Lifetime Rec: Tunnel Week

I had volunteered for Tunnel all day Friday and when I had finally walked through the whole scene, I had a realization of why I was involved in the Tunnel this year. I had the realization when we were sitting down in the last classroom scene. Twenty short minutes can show you a side of things that are uncomfortable and can be hard to intake. But those twenty minutes can show you a whole other side of things and how oppression works within our society. The fact that the Tunnel was based on oppression on Boise State campus was really an eye opener because it is happening right before our eyes and we continually ignore things that we do not want to face. As we had discussed in our debriefing between PA's, what is the line where you draw your passion for exploiting oppression. I definitely think that if you are constantly fighting people on what they believe, it makes it harder for them to change. Within my Humanities 207 class, we discuss that it is important that you are not trying to change the people around you but yourself. When you have investigated how you can change, things around you will begin to change. But I still feel that there are certain situations where I am more likely to jump on someone due to my own personal experiences. In the situation where I had told one of the students to stop making Helen Keller jokes, he was thrown off and said " I am sorry, I didn't know." I feel that in this situation it is just a brief realization that we all needed in order to become more conscious of what we are saying to each other and what we are feeling. That is why I think it was great that we went through Tunnel as a group because we were all able to see things that our residents are experiencing and things that we are experiencing personally.