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Journal Entries for December 2002 Jump to: December 20, 2002 School Failure Can Build Career Success I remember being a 10-year-old at Manchester Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles and not being able to read a book about Kit Carson that was one of the main reading assignments in my 6th grade class. I think it was difficult for me to read the book because I was a sensitive child when it came to racism and genocide. My sister tells me to this day that I never was prejudiced and that I hated the whole idea of racism. The concerns that I had about racism and genocide transferred to the elementary school. I could not believe that the teacher was approving of a person like Kit Carson, the famous Indian fighter who was responsible for the killing of many Indian people. The teacher brought me up to the front of the class to humiliate me, by saying that I could not read. But she also said that I was the most behaviorally improved class member for trying to read the Kit Carson book. At this point my class members applauded me for being the most improved. This made me feel both good and stupid. I was happy that I was the most improved student but I felt stupid because my teacher made an issue of my not being a good reader. The humiliation and confusion hurt me intellectually; I lost my confidence in learning to read. I eventually dropped out of school and did not finish high school until I was 21 or 22 years old, when I surprisingly passed my GED. I later graduated from San Diego High School Adult Education when I was serving on my second enlistment of the United States Marine Corps. The Kit Carson book was my first encounter in school with Native-American issues because my schools only had black, hispanic and caucasian children. I did see the old cowboy and Indian movies on television and at a movie theater called the Roundup, where my father would take me to watch western movies. I always felt that these movies made the Native Americans look stupid and in need of guidance from white people to learn how to live. I remember that the movies used to make Native-American ceremonies looked like all they had was a war dance and stupid yelling with their hands hitting their lips to make a strange sound. At the end of those movies my father would tell me to never treat people such as Indians and blacks badly. My father's teaching me about tolerance for people unlike myself fit where I was going to school because of the cultural diversity in my neighborhood. But it is strange that I do not remember ever meeting a Native American in South Central Los Angeles. I know now there are thousands of relocated Native-Americans living in Los Angeles because of the Christian enslavement theology of taking Native-American children from their homes on reservations and putting them in boarding schools across the nation, such as the Sherman Boarding School in Riverside, California. I probably did not see Native-American children because they were mostly in the Catholic schools as part of the missionary program of enslavement theology. At this early adolescent phase, my rebellion toward the school system became a huge issue for my parents and the teachers. I think they gave me a "social passing," which I couldn't understand because I was young for the 6th grade. I think they wanted to push me on to middle school. During my last year at Manchester Elementary School I got into a lot of fistfights and was assigned to detention several times or just sent home. I remember spending a lot of time in time-out, sitting in the hall or in the principal's office. My classmates would tease me because I had to sit in the hall so often. Their taunting would make me angry, so I would get into another fistfight. Being rejected from the classroom and sick with asthma quite often caused me to miss a lot of school. That did not help my learning and reading problems at all. I have spent several years as a psychologist and consultant to schools on Native-American reservations and for urban and rural Native-American and African-American children who had school-related problems. My dream and intention is that my Liberation Psychology will help to change the social system that creates conditions of failure and oppression for children in certain segments of our society. Liberation Psychology works to meet the basic needs of living that enable children to excel to their highest potential. My sad early school experiences only fed my lifelong sensitivity to the injustices of racism and genocide, and economic oppression. My elementary school experience was a fiasco, and it got worse in middle school at Bret Harte Junior High School in South Central Los Angeles. December 11, 2002 Ode to Love I was 6 or 7 when I met my brother Bud, who had been living in a different orphanage than my sister Betty. He was in Germany during the Second World War when I first heard that I had another older brother. I remember getting gifts from him like a German bayonet that he was supposed to have taken off the body of a German soldier. I was an intuitive child, and the bayonet filled my mind with fantastic images of war and the bravery of my brother. Even though I did not know him yet, it made me feel proud that I had a brother who was fighting the evil Nazis. I was aware of the war with Germany and Japan because we had blackouts in Los Angeles to prepare us to be ready if we were bombed. The blackouts made me feel that the world was a fearful place. One day when I came home from school my brother Bud was sitting in our living room. I could not believe that this mythic hero was actually in my home, the man who had been slaying the dragon had returned. My father and Bud would tell their stories about war. Dad would talk about his Navy adventures on a submarine during the First World War, and my brother would counter with his adventures in Germany. It made me feel safe as a child to know I had these two brave warriors in my world. My father had two extremely different sides to his personality. He had a terrible temper; and when he lost control he would rip off his belt and whip my older brother, Chuck, and me with hardly any provocation. My brother and I were beaten severely, but my sister was spared because she was a girl. Thank God my sister did not have to feel the pain, hurt, and humiliation of being beaten with my father's belt. This was supposed to be the acceptable punishment for young children in the 50s, but it felt abusive to me. My father would have been arrested for child abuse by today's child rearing standards. The other side of my father revealed his deep love and devotion to me. When I was suffering and could hardly breathe from severe asthmas attacks, he would hold me in his arms and rock me all night. Many times my family thought I was going to die. I can remember to this day how comforting and safe it felt to be held and rocked by my father. I had experienced the best and the worst in my father. The drastically different aspects of my father's personality and behavior toward me joined in a powerful way to influence my choice to become a psychotherapist and an advocate for children. I earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Clinical Psychology and have gone on to provide psychotherapy to children and their families for more than twenty-five years. The focus of this work has been to convince professionals and parents to stop using punishment on children, and to teach more effective and kinder ways to influence and modify a child's behavior. As a youngster I had experienced the painful abuse from physical punishment and I had received the comforting love from my dad holding me with tenderness and caring. I learned from my father, and from my sister and her husband, that the strength of love is more powerful than punishment in the psyche of a child. December 5, 2002 Saved by a Name When I was 6 or 7 years old, I met my future brother in law, Bud Rockefeller, dressed in a magical and unbelievable Marine Corps uniform. He was bigger than life to me. God gave me an archetypal hero who made a lasting impact on my young development. I was so impressed at my young age that I must have made a life script choice to be a Marine -- which is what I became, later. This may seem strange for a person who is struggling to live a complete life of nonviolence. We live the life we are given and try to shape it and mold it so that we can survive in it as children. I did not meet my sister Betty until she came to live with us when she was an adolescent and I was 6 or 7. She had been living in an old-time orphanage, a horrific situation that is not allowed in our society today. I was angry as her life story unfolded through the rumors in the family. She had a positive influence on my life. I remember her religious devotion and how happy it would make her. It made me feel good for her because I imagined that it must have been so awful not to be able to live with your family. All my years of living in poverty and experiencing my sister Betty's pain made me feel even more anger and resentful towards society. My sister was twelve years older than I, so I mentally adopted her as my mother because my mother was too dysfunctional to be nurturing to me. I remember being loved and comforted by my sister. She and my brother-in-law were like angels that dropped into my life and made life bearable for me. During these elementary school years, my sister was refreshing to me because the teachers only saw me as dumb and troubled. I was such a disturbed child that the image of becoming a Marine made me feel strong and proud; I had something to live for. About this same time, I would go with my Latino friends from South Central to Catholic Catechism, which also had a strong influence on my spiritual formation. I remember attending Mass with my friends. The feeling that I was experiencing something special brought tears to my eyes, and it gave me hope. I don't remember my parents ever going to church, although I remember going one time with my sister Betty. I remember the minister saying at one point in his sermon, "What are we to do now?" I spontaneously yelled , "We don't know. You tell us!" Going to church was especially important during the Christmas season. We were singing the beautiful hymn "We Three Kings", and I heard the words, "…star with royal beauty bright." I remember feeling special because my name was used in such a beautiful hymn. I had a feeling that I couldn't be so horrible and bad if people who looks so happy were singing my name at the top of their voices. Not too long ago, Betty told me that when I was a young child I used to carry the Bible around and I tried to get people to read it to me. I did not remember even having a Bible in the house. In fact, I do not recall any books being in our house. I do remember riding my bicycle for miles to a library so I could check out books, but I do not remember reading them. Those trips to the library at night in South Central Los Angeles were scary. I remember seeing people being beaten up by gangs and being terrified that the gang members would see me and come after me. After years of living in a home saturated with domestic violence, seeing people being hurt, myself included, and being too small to help or to stop it left me feeling like a horrible, no-good person. I went to a Baptist church one day and fell on my knees in front of the minister. I was crying profusely and begging for forgiveness for being a horrible sinner. I was baptized later in this Baptist church, dunked three times in a huge tank of warm water. This spiritual ritual made me feel good about my life for a while. December 2, 2002 Where Did It Start? I have a life-long history of being a social activist. Unbelievably, it began when I was in the first grade at 77th Street School in South Central Los Angeles. At that time, South Central was changing. Business corporations were beginning to move out of South Central Los Angeles and to relocate in West Los Angeles. The black, Latino, and Korean populations could not move because discrimination in the housing industry made it impossible for them to buy homes or rent apartments close to the relocated job sites. The result of this corporate change was that South Central became a ghetto. The blacks, Koreans, and Latinos lost jobs and become so poor they could not afford bus fare to West Los Angeles to work. Unemployment rose rapidly, and poverty became a way of life for thousands of people. I attended poor schools headed by Caucasian administrators who were obviously prejudiced toward my black and Latino friends. The principal at the 77th Street School was being terribly unfair toward one of my black friends. So, at the age of 6, I carried out my first act of non-violence against injustice – a sit-in. I was ordered to the principal's office; he sent me home for a week. After that, I seemed to be getting in trouble at the school daily. I had a difficult time reading because I was so angry with the school. A lot of the trouble I had in elementary school was probably because in my own way I chose to rebel against the school. It also probably had a lot to do with the fact that no one in my family had graduated from high school. My family was poor, and living at a low social-economic level had a lot to do with my feeling closer to my black and Latino friends than to the school administrators. I was angry during those years, and I had serious asthma attacks, being hospitalized many times to get oxygen to help me breath. Now I know my family's low social-economic status had a lot to do with me being a sickly child. The asthma, poverty, and domestic violence in my family were big influences on the persistence of my many school problems. I literally hated school. It was deeply personal for me when I saw my black and Latino friends being discriminated against. My first direct social action at 6 years old was to try to change the social injustice of the school. This was the beginning of my desire to liberate others and myself from ignorance. No wonder I am trying to develop a liberation psychology.
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