The third speaker, Assm. Martin Block (D-San Diego), assured the crowd, “We hear your voices in that building.”  Now, as the Chair of the Committee on Higher Education, that’s exactly what he should be saying.  I realized in that moment that over the last year, we’ve been yelling, marching, and advocating, but really we’ve been hoping that someone would listen to us.  We’ve been occupying buildings and signing petitions, plotting to make our voices stronger than the businessmen who run our schools and our state.  We’ve been skimming, deleting, forwarding, and reposting messages sent by various organizations opposing the cuts, knowing that together we wouldn’t be silenced.

Well, we’ve jumped that hurdle.  But what’s next?

I think it starts with supporting leaders we see standing up for us.  And that’s why, when the girl taking notes next to me wanted to confirm the name of AB 656’s author was Alberto Torres, I quickly answered, “Torrico actually, he’s also running for Attorney General.”  Now, I missed the endorsement meeting so as far as Cal Dems goes, this is probably blasphemous, but I guess bloggers are supposed to have an opinion and this is mine: We know that quality education reduces crime in our state.  We are all products of this.  For public safety, I want to support a leader who is willing to not only be tough on crime, but also stand up for preventing it by funding institutions like Cal.  That leader is Alberto Torrico.

The next step is continuing to use the tools that make our generation unique.  Grassroots organization is no longer about knocking on doors and phonebanking.  It’s about Facebook advertisements, calculated Tweets, and the simplicity of sharing YouTube videos.  In this way, we automatically endorse issues to our friends and relatives, often while avoiding the uncomfortable argument at family gatherings – you know the one with your (awkwardly closeted) conservative uncle about who should actually be paying the most taxes.  The petition for AB 656: Fair Share for Fair Tuition is encouragingly close to garnering 100, 000 signatures.  I don’t think that it’s unlikely to predict that if all its supporters reached out to all their friends on Facebook, defeat would be impossible and higher education would once again be California’s priority.

Both of these stories come out of the Southwest, an area with large Latino populations, which surprises me.  These areas have a high level of minority visibility, although the actions of a few white male residents make it look like the Civil Rights movement didn’t quite make it there.

The first occurred in Dallas: 46% Latino.  A grandmother was cited for a lack of proficiency in English while driving her granddaughter to school, and although his superiors say it was the policeman’s rookie mistake, 38 similar citations have been written by Dallas PD in the last three years.  Here’s the story:

I wish the last commentator would have actually answered this question: Does not speaking English make anyone less qualified to operate within American society?  Sure, it might make it a bit more difficult, but in this case, the officer assumed that the woman was inept, speaking to her character and intelligence rather than her crime.  And let’s be real, plenty of us have made illegal U-turns.  We’re not better drivers because we speak English.

The second story absolutely disgusts me.  It compromises the identity of the individuals involved.  It shows us that business practices too often forget that they deal with actual people.

Source: CBS News

Hotel owner Larry Whitten moved to New Mexico with a mission: to revamp the failing Paragon Inn.  Soon after, he asked Paragon employees to refrain from speaking Spanish at work, so that he could understand what they were saying.  I understand the need to communicate with your employees, Larry, but it’s disappointing that you would ignore their culture, and their right to communicate freely with each other.  Even more disappointing, and really unacceptable, is Whitten’s next business action.  He asked many employees to Anglicize their names. “No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.”

These stories are about ignorance, something I fear we all risk if we get too comfortable with the level of diversity within our communities.  I simply ask, is it ever okay to think we’re diverse enough?