A Year...

In the musical Ragtime, at the beginning of the first act, the father is leaving on an expedition to the North Pole. As he says goodbye to his family, he says, "It's only a year. Nothing much happens in a year. The world will not spin off its axis.  Nothing will change."

Although this musical debuted in 1996, I feel as though the author's words were practically prophesying 2016.  What a year. For marginalized populations, particularly the LGBTQ community, everything has changed. It feels almost as if the world has spun off its axis.

Who could have possibly predicted Brexit?  Or Pulse?  Or Trump / Pence?

My son will start middle school soon.  I have been dreading this for a while, as it seems that the mix of puberty and a shift in psycho-social development stages creates a perfect storm.  Plus, society's method of grouping students by age for schooling, and isolating them on campuses only with each other really creates this vacuum in which kids have no perspective and no role models. It's a recipe for disaster.  My son does musical theatre, and in the musical theatre community, "kids" typically refers to all of the youth in the production, and the youth tend to cling to each other.  My son hangs out with the other kids in the shows, as well as with the adults. He learns with all of them.  They do theatre games, they learn the music and dances, etc.  Why can't school be like that?  I understand why math class is taught in age groups, but most other subjects really have enough diversity that students of a variety of ages could learn together, but we don't do that. In this country, we don't even let them share the same physical space, so middle schoolers are caged up with other kids in this awkward stage, with only their teachers to model appropriate behavior.

But I digress....

I was already afraid for my son to enter middle school, but then I hear reports about middle school students targeting Mexicans with chants like "Build That Wall," and I hear about news reports of strangers telling gay people that Trump is going to put marriage back the way "God" wants it, and I am just so much more afraid.

Middle school is less than a year away.  If you'd have asked me a year ago what November 2016 would look like, I could certainly not have guessed at the increase in fear.

I can only pray that the next year brings an unexpected peace. Trump ran on a campaign of completely bucking a system that he now has to find a way to work within. I can only hope that he will find himself so incredibly humbled by the difficulty of the tasks facing him that he has a huge change of heart. I can only hope that this unexpected turn of political events has awakened liberal-sympathizers enough to turn them from bystanders into true allies. Perhaps it takes the darkest night to really see the stars.