Our Schools, Our Culture, and the Circuitous Path of Progress
On Monday June 19, CAMP Rehoboth organized and hosted a Community Conversation on LGBTQ culture in our local schools. We were joined in the effort by ACLU of Delaware, Equality Delaware, PFLAG, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Delaware. The 70+ crowd in attendance included parents, students, local clergy, press, and concerned members of the community. The two hour discussion revealed a consistent message: as a community, we have work that needs to be done in our schools to ensure the safety and well-being of our LGBTQ students and their allies.
The outcome from the meeting was the organization of a large group of community members willing to work to understand, and find resolutions to, the issues students are facing including: homophobic bullying, a feeling that their complaints are not being heard by school administrators, and in general, a culture seemingly unresponsive to the needs of LGBTQ students and struggling to create a supportive environment for LGBTQ students and the teachers responsible for them.
In the aftermath of the meeting, I am inspired by all who are willing to step up and help, but saddened by the fact that in 2017 it is still necessary for us to even have these conversations at all.
Haven’t we done all this before?
Of course we have, but from what we have learned in the last few years about racial and gender rights in our nation, we should understand by now that deep progress—change in the foundational materials we use to build our culture—takes far more time, patience, and energy than most of us believed when we began protesting decades ago.
The great Martin Luther King, Jr understood that fact even if others did not. “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...“, he said. “Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
Twenty-seven years ago when we started CAMP Rehoboth, I believed that I could create the organization and then retreat to the “ivory tower” of my studio, continue to produce my art, and leave the day to day work of the organization to others. In my innocence—which sounds better than my ignorance, though I’m not sure there’s much difference here—I did not understand that creation is only the beginning. Then the real work begins, as every parent knows.
We have been reminded too many times in recent months that progress is not a linear motion. It does not go from point A to point B. Progress, it seems, cannot move in a straight line—which might very well be the reason why a queer perspective is important to the forward motion of humanity as a whole, and why straight couples produce LGBTQ children at a consistent rate across the globe. We are part of the process.
Visually, progress can be imagined as a coil—or even better, a Slinky—a circular motion that curls around and around, sometimes stretching out, leaping forward, but then pulling back on itself, almost to the place where it began.
Activism is more than carrying a sign in a march—though that certainly creates a visual call for change. Real activism is a lifetime commitment. It is about making changes to who we are, how we live, how we think about right and wrong, how we as individuals and as a nation make decisions about what is good, what we value, and how we care for the earth and its people.
Creating a better world is hard. Change is hard. We cannot let setbacks and failures discourage us to the point where we give up. The situation in our local schools is a good example of why, grassroots activism and care of our local communities continue to need our support and constant care.
One of the goals of CAMP Rehoboth has always been to connect organizations to one another within our community, and not to recreate programs and services already being done well by others. Those connections were visible at the community discussion last week, and altogether the organizations present at that meeting represent a sizable force for change in our state.
Though I have no doubt that we can accomplish a certain degree of success in our efforts to make the life of our local LGBTQ students better in the short term, I believe we need to have some deeper community conversations about the long term, creative efforts it will take to alter the deeply embedded cultural bias that still exists in our schools and communities. This is not a problem we will solve overnight.
Toward the end of the Community Conversation, a young man from Cape Henlopen High School spoke to the crowd about the bullying and lack of administrative response to it. When he finished speaking, he asked a simple but powerful question of the adults in the room.
“What are you going to do about it?”
That’s a question each one of us should ask ourselves every time we see injustice in the world.
Murray Archibald, CAMP Co-founder and President of the Board of Directors of CAMP Rehoboth, is an artist in Rehoboth Beach. Email Murray.
Photo One (from left): Steve Elkins (CAMP Rehoboth), Karla Fleshman (Big Brothers Big Sisters of Delaware), Gary Colangelo (Big Brothers Big Sisters), Rich Morse (ACLU Delaware), Linda Gregory (PFLAG Rehoboth), and Mark Purpura (Equality Delaware, CAMP Rehoboth, ACLU) at the Community Conversation at the CAMP Rehoboth Community Center. Photo Two: A Slinky from Gidget’s Gadgets.