A Small Social Justice Study

 

This summer, I think that a lot of us felt the need to start getting a lot more informed about social justice issues. The kids clearly felt this need, too, and we had a lot of great conversations... which led to a lot of great questions...

...which I did not feel equipped to answer. 

I did what I generally do, then, when asked a question I do not know the answer to--I suggested that we look it up!

Rather, I suggested that we rewrite two of the Girl Scout badges at the kids' levels--the Cadette Finding Common Ground badge and the Senior Social Innovator badge--to encompass a short study on social justice, during which we could research the answers to our most pressing questions and find out more about the issues that we felt most called to.

There are so many--too many!--social justice issues to be able to give them all our careful attention during one short study, so we decided that we'd focus on just Black Lives Matter and the LGBTIA+ pride movement for the moment. 

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has a LOT of helpful information for thinking and talking about racial identity, bias, our country's history of racism, and how to be activity anti-racist. The kids and I went through a couple of their topics together, and then we each explored the rest of the topics separately and came together for conversation about them.

We spent another interesting afternoon working on a giant puzzle and listening to interviews of people who represent important moments in LGBTQIA+ history. Or rather, the kids got to work on our puzzle, while I stayed at the laptop and ready-referenced the questions that they continually peppered me with. AIDS activism in the early 1980s and the Stonewall Riots are the only historical events that I feel confident lecturing off-the-cuff about to the kids, so thank goodness for Wikipedia!

If you're interested in the history of the AIDS epidemic (it has a lot of modern parallels!), I highly recommend this book:

It's intense, and so, so, so sad, but it's also a vivid example of the extreme amount of social activism that's required to achieve even a starting point of social justice. AIDS activists sacrificed their careers, their reputations, and sometimes their lives just to get to a point where our government could begin to consider that perhaps we should not deliberately let entire swathes of people succumb to a pandemic.

On another afternoon, we popped popcorn and watched this documentary on the Stonewall riots:

It's a good example of how yes, you DO sometimes have to commit civil disobedience to right a social wrong that's been legislated into existence.

Here's another good example:

There IS a Book Three, but we're still on hold for it at the library!

John Lewis' story is epic. I'm ashamed to admit that I knew nothing about the Freedom Riders until I read his story. I'm sure my school system failed me in not teaching this, and then I failed myself by still not learning it after I was grown up and supposed to teach myself everything I'd missed out on learning as a kid. 

As another project on another day, the kids looked up book lists featuring POC and LGBTQIA+ people. There are several book lists referenced in this article about things white people can do to advance racial justice. There are a ton more great books in this list of children's and middle-grade LGBTQIA+ literature. The kids requested all the ones that looked interesting to them from our public library, and if there were any that the library didn't already own, they were to fill out a Suggest a Purchase form for it. Our library is awesome, and I think that Will only managed to find one book on all of these lists that the library didn't own! We got a bunch of new stuff to read for ourselves, though--I was especially excited to see that Jazz, whose picture book I always recommend to people as THE way to explain what it means to be transgender to anyone young or old, has a memoir now!

The Cadette Finding Common Ground badge wanted Syd to explore civil debate. Watching protest march footage certainly covers that, but at that point in the summer I didn't want to actually take the kids to anything in-person, but I did want to find something that showed how anyone can agitate for social justice, so we also spent another afternoon working on our paint-by-numbers and listening to protest poetry and protest songs. Here's an extensive list of protest poetry--shout-out to Paul Laurence Dunbar, who we previously met while learning about flying machines!

The kids sat with all of the research that we'd done for a few days, then came together to create a list entitled "How to be an Ally." Here's part of it:

They did pretty well, although their list shows that I didn't do enough to help them feel empowered and able to take direct action, perhaps, as much of the list is more about amplifying the message or showing support for the message, etc. Or maybe that's a product of this pandemic, when I don't feel comfortable encouraging the kids to attend protests or physically volunteer their time, so then they don't think of those options. But ultimately, their list is do-able and kid-friendly, and they each chose an item from it to do right then:

Syd intends to make digital copies of her hand-drawn pinback buttons (in the top photo), so that anyone with a 1" pinback button maker can download them and make them, too, but then high school started, and her algebra and biology teachers are definitely making up for the lack of work that her French and art teachers are giving her. So pinback button designs might have to wait until she learns everything there is to learn about algebra and biology first...

In other news, Will's teen police club, run by our local law enforcement officers, had a meeting (in the brief window when our community was starting to get back to doing stuff like that, before they stopped again) specifically to discuss Black Lives Matter and the instances of police brutality that have been so much in the news. Will came prepared (because I'd given her a list of these instances and required her to research them, summarize them, and then write her opinions), and although overall the discussion wasn't the absolute greatest, it wasn't terribly awful, either. I don't think that the officers who volunteer their time to work with the community's children are bad-hearted, but I don't think that they're exactly the wokest, either. And at one point, when an officer was discussing our farmer's market controversy and told the children that there was no proof that the Schooner Creek farm was run by Nazis, Will spoke right up and told everyone there that our family knows them and they're definitely Nazis.

Technically, I think they're actually "white identitarians" who refuse to admit that they're racist and instead insist that they just want to evict all POC from this entire country that was originally stolen from its indigenous people, but whatever. Everyone knew what she meant.

And I guess if I was looking for direct action towards social justice, then stepping up to contradict a police officer and tell a group of your peers a bit about your own experience with racism is pretty direct!

How We Earned the Girl Scout Senior Locavore Badge

One thing about all this time staying on my own property due to the pandemic is that I have been absolutely banging out some nagging projects. Like, long-term to-do list-type projects are getting done over here every day.

Cool, I guess? I'd still rather be able to go to the park every day and drive my kid to ballet class and check out more library books, but whatever.

Anyway, along with trimming back all the shrubs and brush on our property, washing all our LEGOs (I didn't say that these projects were all rational...), auditing my Girl Scout troop's bank account (once every six months is NOT an ideal schedule for this, yikes), deep cleaning the shower (same), and admitting to myself that there are publicist-sent books that I am simply never going to review and I should put them in our Little Free Library, I started organizing some of my digital photos and discovered that apparently I had so many adventures last year that I didn't even write about some of them!

Sigh... I mean, I'm having so few adventures right now that I'm seriously going to describe to you HOW I washed our LEGOs later, but cool, 2019 Julie Who Had So Many Adventures She Didn't Even Write about Them. Cool.

Anyway, this is the story of how my Girl Scout troop earned the Senior Locavore badge last year, when we could all meet together in person and do things in public. These particular plans do NOT lend themselves to being of a ton of use while sheltering in place, but if you've got internet access and a farmer's market that does curbside pickup, your own Scouts could earn this one individually at home.

The inspiration for my own Girl Scout troop earning this particular badge was a grant that our local farmer's market had won, allowing them to give youth groups who arranged a field trip to their market a $50 voucher to buy farmer's market products during their visit. How could you possibly pass up a generous deal like that?!? Even if there were NO relevant Girl Scout badges to earn at a farmer's market I still wouldn't pass up that deal, and I was even more stoked because, of course, Girl Scouts has LOADS of relevant badges to earn at a farmer's market.

PREP WORK

Arranging the field trip with the farmer's market was the most important piece of prep work, obviously.

I also hit up AAA for as many maps of Indiana that they'd give me, which was four. I keep hold of these maps, and we've used them in different meetings to plan hiking and camping trips. I dug out a couple of compasses from the closet (my favorite is this compass, although I do not want to talk about how hard it was to reassemble after Will "accidentally" took it apart), and got troop parents to bring a couple more. 

At the time, I was already working on this large-format clipboard project for my own kids, so I cut the extra MDF to size to make a couple more large-format clipboard bases. I wanted the kids to have plenty of work space for those maps!

Since I wanted the kids to complete the entire badge in one meeting, and we'd be picking out food, anyway, I decided that after visiting the farmer's market, we'd walk a few blocks to the lawn in front of our city hall. The building is unlocked during farmer's market hours, so the kids could wash their hands (and the produce!), and there's a nice tiered grass and stone area where we could spread out. There, I planned to give each group a "cooking challenge" for the food they'd picked out at the farmer's market, so I packed knives, cutting boards, serving bowls and utensils, and asked other troop parents to bring food prep supplies, as well. I also announced that Step 4 of the badge would be on the kids' own to complete, but if a kid wanted to have completely earned the badge by the end of our meeting, they could bring a dish for Step 4 to the meeting to include in our post-cooking challenge potluck. The kids would have been perfectly happy eating just their cooking challenge creations for their potluck dinner, but I thought that it was nice to also have some baked goods and casseroles to mix in.

Along with that optional dish, I asked each kid to bring to the meeting their water bottle, a personal mess kit, and something to tie their hair back--with Girl Scouts, you have ALWAYS got to be making somebody tie their hair back! The kids in my troop don't all have their own phones, so I also noted that I'd be dividing the kids into groups of 2 or 3, and each group would need access to something that could take photos.

The  main thing that I prepared in advance, however, was a farmer's market scavenger hunt. I wanted a way not just to have the kids meet the badge requirements, but also to explore the farmer's market and engage with the sellers, so I wrote this scavenger hunt for the kids to do in their small groups:



You might think that all of my safety info at the beginning is a little weird... well, our local farmer's market was currently dealing with the fallout from the realization that one of their vendors was a white supremacist. There had been a lot of protests and counter-protests, at a previous farmer's market there'd been a bunch more white supremacists "guarding" their stand, and our field trip was going to be on the first farmer's market date after the whole event had been shut down for two weeks.

Also, the white supremacist was a former friend, not just of mine but of some of the other troop moms, too, and most of our kids had been friendly with her kids.

Good times, amiright? Fortunately, I have another friend who knows several farmer's market vendors, and while I was a couple of blocks away with my troop doing our intro and getting ready to walk over to the market, she was texting me that everything was looking peaceful, with no white supremacists selling their Nazi tomatoes anywhere to be seen.

BADGE ACTIVITY #1: What is a locavore?

To begin our meeting, the kids and I discussed the definition of "locavore." The kids brainstormed some reasons why it's good to eat locally, and decided that local food is good for your body because it's fresh, it's good for the economy because you're spending money on the people who live and work in your community, and it's good for the environment because you're not using resources to ship food to you from far away.

The kids got bogged down, though (as I'd hoped they would), when we tried to decide EXACTLY what "local" means. Is it ten miles? One hundred?

The reality is that there isn't really an exact standard; people generally have to decide for themselves their own range for eating locally. I told the kids that part of their task at the farmer's market would be to find out how far some of the producers had traveled to vend here, and to do that, they needed to annotate their maps.

The idea behind annotating the map is that the kids put our current location as the center, and then they used the compass to draw concentric circles that represented distance away from the center. We found the map scale and saw that it was 1 inch to 13 miles, so the kids decided to draw a new circle for every inch.

This was a challenging activity for some kids who'd never used a compass before, and for other kids who'd never practiced much map-reading, but I'd divided them into small teams of two to three kids first, and fortunately there was somebody in every group who knew how to do both. 

Most groups drew 4-5 concentric circles before they decided they'd done enough. Together, we tried to find a familiar place or two on the map for every circle, so the kids could better visualize the scale.

BADGE ACTIVITY #2: Tour the farmer's market, complete a scavenger hunt, and go shopping!

Normally, I'd only give the kids one activity to do at one time, but there was a lot that we needed to accomplish at the farmer's market. Fortunately, all the kids in the troop are good listeners!

Task #1: Complete a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt was designed to meet Steps 1 and 2 of the Locavore badge requirements. It involved interviewing someone involved in the food delivery chain (Step 1), learning when certain foods are in season (Step 2), and finding food sources on their food-radius map (Step 2). 

I added in some more fun activities to get the kids engaged with the food and the vendors, and I included directions for how I expected them to behave. Kids don't always have experience interacting with business owners and retail workers, so part of the learning experience was figuring out how to engage someone politely. It's easy to get so task-oriented that you don't realize you're interrupting, and it's sometimes hard to follow the social script of a new situation.

Matt made it pretty for me. It's good to have a graphic designer as a spouse!

 I told the kids that they didn't necessarily have to complete the entire scavenger hunt, but they all had a blast and so I ended up keeping us at the farmer's market long enough (a little too long, honestly, considering all the other activities we had planned) for them all to finish.

Task #2: Shop for a food preparation challenge. We had three teams of kids, so I gave each team of kids one of the following assignments:

• Garden Salad
• Fruit Salad
• Crostini, or, Something Interesting to Put on Bread

Each team had a budget of $15, and I kept the last $5 to help out if a team went over. (Spoiler Alert: Team Fruit Salad needed that extra five bucks. Fruit is expensive!). 

As the kids worked on their scavenger hunts, they were also meant to be figuring out what they wanted to buy for their challenge. I do think it was nice that they had both the scavenger hunt and the food prep challenge, because this encouraged them to interact with and learn a lot more about the vendors than either activity alone would have done, and it was highly amusing to watch them busily going back and forth between vendors, talking through the pros and cons of various food items and agonizing over hard decisions. Whenever they reported back to pass off their haul, it was clear that some vendors were also being incredibly generous--those kids got a LOT of delicious food for their money!

After everyone had finished the scavenger hunt and spent all their money, we walked a few blocks over to that nice grassy area I'd scoped out, washed hands and produce, and then the kids got to work on Step 3 of the badge!

BADGE ACTIVITY #3: FOOD PREPARATION CHALLENGE

Here's part of Team Fruit Salad in action:

Here's one-third of Team Garden Salad:

And here's an example of the very creative stylings of Team Crostini!

If I had this to do over again, I'd encourage the teams to barter some of their ingredients. Wouldn't some blackberries and apple slices be lovely on bread? And I wouldn't mind some sweet peppers or cucumbers in my fruit salad!

BADGE ACTIVITY #4: Local Foods Potluck

The kids could have gone on happily chopping produce and putting it in bowls and on bread forever, but eventually I called time so that they could show off their creations. Then we washed hands again, laid out our feast, had the kids who'd brought dishes from home to meet Step 4 explain them, and the kids enjoyed a Local Foods Potluck as Step 5 of their badge. 

I'd brought some plastic baggies, so while the kids ate I packaged up their unused ingredients into a variety of bags, and when they'd finished eating, I also portioned out their uneaten food challenge creations while they ran around and played. I called them all back to clean up, and when the space looked as if nobody had ever completed a cooking challenge or held a potluck there ever before, I had the kids all line up, and then got to take turns choosing something from the leftovers, until everything was gone. 

This turned out to be a stellar Girl Scout troop meeting! I think the kids all really enjoyed themselves, and they got a change to practice some academic skills, some practical skills, and some real-world social skills while having fun. They got some exercise, they spent time outdoors, and they ate healthy food. They would have liked a lot more free time to socialize, so this would have been even better as a half-day meeting after the Saturday farmer's market, but for a Tuesday evening on a beautiful day in a summer with no pandemic, I'd say it was pretty perfect!

Six Months Ago: Homemade Halloween Treats: Sandwich Cookie Critters

One Year Ago: Homeschool Science: The Chicken Egg Osmosis Experiment

Two Years Ago: Homeschool Biology: Extract and Visualize DNA from Beef Liver

Three Years Ago: An Afternoon at Ocmulgee National Monument

Four Years Ago: Pom-Pom Pals

Five Years Ago: A Passion for Perler Beads

Six Years Ago: The Best Way to Hike

Seven Years Ago: Kid Meal: The Incredible, Edible Soft-Boiled Egg

Eight Years Ago: Homeschool Boot Camp

Nine Years Ago: On Daytona Beach

Ten Years Ago: A Temporary Flower Installation

Eleven Years Ago: I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

Twelve Years Ago: Finally, Clean Lockers

To the Orchard, One Decade Later

What does one decade of visiting the same apple orchard look like?

It looks like this!

Syd at 3

Syd at 13!

Will at 5

Will at 15!

 On this trip, we even had a special guest star!

It turns out that he is quite useful for enabling access to formerly out-of-reach apples:

At first, Syd was timid about being up so high, but she quickly got used to it, especially when she figured out that she could essentially get Matt to pony her around so that she didn't even have to walk from tree to tree:

See the triumphant smile of a kid who's discovered her very own labor-saving device!

Will and Luna ditched us pretty much immediately, but Syd stuck by her car service, and together we treated the informative guide to apple varieties as a checklist:

I think we managed to get a sample of every single apple variety currently in season!

And then we had a break to lie down between the trees and eat apples and things that can suitably accompany apples:

Such a coincidence that our missing two managed to find us after most of the picking was done but just in time for peanut butter and cheese!

This goofball really likes cheese:

And THIS goofball is pouting because she's so full of apples that she feels sick, and yet the apples are still delicious:

Because the kids love the apple orchard so much, after a couple of hours I've got a little goodwill credit that I immediately spent on forcing them to submit to posed photos:

I didn't actually have any goodwill credit to spend on this guy, who'd basically spent the past two hours toiling as Syd's personal pack pony, but he posed for me, anyway (although who doesn't TAKE OFF THEIR SUNGLASSES for a family photo?!?):

And then he did the same for me!

The rest of the afternoon passed away just that easily, with apple-picking and lounging--

apple cider slushes and caramel apples and fudge, and the giant hay mountain that the kids adore:

We brought home a whole bushel of apples, a half-gallon of apple cider, six dollars' worth of fudge, and plans for homemade apple pie, homemade caramel apples, homemade applesauce, and whatever else we can think up, although last year we ate our entire bushel before we could actually make a thing from them and had to go buy more!

I'd like to say that we'll definitely get more creative in the kitchen this year, but it would be a shame to buck tradition...

That Time that I was Accidentally Friends with a White Supremacist

So you guys, here's a thing that's happened this summer:

I'm part of this super low-key homeschool group in my town--for those of you playing the home game, it's the nice one, not the one with the mean moms who bullied me for several years. This nice homeschool group trends more hippy than not, with the kind of people who drink homemade kefir out of jars and pass around grain-free snack bars and form nature co-ops. We used to have an afternoon playgroup every week. We've gone on camping trips together. I chip in on the natural foods group buy sometimes. I love them.

One of the moms in this group was among the hippiest of them all. She once lovingly explained to me why tampons are bad. She sometimes brought homemade jello--like HOMEMADE jello, made with, like, organic gelatin and applesauce and coconut oil, and she ate it out of a Mason jar. On a hike, she gamely pretended to consult with me about tree identification via bark, politely ignoring the obvious fact that I obviously cannot identify any tree beyond if it's a maple or an oak or a sycamore, and for sure not by its bark. We were Facebook friends, and I was really into all the photos that she posted of her sheep and the stuff that she wove on her honest-to-god loom. On one camping trip, she taught my kid how to use a drop spindle. I really liked her, you guys. I really, really liked her.

She and her husband are farmers, because, you know, of course they are, and they sell at some of our local farmer's markets. That's not important right this second, but hold onto it.

Okay, so a couple of months ago I was scrolling Facebook, as you do, and my friend had vaguebooked some weird post about people who were spreading lies about her. I had no idea what she was talking about, which is generally the point of vaguebooking, but in the comments to her post, someone commiserated with her and said it was awful, all those awful things people were saying about her in our town's local Facebook group.

Does your town have one of those? A sort of indie little Facebook group where people ask for recommendations of good carpenters and bitch about the road construction and sometimes gossip? Our town has two--an official one and a sort of anti-official one for the snarky people who can't say anything nice. I swear that I've heard more breaking news on these groups that later ends up in the newspaper! I also know all the good carpenters, and where to get a watch fixed, and that the McDonald's by the highway always tells people that they're out of soft-serve when really they just don't want to get the machine fixed.

So OBVIOUSLY I immediately clicked onto that Facebook group and scrolled down to see who was talking trash about this friend, and indeed, people were talking trash about her!

Okay, here's another tangent: last year, in the county over from mine, a guy committed a hate crime by vandalizing a synagogue. He'd originally planned to burn it down, and still had bomb-making supplies in his car when he was arrested. His trial recently happened, and as part of it the transcript of the FBI interview was released, and on page 70ish of this interview transcript he gives the first names of two people who were members of a white nationalist hate group, Identity Evropa. He claims that these people had dinner with him in a local diner, and within a couple of days of that he'd used a money order to pay dues and join this group. He's pretty disjointed, about what you'd expect, but there's a pretty strong implication that these people who met with him are the ones who recruited him into this hate group, not long before he became radicalized enough to commit an actual hate crime.

And now we're back to the story: in his interview, he gave the first names of these people he met with, the members of Identity Evropa, and their first names matched the first names of my friend and her husband. People were claiming that they WERE these people, and were trashing them and telling people not to buy produce from them and that they should be banned from the farmer's market, etc.

I've had mean lies spread about me before, and it sucks, so I was loaded for bear at this point, and I immediately went into research mode. It shouldn't be that hard to prove that my friend wasn't the person named in the FBI transcript, and shame on the FBI for making it so easy for someone to be falsely accused like that.

Step 1: I found the FBI transcript for myself, and read it for myself. And yes, the names did match, and the location that he gave for their meetup was feasible. BUT in the interview, he also gave the woman's handle that she used when she posted on the Discord message board associated with Identity Evropa. So...

Step 2: I Googled that handle and Discord, and the first hit was Unicorn Riot, a non-profit that specifically worked to obtain and post the messages from neo-Nazi Discord chat boards. You can search this by Discord handle, and doing so gives you all the leaked posts from that specific handle. There's no context to tell you what the user is replying to, so all you really have to go by are what that user says.

I read through all of the posts that this specific user posted, looking for clues to help me prove that this person was not my friend. Except that all of the identifying information that she gave did line up--not enough to definitively identify her, but enough that, frustratingly, I couldn't definitively say it wasn't her, either. She posted pictures of her sheep. My friend has sheep. She posted a picture of a weaving that she'd done. My friend weaves. She posted the sexes and ages of her children. My friend has children of those ages and sexes. She posted a picture of her newborn. My friend's baby was born then. She posted about homeschooling. My friend homeschools.

At some point, although I was still looking for identification details that would prove that this Discord user wasn't my friend, I went back and also started taking screenshots of the upsetting, racist things that the Discord user was posting. She posted about taking the gentle children's world history curriculum, Story of the World, and supplementing it for her children with another book that purports to be a history just of white people, and is used as a call to arms by a LOT of white supremacists. She derided a particular self-help book as "anti-white." She claimed that there was no such thing as a Native American genocide, and that Native Americans could be prospering but "do not today for other reasons." She wrote these words: "Any Whites who have spent time living in a neighborhood or attending a school with a non-white majority know the strife that Whites endure."

You see where this is going, right?

But still, it wasn't definitive that this racist Discord user spewing upsetting, racist things was my friend, I mean, it wasn't definitive to me at the time. Until--and I don't remember if I found this link on the Discord leaks, or if it was another comment on the Facebook group that gave it to me--but either way, I learned that this person had a short-lived YouTube series. In it, she goes by her Discord handle, and tells us about plantain and yarrow and the benefits of bone broth.

Step 3: I clicked on the YouTube channel and played the first video, the one on yarrow. Twenty-two seconds in, my friend's voice says, "Greetings from the homestead. I'm Volkmom." Two minutes and 45 seconds in, she informs me that "race is sacred."

And that's it. She basically handed me the clearest way to identify her--I'd know her voice anywhere.

The Facebook gossip was absolutely correct. This Discord user really wasn't my friend, but only because I can't be friends with someone whose worldview is not just wrong, but abhorrently wrong. I feel sick to my stomach, wondering why she hid this about herself, why I could be so fond of someone who had such a rotten heart. She was one of my aspirational Facebook friends, you know those ones who you read their Facebook posts and you're all, "Gee, I wish I wanted to install a hoop garden and keep sheep! Aww, look at how pastoral they all are, sitting in the sun and eating blackberries!" My kids know her. My kids like her! I've now given my children memories of hanging out at the lake with a white supremacist.

I thought she was so great, you guys.

Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those things where everyone in the know could simply be all, "Hey did you know so-and-so is basically a neo-Nazi? We're not going to hang out with them again, okay? Okay!" That's because remember when I told you to hang onto the knowledge that this woman and her husband sell at the farmer's market?

They sell at the farmer's market. And this fact is blowing up my town.

My town apparently can't legally evict them, although another farmer's market, run not by the city but as a non-profit, did. The mayor says that sure, he super hates white supremacy, but the town also arrested a peaceful protester who was simply standing next to their booth holding a sign saying she'd been harassed by them. The town makes all of the anti-racism protesters stand outside the farmer's market, but the creepy dudes with the visible knives, who literally told a reporter that they were Three Percenters--you know, the actual right-wing militia that was active at the Charlottesville rally? Yeah, they get to hang out in front of their booth. On Saturday, less than half an hour after the peaceful protester was arrested, my kids and I walked past their booth and past a whole group of those guys laughing and chatting in front of it. I'd have had to push past them if I wanted to approach the booth. Most people were pretending like they didn't exist, but plenty of people were squeezing past to deliberately buy from them, as well.

It has been weeks and weeks of this mess, there's been a conflict there for the past two Saturdays, at least. And then on Monday, driving the big kid to horseback riding, I heard on the radio the breaking news that the city is SUSPENDING THE ENTIRE FARMER'S MARKET. They say that they're suspending it for two weeks, but who knows?

Are a bunch of farmers and producers going to lose a lot of money? For sure. The farmer's market here is bustling, even when white supremacists and their pet right-wing militias scare away a bunch of potential customers.

Are they saving us from an incident in which people are going to get seriously hurt? It's starting to seem like it. I mean, I guess? If arresting peaceful protesters but letting avowed Three Percenters stand armed in the exact same spot is honestly the best that the city can do to keep its people safe at a farmer's market, of all places, then sure, I guess, just shut the damn thing down and we'll all be racist or not quietly inside our own homes.

You guys, I am not built for the soul-searching and internal conflict and Feelings that this has made me feel. The weird guilt that I was accidentally friends with a white supremacist. The upset that I really liked her, and the worry that maybe I should talk to her and tell her--I don't even know, that racism isn't okay?--and I'm doing the wrong thing by avoiding her, instead. Or should I join the protesters? I want to hate her and demonize her, but man, I can't get the picture out of my head of hanging out around a campfire with her, listening to her and the other hippy moms talking about orgone boxes (WHICH ARE ACTUALLY A THING AND NOW I HAVE TO GO RESEARCH THEM AGAIN TO MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT RACIST, BECAUSE MY LIFE HAS BECOME ME QUESTIONING ALL OF MY MEMORIES), and how she was really nice and I liked her.

And who else do I know who's secretly racist? That's the thing. I don't trust my pleasant memories of pleasant times anymore. I don't trust all of my friends anymore. I don't trust myself to know who's a great person and who's a really, really, really terrible person.

ANYWAY... Apologies for the last few paragraphs basically being a bonkers, incoherent rant. I don't really have any summing up thing to say, or, like, some kind of profound insight or whatever. Mostly, I just wanted to tell you about this crappy thing that's been happening and how I'm feeling super crappy about it.

If you, too, were ever accidentally friends with a white supremacist for a while, let me know and we can start a club!