Some folks call them "snow days," when I lived in Dallas we called them "ice days." Rural areas in the South often have "rain days." In California, we call them "fire days." These are the days when school officials gather around the TV to see if Mother Nature is going to heap her wrath on mankind and leave the kids cheering with the possibility of the cancellation of school for a few days.
When I moved to California seven years ago I was introduced to this anomaly. The dry heat of Santa Ana winds coupled with no humidity makes the perfect setting for raging wild fires... in most cases, they are assisted by local "fire bugs." During my first fire I found myself glued to the TV amazed at the total devastation that accompanied these raging fire storms. Luckily Southern California is home to the best trained fire fighters and police officers in the world and they approach them with the skill and precession of a surgeon.
Monday was a fire day. We began school with the howling winds and the anxiety that any moment we could get word of fires and evacuations. About 10:00 a.m. our fears came true. We constantly monitored the air, as we have a directive from county officials that when the air quality gets bad all outside activities are cancelled. At first the wind appeared to blow away from us and our football staff held their breath with the hopes they might practice before Fridays big game. Unfortunately that was not the case.
There is just something about the warm howling winds and the smell of fire in the air that seems to bring out the worst in all of us. The fires seemed to be contained on the other side of the hill, so we opted not to close school. However, all day we were extinguishing the "social fires" that had been raging from the stress. We thought that all was calm, until a radio call came immediately after the final bell sounded that two young men were fighting in the middle of campus.
I rushed outside to find a Caucasian young man yelling "Yeah I said it, He's a F--king Ni--er." The stress of the day had certainly brought the worst out in Denver. A few weeks ago I had a discussion with Denver about his brother's ties to the white power gang and how he was trying to break away for a fresh start. So much for that lofty idea.
I escorted him to my office, reminding him to breathe deeply along the way. Of course I heard all the male prowess of how he "knocked him out" and I tried to contain my deep desire to "knock him out" too. Denver was out of control. I managed to get him to my office where he managed to explain that a group of African American young men had approached him about saying the "N-word" to someone years ago.
My colleagues had escorted the other half of this fire day drama to the office. When I opened the door Robert was explaining how he had approached Denver about calling a young lady the "N-word" in their math class when he got upset and started challenging him to fight. Now knowing Denver this sounded a bit more truthful... he has always had a short fuse and he was still flapping around my office like a bottle rocket on steroids.
After taking many statements we finally put the final piece of the puzzle together. It seems that both the young lady and Denver had a long history, dating back to middle school of calling each other racist names. For some reason this generation thinks that if you put an "a" on the end of a very ugly word it makes it OK. I questioned Denver if calling him a "Cracka" makes it any less nasty simply because they changed an "er" with an "a"?? He admitted no, and I suspended him for five days.
We then turned our attention to Robert to had led the vigilante charge. I asked him since when was he hired to do my job. Given that I grew up in the Deep South, I have seen this sort of "ugly" all of my life and I probably have a smaller threshold for dealing with it... I have seen what it can do to schools and communities first handed. We then informed Robert that he was also suspended for five days.
The lesson here is how do we stop this "Ugly"? For some reason racist names have now become terms of endearment (if you are of the same race.) When someone from another race uses that same name it then becomes vial. I have seen kids of ALL races fall into this fallacy. Ugly is just Ugly no matter what its skin color happens to be... for heaven sakes, let's teach our kids better words to insult their neighbors and friends like, skinny, bow legs, four eyes, or fatty and leave the racist names alone!!!
