“No basta rezar, hacen faltas muchas cosas para consequir la paz” are lyrics to a powerful song. My translation is “Do not stop praising/praying/raising up, there is never a lack of things that need done to secure peace”. The message of this song is so clear, that we must keep trying, by any means necessary, to achieve peace. So what is peace? Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (2015) provides many definitions for the word peace: 1) a state of tranquility or quiet as (a): freedom from civil disturbance or (b): a state of security or order within a community provided for by law or custom, 2) freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions, 3) harmony in personal relations, and 4) (a) a state or period of mutual concord between governments or (b) a pact or agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity.
A few words stick out- tranquility, freedom, harmony, and concord. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (2015) rightfully does not describe peace as an absence of differences or a unidimensional form of existence. Differences exist; people are different for a variety of reasons. This reality is beautiful when diversity, differences, differing opinions, and multidimensionality come together in a state of concord, harmony, and tranquility in a way that guarantees freedom for all. Is that possible? Deep down inside, I believe yes, otherwise I would be a poet hiding in the woods like Thoreau. Or creating art with life’s throwaway objects and cans of spray paint in a small and hidden studio in some over-crowded city. Or even pouring over the romance languages and savoring each new word I learn to say, hear, or speak. So I will not stop praising/praying/raising up. I will do everything I can to secure peace because I believe in it. Let me say my heart goes out to France and ISIS simultaneously. The ability to inflict terror and the experience of terror are both states to be pitied. I wonder, what can we learn from this terrorist attack? What can we learn so that people will never stop praying for and working towards peace? Religious fighting has always confounded me, especially when it involves Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. From my reading and understanding of religious texts, it is all the same God simply manifesting itself in a variety of ways to connect with and be revered by people. This is explicitly true and not simply part of my beliefs or understanding, for the three religions previously mentioned. Same God, different prophets, rituals, and ways of praising. I say then let’s never stop praising, there’s never a lack of things needing to be done to secure peace. The absence of peace simply cannot be explained through religious premises. One must ask, what is going on politically or economically? Are politics and economy actually separate entities? As an undergraduate student, I aspired to be a Foreign Service Officer and even signed up to take the exam twice. Something always held me back from actually showing up to complete the exam. However, I was inspired by the European Union’s decades of sustained “peace” on European soil, none-the-less, and a commitment by many countries to replace a national identity with a European one. Aha naïve me said, Europe had succeeded in creating a model the whole world could follow, a model where national differences could be set aside in order to achieve a World identity. The more I learned about politics as intrinsically tied to economy, the more I came to understand that change could not happen politically. The European Union’s large expansion to include unprepared countries and their failing economies during my undergraduate years, further solidified my synonymous understanding of politics and economics as an opposing force to peace. So where does that leave us today, after such a horrific terroristic attack? It leaves us in a state of never ending prayer and praising to raise up peace. It asks us to set aside our differences, might I add appreciate those differences, instead of making joke or terror out of them. It requires a reminder of what happens when Europe exists in a state of discord… the whole world suffers. “Do not stop praising/praying/raising up, there is never a lack of things that need done to secure peace”. “No basta rezar, hacen faltas muchas cosas para consequir la paz”.
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Psst I have a secret to tell all of you, other than I don’t know how to use twitter (this will be remedied soon by my niece over Christmas)…. An abundance of strengths exist within society and not all things need changing. In social work, we employ strengths-based perspective, a wonderful maneuver to create everlasting change within individuals simply by reminding them they are strong through an emphasis on their individual strengths. Individuals ascend when reminded that within exists a perfect being, made special by unique attributes, talents, interests, experiences, flaws, mistakes, terrors, etc. Each challenge is then transformed into an opportunity to grow stronger, fuller, and even more perfect.
As a person, I tend to naturally focus on positives and amplify them to those around me. Strengths-based perspective then resonated perfectly with my nature and was easy for me to apply in social work practice settings. Recently, I have forgotten strengths-based and lost faith for a short period of time in humanity and myself for a variety of reasons. Distance from family/friends, the absence of Pittsburgh- including its flourishing yoga community, the Cathedral of Learning, three rivers combining, the multitude of steel-imposed bridges, and the variety/liberalness allotted by city life in general. My research too, is admittedly, deficit-focused and emphasizes societal injustices for the purpose of instituting much-needed changes. These among other things influenced my recent negative thinking, but my yoga practice and today’s church attendance brought me back to faith. Yes, indeed the organization of society is flawed and needs reformed, but the individuals composing that structure, are fortified both by what is right and what is wrong. Each time I surmount my yoga mat, I feel my life in a beautifully harmonious and gracious way. In other words self-conscious (let me hide behind stacks of books please) me, actually feels alive, beautiful, gracious, and perfectly in sync with the vibrations of the universe and people within. Each and every part of me is acknowledged as necessary, including my bunk right shoulder, and appreciated so that I might steadfastly ground, balance, stretch, open, expand, flow, meditate, and grow. In this space, I feel supported by people, which rejuvenates my belief in humanity. During my yoga practice, I am aware that innately all people, including myself are good. All that might be classified as “bad” in my life or the lives of others, simply helps us strive towards goodness and fortify our inner perfect selves. Enough of what’s bad, at least for today’s blog, so what’s good. So very much about life is so very good. Such as the unconditional love secured by family and true friends. Professors/Teachers/Mentors that understand, move, and guide you (Dr. June G. Hopps and Elsie Escobar I’m especially grateful). A sincere smile or a simple embrace when needed. A song that makes you so happy you want to dance until your feet hurt or a song that resonates with one or many experiences you’ve had. Symphonies. Making snow angels, ice-skating, and sled-riding. Books and poems. A warm embrace from someone you love. Being in love. Butterflies. Climbing in general, whether it be trees, climbing walls, rocks, mountains, or monkey bars. Swimming in the ocean. A magnificently star-lit sky. The moon and the sun. Sunshine. Twilight, when pink and purple intertwine to paint the sky. Rainbows. The innocence of childhood and its simple pleasures. Children. Hiking or walking in fields lined by trees and nature. Flowers. Water, waterfalls, lakes, rivers, streams, and oceans. Art and entertainment through story-telling, film, TV, and theater. Laughter, sweet laughter. Languages, Italian in particular, for me. Green valleys and fresh air. Faith in all its many forms. Helping a stranger. Holding someone’s hand. Coworkers, especially co-social workers. Animals and insects. The wind when it grabs your attention to look at something you might have missed. Meeting new people and finding shared interests. Truly this list goes on and on. People are innately good and for the most part, life is good too. So the social work profession applies a strengths-based perspective when working with individuals. It seems that this approach can also be applied to society in general, which is really just a composition of individuals' multiple lives. A strengths-based society, I like how that sounds. Today I took my dog for his daily walk in fields near my home. Typically this walk is soothing. The trees are abundant and even the polluted lake helps create a serene landscape. Today was different due to the inclement weather that has collided harshly with this naturally beautiful landscape. I saw many majestic trees uprooted and laid fallen on the cold and wet ground. I felt a sincere sadness for these trees now dead, severed from the ground that once supported and nourished them. I caressed one carcass of a beautiful tree and communicated to it a deep regret that the harshness of its recent surroundings led to its early demise. This tree, naturally ingrained with strength and purpose, no longer generated enough energy to sustain life.
The severe weather and its disastrous impact on these trees moved me and appeared to perfectly symbolize the hazardous nature of society’s segregated social structure. Humans, like these magnificent trees, inevitably fall, immobilize, and decay when confronted by hostile environments. Segregation creates a hostile social climate that runs rampant in many forms, which manifests into unnecessary conflict for all members of the human race. People are then segregated by race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, culture, national origin, language, etc. This conflict creates advantages for some and disadvantages all. Conflict theory explores the function of conflict within society; it suggests that conflict is an interactive process of socialization (Coser, 1956). Through conflict group members orient towards a specific group consciousness to establish boundaries between groups (Coser, 1956). Conflict then institutes societal structure through the separation and organization of people into within-group sameness and between-group differences (Coser, 1956). Simmel (1955) states that “disassociating factors- hate, envy, need, desire- are the causes of conflict; it breaks out because of them. Conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties” (p.13). Like the trees I witnessed today, people are annihilated when in conflict with unrelenting hostile parties, motivated by greed and power. This has been evident throughout history and continues today to our detriment. The European Union, once a pinnacle for integration of people and hope for a better tomorrow, is now crumbling based upon notions of wealth and economy. In the United States, privatized prisons are over-crowded with people of color to the benefit of the entrepreneurs that own them. These are just two examples of segregation’s catastrophic aftermath. Segregation and its justification shocks me. The failure of society to learn from past mistakes, such as World War II, horrifies me. Like trees, humans are unique and similar simultaneously. The differentiation of people through segregation breeds hate, misery, misunderstanding, and at times homicide or even genocide. I felt an avalanche of pain and momentary doom when I gazed at this fallen tree that to me, represented the consequence of segregation so embedded in today’s social structure. I physically and emotionally existed within this foggy space most of the day. Then I remembered that progress is possible and that people certainly possess a capacity to change. I felt my profession, social work, for the billionth time ignite my soul. Integration, yet again, lamp-lighted my path. Today can be described as the day that some trees laid fallen. Today can also be described as the day that many more trees withstood hostility and remain firmly rooted, even stronger than before. Tomorrow there is hope that like trees, humans will emphasize what is similar and disregard what is different. References: Coser, L. (1956). The functions of social conflict. New York: The Free Press. Simmel, G. (1955). Conflict. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Clark (1989) in his seminal piece Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, conducted originally in 1965, found that “school segregation in the South has, for generations been supported by law; in the North, segregation has been supported by community custom and indifference” (p.111). Black schools did not receive the same federal financial support as white schools, which led to inferior quality of the education in those schools (Clark, 1989). Clark suggested that the continuance of segregated schools would lead to “a school system of low academic standards, a second-class education for under-classed children and thereby a chief contributor to the perpetuation of the “social dynamite”, which is the cumulative pathology of the ghetto” (p. 112).
Clark (1989) also found that segregated schools were “separate, but unequal”. The further black students progressed in schools the higher the discrepancy became between their education and that of white schools. The majority of students leaving black high schools in the ghetto were found inferior both in reading and mathematics (Clark, 1989). Clark (1989) credited some of this lack of achievement to the judgmental and racist attitudes of their educators in addition to limited resources. Teachers treated black students as if they were uneducable, which led to a self-fulling prophecy (Clark, 1989). Thus, black students received a second-class education from racist teachers in substandard environments, which led to their academic failures (Clark, 1989). The educational climate described by Clark (1989) holds true today where racism continues to influence the structure and schooling of America’s public schools. The majority of black students continue to attend segregated public schools branded by disparities, including substandard physical facilities, uncertified teachers, and limited funds/resources to provide interesting and innovative educational programs for students. The racial dynamic that exists within public schools poses barriers to higher education for minority students, rather than preparing them for educationally-motivated economic mobility. Gibson (2015) states “It has been well-documented that educational institutions have not been neutral sites when it comes to gender and racial socialization of students” (p. 199). Simpkins (2002) suggests that public schools tend to “give up” on their black students” (p. 1). These students are at risk for becoming ‘public school throwaway kids’, which he defines as “those students who are forced to drop out of school or are expelled due to their schools’ inability to teach them” (Simpkins, 2002, p.1). Thus, teachers continue to exhibit racist attitudes towards black students and treat them as uneducable (Simpkins, 2002). Public schools also fail to account for the cultural, linguistic, and developmental differences apparent in black students; nor do they consider the impact of adversity, poverty, or oppression (Brunious, 1998; Partee, 2015; Simpkins, 2002). Society in general, and public schools specifically, fail to meet the needs of black students; instead they further disadvantage minority students through the continuance of ‘separate and unequal’ practices. I ask, 50 years after the Brown vs. Board of Education (1965) ruling, when will the segregation of public schools end in the United States? Why is de facto segregation still the over-arching preferred form of interaction between blacks and whites? Thankfully, a woman in my community of origin legally challenged segregation and won. Hoots vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1981) forced the merger of five small school districts into one large school district, Woodland Hills, where I attended. In this environment, integrative practices flourished, and we classified ourselves by our school mascot, not our skin tones. People of all races that attended/attend Woodland Hills go on to be successful at college and their corresponding majors/professions. If integration works, meaning that people unite as one human kind rather than multiple races divided, why do people still segregate? If integration of public schools is found to elevate the academic achievements of minority students through better schools, resources, programming, and opportunities then why are public schools still segregated? References: Brunious, L. J. (1998). How Black disadvantaged adolescents socially construct reality: Listen, do you hear what I hear? New York: Garland Pub. Clark, K. B. (1989). Dark ghetto: Dilemmas of social power (2nd ed.). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Gibson, G. A. (2015). Education vs. schooling: Black adolescent females fight for an education in the 21st century. In Collins, C. F. (Ed.), Black girls and adolescents: Facing the challenges (pp. 199-210). Oxford, England: Prager. Partee, M. E. (2015). Black girls in poverty. In Collins, C. F. (Ed.), Black girls and adolescents: Facing the challenges (pp. 61-74). Oxford, England: Prager. Simpkins, G. (2002). The throwaway kids. Brookline, Mass.: Brookline Books. |
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