The Far Reach of Intolerant Expectations
The Oklahoma City federal building bombing took place during the Freedom Writers experiment and when the initial hysteria of wanting to blame a foreign Muslim terrorist gave way to the factual information that it was a white Christian, the reality hits home hard enough to warrant a memorable diary entry from one of the student. The entry transforms reveals the subtle and insidious power that jumping to conclusions can have on the formation of intolerance:
“There are many Timothy McVeighs around us every day and it is very surprising to find out that it is the person you least expect.”
Bitter/Sweet
Rare is the first-year high school who becomes famous beyond those students in the classroom. The almost overnight elevation of Erin Gruwell from unknown just another fresh-faced, idealistic newbie into the celebrity teacher of Wilson High School was bound by duty to create a certain backlash of envy and jealousy among the other members of the faculty. And nothing feeds into those negative feelings more than when a young attractive teacher suddenly benefits from a wealthy male benefactor. So, it was really just a matter of it, not when, as she records in her diary, among her fellow teachers there were:
“some had the audacity to say that John Tu was my `sugar daddy’”
A Cinderella Story
Some envious co-workers may view John Tu in a particularly pejorative light, but for one of the Freedom Writer, he’s Prince Charming. Her diary account of a fancy dinner at the Marriott at which she shares a table with John Tu and is amazed that such a wealthy, powerful and influential man would actually sit there and listen to and really value her opinions becomes one of the most memorable of all student diary entries printed in the book. It’s not just that she feels it herself, but that her vivid journaling puts the reader right there next to her that night when it was:
“almost midnight and I feel like Cinderella when she was racing home from the ball, knowing that her chariot is about to turn into a pumpkin.”
Diary 97
The entry title Diary 97 is an equally impressive, yet completely different exhibition of a student possessed with a genuine gift for conveying thoughts through metaphor. The unifying theme of the entry is disappointment that the Freedom Writers may be fragmented the following year which would be yet another assault on the student’s one single devoted desire: to find some sort of order and predictability in their world. The opening sentence is engagement with metaphorical imagery of a very high aesthetic:
“I feel as though chaos is stalking me, sliding its slimy tentacles into every crevice of my life.”
From out of that coherent symbolism, the rest of the diary entry explodes forth into a heartbreaking litany of the literal which explains all that needs be said about what has created this monstrous concept of the tentacled chaos.
Life During Wartime
The concept for the students to keep a diary is inspired by accounts of young people like Anne Frank whose now-famous diaries distill the insanity of a world gone made around them into the deeply personal that is on some level accessible to all. But one does not need to be hiding from the Nazis or trying to survive under the barrage of rockets flying across Sarajevo to replicate this in the United States at the end of the 20th century. Becoming a teenage survivor of war no longer requires living in another country or even an actual war for matter. For many of the Freedom Writers, just going home after school is like living in a war zone:
“Reality is difficult for me because of where I live. I live in a neighborhood where the sounds of gunshots are my lullaby.”
