Just had a former student I taught more than a decade ago reach out with an email after her participation in the March yesterday. Here is part of her letter:
First and foremost, thank you for your years of service as an educator. I'm sure many of your students including myself are grateful and reflect on our early government and politics lessons in your classroom as we navigate this tumultuous presidential election and inauguration and sort through our many feelings that for me at least seem to be simultaneous feelings of anger, fear, rage, disbelief, sadness, and embarrassment.
As I joined many in the streets of DC yesterday attempting to send a message to our newly minted President about the country I believe in; I couldn't help but feel a sense of urgency to get more involved than I ever have been in the past. I must say I am ashamed that it came to this for many of us to really wake up, especially those of us who deeply care and were informed but were too busy with "our lives" to get more involved at the grassroots level.
Part of my response to her, and what I have also written as a response to Facebook posts of several other students was to remember what I told them when I taught them: that they could not take rights for granted, that they needed to participate politically or one day they could wake up and find those rights were no longer there. As a nation we are on the brink of that point. The energy from yesterday must be sustained starting with elections this year - Governors in VA and NJ, House of Delegates in VA, etc. With sufficient energy even gerrymandering can be overcome. We cannot wait.
On another thread on Facebook I responded to a friend from here at Daily Kos who was unfriending people who had voted for Trump why I could not do that at this point, I wrote this:
I cannot take that approach. Among some of my former students (not many) are a few who did vote for Trump, and even one who worked for him. My task is to keep open lines of communication so that hopefully I can bring them back to a commitment to the notion of liberal democracy, not of a strong man in the model of Mussolini.
As we go forward, we may well find that some who did support / vote for Trump get disillusioned. We will need their support as well to as quickly as possible, beginning with the elections this year, begin to bring this country back to its senses.
I am not at the current moment teaching. Perhaps I will again later this year, perhaps next year. Receiving a letter like this, getting likes on the comments I am making on Facebook, these are things that remind me of the value of the teaching I have done in the past. Even if I do not obtain another teaching position ever again, I can take some comfort that the lessons I offered still make a difference, in this case to a student I taught about a decade ago.
Peace.