sol17-5 Am I ranting or reflecting?

I am participating in the
Slice of Life Story Challenge (SOLSC).
All participants are writing about one moment, one part of their day, every day of March 2017. 

A big thank you to Two Writing Teachers for providing this unique opportunity
for teacher-writers to share and reflect.

Just recently, I opened up the Washington Post and read a beautifully written piece by a woman I knew a long time ago...her name is irrelevant to this slice, the topic she wrote about is irrelevant to this slice, but seeing her name in print took me back in time.... 

The local elementary program was a paired program with two schools. My boys were bussed to an "early childhood campus" in a poor, immigrant community two miles away for pre-K through second grade; for third grade through sixth grade, the immigrant children were bussed to attend the older elementary campus in my middle-class ('white') neighborhood, a school only a few blocks away from my house. I loved this pairing. I loved the early childhood campus and its dynamic principal, I loved our diverse schools, I loved the education my boys were receiving. All was well.

But not for long.

We entered into a painful period the year I agreed to be on the PTA Board. Due to population growth, the boundaries for our local schools were being redrawn. Some local folks (including the writer I mentioned earlier) were adamant that this was an opportunity to unpair the two schools - to give our middle-class neighborhood its own school again, pre-K through 6th. I don't remember anyone in the immigrant community wanting the schools to be unpaired. But the middle-class neighborhood was in an uproar. This woman and I felt differently. Although I loved the school pairing, I remember this woman speaking in opposition to it (PTA meetings, town halls, school board meetings), speaking passionately, fervently, relentlessly, "I want my child to be able to walk to school." 

The boundary issue pitted neighbor against neighbor. 

She lives in my neighborhood but I don't call her friend. 

It still seems to me that she only wanted her views heard. It still seems to me that she feared the campus, the neighborhood that she did not know. It still seems to me that we humans have a lot to learn about listening, about sitting with the tension of opposing views, about considering the possibility that a different opinion may also be right.

How did it all shake out? The boundary decision left the two schools paired and intact; I don't know if my neighbor/the writer took her child out of the public school system or if she made peace with the decision. Why don't I know? Because, unfortunately, my own house/address was placed in a new school district...my boys had to leave the school we loved and attend a new public school. They still received a great education.

“If I were asked for two words to summarize the habits of the heart American citizens need in response to twenty-first-century conditions, chutzpah and humility are the words I would choose. By chutzpah I mean knowing that I have a voice that needs to be heard and the right to speak it. By humility I mean accepting the fact that my truth is always partial and may not be true at all—so I need to listen with openness and respect, especially to “the other,” as much as I need to speak my own voice with clarity and conviction. Humility plus chutzpah equals the kind of citizens a democracy needs. There is no reason, at least no good reason, why our number cannot be legion.” ― Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit