The Dream We All Dream Of

A few weeks ago, when I picked up the Mad Cow from school, he was clearly holding back tears. Now, this is not an unusual situation as he will cry at the drop of a hat over pretty much anything - birds getting rained on, not enough french fries for lunch, someone accidentally bumping in him during PE - but this seemed different. There was a sense of pure unadulterated sorrow in his face.


I asked him how his day went and he said he did not want to talk about it but would draw me a picture. Now having worked in criminal law, I assumed the worse - that he would draw me a picture of someone touching his private parts or a scene of satanic worship. With head down and tears still falling like a Manoa waterfall, he did not finish writing until we got home - about a 10 minute ride. When the car ws put into park, he handed me his masterpiece which said amongst other things "I am angry because I could not play Beyblade and I could not have PE.


I assumed that he had been punished for some infraction or due to mass manic Beyblade hysteria hitting the First Grade but he said that was not the case. He explained that in the morning, the teachers divided the class into two. For one group, it was first grade business as usual but for his group, it was a trip to first grade second class citizenship. Amongst the indignities his group suffered (besides the horribly traumatic loss of Beyblade) were having to move to the back of the classroom, having to wait for the first group to finish snack and lunch before they could sit down in a segregated section, having a shorter recess and wearing a sticker that told everyone they were not in the good group.


If you are my age or older, you'll recognize this as the "Blue Eye, Brown Eye" experiment which was performed by Iowa teacher Jane Elliot in 1968 the day after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Ms. Elliot divided her third grade class of all white students into groups - separated solely by eye color. On the first day, the children with blue eyes were told they were superior to those with brown eyes. The blue eyed children were given privileges denied to the brown eyed children who were forced to wear collars around their necks and were criticized and ridiculed by Ms. Elliot throughout the day. The next day, much to the dismay of the blue eyed kids, the labels were switched.


Ms. Elliot was stunned to see how the behavior and demeanor of the students quickly changed depending on what label that was put on them. The "inferior" children took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests and other classwork. The "superior" children became mean-spirited and seemed to enjoy discriminating against their "inferior" classmates. She realized she had created a microcosm of society and repeated the experiment year after year, including in 1970 when it was the subject of a documentary. 30 years later, the students who participated in 1970 spoke about the experience and the lasting impact it had on their lives.


After reading the Mad Cow's note, I spoke to him about Ms. Elliot's experiment and why it was important. I told him about the reaction of the students in the 1960s, how the "good group" no matter what color their eyes were treated the "bad group" poorly, and how the "bad group" felt being labelled and treated as the "bad group". What he said in response made me realize how different the world is today than it was when Dr. King was killed.


"Oh Mom, that didn't happen. All of the kids in the good group were crying too because they did not like how we were treated and that we could not all play together."


Now, granted, if you were to divide the kids by eye color in the Mad Cow's school, the ratio would probably be nine brown eyed kids for every one non-brown eyed kid but the Mad Cow's best friend would be the one non-brown eyed kid in that mix.


We continued to talk about what had happened and how he felt. He kept asking the same question to me over and over, for which I clearly had what he considered an inadequate response.


"Mom, why do some people treat other people bad just because they are different?"


To this I offered the following, none of which he seemed to accept - The mean people are just stupid, ignorant, uneducated, live only with people like them, bakatare, selfish, scared and mean. He was silent for a while and then asked, "Mom, is this why Grandpa Goro, Grandpa Robert and Uncle Beau went to war? Because they had to stop the mean people from being mean?" (Photo with some of the 100th Grandpas with Uncle Chris of the 100th/442nd).


Click, click, click.


Rather than bombard him with a history lesson, I told him about stories about our family surviving the cruelty of "the mean people" including meeting friends of Grandpa Stanley and Grandma Rita in Florida who had survived the concentration camps in Germany, of Grandpa Eddie not knowing whether to use the "white only" or "colored only" restroom in Texas or sit in the white or black section of the bus, of Daddy being called "kike" or "Hebe" at school, of Mommy being told by a friend that she shouldn't be mad over a racial slur because she was not a "Gook" but a "Jap", of how different our lives would be if Great-Grandpa Kihachi had raised enough money to move his family to California from Hawaii. I did not have to explain why there were wars against "mean people" because he knows the stories of the 100th in World War II and the 100th/442nd in Kuwait and Iraq by heart.


His now glazed over eyes looked at me again and he asked, "Wouldn't it be easier if there were just no more mean people? That way nobody would have to get hurt or die and everyone would be happy."


So simple, yet so profound. Isn't that basically what discrimination of every sort boils down to - one person being mean to another for the sole purpose of hurting them? Isn't war basically an effort to shut these mean people down? Isn't it stupid to hurt or kill people just to get your mean yayas out?


Knowing the limitations of my psyche and personality, I know I cannot make the commitment that the Mad Cow made to never be mean to anyone. I am not a child of the 2000s but am a child of the same 1960's environment of the students in Ms. Elliot's experimental class. I fear that if offered the chance to be "superior" at the expense of the "inferiors", I would readily accept - offering some justification for doing so like it was payback for putting my people into internment camps or for not letting people of my gender vote or uh, elder abuse.

I don't have the purity of heart and mind that my son has. When he plays Club Penguin, he does not discriminate between the different penguins based on gender or employment not does he put one puffle over the other based on color. It sounds trivial but that is the way he approaches life - just as penguins are penguins or puffles are puffles so people are people.


Now that isn't that the dream we all dream of for our world? To simply treat people like people?