worked with a team studying the dynamics and responses to busing and school desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky. We interviewed everyone who had anything to do with the experience .
On the day I went to interview individual students—both African American and white—who were attending a previously all-white high school, the teacher who was coordinating my time sent me, to my surprise, not individuals one at a time, but a group of twelve white students. I had already prepared my questions, but instead I asked them about their experience in the past and what had changed with busing and desegregation. The answers were very clear: Everything before was fine; now it was awful. The description of the African American students was horrific—dumb, smelly, rude, uneducated, the n-word, as bad as you could possibly imagine. One sophomore girl was particularly caustic in her hateful, racist comments and seemed to enjoy using every moment of her time to set the record straight about these terrible “lowlifes.”
The mood in the room had reached a near-fever pitch, when a knock on the door was followed by my next group to be interviewed—twelve African American students. The hush in the room was instant and palpable. The white students all got up to leave; I said, “No, you can stay, please sit down,” which they did. I then proceeded to ask the newly arrived students the exact same questions I had asked the white students .
The stark reality of the answers—we had no books last year, our school was filled with litter and everything was broken, our teachers were not like the teachers here, the cafeteria was awful—corroborated the answers of the white students. Except that instead of racial stereotypes, here was the very tender, human side of these new, grateful students .
I realized there was a stifled noise to my left. I looked over and saw the sophomore girl—the same one who had been so filled with hate—crying, tears streaming down her cheeks. She stood up and said there was something she needed to say. Between her deep sobs, she told the African American students what she had just been saying about them—everything, word for word. Everyone in the room started to engage in the conversation, with much of the support given to the sophomore girl coming from the African American students .
The discussion turned rigorously honest, courageous, and real, and it forever changed the hearts of each one of us. It was enough to meet each other and tell the truth, to hear each others’ stories, enough to learn how profoundly we are all so undeniably connected. When the teacher came to reclaim her students, they sent her away, so they could continue talking until they felt they had reached a point where they were done, for now. When they walked out to face the rest of their world, they walked out together .
Reese Fullerton
Enough Is a Verb
T he next right thing, the moment of enough, is always and forever changing, just as we are being changed. The most basic level of our physical and emotional development ensures that who we are, what we need, and what we can or cannot do about it is in perpetual flux. We never wake up to precisely the same life twice.
If we wake up assuming we are basically the same person, with the same achings of heart, yearnings of soul, and needs of the body, we will gradually drift further from the truth of who we have become in this moment. If we are reluctant to update our position, we will live our days presuming that wherever we set our course when we began, however long ago, obviously describes precisely where we should be by now.
But our life pilgrimage is always changing, and what is enough for today has been seeded by hundreds of choice points, each responding to subtle but undeniable shifts in our heart’s desire, our ability to see clearly, and to tell the truth about what we see.
Various branches of scientific inquiry enthusiastically affirm what the Buddha described as the Law of