BEING WHO WE WANT OUR CHILDREN TO BECOME

Right now there is no way to explain or describe the loss we all feel at Howard Zinn’s death. In the days to come, I am sure we will try to wrap our hearts around the loss and the call to action. For now I ‘d like to share this …A poem by Wendell Berry comes to mind. It is my belief that Howard Zinn always lived in the “grace of the world and is now truly,  ”free.” May we each be filled with his spirit for kindness, his energy for justice , his willingness to work for all of it.THE PEACE OF WILD THINGSWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.— Wendell BerryRobert Shetterly wrote to several subjects of the portrait series this summer and asked them to share their ‘moment of truth,” a turning point when each knew they would go on to do something more with life. These were written for students in order that they could understand how fragile, fleeing and transformative life can be.Here was Howard Zinn’s note to us:” I grew up in a family of working-class immigrants, living in tenements in Brooklyn. Our living quarters were rather miserable and we kids spent most of our time out in the streets. It seemed natural that I should develop a certain class consciousness, an understanding that we lived in a society of rich and poor, and whether you were rich or poor had nothing to do with how hard you worked. There were young radicals in my neighborhood, a few years older than me, and I was impressed with how much they knew about what was going on in the world. I was beginning to read books about Fascism and socialism. One day, my friends asked if I would join them in going to a demonstration in Times Square. I had never been to a demonstration, and it seemed like an exciting thing to do. When we got to Times Square, there was no sign of a demonstration, but when the big clock on the Times Building struck ten, banners unfurled in the crowd, and people began marching and chanting. I wasn’t sure what they were concerned with but it seemed they were opposed to war, and that appealed to me. One of my friends took one end of a banner and I the other. I heard sirens and shouts and I wondered what was happening. Then I saw policemen on horses charging into the crowd, beating people with clubs. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Here were people peacefully demonstrating and they were attacked by the police. Before I knew it, I was spun around and hit on the side of the head, with what I didn’t know. I was knocked unconscious, and when I woke up in a doorway, it was an eerie scene, everything quiet as if nothing had happened. But something had happened to me. I was stripped of my illusion that we lived in a democracy where people could protest peacefully. At that moment I moved from being a liberal to being a radical, understanding that there was something fundamentally wrong with the system that I had always thought cherished freedom and democracy.”