Overwhelmed? There's one choice we always end up making

I walk my kids to preschool in the pouring rain. It’s about a mile and a half and it wouldn’t be so bad except the main road through town and the buildings on either side of it are a couple of hundred years old. This means that massive regional traffic is now being squeezed through a single-lane road that was originally meant for nothing more than the occasional farmer’s handcart. To get around this bottleneck my kids and I would have to walk an extra couple of miles.

A deluge of mud and water sprays across a narrow sidewalk from the wheels of a passing bus. Creative Commons image by Matt Biddulp.

The sidewalks are often no wider than a sheet of printer paper (and sometimes they’re entirely non-existent). Add in overloaded drainage systems and the fact that most of the inhabitants of the hilly country around our town drive large vehicles and live lifestyles in which walking is considered eccentric (and voluntary).

All told, it isn’t very pleasant to get to the preschool or to the medical center on the other side of town. 

An endless stream of cars roars by, pushing and then exceeding the speed limit even though there isn’t much space between them. Each one in turn sends a wave of dirty, oily water spraying across my legs and across the torsos of the children. Each driver would have to look in their rear view mirror to see the spray of water they have personally hit us with. But they can all see the car in front of them squirting the sludge on us.

If they looked... if they thought at all, they would know that their car is going to do it too. They don't think or they don't care. Hard to say which.

We come to a tiny cramped parking lot for three vehicles in front of a shop. I go in front, keeping my children behind me as I carefully make my way around their bumpers, just inches from the zipping, roaring traffic. Sure enough one of the parked cars jolts into motion without warning just as I step behind it. The driver was probably trying to get into a tiny break in the traffic on the main road. He slams on his brakes and I jump backward but his bumper still comes in contact with my leg. I make my way toward the front of his car, to get around in the gap he has now left there. (Yes, he turns out to be a man.) We exchange angry words.

“People shouldn’t walk out in this. It’s ridiculous!” He looks frazzled and he is obviously not thinking about the fact that I’m carrying a white cane. If I want to get to work, get to a doctor or get my kids to school, I have to walk. 

We continue down the tiny sidewalk--walking the gauntlet of deafening noise, noxious fumes and greasy spray—with the very real possibility of sudden death only inches away.
I’m juggling a white cane and an umbrella against the pouring rain, but my small daughter takes my hand anyway and when the sidewalk broadens enough that we can walk side by side, she asks, “Mama, why are people so mean?”

A woman holds an umbrella to try to block a gush of muddy water showering her from a passing car. Creative Commons image by Brett Jordan. 

I’m already having enough trouble with my emotions and I clench my teeth, unable to answer without saying something hateful that a child shouldn’t hear. 

But right then the car coming toward us on the road slows remarkably. The driver doesn’t slam on the brakes, but simply slows to a more reasonable speed. There is nothing else around except us in the narrow road and the street is open and empty in front of the car. The frustrated drivers in the cars behind the slow one crowd up on the bumper, but that one vehicle goes past us without spraying dirty water. I can only tell it’s silver. I can’t see anyone behind the windshield or even the make of the car. 

But it gives me the chance I need. “They aren’t all mean,” I tell my daughter, while I reach back to make sure my five-year-old son is still right behind us. “Did you see that car slow down?”

“That was a nice one,” my daughter says.

“That’s right. We get to choose if we’re kind or cruel,” I tell my kids.

Your Choice

When a kid grows up with any sort of significant disadvantage, she'll necessarily have some limits on her choices in life. But this is one thing my kids get to choose, even if they don't have all the privileges bestowed by wealth or white skin. One day they will be adults in this hectic, crazy-making world and they'll get to choose to be thoughtful about their actions and words... or not. They'll get to drive and slow down when they see someone trapped between a gutter of water and a wall... or not. They'll get to carefully avoid racially loaded language, ablelist metaphors and national slurs... or not. These are all part of the choice to be mindful of our impact in the world (or not). 

Here is a truth. I actually don’t think all the people rushing by and drenching us want to be cruel. I know how hectic and pressured their lives are—bait-and-switch professional jobs, kids who have to be all-stars in order to even be considered for the college track high schools, rising prices, bills to pay, health troubles of their own. There is virtually no one who doesn’t have to struggle. 

And to have the presence of mind to slow down in order to avoid drenching someone at a narrow spot in the road? It isn’t easy. 

Another thing. White people don't want to be cruel when we accidentally assume the one person at the meeting with brown skin must be the maid or when we let racist rhetoric slide in our professional, social or religious circles and pass it off as "a difference of opinion." Most white people today, if they stop to think, know better. But thinking... taking action in a group like the driver who made sure several other cars slowed down and didn't splash us... takes mindfulness and focus. And it is damned hard to focus with what's going on around us--in life and in the media. 

Presence of mind is key though. It isn’t enough to want to be a benevolent. We must also cut through the chaos and focus enough to see where we may unwittingly do genuine harm. Being mindful of our impact both on other people and on the environment (and thus on future generations) is no small thing. But it is what differentiates kindness from cruelty and often defines self-respect.

A Mindfulness List

Some of us like to make lists and lists can help us to remember, not just to buy bread, but also to remember the things we are aware of sometimes but need to be mindful of all the time. Mindfulness lists might include changing habits of speech that have become offensive in society, doing less harm in our consumption, moving and relating in ways that don't hurt others and so forth and anything else where you've thought "I didn't mean to hurt anyone by doing that but I did."

Here are a few examples of the things I want to remember to be mindful of myself—despite how overwhelmed or frazzled I might be with my many hats and roles in life. This is my personal list--not the most important things in the world. Many things that are important I am already am mindful of. That's why I don't have avoiding racially stereotyped language or recycling on this list. Those were on my list twenty years ago and now I'm constantly mindful of them. Here's my current list:

• Say hello to and thank people in low-status jobs, such as cleaners and catering staff.
• Whenever possible buy from companies that pay their employees a living wage no matter what country they work in. 
• If I want to ask a person of color to speak on their ethnic group, make sure I've asked them to speak on an area of professional, academic or other expertise unrelated to their ethnic group in the past.
• If I'm around when someone makes a dismissive or belittling comment about a disadvantaged group or uses derogatory language (even if they don’t mean anything by it), I  want to be someone who speaks up. Educate gently at first, then firmly if necessary. 
• Speak to children, foreigners and people with developmental disabilities in a normal voice. Take a smidgen of extra time to make sure you’ve understood them. 
• When attending a racially diverse meeting, make sure someone of a background different from my own has been heard from before speaking up for a second time. 
• Notice when I accidentally judge and jump to conclusions about another. Stop and reconsider. Weigh the known facts and toss out assumptions and statistical probabilities, when it comes to another person.
• Don’t swat honey bees or bumble bees, use a rag to swipe them back outdoors. (I know that one sounds trivial by comparison but in the scheme of things, who knows. It's my current environmental awareness goal and it's hard because of my vision impairment and moderate bee allergies.)

What's on your mindfulness list?

We won’t be perfect. Life can be crazy and we're often trying to do things more long-range than these as well. These are just acts of mindfulness, not anything that will change the world. We also want to do serious work for positive change. 

Maybe that is the most important thing I wish to remember. 

• Expect that everyone you meet is probably pretty frazzled and usually for reasons beyond their control. Cut people some slack.

Keep trying to be the sort of person you respect.

Climate Change and Conspiracy: A Video Interview with Arie Farnam

Are you fed up yet? Ninety-seven percent of peer-reviewed scientific papers that touch on the subject are certain climate change (global warming and increases in extreme weather) is happening at a rapid rate and it's caused by human industry and specifically the burning of fossil fuels. 

Ninety-seven percent. This isn't much of a controversy among scientists, at least not among those who aren't directly backed by oil and coal companies. And yet, when Fox News reports on climate issues, seventy percent of the mentions of climate change deny its reality or the role of fossil fuels. Fox News doesn't have a lot of scientists to choose from with only three percent inflated to seventy percent, but they try. 

But why do they try? The producers and owners must have children too? Can they really be ignorant or are they willfully lying in a dangerous betting game with mass starvation as the stakes? Whatever their motives nearly half of the American public believes that climate change is a hoax and that we can go on burning fossil fuels with impunity. This is what Fox News and others have done.

In this next interview on the burning issues of today's dystopian world, I discuss the facts on climate change, the anonymous donor's association that provides the lion's share of the funding for pro-fossil-fuels media and lobbying, what we can do about it and who is the real-world equivalent of J. Company from the Kyrennei Series.

This is the second video interview in which I take a look at the factual real-world issues that lurk in the pages of the dystopian fantasy thrillers of the Kyrennei Series.

Kyrennei Series readers, please comment below and nominate individuals or organizations as your personal heroes. Who do you think is the real-world equivalent of J. Company? Who do you think has the courage and the audacity to go up against the worst injustices in our world?

What a billionaire can do and missed opportunities

I was recently asked to answer the following question on online forum: "What can billionaires do that multimillionaires cannot do?" And my answer was possibly the most controversial thing I think I've ever written. It has been debated, slammed, erased, defended, banned and promoted in various quarters. And given that my blog is called "A Rebel with a Pen" it's time I posted it here. 

Some people were angry that I answered this question at all because I'm nowhere close to a billionaire or even a millionaire (let's face it, I'm not even a hundred-thousandaire--if that were a word). What could I contribute to such a discussion? 

My answer is that I didn't fail math and I even have a calculator. There are things a billionaire could do that a multimillionaire couldn't and I don't need to be one to do the numbers. It's astounding what a controversy a little logic can turn up. Here it is then.

What can billionaires do?

They can...

Destroy democracy, cause a whole nation to starve, spoil a huge swath of the earth without ever realizing it, pick your war. Have not a friend or real relationship in the world and yet be surrounded by smiles and beautiful acts that resemble relationships. Be born, grow up, live to be old and die without ever learning the basic ABCs of ordinary life.

There are plenty of things a billionaire can do. It isn't that millionaires can't come close to some of these things, but their impacts are a bit more local, less global and they usually have to work harder at the psychological denial part because they don't have as many people paid to please them.

Another person who answered this question was Omar Sayed and he primarily explained the mind-blowing difference between a millionaire and a billionaire with this simple statement, "One million seconds is approximately 12 days. One billion seconds amounts to 32 years!  Just imagine what you can you do in 32 years vs. 12 days."

And it's true. For many of us time is money, but wealth beyond the level of the comfortable survival of one's family is no longer time. It is most concisely the ability work one's own will.

A family can live comfortably in the United States on $100,000 a year, including the high-quality education and healthcare which are out of reach for most of the population. Given that, everything beyond $100,000 lies in the realm of what a person "can do" voluntarily. And a billionaire has A LOT of money beyond that first $100,000.

Yes, a billionaire can do fun things like buy a private island or a couple of private jets. A billionaire can have candlelight dinners on a platform far out in a lagoon with just one special person and servants in rowboats to bring them whatever they desire. A billionaire can spend years sailing or bungee jumping or golfing without having to work. And possibly a billionaire can do these things and avoid those terrible things that they could do that I mentioned earlier.

But there are even more things that a billionaire can do.

A billionaire can stop a famine in a particular country, invest in the process and regain most of the money and do it again in another country. Sure, it's a risk and it is unlikely to be as high of return on investment as businesses that cause famines, but it can be done.

There are things that might not even cost too much money that a billionaire can do that others cannot. A billionaire could make true democracy possible again simply by speaking out and telling what billionaires are doing with financing candidates and media. At least a billionaire could have a huge impact on that and be remembered as a hero for generations. 

A billionaire could turn an entire economy to green energy, creating countless high quality jobs and making an impact to combat climate change that the billionaire's grandchildren would be able to equate with the actions of Oskar Schindler. And the billionaire probably wouldn't even lose money.

Some things a billionaire can do might lose money, but they might be worth it anyway. A billionaire could buy a large enough piece of the Amazon rain forest to make sure that there still is an Amazon rain forest in 100 years. 

A billionaire could live a normal, modest life with no private jets and be remembered forever as the person who funded anti-cancer research and kept the price of the resulting medicines affordable or who made possible the nation-wide switch to effective solar power. A billionaire could make it impossible to ever again claim poverty as a reason you couldn't get a college education. 

A billionaire can't do all of these things all at once. Like all of us a billionaire would have to choose. Money is choice.

In researching for my latest book, I had to ask in wealthy circles what sort of shenanigans the children of billionaires get up to. The answers were confusing and sad. The list of common self-destructive behaviors among the children of the very rich are no less horrific than among the children of the very poor. Rampant drug use, extremely risky behaviors, racing expensive cars--a statistically high probability of tragedy. 

And why is this?

It's often blamed on the stifling lack of challenges and a mistrust in relationships that are often more about money than about heart. People who have that much wealth somehow cannot find something to fulfill them, something worthwhile and full of passion. It isn't my place to judge others, and I don't. It is more with compassion that I offer this. 

There are many things a billionaire cannot do. A billionaire cannot stop all wars or all hunger. A billionaire cannot make people just be kind to each other. A billionaire cannot make their own parents or siblings or children stop bickering. A billionaire may not even be able to save someone they love.

But there are things a billionaire can do. Worthwhile things, full of passion, challenge and risk. Things that would do a person honor.

I can easily see where a life without challenge can become empty--even with private jets and prestigious islands. I can see where it would get old knowing that many of the people who befriend you only want a piece of the pie, rather than real friendship. Trying to identify a real friend could be hard.

But there is a choice a billionaire can make that others cannot. A billionaire can become a real life hero for millions--not coincidentally or by dying heroically but simply by making a choice about what to do with their money.

What it's like to suddenly be free for the first time

I was asked a question on Quora recently, "What is it like to be blind and take public transportation?" Oh, boy! They did ask though. I can get a little intense on this subject. And since my last post picked on the Czech Republic and trains, two things that have brought much good into my life, I feel like I need to balance the scales.

So, I'm reposting my answer here. Fair warning. They might as well have asked, "What is it like to be free for the first time?"

I grew up in a remote rural area in the US. The nearest "town" was five miles away. Population 250. My best friend lived twelve miles away. Most of those miles were rough gravel roads that make bike riding take a lot of extra energy. Riding to the nearest town on bikes was the first right of passage. My older brother did it first. Then me. 

Yup, I was legally blind. I did it anyway. I can see just enough to tell if there are large shapes right in front of my front tire. If I don't ride too fast I can follow the blurry color of the road and not end up in the ditch. If there aren't very many cars - and there was only one every hour or so - I do okay. When I was eight or nine I decided that I was going to ride to a slightly larger town, where our school was located, about ten miles from home. My brother, who was two years older, hadn't even ridden that far yet. He didn't believe I would. I got up early one spring morning, packed a lunch and set off. He caught up with me a few miles later and beat me over the line of the city limits of the town by about half a second. So, okay, he technically made it to that town first too. 

I always knew I wasn't going to be able to drive. It was like knowing if you're right or left handed. I didn't think it was a big deal. Everyone around knew I couldn't see much. It didn't matter in most things. We used to joke, "Shucks, Arie won't be able to be a truck driver or a pro-basketball player. She'll have to be lawyer instead." We were dirt poor but I was a champion debater. I almost always won arguments with adults. And we all set our sights high. 

Not driving started to become an issue when I was a teenager. I saw my brother drive off to see his friends on the weekends. I had to beg for rides everywhere and distances were large. I often couldn't get a ride and there were many lonely weekends. I wanted to join the teenage life of the nearby towns but when I was fourteen my older brother had to live with another family in order to attend a better school hours away, so I didn't have him to give me rides. I was mostly stuck.

When I was sixteen I won a scholarship to study in Germany as an exchange student. I spent a year with a German family and had my first real experiences riding buses and trains. I rode a bus from my host family's suburb into the city to go to school. But I knew there were buses in the US like that - usually one line that went from point A to point B. I had spent a summer working in Portland, Oregon and that was how the buses went. They went so rarely that you had to plan your whole day around their schedule and if where you wanted to go wasn't on that one special bus line, you were just out of luck or you ended up walking for miles through suburban streets that often don't even have sidewalks anymore. So, at first I didn't get it. 

It wasn't until a few years later that it finally clicked. I had met my first love while in Germany. He was a young man from Czechoslovakia in the old East Bloc. A few years later, I returned to Europe to study in what was then the Czech Republic on another foreign exchange program, this time for my university. I lived and studied in a town a hundred miles from the area where my circle of Czech friends mostly lived. And yet, I got to see them every weekend. I would finish with my last class, skip down the long flight of ancient stone steps from the university and right onto a waiting bus to the train station. Trains ran every hour or even more often at peek times. It was no big deal. My friends mostly lived in small villages, scattered around East Bohemia but there were always buses from the train to their houses. 

By Friday night, I would be sitting at the table with my friends drinking good Moravian wine and playing music 'til all hours. And on Sunday night I'd be back in my dorm, ready for classes. At my American university, I never left campus for months at a time. There was nowhere to go and no way to get there where I studied in Wisconsin. 

The next summer found me in Prague, working as an intern for the English-language newspaper The Prague Post. I had to learn the public transportation network perfectly. I often had to rush out to a story or track down some obscure address in an out of the way part of the suburbs. The first few weeks were disorienting. I would come up from the subway (metro) and feel like the world literally spun around me when what I thought was north turned out to be southeast. But by the end of the summer I was a pro. I could calculate complex transfers in my head and I knew where the various subway, tram, bus and train lines went and where they intersected. I could get from any place to any other place ANY TIME I wanted to. 

When I first realized that I literally started sobbing (in private, thank goodness).

I had never dreamed I would be able to get around on my own. I had buried the sorrow of it, told myself that it didn't matter. My family wanted me to be tough and never let on that being legally blind was an issue. And I had mostly done that. But it had mattered. Being trapped and unable to move in a society where everyone else can move around matters.

I have been asked many times why I moved to a country on the other side of the world when I have such close bonds with my family. I call my mom and my brother multiple times every week and we are ever so grateful for Skype and other changes in technology that have made long distance relationships easier. I miss the wild beauty and clean air of Oregon with a constant ache. I'm not really all that fond of a lot of things about Central Europe. I am a country girl and always will be. I don't like cities that much and I yearn for the comfy atmosphere of country kitchens and old friends. But I left all that. I married a Czech man (not my first love, unfortunately) and bought a house in a little town outside Prague. And I am stuck here now.

I did it primarily for public transportation. If it weren't for trains and buses, I would probably be back in Oregon, which still feels like home. We think about moving back sometimes, my husband and I, but our discussions always get stuck on that issue. The only places we could live, where I could have anything like a reasonable lifestyle or career, are the centers of a few large cities. We don't want to live in a big city and even in the cities it isn't easy in the US. I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan one summer. It was doable but the public transportation was rough and grimy and only in the city. It still entailed a lot of miles of walking. 

Early in the industrial era, the United States was an international leader in rail transportation. But the American rail companies were sold to corporations with big oil interests years ago. Some tracks remain but mostly only for heavy freight. Truly useful (defined as quick and ubiquitous) public transportation has been curtailed in the US through a combination of political, economic and geographical problems over more than half a century. As a result, I am an expat, unable to live a reasonable life in my own country. So, yeah, I can get passionate about public transportation.

The Czech Republic has one of the tightest rail networks in the world. There are stops literally everywhere. Other than a few remote areas, public transportation will take you within a mile or two of any destination, often faster than a private car will. I know some companies where the top executives take the slick, air-conditioned, wifi-enabled trains to conferences in other European countries while the lower managers are required to drive the company cars, because it's just faster, better and more pleasant than driving. 

I can go anywhere virtually any time I choose. I take my daughter to guitar lessons and international choir practice in the city just like other mothers. I visit friends in other cities or I just get outside town a mile or two to walk in a forest on a Sunday afternoon. It may sometimes take a little planning if my destination is remote or distant but it is possible. And it would simply be impossible in places without good, tight and truly functional public transportation.  

I love to hear from readers and I don't bite, even if you don't agree with me. Leave a comment below. What unlikely subjects can stir your passion?

A "strange mama" and the freight train of racism

A few years ago, I was interviewed by a parenting magazine in the Czech Republic where we live most of the time. You might think that this would be an honor, and it was… sort of.

The topic of the article was “unusual parents.”

That’s me. The strange mama. I merited an interview because my children are trans-racially adopted… and bilingual… and I’m an American living in the Czech Republic… and I’m legally blind.

That was quite enough to be going on with. I didn’t actually even mention that we partially homeschool, I make our own medicines out of herbs and we’re wild, tree-hugging Pagans.

That was the year we started what has become an annual celebration of our oddballness as a family. We went on a litter collecting expedition.

Okay, a bit of background is necessary here. The Czech Republic is a nice, quiet little country with a good standard of living, great universal health care, free university education and lots of other reasons to rejoice and relax. It does have a few knotholes, however.

One is litter. Czechs hate litter and they are extraordinarily judgmental about other nations who litter, which is ironic because they are champion litterers themselves. There is also a little, low-level ethnic conflict in this country between the Czechs and the tiny (three percent) Romani minority, sometimes called Gypsies.

For one thing the Roma get blamed for lots of things, including the country’s litter problem. In reality, there are no Roma in our town, and its a litter disaster. Roma have also been, until very recently, systematically channeled into sub-standard, segregated schools. The school segregation issue is slowly and painfully improving by inches. Romani people in the Czech Republic remain among the most marginalized groups in a developed country with unemployment as high as 90 percent and racist remarks against them common in the media and among the country’s leading politicians.

That was one reason the magazine considered me to be a unique parent. My husband and I adopted children and refused the prolific advice of social workers who advocate that adoptive families restrict their adoption applications to non-Romani children only. The choices on the official, state adoption application form are “Majority ethnicity only” “Non-Romani only” and “No restriction of ethnicity.” It’s that overt.

My husband and I didn’t necessarily want to be activist about it but we had no reason to limit which children we might adopt by ethnicity, despite the pleas of our case workers on both the local and regional levels. Fate being what it is our kids are of Romani background but they don’t look stereotypically Roma, so we’re still “flying under the radar” in terms of small town racist politics. A few people in town know the “dreadful secret” that there actually are Roma in our quiet bedroom community but most don’t make the connection.

So, the ironies are multiple when my kids bug me to pack rubber gloves and garbage sacks on the way to preschool. I promised them that we could pick up trash on the way back. Yup, my kids want to pick up trash so bad that they pester me about it.

They aren’t really perfect angels. Far from it. They can be brats to each other and their friends, and they throw tantrums with the best of ‘em.

But they do have this one angelic trait. They seriously don’t like to see litter and when the snow melts and the ground is bare and muddy in the early spring the litter is extra visible. So this is the time of year that it comes up and ever since I taught them about picking up litter, we have our early spring pick-up sessions.

This is the kind of town where you will be stared at for being the slightest bit out of the ordinary. So, when my two preschoolers and I pick up trash, people a block away tap each other on the shoulder and walk backwards they stare so hard. What they see is the woman with the long white cane holding the garbage sack while the tiny children with rubber gloves pick up trash. I have no idea what they think but I know they’re perplexed.

My daughter once asked, “Mama, why are those people looking at us so much?”

I told her, “They’re probably surprised that someone is picking up the trash.”

“But why are their mouths open like that?” she continued.

“Possibly because of Mama’s stick, honey.”

People are weird. My kids have proof.

My daughter’s six now and she knows she’s Romani. She loves Romani music and dance. She says Romani girls are the classic princesses. The teacher at our Romani culture camp is her real live hero, second only her choir teacher.

The day is coming when she will learn that Romani people aren’t treated as equals in this society. I can feel it coming like a freight train bearing down on us. I can’t stop it.

Up until now, my daughter has always thought we were “just like everyone.” She loves it when she discovers that she has the same color jacket as another kid or the same cartoon character on her toothbrush. She isn’t going to like our oddball status all that much, when she finally learns what all those open mouths and staring eyes really mean.

For now, I don’t tell her every gruesome detail.

“Mama, are you laughing or crying?” she asked as we walked away from the Pedagogical Psychological Advisory Office after she was tested for “attention problems” and “motor immaturity.”

“Mostly laughing,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“That I’ll have to tell you later, honey, when you’re bigger.”

The official at the meeting had tried to have my daughter sent to a segregated, inferior “special school.” She hadn’t even been mean about it. The special schools aren’t officially only for the racial segregation of Romani children. They are supposed to be for kids with developmental delays and disorders.

My daughter’s in kindergarten. She does appear to have some difficulty with attention and anxiety, and like many left-handed kids, she struggles with clutching her crayons too tightly. She’s also the only kid in her class who can read, and yet they tried to send her to “special school.”

Why was I laughing then?

Because I’m not a Romani mother living in poverty who can barely read, facing a phalanx of overconfident bureaucrats steeped in prejudice. I know my rights and, given the civil rights struggle that is going on here, this isn’t even a hard fight to win. There will be no segregated schools for my kids. The law has taken the teeth away from the officials at the pedagogical psychological office.

But I was also crying a little.

Because this is still happening. Because my daughter doesn’t want to homeschool and I can hear that freight train coming. I’ve seen the crushing force of racism break many a kid’s spirit, especially those who are sensitive to issues of “being just like everyone else.”

I don’t want that freight train to flatten my brave, bright daughter. I want to show her that different isn’t bad and when society calls something “strange,” it’s their problem not ours. I hope I can… but it feels an awful lot like standing up to a freight train.