Couldn't Keep It To Myself*: Making Tomorrow Today

Heard something on the local public radio station last Monday that was too good not to share: Making Tomorrow Today: the Power of Youth. Here's what I heard:

• some fantastic poetry ("Tomorrow is Today") from Rhummanee Hang, a spoken word artist who is also active in South East Asians Making Immediate Change,

and learned about people and organizations like

• Jessica Rimington of the One World Youth Project


• Amalia Anderson of Fourth World Rising (she focuses her energy in multiple directions these days, including with the National Media Justice Network)


• Caleb Ryen of the Vista Community College (Berkeley) Gay-Straight Alliance


• Manuel Francisco of Tloque Nauaque Teocalli/Sixth Sun Calmecac Wilderness Program, a group that works to provide cultural training and preserve traditional indigenous ceremony as well as environmental education and activism. He credits the folks at the Ralph J. Bunche Youth Leadership Academy for his activism. (And where did Ralph J. Bunche learn his activism as a youth? His mother's family, the Johnsons, whose farm outside of Alton, Illinois was an important stop on the Underground Railroad.)


• Thenmozhi Soundararajan, of Third World Majority, an incredibly busy woman who's into a little bit of everything---technology, storytelling, film, writing, and is the only person on this radio program I already heard of. Here's an interview with her from the now-defunct Clamor magazine. (Defunct! Dammit! Another good source bites the dust!!)


• Lily Dong, who was instrumental in creating the Arroyo Seco Woodland and Wildlife Park

This program also featured the work of the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. The Destiny Arts Center teaches arts, performance, leadership skills, martial arts, and violence prevention to youth. Filmmaker Paul Ginocchio made a documentary about Destiny Arts; the name "Destiny" stands for De-Escalation Skills Training Inspiring Nonviolence in Youth. I think we need a center like that in every city in the U.S.

*********

*Title shamelessly stolen from Wally Lamb's Couldn't Keep It to Myself, collection of stories written by women at the York Correctional Institute, where he volunteers teaching a writing class. He's the phenomenal italian-american writer who is better known for She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True. He edited another collection of stories from the women at York entitled I'll Fly Away: further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison. Sometime this fall, he may come out with the latest novel he's been working on, The Hour I First Believed. From the pre-reviews I've seen, it looks like this work will continue to explore the themes of buried history, hidden secrets, mental illness---and salvation.

A good friend of mine brought me I Know This Much Is True when I was in the hospital on bed rest for premature labor. That book, a crossword puzzle magazine, and a sparkly-feathery ballpoint pen for the crosswords (and to cheer me up). I didn't touch it for years, because the only thing I knew about it was that a dead baby figured into the plot somehow (dead baby!! what the hell was she thinking, bringing a dead baby book in to a woman in extremely premature labor!!!). Uhh-uhh. A week or so after I was home from the hospital, but my daughter wasn't, I lost it in all four colors while watching The Joy Luck Club when Suyuan left the twins under a tree with all that was left of her worldly wealth ("NOOOO!!!NOT THE BAY-BEES!! WAAHHH!!). Good thing I came in towards the tail end, and missed the infanticide scene, huh? I never, ever cry over movies, or over much of anything else, either. I chalk it up to the crashing hormones of childbirth, and the extreme duress of a newborn in critical condition in the NICU. Eh, anyway, to my friend's credit, she wasn't thinking of that part of the book; she was thinking about the dysfunctional sicilian family theme being right up my alley. And after a few years of the book sitting around on the shelf, I picked it up and didn't put it down all weekend. It was right up my alley. ;-)