Sarcasm Girl Mans the Barricades

Wednesday night at bedtime SG told me that she was planning on participating in a student-walk-out/demonstration against the Iraq War and the Bush regime the next day. "I'd like to do it with your approval, but I'm going to do it." she said firmly. I didn't give her much to push about; told her if this was something she felt strongly about I would write a note to the school authorizing her to leave at 11:40. My biggest concern was for her safety; a couple of years ago the students at her school staged a walkout in protest of the dress code, and while the vast majority behaved well, a few kids misbehaved so badly that SG got scared and angry about it. So she understood when I told her, "If you get any sense that things are getting out of hand, you get somewhere else and stay there and call me."

Yesterday at 11:40 she showed her teacher and the guard at the door her note (the guard asked where she was going and she told him. He nodded approvingly, asked how she was getting down there, and told her to stay safe) and left the campus. And for about three hours, partly in the rain, she marched, she screamed, she spoke as a representative of her school, and she was, in her own words, "more exhilarated and connected than I've ever been in my life." I'm proud of my girl, who has a great sense of social conscience, and I'm so glad she had such a good experience of her mild civil disobedience. She then went off her her voice lesson (with what was left of her voice) and straggled home to do her homework. But the glow lasted.