I teach high school civics. You might think this is the worst subject to teach—especially in these politically polarized days—but I would argue it is one of the most important as we teeter on the edge of a constitutional breakdown in the United States.
A classroom full of 39 teenagers in a room, 5 different classes a day, isn’t for the faint of heart. One student comes to mind. This student didn’t follow directions on a project. I reminded the student that instructions were supposed to be included for the How a Bill Becomes a Law boardgame. The student snapped back that their group wasn’t done in time, and that they didn’t have a chance to print it, and…and…and. The student couldn’t hear me when I offered to print it for them (even though we were about to play the games), too busy being defensive and talking in circles.
“I”m offering to print it for you. Can you stop arguing?” I said, trying to get the show on the road. The class had weeks to prepare for this moment at the end of the semester. I didn’t ask them to do it at home. And it was an AP course. You sign up for the class expecting rigor and independence.
The student continued to argue. The others at the table shushed the student. They didn’t want points taken off because their classmate didn’t do the instructions. The student wanted to keep being defensive. I walked away, and yes, I printed the instructions for them anyway.
This is a tiny, G-rated teenage attitude encounter, but I bring it up because teachers learn the art of walking away when working with adolescents, even in the most outrageous situations.
I learned my lesson almost 20 years ago. A smart but lazy boy liked to challenge everything I said. He would often be rude and confrontational. Kids these days would call his comments rage bait. I remember calling out his off task behavior (in front of the class, a fatal mistake), asked him to follow the rules, and he refused and sassed back. I responded. He responded. This volley of words went on until I registered the reactions from his classmates, their disgust palpable in their facial expressions. They were mad—at me! Even though their classmate was acting like a fool. Even though they agreed he was out of line. They were mad at me for escalating it. For making it everyone’s problem.
I think about the stories I hear in the news. Stories like what happened to Renee Good in Minneapolis, shot to death by an ICE agent. I read the comments online about her death and heard the snide sound bites from interviews with people saying that Good and her partner deserved it. Even provoked it. That they escalated the situation and should have complied. People responding as if dissent and political protest or maybe just not moving fast enough for another person makes you bad. That somehow people deserve to lose their lives over a smart aleck comment, and even worse, that an agency like ICE should be able to take matters into their own hands, which circumvents and undermines our legal system.
We teach our students that political speech is the most protected by the law. We teach them voting is important, that it is respectable to speak up and defend what is right, and yet in many other ways we tell them being quiet and compliant is what society really wants. We send them off to the real world and have given them conflicting messages about the boundaries of freedom and liberty and what it means to be an engaged member of a democratic society.
And here is the thing.
I’m a high school teacher. We get sassed back to regularly, and not just from kids. From their parents! I’ve often thought about how teachers could lead the way to teach the art of deescalation. It is what we do on a daily basis.
Don’t get me wrong. There are teachers who don’t know how to do it. Teachers that fuel fires that cause more destruction, because teachers are humans. Law enforcement are human. Even our president is human.
Here is a little secret, a personal belief that I hold.
I don’t think it is necessarily bad that our kids push back.
That we have to earn their respect.
That they hold us accountable.
These are all amazing skills to have, and we need to spend more time helping them hone the art of speaking up and advocating for themselves in a respectful manner. Instead of punishing kids for their push back, we need to nurture it. Being able to safely disagree is the most democratic thing we could ever foster.
We need people who can think critically and communicate effectively. We need people who know how to skillfully disagree. People who are kind and empathetic, know their values, and are willing to defend them. People who can sift through the noise and draw their own conclusions based on facts and not guilt or shame or a desire to fit into someone else’s definition of who they should be.
I don’t think we can fully unpack this without looking at religion.
Baptized Catholic, I tried to hang on to the spiritual thread I had been born into. My mom, a Palestinian Melkite Catholic-—a minority within a minority— married a Roman Catholic white guy from California.
My Lutheran German grandmother would make digs at the Catholics.
“How can a priest give marriage counseling when he hasn’t ever been married?” she’d say. She reminded me numerous times that she was never a Catholic.
I heard the stories of my grandfather, who insisted that his kids go to Catholic school, but didn’t attend Sunday mass himself.
My parents never took us to mass, unless you count a funeral service here and there. In my mind, this meant they didn’t really care about religion either, even if my mom thinks wearing a Virgin Mary necklace makes her devout.
I tried to be Catholic. I really did. I even became somebody’s godmother. I remember looking at the catechism homework my cousins had to do and questioning why nothing ever talked about being a good person. It was all compliance. I asked why girls were taught to be chaste, while boys could do whatever. Why the next door neighbor cheating on his wife could go to mass on Sunday like nothing ever happened. I balked at the stories of immaculate conception and walking on water. I lamented to my elders, “If they just admitted these are stories symbolizing something else, I could respect it.”
But no. It was believe or else. Don’t question authority. Go with the flow and don’t make waves.
As a young adult I decided it was time to let go. I didn’t want to be anything. I felt that I didn’t need organized religion. There were various religions coming out against same-sex marriage as it showed up on state ballots, and I could not stay quiet in any institution advocating oppression. I had a problem with the judgement and shame.
When my husband and I had kids, he wanted to raise them as Buddhists, as he had been raised. I didn’t have any objections to that. I only required him to be in charge of this endeavor, as I still didn’t believe I needed anything and I was not a Buddhist. Every once in a while I went with them, but mostly I stayed home on Sundays with the baby while he took them. I was happy with this arrangement.
And then one day, my husband unexpectedly died during our diaper years, leaving me a 34-year-old widow with a 1-year-old, 3-year-old, and a 6-year-old. In the painful bowels of raw, new grief, wondering if there would be any end to the suffering that I felt, I began to contemplate whether it was time for a flotation device. That maybe I actually did need something.
But not right away.
After Kenneth died, I became our kids’ chauffeur to the temple. Not because I felt strongly about them being raised as Buddhists, but because it felt like the most sensible act of grief to do—to try and keep life as much business as usual as possible for the kids.
I did not participate. I did not chant. I refused to put my hands together and bow. All of these traditions felt reminiscent of my previous life as a Catholic. I was not going to be a sheep, blindly following the masses, stuck in the trenches of organized religion. Not for me. I was not a follower. I did not need it. This was just for Kenneth.
After service, the children went to dharma school, which was a Buddhist version of Sunday School, literally developed over a hundred years ago to help Japanese Americans assimilate into white, Judeo-Christian culture by having their own Sunday customs. When my husband would take our children to dharma school, he cheated and cruised into service right before it ended, handed off the children to the teachers, and stood in the garden chit-chatting with the other dads until it was over. I was a rule-follower and found the idea of skipping service embarrassing and not something I wanted to do. I already felt like an outsider, so in my mind there was no other option other than to torture myself with the public shame of inevitably arriving late, squeezing down a pew to find a seat for me and my 3 young kids, and staying until the end of service. But I was just the chauffeur. Nothing more.
It was easy to not participate. I was busy trying to keep the baby from crying or pulling the person’s hair in front of us. But after service—while the kids were at dharma school—I found it difficult to hide. I didn’t know anybody to talk to in the garden. I did not have any friends. I was sure that I stood out as one of the few non-Japanese, non-Asian women there. A fish out of water.
I found refuge at the adult discussion. It was the coffee that drew me in. The goal was to hide and pass the time and have somewhere to sit. The minister typically led a discussion based on the topic of the service. There would be an essay that people read together. People discussed their ideas or shared their stories. Sometimes they asked the minister questions. I gave the baby snacks and this occupied him while I listened and sipped desperately needed coffee.
I didn’t fully understand it then, but I was attending services in a sect of Japanese Buddhism called Shin Buddhism, or Jodo Shinshu. I had no idea that there were different sects of Buddhism, but this is the largest one of Japanese Buddhism, with a rich history of being in the United States as a part of their immigrant stories for over a hundred years.
In Shin, listening is an important practice. I didn’t chant, recite Namo Amida Butsu, or put my hands together in gassho, but I did listen. Not intentionally. But as I listened, I started to connect the dots. Buddhism is a religion, philosophy, whatever you want to call it, devoted to the problem of suffering and offering a path of transcendence. Buddhism has evolved with each country it has encountered, morphing to fit unique customs and cultural differences while still carrying the dharma. It felt surreal when I realized I had encountered it in Orange County, California, a half-Palestinian, half-European Catholic dropout not looking for anything.
I love being a part of this Japanese sangha. I’ve learned so much from them and their gentle demeanor, their stories inextricably linked to immigration, the atrocities of World War II incarceration, racism, and the legal and economic constraints imposed on them. The sangha has grit. They are kind and hard working. One of the reasons I wanted to practice alongside them was the realization that whatever Kool-Aid they were drinking to be calm and generous, I knew I needed some. I was angry at the universe after my husband died. In this sangha, which had collectively withstood numerous challenges in history, I knew I could learn from their source of strength to calm the storm inside of me.
I think about the audacity of anyone to question how American someone is. Who does or doesn’t belong. Japanese Americans, like many other generations of immigrants, were treated poorly and still woke up and kept fighting. Not with their words or actions (Japanese Americans can be some of the most conflict averse people about their internment, for better or worse), but in the way they choose to live their lives. I attribute much of this to the influence of Buddhism, which is the dominant religion in Japan. You don’t need to go to Sunday service to see it. They are born with it. It is in their bones; they learned through osmosis. And they brought this strength and values with them to the United States and have passed it along to many generations of Japanese Americans.
And to be clear, my kids’ paternal grandmother was 2nd generation Californian-born, their family here on American soil longer than anyone in my white family. But many people in our society back then and even today would assume they didn’t belong here by the way that they looked.
I loved Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance. I don’t care that it wasn’t in English or that I didn’t get all of the cultural references. I really appreciated how he put his rich culture out there for us to experience and learn from. I took a deep dive online to figure out the symbolism, like dissecting a colorful movie layered in meaning that would take time to unpack. Do you need to speak the same language to recognize joy?
I imagine what such a display might look like for the Japanese American communities. Maybe a scene from the summer Obon festival, women dancing in their yukatas under the lights and to the beat of taiko drums, imagawayaki filled with azuki bean paste hot off the grill, the smell of deep fried dango dogs, craft tables and plant sales, elderly ladies folding wontons, kids throwing pingpongs into goldfish bowls to win a prize.
I imagine what a Palestinian-American scene would look. Little Arabia street, the jewlery store, falafel shop, Arabic markets to buy fresh Arabic bread and lebani and zaater and nuts to serve to guests, cheese bread bakeries, Turkish coffee served in demitasse cups, tetas folding grape leaves and stuffing kusa, and old men smoking hookah in their garages while they play backgammon with friends.
I know we have so many beautiful stories to be told in this country because I’ve been lucky enough to be in the middle of a few.
We should be learning from each other.
We should know each other’s stories.
This is what builds empathy and interconnection. In a country so divided, Bad Bunny is on to something. More love.
There is no one American story that makes us more American than the other. We need to start loving our neighbors. We need to know them.
Recently I was at a softball opening day ceremony. The national anthem played over a loud speaker, and as I listened to it shoulder-to-shoulder amidst a sea of people from all different backgrounds, I felt even more sure that you don’t have to be a certain color to love a sport or this country. You don’t have to belong to a certain party or religion to love a place. You belong because you are here. You belong because we are all here, our stories intertwined, each of us with the same basic needs existing together for a fleeting blip on the timeline.
I know a lot of people feel like everything is hopeless and beyond our control. I’m trying to teach 12th graders that they can make a difference when every single day there is another reason to not trust our government, or to feel hopeless about tomorrow.
Many years ago I shifted away from exclusively teaching boring government facts. The three branches of government. Constitution. We don’t even need textbooks to give us that information anymore. Instead, civic action projects have become the backbone of what we do. My students pick a problem in their communities and make policy proposals. They advocate to policy makers. I teach them what to do when they don’t get a response. They raise awareness around their issue. They work with allies and build coalitions. Most importantly, they have to do. They must use their voices to advocate for something they are passionate about. My job is to teach my students that democracy is a verb. I hope that in my own small way, I can make a difference by showing them that they have a voice, and it is just as important as anyone else’s.
When the world feels hopeless to you, I encourage you to look nearby.
Pick something close to home.
Say something.
Do something.
Vote.
Pitch in for your kid’s baseball team.
Introduce yourself to a neighbor.
Volunteer with an organization.
Get to know your postal worker.
Donate rice and beans to your local food bank.
Help local trappers spay and neuter feral cats. Fix your own pets. Rescue a dog.
Check on the elderly people you know.
Share a meal.
Join a board.
Attend a city council meeting.
Meet your local representatives.
I’ll be honest. There is no magic solution. I sometimes feel hopeless too. But I promise that when you start doing something, no matter how big or how small, it is going to make you feel at least little hopeful in a world that gives you 5 million reasons to believe nothing matters.
In the end, our democracy will not be defined by the political machines, but rather the bonds we form with each other, right here in our own neighborhoods. Our ability to stick together and take care of each other, with pride and mutual respect for the unique threads we each bring to this colorful tapestry of a country we call home.
Teresa Shimogawa 