Tag Archives: personal agency

The Hana Chronicles: Month 7, Day 28

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Posted by on in Assistance, children, collaborating, Community, Family, Historical, impediments, Inner Struggles, Personal Values, Social, Striving

August 18, 2026- Hana does not like it when her meal gets cold, especially the meat. She began fussing, but stopped when she saw that I was not reacting, and was just sitting and waiting for her to stop. I then reheated her chicken, and she finished it. She leaned over and put her head against my chest, when the meal was over and I had cleaned her up. It was her way of asking if I loved her, in spite of her little tantrum.

I love her the way I love her father, and the way I loved her grandmother- unconditionally. I don’t get sidetracked by her being disagreeable, nor do I reward her for it. She is seeing that there are rules that need to be followed, even when it is not what she might want in the moment. She is approaching toddlerhood, already. She has some agency and dignity, which is respected. Likewise, she is being taught to respect the agency and dignity of her parents-and of her grandfather.

HANA’S NOTE- I hate it when my food gets cold. But, I like to play at the table. Papa makes me behave.

YEAR IN REMEMBRANCE-2001

In my years of handling disturbances, crises and other difficulties, I have had no trouble rising to the occasion and seeing things through to a resolution. I was not prepared, though, for a well-organized, slow-rolling absconding by two students, two days before Valentine’s Day. Multiple people were involved in this, and I, focused heavily on the day-to-day grind of running a residential school, was the last to know. Students told me, later, in shame, that there were one or two staff members, at least one parent and several of the residents who helped the girls, The kids didn’t think I’d be held responsible, when they did their part in the caper. I held myself responsible, though, and resigned that same night. The girls were located, the next day, and faced the law.

I fell back on Substitute Teaching, and Penny, having finished her semester in Mesa. did the same. We made the best of it, and truth be known, I was physically and mentally exhausted by my work at the Academy. I was actually glad to be done with it, and I was definitely done with school administration.

In August, Penny got a full-time job at El Mirage Elementary School, west of Phoenix. We moved to an apartment complex in midtown Phoenix, near what was then Metrocenter. Sierra Pines was, at first, reasonably well-run, and we felt fairly safe. I signed on to Substitute in two nearby school districts, while applying for various School Counselor positions.

On the morning of September 11, I went to a grocery store to buy a few items for the week. When I turned on my car radio, afterward, Morning Monkey broke into his playlist to announce that an airplane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, in New York. It hit me that this was a terrorist act. When I got home, Penny noticed that my face was ashen. She went to work and Aram went to his middle school. I stayed at home and was glued to the TV screen, going out only for a sandwich at lunchtime, just to reconnect with the outside world for an hour. My wife and son both came home early.

I would work at substitute teaching, the rest of the year, I went to the business of a Sikh man who was slain, in the aftermath of the terror attacks, and paid my respects to his family. Penny and I ate at Arab-owned restaurants, to show that we did not hold the average person responsible for the acts of extremists. On the long weekend of Veteran’s Day, we were visiting Penny’s parents, in Prescott. On November 12, we woke early and had the TV on. News came of another plane crashing into an apartment complex near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, also in New York.The complex was home to many New York City police officers and firefighters. The official version was that this was pilot error. I sense differently, in my bones, to this day.

In any event, not much has been the same, since September 11, 2001.

Agency Honouring

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Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, distraction issues, impediments, Inspiration, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Striving, Travel

August 18, 2023- A world famous entrepreneur and television host walked into a Red Cross shelter-with a full camera crew and other members of the entourage. The shelter manager informed one and all that no filming or recording was allowed inside dormitory area of the shelter. This is standard procedure for ARC shelters. The crew and most of the others left, but the famous person stayed and distributed items that she had brought along. The performative element of the visit was foregone, with no real damage to the agency of either the donor or the shelter clients.

Personal agency is, as I have said earlier, a most important thing to honour. So, for that matter, is collective agency, that which acknowledges the integrity of a community of people. I am not threatened by the presence of anyone who identifies as gay, bisexual, questioning. I am not threatened the presence of a transgender person. Conversely, I am not threatened by the presence of a conservative, fundamentalist, traditionalist human being. I know who I am, and not being influenced by someone whose life experiences are different from mine, honouring their agency and their humanity is not at all difficult.

Honouring a community is, likewise, not difficult. Having lived and worked with Dineh, Hopi, Korean and Vietnamese people helped me see things from a wider perspective. Visiting with people in all fifty states and D.C, all ten Canadian provinces and thirteen other countries has only expanded that perspective further. Community involvement, here in my community of residence, is the cement that reinforces respect for individual and collective agency, day to day.

These thoughts come to me, after a short postmortem on the recent “Copper 2 Gold” series of discussions on overcoming one’s lingering prejudices, particularly with regard to relationships with People of Colour. There is a legacy left by colonialism, and by the individual and collective sense of superiority that spurred that colonialism, in the first place. It doesn’t require a system that is identified by a colloquialism from the dialect of enslaved people (“woke”) to correct its excesses, but it certainly needs every single person to examine his/her lingering misconceptions and prejudices, and to do so earnestly.

Jitterbug, with The Munchkins

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Posted by on in Assistance, children, collaborating, Community, Education, Entertainment, impediments, Inner Struggles, Inspiration, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving

July 28, 2023, Carson City– The cast was set to dancing and jumping about, in this version of the spell cast by a cheekier version of the Wicked Witch of the West. W3 did not feel like even hinting at opium being an acceptable diversion and so came the Jitterbug, whose weapon was getting everyone to dance until they dropped from exhaustion. The classic dance marathon, instead of deadly poison, was a tad more family friendly-but W3 still asked Scarecrow if he wanted to play ball.

“The Wizard of Oz” first came into my consciousness when I was about nine, and we started watching it, as a family, once a year. When I hit my mid-teens, the watch party shifted to a gathering of friends-still a time for laughs and feigned fright. Seeing that it has not lost its appeal is re-assuring. There is much that is not ersatz about our culture, and these are the totems that I hope will remain.

Children and teens are almost universally dear to my heart. One of the dearest was on stage as a Munchkin, her time under the klieg lights about five minutes of play time and a few minutes at the end. In our pre-play conversation, I re-assured her that this is how just about everything starts. The first jobs are almost always the equivalent of a small role, with few lines. It is approaching the task with aplomb, with the confidence that one is going to do the small stuff well and move up the ladder, to a place that is deserved, that makes the dream become reality.

So she did her small role well, being visible and audible from where I was sitting, with her grandmother, in the second row. Afterward, the three of us went to a fast food place and each got an orange cream shake. We talked of the importance of agency, which she has already stood for, as she described an incident in which she asked that officials remove a poster she finds offensive. She heard us say: “Good on you and keep standing for justice, even when-especially when, it’s hard.”

I will always stand beside her, her brother, cousins and any other young person who is looking at being hazed or subjected to injustice.