Suburban Teenagers Traipse Around Philadelphia

Yesterday twelve students from Abington's ACLU club and their teacher sponsor, Mr Kummer, left Abington High School at around 10:30 AM for a downtown excursion. While the other students piled into two student-operated cars, the three sophomores in the group, Almeda, Katie, and Marisa, rode in Mr Kummer's car to the nearest train station, from which they took a train into center city Philadelphia. Once at 30th Street Station, many of the students opted to purchase a snack from Au Bon Pain. "I got a raspberry cheese croissant," proclaims Almeda, "and it was sublime."

After the snack, the club walked en masse to the University of Pennsylvania, where Almeda's father works as a computer programmer, and where they were to meet Joshua Brown, the president of the ACLU Penn Chapter. Brown, 20, spoke to the group about the ACLU, the Penn Chapter specifically, and gave out lots of goodies, such as ACLU buttons and pencils and pamphlets with all sorts of information. "One could easily take over the world with buttons . . .," says Katie, clutching hers possessively. A few of the students immediately pinned theirs to their backpacks.

After Joshua had finished talking to the Abington ACLU club members, he led them to the basement of Houston Hall, the cafeteria. Almeda, full from her raspberry cheese croissant, bought only a yogurt parfait and a raspberry Snapple iced tea ("Real Fact #13: Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds."), raspberry being the flavour of the day. She was very tempted to get a Cherry Garcia Ben & Jerry's ice cream bar and even more tempted when she saw they had larger cartons of the ice cream as well.

"It comes in pints?!" she exclaimed, quoting one of the sexiest characters ever from a well-known film about little people and rings and rushing to the freezer which held the pints of ice cream. However, her wiser side convinced her that it was not the best weather for ice cream consuming, and Katie wisely pointed out that she probably couldn't eat the whole pint in one go. Almeda felt differently about that but abstained nonetheless.

When everyone had finished eating, Mr Kummer ushered the students out of the cafeteria and to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, where they met Gary Kallman, a member of the Justice Talking staff. Mr Kallman talked to them from approximately 3:00 to 4:00 about the Reducing America's Vulnerability to Ecstasy [RAVE] Act, the topic of the debate that the ACLU students would be watching later that evening, and drug policy in general. He also gave each member of the ACLU club a little tin of red hots which said "Justice Talking - red hot radio from NPR" on them. Katie was disappointed that they were not buttons, but decided to give the candy to someone else and keep the tin, despite Almeda's insistence that they did not taste all that hot.

Around 4:00 PM Kallman led the group to the The Wistar Institute, where Justice Talking is taped. The two debaters were Terrence Farley, the First Assistant Ocean County Prosecutor and the director of the Ocean County Narcotics Strike Force in New Jersey, and Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Drug Policy Litigation Project. The moderator was Margot Adler, and the ACLU club members were in the audience. Almeda got to ask a question, as did two other members of the ACLU.

"I really just came up with a question because I wanted the chance to get on the radio," says Almeda. "So I said, 'Mr Farley seems to think that the only purpose of the RAVE Act is to add open air and one time events to the list of places whose owners can be held liable for drug use. What does Graham see as negative effects of the RAVE Act?' 'cause first of all, everyone was asking the other guy questions and I thought Graham needed an opportunity to speak. Also, the other guy was making [the RAVE Act] out to seem harmless, when the background information I'd read said entirely the opposite. So that's why I asked that. Mr Farley (Notice how I refer to the guy whose opinion I'm opposed to as Mr So-and-so, but the guy with whom I agree as First Name? I did that unconsciously.) told me it was a good question, which made me doubt it, but that's okay."

When the debate ended at 6:00, the ACLU club members got a chance to talk to Graham Boyd before leaving. Then they walked back to 30th Street Station, although first Mr Kummer led them in the opposite direction from the one they were supposed to be going, and took the train back to Abington. Marisa and Almeda got transportation home from Katie's father, and all agreed that it had been a super day. Almeda certainly felt the day had turned out especially well, considering its poor start for her.

On Sunday evening she had been having trouble concentrating when writing her Othello essay, so she left half of it undone and woke up at 5:00 the next morning to finish writing. Consequently, she missed the bus. Her mother drove her to school, and she arrived only two or three minutes after the bell had rung but had to wait in a long line for a pass and thus was ten minutes late to first period. "Some reform is needed in that system," Almeda complains grumpily. "Punishing late students by having them wait even later to get to class is completely unnecessary."

Almeda | 10.12.02 16:45 | TrackBack