connections

In Anchorage, I have a few connections, but not as many as I want. It's just that I have not gone to many events or attended concerts as I did in the 1990's. I would do what I wanted, and feel confident, and I did feel confident as the Accessibility Coordinator. But now, I feel great about last week and the scientific spiritual workshop, and i feel hopeless sometimes also. It's a seesaw and an oscillation. It's amazing that the Freedom Rides were 50 years ago, and I was in high school when my parents would take me out of school for the boycotts during the desegregation struggle, and I knew about teachers then like Mrs. Bruno at Grover Cleveland High School, I think who were in SNCC, and I would go to events where African-American students were speaking about their rights. In college, I took Pan-African studies and read literature by people of color and I was one of the only white students in the class. I always wondered why people of color did not always understand that when prejudice effects one, it effects all peoples. It's just that with this Folkstage on www.wfmt.com, it's bringing back high school, where we had a "blind power movement" and the Village Vooice wrote this article about us, and we adopted the fierceness of the movements at that time. We were in high school, and we would want parent education, jobs without judgment, we wrote on a sign, and bread not breadcrumbs. Judgment has been dogging me all my life. We must learn to chart our own course, and decide for ourselves. We would adapt Phil Ochs songs or whatever to mold them for blindness advocacy purposes. We were just spunky youngsters, in 1968 and 1969, and I guess I was highly impressionable. This does not mean that we do not need to work on our own stereotypes, biases, and prejudices. We all have them. We live in an oppressive society which must be improved with the assistance of everyone. Koraling Lynne