The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [18]
“Oh no, not again! Please not again!” I thought to myself as I stood up to get off the bus. I had tried to ignore the girls’ name-calling the entire ride home. Now that we were at my stop, I knew I had to face them before getting off. In order to leave the bus I had to walk through a long crowded aisle and face the obnoxious girls. As I stood up, the girls followed. They crowded together, and approached me as if they were ready to strike at me. Why did they want to take their anger out on me? What did I do to them? All of the sudden, the girls began to kick and sock me repeatedly. I could feel the pain all over my body but felt defenseless. I did not fight back.
They continued to hurt me as if there was nothing more important to them than to see me in pain. The last few kicks were the hardest; all I wanted to do was to get off the bus alive. My friends were staring at me, hoping that I would do something to make the girls stop. Why? Why didn’t my friends help me? Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I was able to release myself from their torture. I got off the bus alive. Imagining that the worst had already passed, I began to walk away from the bus and the girls stuck their heads out the window and spit on me. I could not believe it! They spit on my face!
The feeling of their spit striking me, running down my neck, and their germs accumulating on my face, felt disgusting. I heard paper crumbling in their hands, and then they threw it at me. I began to walk faster as the bus was on its way. While I was cleaning my face with a napkin, I could still hear the girls laughing. When they waved good-bye, my nightmare was over.
Today in Ms. Gruwell’s classroom, I realized that a peanut is still a peanut even if the shell is different. Some taste better, others look fresher, but in the end they’re all peanuts. Ms. G’s analogy, “Don’t judge a peanut by its shell, judge it by what’s inside of it,” made perfect sense to me. As long as I know that I am a human being, I don’t need to worry about what other people say. In the end, we all are the same!
Diary 18
Dear Diary,
This game is stupid; I’m not a peanut! And what the hell does world peace have to do with peanuts? All these thoughts rolled though my mind as I tried to piece together a puzzle consisting of people and Planters. What was the message? Today Ms. Gruwell and I were not on the same continent, let alone the same page. At first I just sat there trying to glue together any two thoughts that seemed to even break surface, but still I found nothing.
There I stood with both feet out the door, on the brink of tears, and quickly closing in on insanity, when something played out in my mind. I remembered a saying that I had heard: “It’s not the messenger, but the message.” Slowly my peanuts began to take form. I wasn’t afraid because they weren’t accompanied by a tophat, tap shoes, and a corny jingle. Instead they began to have purpose, they began to set goals, dreams, and ambitions. My peanuts, before my very eyes, changed into human beings. Short, long, fat, thin, and otherwise odd, but nevertheless peanuts. Brown, black, white, yellow, and all in between, nevertheless human. So why is it we don’t care about the contour of a peanut, but would kill over the color of a man?
The more I thought about this, the more the concept overwhelmed me. I began to analyze and reflect on my life, my many encounters with injustice and discrimination. It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. I think this is one of the most important realizations I’ve ever had. World peace is only a dream because people won’t allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We won’t allow the color of a man’s heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We won’t allow him to be a peanut, therefore we won’t allow ourselves to come to live in harmony.
Diary 19