Submitted By: ben.killen.rosenberg@gmail.com – Click to email about this post
Posting on behalf of Loretta Kim Rosenberg loretta.kim.rosenberg@gmail.com
Hey, I’m Back!
A few days ago, a neighbor stopped over at my house to tell me to get back to writing. I’ve appreciated the emails and phone calls of support from citizens in the community, many I don’t even know, urging me to keep writing. So here I am.
I didn’t take a break because I was afraid of the haters who emailed me. Disappointed and discouraged, but not afraid. A lot of those emails, I suspect, were written by people day drinking and leaving their minds behind.
I took a break to gain some distance and perspective about what’s happening politically in town and why it bugs me so much.
How do we hold people accountable for their actions in our shared public life, if not by naming both the action and the actor? If there’s no accountability, there’s no justice. If there’s no justice, there’s no peace. That’s not just a slogan.
Do the rules and laws we have apply to everyone, including our elected officials?
When the word civility is used as a tool to shut down talking about uncomfortable things, who wins? When being “nice” means being silent, how do we deal with the hard stuff?
The seeds of who we become start growing early in life. Both the bad seeds and the good seeds. Some we water and some we don’t. Some we’re aware of and some we aren’t. During my break I remembered something I hadn’t thought of for a long time that shows me one of the seeds I’ve watered and why I’ve been so bothered.
The summer I was nine we moved to Yakima, Washington from Portland. Our new home was in a quiet neighborhood with no busy streets and a cemetery at the end of the road. I could walk or ride my used pink and white Schwinn to McClure Elementary School and there were a ton of other kids about my age to play with.
Mrs. Green, my 4th grade teacher, was married to a police officer whose name was Peas. No kidding. Mrs. Green was a mixed bag. She had her favorites—Meg and Matt, Jeff and Jean—the four golden ones who got picked for everything. She was one of those adults you couldn’t trust. She acted one way when other grown ups were around and a whole ‘nother way when they weren’t.
I was somewhere in the middle of her list of kids she tolerated but there were a few kids she actively disliked—Lee who had warts on his hands and was painfully shy (I know because we were partners for square dancing). And Connie. Connie was maybe the only kid in our class who had a single mom and lived in a crappy duplex near my house. We weren’t friends really but we did walk to school sometimes. She didn’t have nice clothes like Meg and Jean. She got discounted hot lunch every day and she got excluded from things like field trips, when money was involved.
Connie got in trouble a lot for not staying at her desk. She’d get up about a million times a day to sharpen her pencil or go to the bathroom. Sometimes Mrs. Green would keep her inside at recess like that was going to help.
One day Connie got up one too many times and Mrs. Green used her husband’s handcuffs to cuff Connie to her desk. No lie. I don’t remember for how long. I do remember Connie’s face beet red with tears running down her cheeks and nose running with no way to wipe away the tears and snot.
This happened in 1969. I knew, as did every other kid in that classroom, that this wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. If it happened today, Mrs. Green would’ve been fired and sued but none of us 4th graders told anybody. It was just another case of being a kid at the mercy of adults.
Fast forward to when the yearly school pictures came out sometime in the fall. Mrs. Green gave every kid who wanted, the smallest sized picture of her. I took one with a plan to revenge Connie in mind.
Fairness, facts, truth and justice matter more to me than just about anything else and always has, so I’m usually disappointed with how things play out in real life.
I drew a devil face and horns in ink on Mrs. Green’s picture and showed it to Connie after school. Other kids saw it and one of them snatched it from me and took it back to school to show Mrs. Green what I’d done.
I had to tell my mom and I told her why I’d done it. She wasn’t mad but she didn’t interfere with Mrs. Green’s punishment. I was supposed to write an apology and when I wouldn’t, because I was not sorry, I lost my recess for the rest of the year–months and months of sitting inside at my desk looking at Mrs. Green and wishing she was dead.
As a 9 year old, I didn’t have a way to challenge the hypocricy of an adult who pretended to be nice while using her power and control to bully a kid.
But I’m not a kid anymore.
I’ll be writing again this week. Until then, peace out.
Kim Rosenberg loretta.kim.rosenberg@gmail.com
Hey, I’m Back!
A few days ago, a neighbor stopped over at my house to tell me to get back to writing. I’ve appreciated the emails and phone calls of support from citizens in the community, many I don’t even know, urging me to keep writing. So here I am.
I didn’t take a break because I was afraid of the haters who emailed me. Disappointed and discouraged, but not afraid. A lot of those emails, I suspect, were written by people day drinking and leaving their minds behind.
I took a break to gain some distance and perspective about what’s happening politically in town and why it bugs me so much.
How do we hold people accountable for their actions in our shared public life, if not by naming both the action and the actor? If there’s no accountability, there’s no justice. If there’s no justice, there’s no peace. That’s not just a slogan.
Do the rules and laws we have apply to everyone, including our elected officials?
When the word civility is used as a tool to shut down talking about uncomfortable things, who wins? When being “nice” means being silent, how do we deal with the hard stuff?
The seeds of who we become start growing early in life. Both the bad seeds and the good seeds. Some we water and some we don’t. Some we’re aware of and some we aren’t. During my break I remembered something I hadn’t thought of for a long time that shows me one of the seeds I’ve watered and why I’ve been so bothered.
The summer I was nine we moved to Yakima, Washington from Portland. Our new home was in a quiet neighborhood with no busy streets and a cemetery at the end of the road. I could walk or ride my used pink and white Schwinn to McClure Elementary School and there were a ton of other kids about my age to play with.
Mrs. Green, my 4th grade teacher, was married to a police officer whose name was Peas. No kidding. Mrs. Green was a mixed bag. She had her favorites—Meg and Matt, Jeff and Jean—the four golden ones who got picked for everything. She was one of those adults you couldn’t trust. She acted one way when other grown ups were around and a whole ‘nother way when they weren’t.
I was somewhere in the middle of her list of kids she tolerated but there were a few kids she actively disliked—Lee who had warts on his hands and was painfully shy (I know because we were partners for square dancing). And Connie. Connie was maybe the only kid in our class who had a single mom and lived in a crappy duplex near my house. We weren’t friends really but we did walk to school sometimes. She didn’t have nice clothes like Meg and Jean. She got discounted hot lunch every day and she got excluded from things like field trips, when money was involved.
Connie got in trouble a lot for not staying at her desk. She’d get up about a million times a day to sharpen her pencil or go to the bathroom. Sometimes Mrs. Green would keep her inside at recess like that was going to help.
One day Connie got up one too many times and Mrs. Green used her husband’s handcuffs to cuff Connie to her desk. No lie. I don’t remember for how long. I do remember Connie’s face beet red with tears running down her cheeks and nose running with no way to wipe away the tears and snot.
This happened in 1969. I knew, as did every other kid in that classroom, that this wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. If it happened today, Mrs. Green would’ve been fired and sued but none of us 4th graders told anybody. It was just another case of being a kid at the mercy of adults.
Fast forward to when the yearly school pictures came out sometime in the fall. Mrs. Green gave every kid who wanted, the smallest sized picture of her. I took one with a plan to revenge Connie in mind.
Fairness, facts, truth and justice matter more to me than just about anything else and always has, so I’m usually disappointed with how things play out in real life.
I drew a devil face and horns in ink on Mrs. Green’s picture and showed it to Connie after school. Other kids saw it and one of them snatched it from me and took it back to school to show Mrs. Green what I’d done.
I had to tell my mom and I told her why I’d done it. She wasn’t mad but she didn’t interfere with Mrs. Green’s punishment. I was supposed to write an apology and when I wouldn’t, because I was not sorry, I lost my recess for the rest of the year–months and months of sitting inside at my desk looking at Mrs. Green and wishing she was dead.
As a 9 year old, I didn’t have a way to challenge the hypocricy of an adult who pretended to be nice while using her power and control to bully a kid.
But I’m not a kid anymore.
I’ll be writing again this week. Until then, peace out.
Kim Rosenberg loretta.kim.rosenberg@gmail.com
