“You have to make ’em look really proud that they are free now”

We have a photograph of Barb Vogel’s classroom in Aurora, Colorado. We’d like to show it to you, but we couldn’t obtain reprint rights, and we are scrupulous about things like that. But a thousand words is at least as good as a picture, often much better.

Ms. Vogel is the fifth-grade teacher who led her class in fund-raising efforts to buy freedom for slaves in the Sudan. They raised enough money to free 1,000 people. Unfortunately their efforts so invigorated the slave market in the Sudan that more people, not fewer, are now enslaved.

In the photo, we see one wall of the classroom. The wall is literally covered with mementos of the slavery campaign. There are photos and posters and little paper doll figures. Here’s how the latter are described in a Denver Post article by reporter Bruce Finley:

Each time news of a buyback reached Colorado, eager young students such as Lindy deSpain painstakingly cut out another paper figure and pasted it up on the “freedom wall” in their classroom.

“You take some brown pieces of construction paper. We have these little people-tracing things. You trace around it and cut it out and color them in,” Lindy said earnestly. “We color clothes and some of the scars and things they might have.... You have to make ’em look really proud that they are free now.”

Isn’t that sweet? What better use could there be for a fifth-grader’s time than making paper dolls? Reading? Writing? Math and science? Aw, where’s your heart...?

(A question that has occurred to us more than once is this one: Where were the children’s parents in all of this? Did none of them say, “Hey, Sudan be damned, I want my kid to be schooled at school!”)

It is kind of young Ms. deSpain, too, to impute an emotional state to manumitted slaves. Contemplative people might wonder if they are homeless or starving or even re-enslaved. We suspect that there are no contemplative people among the paper doll makers in Ms. Vogel’s class.

Amidst the paper dolls there is a banner from an organization called “S.T.O.P.”, which acronym stands for “Slavery That Oppresses People”. The knee-jerk reaction is to ask, “What slavery does not oppress people?” But contemplation intrudes yet again. We know of too many cases—in Rome, for example—of slaves who did not feel themselves oppressed. We have heard quite a bit about slaves who were horrified at the thought of manumission. And, of course, the Ottoman empire was fiercely defended for centuries by slaves. None of this can be unknown to the maker of the “S.T.O.P.” sign. (Or perhaps it can; S.T.O.P. is an organization founded by Ms. Vogel herself, and she may be completely impervious to evidence.) In any case, we would bet the price of a Sudanese slave—cheaper by the minute—that every bit of it is unknown to Ms. Vogel’s students.

But: We would welcome being proved wrong. It is the singular mark of thoughtful people that they want to be proved wrong. They may love their arguments or they may loathe them, as we sometimes do, but what they cherish more than any argument is to be right. Who prefers his position to truth may be many things, but what he is not is contemplative. To be thoughtful is to be wrong again and again, to be, it is but to be hoped, progressively less wrong. So if there is a student in Ms. Vogel’s class who can prove us wrong in even the smallest way, we will be chagrined and gratified.

Write to us, young portents of Aurora’s dawning, and instruct us in the greater mysteries and the lesser. We have on other pages called you gulls and dupes. We have insisted that you were deprived of an education, implying that your ignorance has been disturbed only by the inculcation of stupidity. We would like nothing better than to discover that this impression of you is incorrect. Thoughtful people have been known to scowl, but we vow to “look really proud” if you can make us believe that you might someday be free of the slavery of ignorance. So you be our teacher. Show us that we have erred, if we have. Or show us that Ms. Vogel has more slaves to answer for than those pitiful wretches in the Sudan...

 
Bruce Finley, honorary Hildy Johnson

We make enough nasty cracks about reporters, but we are delighted to have something nice to say for a change. Bruce Finley’s article in the Denver Post is something we seem never to find in the newspaper: It is news. Print and broadcast news reports are crammed to bursting with stories that amount to, “It was said”—where what was said is always tendentious, often deceitful, and, if it is challenged at all, is challenged only by some other equally dubious testimony. By contrast, what Mr. Finley has done is ask, “Is this true?” The answer he got was disquieting, but like Hildy Johnson and Socrates, our Athens bureau chief, he followed the argument where it led.

News in the newspaper... What a refreshing change! Bravo, Mr. Finley! Nicely done.

—GSS

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