Coming to Terms

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Coming to Terms

It's not a light bulb that suddenly turns on. It's not a bolt of lightning that strikes you without pain. It's more like a boot; a steel toe boot that literally drops out of the sky and kicks you directly in the face, knocking out the majority of your teeth and smashing your nose into a bloody mess. That's more what it's like when you come to a realization. All that talk of a magical epiphany is left in the dust while the boot moves on to its next victim. It doesn't let you see through some new set of eyes; it dulls your other senses so that all you can do is see. You see what you've been missing for a long time. Being a person of many passionate convictions, its fair to say that I've had to have facial reconstructive surgery quite a few times.

It most notably happened my sophomore year of college, taking a class called “Cubans in the USA .” Of course my family warned me that the professor was a raging communist, known for such ghastly evils as not believing in the embargo, questioning the motives of the Cuban American National Foundation, and, dare I say it, not thinking that Fidel Castro was the anti-Christ in the flesh! (Oh no! Stone Him!) So sure enough, the first day I went in, wearing a Cuban flag pendant, guns ablaze, ready to strike down this hedonistic infidel with my passionate patriotism. But something happened. He told us to give him a chance to ward off these notions our grandmothers instilled in us. (Oh no, he's already using some evil mind control technique! ) But I did give him a chance. And at the end of the semester, I was eager to learn more of how to correct my mis-education, without loosing my sense of pride in my background, while slowing recovering from the boot's most vicious attack.

But even more recently, and more notably, it happened during our visit to the South Florida Water Management District. I scanned the website the night before class and went in on Friday morning, armed with my deep, uncontestable knowledge of the everglades, ready to battle this evil government agency whose sole purpose had to be to serve as a façade for the fact that the government didn't care about the everglades.

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