A large part of my job is working with volunteer groups. We get them from all walks of life; today was a church group...
of children...
of conservative children...
I have to make it quick so I'm sorry, but I feel compelled to share and I'm looking forward to hearing what you all think.
Our work is in ecological restoration. Often we have volunteers come out and do the work with us. Today we had a church group of kids age 11 - 16 cutting down invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle. Its a great job just about anyone can do and it requires little more than a hand saw and some remedial identification. So we did our work.
It was obvious to me by the clothes some of them were wearing that they were probably on the more conservative side of the fence.
Our work finished we gathered around the truck to wait for them to get picked up. Somebody said something worthy about John McCain, someone then said something negative (and false) about Obama. Unfortunately I didn't hear what they had said.
I decided to engage them.
Note: because of my job, it is generally not cool of me to talk about politics with volunteers, especially children, but I couldn't let this fly.
It turns out we had a great conversation.
I presented that Obama is NOT a muslim, they were surprised to hear that... even though they knew he had a pastor! Furthermore, religious tolerance is something we preach as a nation. Therefore, being a muslim should be alright regardless. They also brought up that his church is all black. It is mostly black, but not all, and again, we preach racial tolerance. Being from a black church, should at the very core of our values, not matter.
That while Obama is pro-choice, being pro-choice is NOT the opposite of being pro-life; pro-death would be the opposite. This is a point that we as a progressive community MUST understand and MUST spread that understanding. Obama is in favor of doing the most important thing and that is lowering unwanted pregnancies. That would go a LOOOOOOONNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG way to reducing abortions.
We talked about John McCain being a POW, and while that is honorable, it does not qualify someone to be a leader.
We talked about republicans spending the country into a deficit.
We had a conversation, questions were asked, communication occurred, and knowledge was shared. It was interesting to me that all of the kids had different pieces of fact and fiction. They would sometimes call each other out on smears. But as a group they all held prejudices that exactly mirrored right-wing talking points. But I really think they understood.
There were three kids who stayed away from the truck. They wouldn't have any of our conversation and that makes me sad. It makes me a bit anxious as well because I'm expecting a call from their church or parents before too long!
Oh well, thus is should be. I would much rather get fired from my dream job for speaking the truth, that to suffer through a McCain presidency.