MLK Day, Then and Now

“You need to go much deeper into the soil.”

A neon Washington Trail Volunteer construction hat was perched atop the man’s white hair. “Gary,” it read. He must have volunteered for a few years to get his own name on the hat.

“I know. I’m working on it. It just takes some time to...”

“Let me show you.” He grabbed the grub hoe out of my hands. “You gotta use the corners of the hoe to break through the ice.”

I gritted my teeth. If you had watched me, you would have known that was exactly what I was doing. But I wanted him to go away, and complacency seemed the best strategy. “Thanks!” I smiled at him.

He walked away. I turned back to my work.  We were building a new connector trail on Cougar Mountain. All the plants and organic soil needed to be cleared away leaving just the durable mineral soil for the trail.

Heaving the grub hoe began to hurt my climbing-callused hands. I sighed and switched to a shovel. I scooped out the organic soil I had just freed and scattered it to the sides of the trail as I had been shown.  I haven’t volunteered in a long time, I thought. But it just seems kind of pointless now. I remembered the MLK weekend eight years prior, when a newly-elected Obama urged us all to get out and volunteer on our day off. My friends and I got trash bags and gloves and participated in a cleanup of the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was a cheerful day, working alongside the diverse residents, many of them immigrants. There was a feeling of working towards something wonderful together, a great hope that things would get better. That we might be moving to a country where things like race and gender no longer affected how you were respected.

“Hey there, what are you doing?” A balding WTA volunteer pointed angrily at my full shovel mid-swing.

“I was told to scatter the organic soil…”

He grabbed my shovel, and picked up a handful of soil. “Look at this! This is good soil, you don’t want to waste it.”

“It has lots of roots and such and it is a dark black. I think that will just make the trail slippery if I left it there.”

“It’s not all organic,” the man spat. He ran his hands through the dark loam and found one pebble sized clump of mineral soil. “You gotta sort it out. You can use your brain, you know.”

What a condescending asshole! And he is saying the opposite of what the first guy said.  Was he serious? There was half mile of trail to be built. If we hunted down every teaspoon of mineral soil, we would never be done. I spit out “thanks,” but I meant, “fuck off.” He sauntered away.

I switched to my grub hoe, and started heaving it above my head to smack the frozen soil into chunks. I hacked and split the ground, imagining it first as that man’s face. Then, as I scraped down past the brown to the orangey mineral soil, it was Trump’s smirking visage I was shattering.

The white-haired man was soon back, would he dare criticize me again? Why isn’t he bothering any of the male volunteers? I began hacking the grub hoe with axe murderer-fervor. He took a step towards me open-mouthed as if about to speak. Ice flying, I hacked the ground faster and faster to match the angry drumbeat in my head. I was grunting, sweat streaming under my down coat. The man’s eyes widened as he looked down at me. He backed away without saying anything.

The next few hours flew by. I kept the mansplainers at bay by aggressively swinging my tools any time one dared come near me. I was originally told to try and get five feet of trail cleared. By quitting time, I had cleared thirty.

A few hours and a warm meal later, I lay in my warm bed feeling the aches of hard work and a creeping sense of sadness. Volunteering was supposed to bring people together for good. But I had spent the whole day defensive and apart as a devalued “other."

Tossing and turning, I thought back to that MLK Day eight years before, the hope I had felt with my friends and neighbors. The hope now turned to shame: did I do enough to bring about the change Obama stood for?

Was teaching enough? As a science teacher, I’ve always told students, “the number one rule in this classroom is respect. I respect you all, and I expect you to show respect to me and to one another.” But my teenage students often struggle with this. Many days I worry I’m not doing enough to build the kind of community where everyone feels valued. 

Dozens of my students went out to protest after the election of Trump. I was glad they returned for my sixth period chemistry class.  “It’s not about skipping school, Ms. Allen,” they told me. “We know we have to make up all the work. It’s about standing outside and showing the world that we stand with our immigrant friends, our LGBTQ friends, our Muslim friends and we will fight for their rights.”

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” I expect to be continually disappointed in myself and others, especially the government. I’m trying to not let disappointment and fear paralyze me or anger overtake me. My students give me hope.

Still, I'm guilty of not doing enough. What can I do? Please let me know.