"It is only through the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Tuesday, March 21, 2000

"It is only through the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." – words of Antonine de Saint-Exupry.

I left Banfield School in February, 1966 after my first year of teaching – overwhelmed with the expectations, I was not Edith Morey. Edith was my fifth grade teacher at Banfield and the teacher who probably had the greatest influence in my life. I also had a desire to see the world. I felt I needed to experience life in order to teach it.

Two weeks later I was hired to teach in Mira Loma, California. There I started fresh again. Miss Lepp, the teacher I replaced, had suffered a heart attack. She became the liaison person between the school and the community. Troth Street School was set in an economically deprived and diverse community.

Two students in my classroom could not speak a word of English – I spoke no Spanish. I called on Henry Heridia to help out. Henry was bilingual. He also facilitated the first hour Spanish Class we studied via a television monitor.

Suddenly, I was in a much different environment than the one I had spent my life growing up in, the one where 99.9 percent of the population was white and making a good living. (A community that had been diverse in itself when Hormel Company was beginning, with different populations in different sections of town. Sections of "immigrants" from Europe seeking a better life for themselves – similar to today.)

The following year I was drafted and soon found myself living with people who were not white and middle class. I was now living with and meeting Hispanics, Blacks and Japanese-Americans - people I had been deprived of here.

Life was becoming the teacher that college had never been.

Today, all of this has changed. Our children are growing up in the same community where I grew up, but with a mixture of people.

Life is moving ahead here in Austin, or is it?

Michael Davis, U.S. District Judge said in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today, "Anyone who says that there isn’t a problem ("racial profiling") has their head stuck in the sand."

Not so long ago an area school administrator who is still an administrator said to me he couldn’t understand why this Hispanic student hit the other student "just because he called him a ‘spic.’"

Two summers ago, as two teenage boys biked past our house, one said to the other as they peddled on by "My old man hates ‘spics’ too."

Last week I called the police chief with concerns I had.

A recent police report came to the Herald, reports I type in. One read: "Four Hispanics physically removed from apartment", the other – "A Black and Hispanic reported looking in cars in parking lot."

Was it necessary to identify these people by race I asked.

"That’s the way they are called in," he said.

The second concern – the other day, at mid-afternoon I met a pickup truck with Texas plates – two people were in it, a man and a woman, Mexicans. There was a squad car behind them with lights flashing, a block off Main Street. Curious, I drove around the corner and came through the First Bank drive-up lot to see what was happening.

The truck by now was pulled over to the curb. Now there were two squad cars with lights flashing parked in the street, one of them straddling the corner behind the pick-up. One officer was at the driver’s window; another seemed to be investigating the vehicle as if they were transporting something illegal. This officer busied himself looking behind the passenger’s seat on the other side of the cab, his eye flush against the window – behind what I assumed to be the driver’s wife. Finally he moved away from the truck and spoke to some other person with his two-way radio.

In the meantime there was a young man standing at parade rest in the street behind the truck, a few yards back with elbows crossed, watching everyone’s every move.

The chief thought he may have been a cadet.

How humiliating this must have felt for the couple on the one hand and frightening on the other. Two squad cars, lights flashing and one officer searching the entire vehicle with his eyes, inside and out. And this young man in behind them like a young soldier.

Eventually, the police and the young man assembled near the first squad car, with the lights still flashing, talking and smiling among themselves. "Now what?" I thought.

Then the truck pulled away from the curb. I caught up with them in the Hormel/QPP parking lot.

"Can you tell me what happened back there?" I asked.

"My plates were expired," he said with a faint smile.

I know what I felt.

I wondered what they felt.

I didn’t ask.

Bob Vilt’s column appears Tuesdays