A while back I mentioned watching the film, "The Freedom Writers" and later on I mentioned that I got the book to read. It's been very good. I only read in 20-40 minute chunks usually, and I'm interrupted frequently as I'm entertaining our darling parrot, Pumpkin, but I'm almost half way through it now.
This book is full of journal entries from students at an inner city school in southern California and some of the things they have to say are so horrifying. My life has been a royal parade next to most of these kids and I cannot imagine growing up in a place where people I know get shot on a fairly regular basis. Imagine being terrified to make the trip between your home and school? Wow. At the same time though, the journal entries are often very touching and wonderful. It's a tough book to put down.
The heroine of this story is their teacher, Erin Gruwell, and part of the education she gives includes lots of books for the kids to read. Right off the bat, I knew one of the books, "The Diary of Anne Frank," but there are others too, and now that I've been reading The Freedom Writers Diary, I would like to go back and reread "The Diary of Anne Frank" and add a few of the books they read to the list: "The Wave," by Todd Strasser, "Night," by Elie Wiesel, and Zlata's Diary," by Zlata Filipovic.
As I'm reading, I find myself referencing on the internet at the same time. One of the kids was outraged when a buried memory of being molested surfaced after she read an article by a journalist who visited camps in Bosnia and wrote about the horrors he saw there. I looked it up and found the story, "Bosnia's Ground Zero," by Peter Maass. It's just horrible...I don't mean his writing. I mean...I just couldn't read it all because what he saw...what he learned and heard stories aboout...it's so horrible. I couldn't read the whole thing.
Isn't it just awful that the world is full of so many terrible things that you have to be careful what you read, what link you click on, what movie you watch, because some things you should not subject yourself to? I don't think we should have our heads in the sand. On the other hand, I also think that you can be aware of things that are terrible and once you have an understanding, steer clear of them. It's been my experienc that getting too close to such things is damaging and serves no purpose but to hurt those who look.
Even though The Freedom Writers Diary shows a lot of pain and hurting, it's wonderful to watch the transformation from caged animals to birds set free. In The Diary of Anne Frank, we read about a girl who tells the world what it is like to be a Jew hiding from death, and her words will never be forgotten. When I read that book as a teenager, I was horrified, but I was the same age as her too...I really got some perspective on the word, "prejudice."
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