I didn’t look at the front page of the local news in yesterday’s Enquirer until early evening. If I had, we could have averted a short lived and intense family crisis!
Son Brian called me at the CDC Association office at 3 p m – he’d been contacted by Keegan’s (Patrick to all of you and to me) social studies teacher – Keegan had skipped 7th bell at Walnut Hills. I’m sure he was envisioning all sorts of dire situations, and I went straight into that mode as well. Brian’s request was that I go by their house, since the office is 5 minutes away, and check to see if Patrick Keegan had arrived. After finishing one last task, I drove along Central Parkway and up the long hill of Clifton Avenue. Agitated enough that I passed their street and had to double back. A pretty small agitation, but nonetheless…
I knocked on the locked door and eventually Patrick opened it. He went back into the kitchen to finish getting his afterschool snack / meal (he is 14, after all), and I went into the living room to call Brian – who reported that he had already talked to Patrick, who had skipped his last class to join in a walkout to protest the war in Iraq. What a relief!
“The organizing group, Concerned Students for Peace, previously had built a soldier’s graveyard around the school’s flagpole and protested military recruitment on campus.” So said the Enquirer, if I had but looked. ” Cutting their last class will likely send them to detention after school, said Traven LaBotz, a senior and member of the group. They’re timing their walkout with that of The World Can’t Wait, a group pushing similar walkouts nationally.”
And so it has transpired. All of them have 2 hours of detention after school on Friday. And thus the family history of protesting has passed to the next generation.
I cannot tell you how proud I am!