not an arbitrary interest

When I was in the eighth grade, I thought that grown-up work was going to be filling out worksheets and making decisions involving multiple choices. It would be a place where you were denied resources and respect because of your race, class and gender, since that was what happened year after year as well-to-do white folks voted down the school budget of our tiny district and shipped their kids off to Catholic school.

Unfortunately, in the eighth grade, no one was talking to me about race and class and gender, so I spent most of my time pissy and alienated, scribbling in my journal about how foolish folks were screwing up the environment and taking away the rights of animals.

It is a radical leap to be a public school student and really understand and accept that your school is lying to you, filling you with toxic fear and laziness, turning you into a ready consumer, an employee, a soldier, a criminal -- anything but a freethinking, active mind.

Well, now I know the truth.

And don't they say, the truth shall set you free?