DREAMERS, MINUTEMEN, AND TUCSON SHOOTINGS :  TERRY GREENE STERLING EXPLAINS WHY SHE QUIT BLOGGING

One night in December, just a few days before  Christmas, two groups of ASU students gathered in two very different parts of Phoenix.

The first group of kids wore college graduation gowns, and received diplomas, and were hugged by their relatives, who then bought them celebratory dinners.

Yay!

They’d finally made it through Arizona State University.

At the very time graduates were celebrating, another group of ASU  students huddled together on a sidewalk in front of the darkened office of Sen. John McCain in central Phoenix.

PHOTO BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

It was a cold night, but the students were full of warm hope. They hoped that the next day, the Dream Act would pass in the lame duck Congress. The Dream Act, introduced every year since 2001, would allow kids who are unauthorized immigrants and have lived in the United States for most of their lives, and have graduated from high school, and  have not committed crimes, temporary legal residency so they can attend college or join the military. If they accomplished these goals, the students would be given permanent legal residency, and eventually citizenship. The students had been focusing on McCain’s office because even though he had transformed from immigration reformer to immigration hardliner, they still held hope that he’d vote for the Dream Act. After all, he once supported it.

PHOTO BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

But McCain didn’t vote for the Dream Act the next day.

It was a bitter disappointment for these honor students, who watched the senate vote on their laptops as they sat on the sidewalk.

It wasn’t easy to learn English, or to succeed in school, or to get coveted private scholarships to pay their out-of-state tuition.  But they did. And after the Senate shot down the Dream Act, students like Chris wouldn’t give up.

This is Chris’s picture. To the right. Below.

The Senate shot down the Dream Act on Saturday.

On Sunday, Chris was in church, listening to words of hope.

“Help us love even those who hate us,” one of the speakers said.

Chris just sat there on the bench. He speaks three languages.  He wants to be an architect.

“We can’t put our hope in politicians, we have to put our hope in God,” another speaker said.

Chris looked at his hands. He is the only one in his family that excelled in school. And in his family, being different isn’t  always easy.

“Dreams may be deferred but dreams won’t die,” said yet another speaker.

***

I was going to blog about that evening, but I didn’t.  I wanted to take a break from writing and reporting. The holidays. Family. I’d get back to blogging, I figured, in January. Five weeks later,  Jarold Lee Loughner allegedly went on a shooting spree in front of a Tucson Safeway.  He gunned down Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and before he was tackled by onlookers he’d killed six people, including a little girl named Christina-Taylor Green. Instead of blogging, I covered the shootings for The Daily Beast.

Here’s another shooting story. And another

***

I came home, packed fresh clothes and drove back to Tucson, where I covered the murder trial of another little girl, Brisenia Flores, who was gunned down , along with her dad, in 2009 by a man in camouflage who had painted his face black. A woman barked orders during this killing spree, which took place in a house trailer in Arivaca, Arizona.  The super comandante was a beautician. She was dressed in a military outfit too. Her name was Shawna Forde. She wanted to rob this family to fund her border surveillance activities.

I wrote four stories about Shawna Forde for The Daily Beast. I was the only reporter who talked to her.

She told me that even in jail she directed a vast militia.

Her lawyers said she suffered from narcissistic traits.  They said she was repeatedly sexually abused, abandoned and neglected.

They wanted to save her life.

But she’s on Death Row now.

***

I came home again, and made up my mind to start blogging.

Then Republicans in the Arizona Legislature, in lockstep with many of the state’s biggest businesses, voted to kill five notorious immigration bills that would have furthered the state’s  racist image. The businesses said they’d felt the sting of a national boycott, and they’d had enough of Arizona’s immigration laws. Let the feds take care of it, the businessmen said.

***

I think things are calming down in Arizona now. At least for a while. So I’ve made up my mind to start blogging again. For  updates on day-to-day events about madmen, killers, and general goings on in Arizona, please visit my Facebook page.

***

And getting back to those Dreamers, Christian is still in school.

He won’t give up.

His life is filled with hope.

Just when he was getting really uncomfortable, Sheriff Joe Arpaio escaped on Monday night  from  the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.  He stepped off the podium.   His aides led him away.

I’ll tell you why.

First, though,  full disclosure.

I am the writer-in-residence at the Cronkite school. I am writing a book about the undocumented underground in Arizona. The professors who grilled Arpaio in the aborted  Meet-the-Press-style forum are my colleagues. This blog, however, is not affiliated with ASU. It is my personal blog. No one tells me what to write. Hey, I  even follow the writing rules of the Chicago Manual of Style, which is more writerly  than  Associated Press style, which journalism schools tend to use.

Okay. Back to the story.

In  August, when I spoke with Sheriff Joe,  he appeared to relish the idea of facing off against the Cronkite journalism profs in a Meet-the-Press-ish forum. “They’re gonna slam me,” he told me. You’ve got to understand that in  Joe Arpaio’s lexicon, the words “slam me” don’t  necessarily have a negative connotation. I mean, the sheriff  doesn’t just sit there and answer questions.  Instead, he shoots back with polished sound bites that signal to his conservative base that he’s on the job, sparring with  those  journos.

On Monday, the  usual cast of Sheriff Joe’s supporters began showing up in front of the Cronkite building in downtown Phoenix at about 6 p.m. Here’s a picture of one supporter. 

The  guy held two signs. One said: We love you Sheriff Joe! The other said: ASU students can’t read this sign. I’d say  maybe thirty  similarly minded supporters showed up. Some carried signs that said: Illegals Must Go.  The protesters were mostly old Anglos who didn’t like illegal immigration. Or Mexicans. Some packed guns. (Although non-felons are allowed to carry guns in Arizona, they can’t pack on ASU campuses.) The  cops asked the pro-Joe demonstrators to get rid of their sidearms.  The demonstrators disappeared  for a few minutes, then returned unarmed. Or so they said.

About three times as many anti-Arpaioists, non-students and college students of every race, carried signs with messages ranging from opposition to the sheriff’s alleged human-rights abuses of undocumented immigrants to suggestions that sheriff was a card-carrying member of the  KKK.

Photo by Janessa Hilliard

A couple of these anti-Arpaioists  also had guns.

One anti-Arpaioist  packed a pistol and a World War II-era Russian rifle with a bayonet. The cops made him stand on the other side of Central Avenue.

The evening was progressing predictably.  Just as they always do, the  anti-Arpaioists waved aromatic  sage smoke through the air  to purify the place from bad pro-Joe vibes. They beat drums and pots. They chanted: Joe must go. A few of them wore black hoodies and bandannas around their faces so you could only see their eyes. These people understood street theater.

At the pizza store near the journalism school, I saw a sign on the door.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

It read: Arpaio Supporters Not Welcome. The assistant manager said he put the sign up because he didn’t “appreciate Aryan Brotherhood people” coming into his store.

By then, probably three  hundred people had gathered outside of the Cronkite school. Maybe a fourth  of the crowd consisted of  cops and journalists.

Only  students, professors and journalists were allowed inside the Cronkite building to hear the journalism professors question the sheriff.  Those not affiliated with ASU could watch the hour-long forum on a giant screen outside, on the mall.

Inside, I couldn’t find a seat. Students crowded around the railings on the third floor. They perched on the stairs. Many were  students I didn’t recognize. They weren’t journalism students.

At first,  Sheriff Joe responded to questions with his usual sound bites. Stuff like “I answer only to the people of Maricopa County who have elected me.” But I heard an edge creep into his voice as he fielded  well-researched questions about things that really matter–like the Sheriff’s alleged stonewalling of  public records requests.

The students, our future journalists,  were learning from seasoned professionals how to ask big-time politicos tough questions, persistently. Public  records may sound boring, but journalists  rely on  them to figure out what’s going on in taxpayer-funded projects. Like the Iraq War.  Or  Sheriff Joe’s jails.

Public records are key to keeping government honest.  As Americans, we have a right to see how our elected officials are spending taxpayer money and running taxpayer-funded projects. Of course, public officials  don’t always want to hand over public records because if they do journalists will learn the truth and convey the truth to voters. Or maybe get them indicted.

So long story short, the Cronkite students were getting one heck of an education as they listened to their profs  put Sheriff Joe’s feet to the fire about public records requests and other  journalism-related questions.

My own feet were hurting, I couldn’t see the panel, so I wandered downstairs to see if I could catch the forum on the outside screen. Suddenly, dozens  of  protesters crowded into the lobby,  blasting the journalism school for having the forum in the first place. It  was all very Cal-Berkeley in the 1960′s.

Only this time, it was stupid.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

What was the matter with the protesters, anyway? Couldn’t they see that the school was training future journalists? Didn’t they understand that  students were learning how to interview powerful public figures who were rarely held accountable for their alleged abuses of power?

I walked over to the outside screen, where about a hundred people had gathered to watch the forum inside. To my surprise,  Rick Rodriguez, a Cronkite prof who once ran The Sacramento Bee, was  making the sheriff visibly uncomfortable as he asked persistent questions about why the sheriff refused to cooperate with the U.S. Justice Department, which is investigating the sheriff’s alleged retaliatory abuses of power against judges and mayors and politicians and cops who dared criticize him.

Then suddenly, the forum fell apart.

Non-journalism student protesters in the audience, those  students I didn’t recognize who had crowded around the rails, began an organized demonstration that involved high-decibel  singing and chanting and yelling.  They wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t shut up. They went on and on, preventing  Rodriguez from getting key answers from the sheriff about why he would not  cooperate with the agency  investigating him for tormenting his enemies.

This was great for Sheriff Joe.

The demonstrators  gave him an excuse to quit the forum just as it was getting very very awkward for him.

The sheriff left  the building.

Scowling, of course.

I wondered if he was secretly relieved.  Did  the sheriff sense the truth–that  Rodriguez would have pursued him  into the gates of hell to learn why he wouldn’t cooperate with the Justice Department?

I think so.

And I don’t think the sheriff wanted to answer Professor Rodriguez’s  questions.

For obvious reasons.

After the sheriff’s exit, the demonstrators were jubilant. They played music. They sang. They hugged each other. They climbed on a shelf and hung out a banner. Hey, they’d  broken up the forum. They’d run the sheriff off the stage.

They were just kids. They didn’t understand that they had rescued Sheriff Joe.

They didn’t understand that thanks to them, Arizona’s most controversial public official avoided answering questions that mattered.

To  all of us.