Danny ChaiI’m bored with my page. I’ve said this countless times, but it always surprises me that people read this, it’s so terribly boring. But whatever.
So my sister lives in this brand new house in a new gated development. Tons of Asians there. Asians love the new houses. White people seem to value the character of old neighborhoods more. I’m basing this opinion pretty much exclusively on my sister’s neighborhood and the community of Los Gatos.
Anyway, there’s this interesting issue going on there with the elementary schools. The neighborhood is obviously very affluent, but they bus in kids from a trailer park to the local schools. There’s a predictable movement among the rich folks to get rid of the trailer park kids from their schools,for various reasons, a minor one being property value.
I’m completely trivializing the issue but this makes me angry. One great irony is that some of our church members are involved, and our church helps serve those very people in the trailer parks through a community organization it’s involved with. We have no problem serving them but we wouldn’t actually want them in our schools.
I have to confess though that my thinking is clouded on this issue, because *I* was a bused kid. Half of our elementary school was bused, and my sister and I didn’t realize until fairly recently that it was our half that was the “disadvantaged” one. A somewhat shocking realization. We weren’t poor by any means, quite the contrary, but apparently it was a reflection of our neighborhood.
So when I hear about things like this where people don’t want kids bused in, I feel personally offended. Maybe irrationally, but still. Every time our junior high had a sports meet or our jazz band went to some competition we were painfully aware of the advantages they had in terms of facilities, uniforms, etc. and it pissed me off. And I guess it still kind of does.
Boring.