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| May 12, 2021- From this day, JBOLC is not permitted. "We are informing you that at no point can you or any member of the JBOLC enter on to, or invite anyone on to the grounds of DeWitt Clinton Campus." |
It feels so wonderful to be here and to be a part of the JBOLC organization
We stand for James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center and just one of the beautiful things about this present state of adversity is how these beautiful people have come together and organized such a powerful and peaceful resistance. Our board members, Sung, Dana, Eytan, Cedric, and Joél. Our interns: Annalicia, Paris, Imaam, Clementina, Shakil, and Thy and our partners, friends and neighbors. We all are a community resource and we’re so honored to have earned your trust and respect.
Sustainability and Outdoor Education prepare students for a better life and a better future. We’re those students, each one of us
Sure we and I mean our volunteers have been allowed to tend these school grounds for the last 12 years and that has meant witnessing in front of many others the first signs of asparagus or the return of the goldfinch when the sesame goes to seed.
We were fortunate also to use our backs here to labor - a labor that reaches deep into the soul - common ancestry - Annalicia, one of our interns writes: “Back in Jamaica, my mother was a farmer and I learned a little about agriculture, fertilizing crops, and domesticating animals.
When I came to New York, which isn’t huge on agriculture, I felt that I wouldn’t have a chance to work in the outdoors as I did back home. As a Clinton student, I was introduced to the JBOLC garden which was beautiful with different variations of plants and vegetables. I felt like I found a
small place beside the Clinton building that reminded me of home.”
But I want to remind you that Nature is the teacher around here and We are all her students - if we want to be.
I want to say more about adversity: There is not a tree standing here, some big, some just starting that has not survived some adversity - wind, broken branches, trees split in half from lightening or by a careless knock down or accident or theft - but adversity has made them stronger. Trees grow stronger after facing adversity.
And James Baldwin had much to say about adversity. And in one of the most famous episodes from his groundbreaking essays, Notes of a Native Son, that I taught regularly at this very school, he writes about the summer when he was a young man, barely out of his teens and working at an ammunition plant in New Jersey during the war. He decided one night that he would deliberately walk into a restaurant where he knew he would not be served. But it is not the violence of this story I want to recall - some of you may remember that he threw a glass against a mirror behind the counter and it smashed and it was a real moment of awakening for him. The point is not to break things and god forbid us never to consider this option - the point, I think, is about breaking the mirror. What he broke was the way that they make you feel like somehow their hatred of you is our own fault.
In these 3 weeks now that we’ve stopped working in this garden, because we did obey this awful order, we had plenty of time to write letters, I mean, listen, we’re farmers after all, we love to work hard, we get pleasure out of labor - it is a labor of love, but when we were kept from this beloved space we had to expend our energy and we wrote letters and organized like nobody’s business. We felt hopeful and defiant, confident at times, but also sometimes pretty down. Triggered in me personally were times in my life of loss and grieving. But from time to time I too was part of that mirror scene. Somehow I felt I must have done something wrong, I must have not finished a project or left the woodpile there or didn’t finish painting the fence - and that somehow this eviction is my own fault. That’s what I had to get past, that’s the mirror I had to smash.
This sudden eviction of us from tending and loving and caring for hundreds of plant species in the middle of Spring, for no apparent reason, or at the whim of a school building council that has not one parent, one student, or one union representative, let alone community member: that is wrong and that is what has to be smashed. We’ve done nothing wrong and we are protesting this rude and inconsiderate decision. We’re defending the rights of this garden community to exist, we’re defending the rights of our students and our volunteers to be in this space - and continue to utilize this space to learn from nature how nature works!
Thanks for joining us in this struggle. It’s not our fault.
But finally, and this is the hardest part. We need to be compassionate to those who made this decision - we can’t all of a sudden vilify these people. We can thank them for providing the adversity necessary for us to be strong like trees. Let’s in our actions today and every day moving forward, exhibit love and compassion - after all, we are all brothers and sisters (including with these plants and trees, birds and squirrels and all).
We’re not going to let them get away with this though.
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| May 12, 2021 |
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