At one point, one of the social workers interjected, saying to the group,
“Eighty degrees and sunny!” Everyone in the circle began nodding, ruefully. I
wasn’t sure why. “Tell Mrs. Obama,” she said. “What goes through your mind
when you wake up in the morning and hear the weather forecast is eighty and
sunny?”
She clearly knew the answer, but wanted me to hear it.
A day like that, the Harper students all agreed, was no good. When the
weather was nice, the gangs got more active and the shooting got worse.
These kids had adapted to the upside-down logic dictated by their
environment, staying indoors when the weather was good, varying the routes
they took to and from school each day based on shifting gang territories and
allegiances. Sometimes, they told me, taking the safest path home meant walking
right down the middle of the street as cars sped past them on both sides. Doing so
gave them a better view of any escalating fights or possible shooters. And it gave
them more time to run.
America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found
myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping
wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education
and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall
Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising
their taxes.
And now I was at Harper, listening to children talking about how to stay
alive. I admired their resilience, and I wished desperately that they didn’t need it
so much.
One of them then gave me a candid look. “It’s nice that you’re here and
all,” he said with a shrug. “But what’re you actually going to do about any of
this?”
To them, I represented Washington, D.C., as much as I did the South Side.
And when it came to Washington, I felt I owed them the truth.
“Honestly,” I began, “I know you’re dealing with a lot here, but no one’s
going to save you anytime soon. Most people in Washington aren’t even trying.
A lot of them don’t even know you exist.” I explained to those students that
progress is slow, that they couldn’t afford to simply sit and wait for change to
come. Many Americans didn’t want their taxes raised, and Congress couldn’t
even pass a budget let alone rise above petty partisan bickering, so there weren’t
going to be billion-dollar investments in education or magical turnarounds for