You said, “When they go low, we go high.”
I’ve been trying.
It’s just really hard for me to stay neutral in this election.
I could teach an entire class on understatement with just that sentence.
This year, the politics are personal.
I can’t listen to a presidential candidate call for a ban on all Muslims, knowing I went to Prom with a Muslim from Pakistan.
I can’t listen to a candidate call Mexicans rapists, knowing all the times my students have been ecstatic to go home to visit Mexico.
I can’t listen to a candidate call immigrants criminals, knowing how many times I’ve seen a student break down because they can’t afford college without papers.
I can’t listen to a candidate call sexual assault “locker room talk,” when I know 1 in 4 college-age women in this country have been sexually assaulted. I teach high school. Sometimes I can hear that clock ticking. Sometimes it feels like a bomb is about to go off.
I can’t believe I was a sophomore in high school when we dropped bombs on Baghdad. I was a freshman when the towers fell – and now I have students who have never seen those towers standing. Who have never known a world without war.
Who know war is more than just planes and bombs.
Michelle, you used to send emails that said, “Sign my husband’s birthday card,” and I would write in and say, “It means so much to my students to see a President who looks like them.”
Now it’s eight years later, and it seems like every week my students and I are watching another young man or woman who looks like them be executed on camera.
I wonder how many of those images will go on the highlight reel that plays in the shadows of all our minds.
I know every time I hear a man talk about grabbing women I flashback to the time a man smiled at me in the elevator to my apartment building, then threw me against the wall, shoved a weapon in my groin, and threatened to kill me.
I learned it doesn’t take a weapon to win a fight. You just have to value your life more than the other person wants to destroy it.
There will come a time in your life in which you have to fight to win. Sometimes winning just means you get to keep breathing. Sometimes winning means you go to bed wanting to wake up.
I’m going to need every vile, misogynistic, rape-abetting pig in this country to wake up and realize they’re on the wrong side of history.
The revolution is coming, and it will not be televised. The revolution will be broadcast on every flickering screen. It will be a storm of shade hurled by kids whose phones are smarter than any man who thinks interrupting is a trump card.
And when that storm is over, we will speak the truth into the destruction. We will say:
It is not OK to kill someone because the color of their skin makes you feel threatened.
It is not OK to hate someone because the way they love is different from the way you love.
It is not OK to treat women as if they are pieces of meat.
And when we are done speaking, the world will be just a bit brighter.
And that will be enough.
It is enough for me that one day I put a list of words up on the board and said, “Write a poem” and one of my students said, “The moon is a shiny sky freckle” and I thought back to the book I read that said if we ever discover life on another planet we cannot just send the scientists – we will have to send a poet too, for they will explain the strange.
Michelle, I hope tonight you are aiming high. I hope you are looking up at that same shiny sky freckle, thinking the same thought:
When my kids rule the world, it will be brilliant.
Elizabeth DeOrnellas 