Paris. But he didn't talk about that part much so I'm not sure. Anyway, the reason I had to write about this is because it was really amazing to sit there and hear all these people talking about not having things that I take for granted and how crazy people can get about hating people because they're different. And the other thing that really amazed me was that the majority of the people there were there only because they had to be- because it was required for one class or another. I felt like one of the only people there who went because I saw the fliers (which everybody must have seen- they were on every table in both dining halls for a week) ...and wanted to go. I have said right along that I would learn more if I could just spend the next two years with nothing that had to be done. Whenever I have time where nothing has to be done I spend it in the library- I always have for longer than I can remember. Now I'm sure that if I could spend time in the library and have access to talks like that one that I would definitely learn more. I'm a political science major, and I've been here for ten weeks. I still learned more in two and a half hours tonight than I have in any of my classes so far. At least, I learned more that I'll still remember by the time I graduate. That is why I think I want to go to Oxford. Because the way I understand it, that is how you learn there. You have a tutor for each subject, and you only have two subjects. You meet with your major tutor once a week and he or she assigns readings which you do and you talk about the readings that you've already done and you write essays to show that you're thinking... and you do basically the same thing with your minor tutor only you meet less often and get less credits. I'm thinking next spring. A year from now. I was originally thing I'd go this fall, but that's kind of rushing it. I'd really have to be applying now. And there's other factors- if I go I want to study literature for my minor subject, but I'd have to take a 300 level literature course here before they'd let me do that. And my mom would have serious problems with the idea as soon as it dawned on her I'd be in another country for my 18th birthday. And in a lot of ways I agree with her. okay. I got it out of my system and I'm sorry if it sounds stuffy. |