I struggle sometimes with Joe being a teacher living the exact school network I left. I miss it so much. I love that he's in it because it fulfills him and he makes a big difference, but it's very difficult at times. So when he came back and told me there had been this amazing speaker at an Uplift Event, I was jealous. It was wrong of me of course, and my resentment was ugly, but I didn't want to hear about it. I didn't want to hear about another amazing opportunity he'd had while I was stuck at home changing poopy diapers.
Luckily I pushed past my ugly side and asked him to talk about it. He said it had been easily the best talk he'd ever heard. It was Bryan Stevenson.
Fast forward a few months. Joe had gotten this book from Heights but of course never gotten to read it. I hadn't wanted to open it for the same difficulty of wanting to be a teacher at Heights but not being one... but now that I'm back on my reading motivation, I picked it up. For two days I couldn't put it down, and now I'm done with it.
Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer that fights for people on Death Row, especially the mentally ill, the youth, the wrongfully accused... anyone that can't defend themselves in this broken system.
It's not an easy read. It's difficult to sit on my comfy bed with my fluffy blanket and learn about someone who spent 50 years on death row, went blind, and then was finally exonerated thanks to Stevenson's organization. What am I doing? I'm doing nothing.
As I was finishing this book I came across a beautiful question, "Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?" (288). He's talking about how we jail the poor, the mentally ill, the mothers with no support, the children with no parents, instead of coming up with a helpful system. This relates to so much. Abortion, immigration, death penalty... it makes me yearn to go back to schools and teach about love, about learning, about selflessness and to try to instill a desire to just HELP each other.
For a long time, I've wanted to volunteer in Jails. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to do when you're not 100% committed and end up just sitting on your couch with a jar of Nutella watching some Netflix special... :(
I'm glad people like Stevenson exist. Not just to make change but also to inspire it.
It's making me so angry to realize how inspired and alive I am whenever I finish a book, compared to the isolation I'm left with after scrolling through Instagram or watching some show on our Roku TV.
I would 100% recommend this book to everyone. Especially anyone who is pro Capital Punishment, or who thinks racism doesn't exist, or who thinks black people have it the same as white people.
Pages: 318
Total: 2040
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario