Well, after a long time deciding whether or not I was coming on tour, I have returned! New year, new team, and new adventures! This week was training week. I know it may sound pretty boring, but this training week included going to three high schools and one college two days in a row! The first high school that we went to on Tuesday was Grand Terrace high school. Adam (a new team member) and I were standing outside of the high school waiting for the bell to ring. We were talking and waiting, then we saw an administrator of the high school come outside on his little golf cart. Then a school policeman showed up on his bicycle and started talking to the administrator. Oh boy I thought. First day out on the job and we already have admin and police out and ready. The bell rang and I told Adam to face his signs to the street and the cars that were coming out of the parking lot of the school. I was handing out literature, and I found that everyone was really supportive and open to taking the literature that I was handing to them whether or not they were in a car. We were coming near the end of the after school rush and then a man pulled up in a flashy car and a suit. He got out of his car carrying a large black folder and came up to me. He pushed back his jacket and flashed his badge at me trying to intimidate me, “I just came to give you the penal codes for this area. You are not blocking anyone from leaving?” I replied with a “No sir,” trying to be as polite as I possibly could. “Alright well here are the penal codes that I was told you were breaking, but everything seems to be fine.” He handed me the paper and then walked back to his car. I decided to look at the paper to see what the school was trying to accuse us of and one penal code that was highlighted on the list was “Interfering with school activities.” I am pretty sure we were not there while school was in session, and we were definitely not on the football field at that time, so it was pretty much impossible for us to even break that law. Anyways, it was an excellent first day of activism!
The next day, we woke up early, rushed to the office, packed up and headed off to Riverside Community College. When we arrived at ten o’clock in the morning, it was already well above ninety degrees. That day was probably one of the hottest days on campus with the temperature reaching up to one-hundred and ten degrees. We did not want to pass out from the heat, so we stayed in the shade and drank as much water during the time on campus. The last time that I went to RCC, we had protesters come out at the last minute to yell and scream at us while we were doing our peaceful outreach. This time, it was very different. People came up and told us we were doing a fantastic job. Some other students gave us thumbs up, received our literature, and we had no protesters! I was waiting and waiting for protesters to show up, but they never came. That day I also talked to a student who saw the graphic sign of a baby aborted at around ten weeks. I asked him what he thought of the sign, but he just looked at the sign flabbergasted. Then he looked up at me, “I was on the fence, a fifty-fifty kind of guy, but when I saw this sign,” he paused for a minute taking everything in, “Now I’m one hundred percent pro-life, and I am going to tell all of my friends about this.” He motioned to the literature and walked away with a smile on his face.
We went to RCC a second day to talk to as many students as we could and to to saturate the campus with literature. I was in charge of holding the signs that were as tall as I was while we were there, but even though they were pretty tall for me, I could still have some conversations with students passing by. One girl came up to Lizzy and began arguing that we should not have the right to tell a woman what to do with her body. Lizzy told her that it was not a woman’s body, but an individual human being’s body in the womb. The girl said that she did not think that the child was a baby yet, so she did not consider abortion murder. When I showed her the picture of the baby that was aborted in the third trimester, she said that she thought it was bad to abort a baby at that age, but it was fine when a woman decided to get an abortion in the first trimester because the baby was not developed. Then I asked Kyle to turn his sign around that he was holding and showed her a picture of a first trimester abortion. “Can you honestly look at that picture and say that is okay?” She glanced over for a split second and turned back to me, “Well it’s not developed yet, and it doesn’t have a personality.”
A young woman could not contain herself any longer, “Does a personality define if you are a person or not? That doesn’t make any sense! If you would actually read their signs, you can see that a baby has a heart beat, brainwaves, internal organs, EVERYTHING!” Then the two of them started debating among themselves. “Well what if that baby is conceived through rape?”
“So she is a baby? You have to stick to one side or the other, is she a baby or not?”
“Well it’s a fetus.” Then I pointed out that fetus meant “little one” in Latin and that she was a little “someone”. The baby could not be anything else, and she just waved it off like I said nothing important. “But what if a fetus was conceived from rape?” I came in again, “Well does that change the humanity of a person? I know someone who was conceived out of rape, do you think that she shouldn’t have a right to life?” The discussion continued until she excused herself from the group to sign up for a math class.
Well that’s only week one! I wonder what will happen in the next few months.
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