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Suffer The Little Children

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Fostering a Better Community for Children and Youth | City of Boulder

On Children

Kahlil Gibran

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

https://poets.org/poem/children-1


[Content warning: because people accuse liberals/teachers/LGBTQ+ people of committing sexual assault against children, I talk about that issue and those accusations.]

They keep saying it’s for the children. That’s why.

That’s why they’re censoring books, and harassing librarians, and persecuting teachers, and trying to outlaw the teaching of specific ideas and topics.

Because they want to protect the children.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it on the dumpster fire that used to be called Twitter and is now (sort of) called X: some conservative putz of a commentator says something like “You know, I didn’t really care about [CRT or racial equity/LGBTQ people/sex education] UNTIL THEY STARTED COMING AFTER OUR CHILDREN. BUT THEN I HAD TO SAY ‘HELL NAW!’” See, that’s where we liberals crossed the line, they say: we went after their children.

And they want to protect the children. So they say. Over and over and over again, generally growing louder every time.

Now, I understand this. I want to protect children too: I want children to be free to exist as themselves without being hated or abused or ostracized. I want children to be happy. I want to help them create opportunities to achieve their goals in life, to be who they want to be; that’s most of the reason why I became a teacher and why I still do it, even after 23 years, even despite the ways that others (mostly conservatives) have tried to stop me from teaching. I want children to live: I won’t say that I would put my life on the line to save a child’s life, because I also want to live; but I would fight to save a child’s life. And I am a pacifist: I wouldn’t otherwise fight for anything. But I’d fight to protect a kid.

(Also I would fight to protect my wife or our pets. I’d lose, but I’d fight. Just sayin’.)

The truth is that liberals, along with schools, and Democrats, and LGBTQ+ people, are not “after” their children. Inasmuch as most of those groups of people want to help educate children, we are actually seeking to make children happier and stronger: not to take them, and not to harm them. Personally, I REALLY don’t want to take anyone’s children: I don’t want children. Not at my house.

But I’m being disingenuous here. They don’t think I’m after their children because I intend to kidnap them and take them home with me; that would be absurd. No: they think — at least they say, and yell, and scream — that I and everyone on the left, in schools, involved in LGBTQ+ issues, or even just someone in drag reading stories to their kids, are sexual predators. Pedophiles, who are grooming their children by exposing them to inappropriate material.

Let me be very, very clear here. Democrats and liberals and schools and LGBTQ+ people and those who fight for racial equity and all the rest are not in any way groomers or pedophiles. Of course there are pedophiles and abusers among every group, but there’s no particular reason to claim that they are more common on the left, and to say that any teacher who talks about gender or sex is grooming children in order to rape them means that I will punch you in the fucking face. Even though I’m a pacifist. Because fuck you if you think that, or you make that accusation. How fucking dare you? The one time I got a conservative to agree with me immediately was when, during a Twitter argument about something in education, some asshat called me a groomer and I blocked him; another conservative commenter asked, as conservatives are wont to do, why I had blocked him, saying something about how I was hiding from the argument; I said “No, I’ll argue with anyone all day about these issues — but if you break out that disgusting fucking pedophile/groomer slander about me, you can fuck right off forever.” He liked the comment and let the subject drop. Because fuck you if you actually think that. And I expect that rational people would see my point on this.

I recognize, of course, that all of you reading this are rational people who see my point on this. None of you reading this think that I or teachers in general are groomers; none of you reading this believe that, because I teach novels and short stories that relate to sexual activity or gender identity or anything along those lines, I am intending to make the students in my class easier to rape; but the whole disgusting fucking slander makes me just foam at the mouth with rage. I hope that’s understandable. That is, naturally, the goal; it’s hard to debate the issues when someone is accusing you of raping children, and it’s harder when their evidence is a gross and appalling and absurd misinterpretation — an intentional misinterpretation — of what you actually do. Because then I feel like I have to start justifying the things I do, like teaching a book that might have a sex scene in it or might talk about gender roles, to show unequivocally how wrong they are: as if there’s any justice in claiming, for instance, that To Kill a Mockingbird (which does have a “romantic” [actually it’s sexual assault] scene involving sexual touching, and also accusations of rape and hints of incestuous sexual abuse, and does question gender roles pretty extensively through the character of the ‘tomboy’ Scout) is actually intended as a way to make it easier to rape children; and it’s even harder to walk away and refuse to dignify their slander with a response, which is the right thing to do, but then that fucking asshole is back there still calling me a groomer and I have to ignore him rather than punching him in the fucking face.

But their goal is to make me lose the argument, or even better, walk away, leaving them alone on the soapbox, because I’m so pissed off about what they said to me that I can no longer address the argument they are making. And it’s effective: because here I am dignifying this bullshit with a response, and speaking to people who know better. But I can’t help it. It upsets me.

It’s upsetting to be someone who spends so much of my time and energy, so much of my life, trying to help and also protect children, and then to have people, generally for crass political gain, use my own dedication against me by claiming that my very desire to help children implies that I want to rape them. And for them to justify these attacks, these various attempts to take apart our democracy and our education system, along with that disgusting slander, by saying they are — protecting the children.

It’s been happening a lot. It’s very upsetting to me.

So I wanted to talk about it some. Because I don’t want to leave conservatives alone talking on the issues here because I’m too mad to speak.

(Another caveat: I do know that not all conservatives support these arguments, and certainly not all conservatives make those disgusting accusations. All I can say is: it sucks to be stereotyped, doesn’t it?)

But let’s focus for now on the actual arguments. 

So first, the argument that CRT and similar (intentionally misinterpreted) ideas are taught in schools and that this is damaging to children hearing about these ideas. We all know, I hope, that CRT, Critical Race Theory, which is a framework used to describe TO LAW STUDENTS IN GRAD SCHOOL how the historical institutions of racism in this country have made it harder for equitable outcomes to exist in the modern era, is not taught in any K-12 public school in this country. But that’s not the main point, just like arguing over whether the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” is not the main point in a gun control debate, is only in fact a red herring. (By the way, if you ever are arguing about gun control with someone who cares about this particular nonsense, it stands for Armalite Rifle. ArmaLite was the company that originally designed the weapon.)

The real objection is not to CRT, it is to teaching the idea that the US is a racist nation, and that historical racism has impacts on the world today. Conservatives don’t like hearing people say that this nation is a bad place, or that it has done bad things to people, or especially that it continues to do bad things to people. They think that we are united in our love for our country, and that’s how it should be. 

But the problem is, we’re not united in our love for our country, we are united in our love for the ideals our country represents for us. And we should all be appalled by the corruption of those ideals in our country’s actual actions and impact on the world. We are supposed to be a country that stands for liberty: and instead we promote the oppression of billions of people around the world, in various ways — from subsidizing economic slavery in every poor nation that makes our shoes and electronics, to allowing climate change to devastate people’s homes and livelihoods because we won’t fucking stop driving Ram 35000s, to directly overthrowing democratic governments because they stand in the way of our economic exploitation, or because they are, in our sordid little fanatic-minds, associated with the greatest enemy of the corruption of our actual ideals: Communism/Marxism/socialism.

Speaking of red herrings. This one is the reddest: and it has thrown us completely off the rails for coming up on a century now. We have, literally, assassinated political leaders, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, because we thought they would create a stable Communist/Marxist/socialist state, and for some goddamn reason, we can’t let that happen. We’re supposed to be about liberty? Us? We’re supposed to believe in free expression, and live and let live, and the free marketplace of ideas — and yet we have to stamp out Communism/Marxism/socialism wherever it exists, both in our “free” nation and in other nations? Somehow that became our most important ideal, around the world: the nation that supposedly stands for liberty actually stands for taking it away from anyone who uses that liberty to freely choose Communism/Marxism/socialism. And why? Because we don’t defend liberty: we defend capitalism. 

Sorry: I got off the topic of racial equality, and historical racism and institutional racism. So feel free to go back over everything I just said, and wherever I talked about Communism/Marxism/socialism, go ahead and replace those words with “racial equity,” and the word “capitalism” at the end with “institutional racism.” All still true. We have contributed to the oppression of free people, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, and assassinated leaders, because those situations and people promoted racial equity in some form; and this country defends institutional racism, and always has. Almost every evil and disgusting thing we have ever done as a nation also has a racist element to it. 

One of the more amazing examples I know of how appalling and unrepentant we are about our racist culture is the running argument in modern partisan bullshit about which political party is more racist: is it the Republicans, who support racist policies? Or the Democrats, who used to support even more overt racist policies? Or both parties, who participate in institutional racism even while either decrying it or claiming it doesn’t exist? 

You know what? FUCK WHO IS MORE RACIST, LET’S JUST STOP BEING RACIST! What do you say? How would that be? And you know who that would help?

The children. Who really shouldn’t have to grow up in a racist world, and who shouldn’t be taught to believe racist ideas. Like the idea that the United States, which is unequivocally guilty of countless racist acts including multiple genocides, is not actually a racist nation. Do we not see how pretending that this country is innocent of harm is one of the most harmful racist things we could do? That that pretense not only allows the harm to continue, but also states clearly that the past harms don’t matter? Which could only be true if the people who were harmed did not matter?

The problem with trying not to teach these ideas in school — that the US is a nation with racist institutions that came from a historically racist past and foundation — means we can’t teach the truth. And as Fox Mulder (not the Fox News Channel; Mulder is the reliable one) told us, the truth is out there: which means kids are going to learn it eventually. And that’s when they’ll realize that not only has this country been racist in the past, it still is now: because the people now tried to cover up that racist past.

Trust me. I had that experience. I grew up in Newton, a wealthy suburb of Boston; and not until college did I learn that Boston was where the last and worst riots — actual fucking riots, that is — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis] over desegregation of schools occurred in the 1970s. 40 riots. Carried out by white people, in the place where I grew up.

Gee, I wonder if they were as bad as the BLM riots of 2020. They certainly were not precipitated by the police murder of an innocent man like the BLM riots were. They were caused by a bunch of racist people who didn’t want people of other races in their kids’ schools.

Nobody in my schools told me that. Which is — let’s use the word “interesting,” because a lot of my teachers had been teaching, in Newton, for 20 or 30 or 40 years. I graduated in 1992, which means my teachers? They were there. Not all of them, of course, but some of them were. And nobody told me about it. So when I learned about the Boston bussing riots, how do you think I felt about my teachers?

I lost faith in them, a little. I realized that some of them were racists. 

Shall I mention here that nobody in my high school was LGBTQ+? 1600 students, and not a one of them was gay or bisexual. 

To be clear, literally hundreds of them were gay or bisexual or in some way queer; but none of them were out, none of them were open about it: because they would have had the shit beaten out of them, if they were not actually murdered. My hometown was not welcoming to LGBTQ+ people. I wasn’t, either: one of my most distasteful moments is when, in the middle of the hilarious and silly home movies my friends and I made in high school, we burst casually into multiple homophobic slurs and jokes. Just a stream of them, many coming directly from my mouth. I hate it. 

But that’s how I was raised: not thinking that any of these issues were real, that the people who lived them were real people; or at least that they didn’t involve ME or MY town or the people I knew. All of that was, y’know, somewhere else, and in the past, racism in the South before the 60s and homosexuality and so on in San Francisco. 

Never heard of Stonewall, either. Not until after college, even. And before I lived in Newton, I lived on Long Island. A suburb of New York City. Though of course, I wouldn’t have heard about the Stonewall riots then; I moved when I was in 3rd grade, and you can’t tell a 3rd grader about race riots.

You sure can tell him about war, though. The Shot Heard Round the World, and the Minutemen plugging away at the Redcoats. Cowboys shooting Indians. Allies fighting the Nazis. Cops fighting robbers. Pretty sure I heard about some of that before I was 8.

So the point is, when you conceal the truth, you open yourself up to the righteous and deserved accusation of — being someone who lies to hide the truth. And what reason could you have for hiding the truth other than — something nefarious that probably includes a continuation of the problem that led to the truth you concealed? Only racists would want to hide the truth about racism, because they want to minimize the reality in order to maintain it, or because they think the victims are not deserving of consideration — which is a racist idea. I never heard about the Japanese internment during World War II, either. 

I mean, maybe my high school education just kinda sucked. I admit I didn’t pay all that much attention.

But the point is that I did learn the truth later, and it made me lose faith. And rightfully so.

But on the other hand: my dad told me, when I was a kid, that his mother, my grandmother, had been an alcoholic, and it had caused my father a lot of pain and a lot of problems in his life. He told me that he was attending AlAnon meetings — actually they were mainly meetings of a group called Adult Children of Alcoholics, which was the heart of the issue; but he had also, at one point, gotten concerned about his own drinking, so he went to some AlAnon meetings, too. And he told me about it. Which gave me great and abiding faith in my father: in his honesty, in his courage, in his respect and concern for me, for our family, for himself. I was inspired by his willingness to tell me the truth of the problems that he faced, and by his willingness to try to address them. I still am. 

The same goes for issues not of race, but of sexuality: and here, as with race, let me point out that many children have an experience I did not have, which is recognizing that they themselves are the secret that is being concealed, that is being ignored. I learned that my nation’s history was concealed from me — or whitewashed; I graduated in the same year as the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, in a city that has strong Italian roots, and so as you may imagine, my understanding of Columbus was… incomplete — but I never had to recognize that the person telling me that racism wasn’t really an issue was ignoring my own lived experience of racism, or that the person telling me that men should only love women was denying my own right to exist and be myself. But the larger point is the same: if we pretend that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, or that they are somehow less real than cis-het people (because queerness is contagious, is taught, is socially constructed and influenced; not like the “natural” and “normal” sexuality of the dominant paradigm [NB: I am writing bullshit to represent what other people think; that statement I just wrote is not true.]), then the LGBTQ+ people who are listening — anywhere between 3% and 10%, or up to 20% if you recognize the more different aspects of sexuality we have been recognizing and learning about for the last few decades, which means in my high school of 1600 people there were anywhere between 50 and 300+ people who were LGBTQ+, only in one year of the four I was there — will recognize that we are lying. And the only reason why we would lie is because we want to do LGBTQ+ people harm, or we deny their right to know the truth about themselves and their world. And both of those are, to be clear, very, very, bad. Telling people they don’t exist or don’t matter is not how you protect the children. Lying to children in order to convince them that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist: that’s where I’m not sure how we can even conceive that we are protecting them. What exactly is the danger to children in the existence of LGBTQ+ people?

And here, exactly right here, is where we get to that disgusting fucking slander: because they have to invent a danger in order to conceal the truth: that there is no danger to protect children from, it’s just that the people who don’t want children to learn about gender or sexuality are bigots and homophobes, and they want to continue and promote their hate. That’s all.

By the way: my school, 1600 students? I think about 20 of them were Black. They all rode a bus to Newton North from Boston. I never heard about why. I just remember thinking that they were being given an opportunity for a better education in the rich white school in the rich white suburb. A thought I never confronted or analyzed. Because my racist environment tried to put racist ideas into me. I am thankful that my parents were not racist, and so did not encourage the growth of those ideas in me, and that I was later educated in a more open-minded and free environment, where I did learn the truth. 

You know what’s another thought that bothers me, now? My parents unquestionably chose a town to live in because it had a good school district, and good property values, and a low crime rate, and all of the other proxies by which people in this country choose predominantly white-skinned, white-collar neighborhoods. And though I don’t for a moment think they thought about sticking with a white community, I don’t think they confronted or analyzed those thoughts, or the reasons why that town was the safest and richest and best educated. They just picked Newton, even though my dad’s job which brought us to Massachusetts from Long Island (Also an extremely white enclave on the edge of a more racially diverse city) was based in Cambridge. 

To be fair, Cambridge is pretty close to Newton. I’m just saying: they fitted us comfortably into a privileged environment, and that’s how I grew up. Oblivious to the truth. Sheltered. Safe. And, if I had not learned the truth, I suspect I would have ended up racist. I surely had enough bigoted ideas and behaviors when I lived in Newton. 

So. Keeping these issues, these truths, out of schools is not about protecting the children: it is about protecting racism. I’m not saying that people who try to protect children are aware of what they are doing to protect and promote racism, any more than my parents were aware of the consequences of putting me in such a sheltered white enclave; but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak: the result of these policies is bigotry, not safer children. As proven, I hope, by the fact that people have to invent slanderous attacks on teachers in order to justify their crusade. 

The same is true of all the other crusades that are ostensibly taken on to protect children: the attempt to eliminate gender-affirming health care, which helps save the lives of trans children, and the concurrent attempt to deny the existence of trans children by keeping them from playing games with other children (Because calling those games “sports” doesn’t make them not games. They are children’s games. And people in this country are trying as hard as they can to stop some children from playing the game. Because that’s how much we suck. And then we crow about being the land of the free? And the home of the brave? Where we’re afraid of a trans kid?), are not intended to protect children, and they do not protect children: they help to destroy children, their happiness and their complete understanding of themselves and their world, if not their actual lives. The attempt to keep children from getting free lunch, which isn’t even supposed to help children other than the vague “protect them from drowning in debt” while we continue to pay nearly a trillion dollars a year for the military that is not currently fighting any wars, and we cut taxes for billionaires and subsidize toxic industries, while we ignore climate change and don’t talk about how that will lead to the world’s children literally drowning in rising ocean waters, is not even deserving of refutation. The attempt to keep parents in absolute control of their children’s education is not actually protecting children either: it is protecting those parents from having children who might disagree with them, or who might ask questions the parents don’t want to answer. And it is creating the danger for those children of living in a country that is less safe and less open, because it would be less educated — since “school choice” is just the choice to choose worse schools. If you want to make schools better, then make schools better: don’t make it easier to leave them and go somewhere else. I work for a charter school. It isn’t better than a traditional public school. Trust me.

And then there’s the big one: the most important and dominant wedge issue, the one that has made people pick sides, and plot and plan and center their entire lives, political and otherwise, around this one single topic: abortion. Because conservatives want to ban abortion, in all cases, whatever compromise they may temporarily accept about the life of the mother or cases of rape or incest; whatever lies they tell about states’ rights and judicial activism while they try to impose federal , national, judicial injunctions on birth control and chemical abortifacients — and they say they are doing it to protect the children. The children who their mothers murder, they say. Innocent children. It’s all for the children.

Except it’s not.

Never mind the points that have been raised for fifty years, about how the same conservatives who argue for saving children’s lives by banning abortion, also argue against those children having free lunch at school, or even a school to have a free lunch at. Never mind the very clear truth that the best way — the only way — to lower abortion rates is to improve both sex education and access to birth control, both of which conservatives oppose because they think, somehow, by keeping children from a knowledge of sex, they will stop those kids from having sex. Which doesn’t work any better than protecting children by keeping them shielded from knowing the truth about history, or about sexuality and gender, and which does just as much harm as all such lies do. Personally I am grateful that my mother, saying clearly, “Well, I don’t want to tell you about that stuff, so I’m glad they will” while signing my permission form to get sex ed in my elementary school, understood that I needed to learn about sex, even though she didn’t want to talk to me about it; if she hadn’t done that, I might have been left with the knowledge of how sex worked which I gained from my friend Benjy when we were 9 — and suffice it to say, Benjy did not have the straight dope about how sex worked. I will also say, that several years later when I understood how sex worked physically but not the harm it could do emotionally, it was a story my mother shared about her past experiences that showed me why I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing — so even though she was uncomfortable with it, my mother had the honesty and the honor to tell me the truth, and the courage, as well; and that gave me even greater respect for my mother. 

But never mind all of that. Here is how we know it is not about the children. Because when Judge James Ho wrote his opinion in the recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision regarding the limitation of mifepristone, he showed us that the abortion arguments of the right are not about the children. We always knew they were not about the women, not about the mothers, that the entire argument showed a callous and wanton disregard for the rights, the sovereignty, the simple human value of the women whom conservatives want to force to bear those precious children to term: but Judge Ho showed us that it’s really all about — the men.

Judge James Ho, who was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow’s library in 2018 (Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was also there), wrote his own opinion in the case in order to expand on what he sees as “the historical pedigree of Plaintiffs’ conscience injury, and to explore how Plaintiffs suffer aesthetic injury as well.” 

Antiabortion doctors suffer a moral injury when they are forced to help patients who have complications from the use of mifepristone, Ho wrote, because they are forced to participate in an abortion against their principles. 

Those doctors also experience an aesthetic injury when patients choose abortion because, as one said, “When my patients have chemical abortions, I lose the opportunity…to care for the woman and child through pregnancy and bring about a successful delivery of new life.” Indeed, Ho wrote, “It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.”

In cases where the government “approved some action—such as developing land or using pesticides—that threatens to destroy…animal or plant life that plaintiffs wish to enjoy,” that injury “is redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside the agency approval. And so too here. The FDA has approved the use of a drug that threatens to destroy the unborn children in whom Plaintiffs [that is, the antiabortion doctors] have an interest.” 

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho wrote. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients—and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.” 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-16-2023

So. Now we know. Conservatives don’t want to protect the children. They want to protect their right to possess those children. To treat them as spectacles, as attractions; as something that exists for the adults to admire, to appreciate, to enjoy. To use. To own. 

That’s what all of this is about. Control: treating children as the property of their parents, of the conservative leaders. I’ve seen the point made, in regards to the abortion debate, that the unborn are the perfect special interest to fight for: because they have literally no demands, no requirements, no arguments of their own: they don’t even exist as separate human beings. Conservatives never have to confront them, never have to talk to them, never have to treat them as their own people who might disagree with the politicians who work so hard to “protect” them. Using children, conservatives can promote their own agenda, and always, always, claim the moral high ground — because they are protecting children. Closing down and militarizing the border isn’t because we are racist and want to deny entry to people who aren’t white; we’re protecting children from fentanyl. Shutting down schools isn’t because we recognize that educated people tend to lean liberal politically (almost as if the truth pushes people in that direction); it’s because we’re protecting the children. Destroying the lives of women isn’t because we are essentially misogynist and supremacist: it’s because we want to protect — okay, actually, that one really is all about us; it’s because we like seeing the little pink babies. We think they’re cute. And so we feel that women should be enslaved in order to produce more of them for us to make goo-goo noises at.

So say the conservatives. And again, I realize and admit that not all conservatives feel this way — but those who don’t agree with the policies and arguments I have described here, also don’t separate themselves from those policies and arguments. Do they?

And me?

I make my job much, much harder than it has to be because I honestly do not like telling children what to do. It might be different if I taught the younger children: but the children I teach are nearly adults. I know that they have minds of their own, and wills of their own, and desires and dreams of their own: because they tell me about those things, they show them to me, on a daily basis. And I cannot stand the thought that I would take away any of that, their dreams or their abilities or their thoughts or their wills, simply to replicate my own thoughts or my own desires through them. I hate that thought. Even when it would be a good idea, I hate it. 

Because they are not my children. They are themselves.

That is the message I want to give to conservatives, in the end. You do not own children. You can try to protect them — preferably from actual threats — but you cannot control them. They are not yours to do with as you will, not even when you want to guide and shape and mold them into people you think they should be. It is not up to you who they should be. It is up to them. If they cannot decide for themselves now, then you still do not have a right to decide for them: all you can and should do is help them get to the stage where they can decide for themselves. You cannot, and should not, keep the future decision hidden from them, even if you hold back all the details until they are ready for them.

And you know who decides when they are ready to hear all the details? They do. 

Your children are not your children. They are their own. 

Treat them with respect.

I Suck

Dusty Leave a comment

I had a crisis of confidence yesterday.

Right now, I feel like it’s not worth getting into; I did a (kinda) stupid thing, I reacted to it (kinda a little more) stupidly. I had a bit of a tailspin. I got out of it, but it colored my day, my night, and then this morning, too.

So all told, I don’t have it in me to write.

It doesn’t help that it’s the end of the school year, but mainly, it was yesterday.

So: I am going to give myself the grace and the space to have a bad day, and to skip, therefore, writing about anything this week. Instead, I am going to share two links with you all.

The first is an open essay from the author A.R. Moxon. I haven’t read his book yet (I will) but he is one of my favorite commentators, and I love both the way he writes and the thoughts he has. And this thought is a doozy. I also love the way he talks in this about the purpose of persuasion. So let me persuade you to read this.

https://open.substack.com/pub/armoxon/p/a-foolish-proposal?r=1b0hss&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

And then, I want to share an audio file from my favorite podcast, Unfucking the Republic. I think this one has a somewhat similar theme, and a similar purpose: and a second persuasive suggestion. I would like to propose the first link, the Moxon essay, as a thought-provoking read, and this link, this 20-minute podcast episode, as a path forward.

Let me know what you think. And I’ll try to write something next week. Assuming I don’t do anything else stupid.

Standards (De)Based Education

Dusty Leave a comment

All right. It’s time.

Let’s talk about standards.

I won’t say I appreciate or admire the people who picked the word “standards” to describe their prescription for education in this country. But I will acknowledge an absolute masterstroke of rhetoric, which is what that was. “We have high standards,” they could say. “Don’t you think schools should have standards? Don’t you have any standards for your students?” they could ask teachers who objected.

What can I do but hang my head in shame, and agree to teach THE STANDARDS?

I’ll tell you what I can do: I can, and do, object to the standards as they are written. I object, too, to the very idea of standards: but let’s take one thing at a time. And the less radical, first.

It’s not too far out there to object to the standards, at least in one way: pretty quickly after the Common Core were adopted in most states, they received the approval of the Obama administration – and therefore the whole-hearted hatred of the Republican side of the country, particularly during the Tea Party boondoggle. So if I say I hate the Common Core, I at least have allies – though they’re not necessarily the allies I want to have. But I’ll take them, because they are correct in essence, if not in attribution of causation.

Backing up. First, what are the standards? According to the Arizona Department of Education, they are this:

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards:

  • Are aligned with college and work expectations;
  • Are clear, understandable and consistent;
  • Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
  • Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
  • Are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
  • Are evidence-based.

Standards are a list of skills and knowledges that students should have when they graduate high school. Jim dandy. Seems useful to know what a student should know.

Quick question: who decides what a student “should” know? And how do we decide that? What is the basis for picking a specific skill and saying a student “should” know that before graduating high school? That knowledge of X, Y, and Z is necessary to “earn” a high school diploma?

Hang on: first let’s look at the sales pitch for the standards.

Critical Message about Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics

· The purpose of the new standards is to provide a consistent set of English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and Mathematics expectations that prepare all students for college and career options.

· The standards are designed to ensure that our students remain competitive in the global market of the 21st century.

· Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards include Arizona additions. Arizona’s adoption of these standards ensures a more seamless education for high mobility students since grade level standards and expectations are consistent across 46 participating states.

· The creation of the English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards was a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Okay: a consistent set of expectations that prepare all students for college and career options. Cool. Equity of access and opportunity is important, it is a fundamental promise of this country, and it is also one of the best ways to assure the general welfare of our people; so yes, all students should have access to the same preparation for college and career options.

I mean: they don’t. There are several other factors involved in educational outcomes, primarily the students’ socioeconomic status and family educational levels (which are also, of course, socioeconomically influenced if not determined). And because education funding in this country is primarily a factor of local district tax base, it ensures that students in the richest schools have access to the best educational opportunities and resources, and students in the poorest schools do not, and that system will survive that way as long as we keep the same archaic, institutionally-racist and classist funding structure.

But yes, surely all students should meet a certain minimum set of expectations. I’m with that. Standards, right? We have standards, and students have to live up to our standards, or we won’t accept them.

Umm…not sure what that means. I mean, if someone I go on a blind date with doesn’t meet my standards, then they go off to find someone else whose standards they do meet, and I go home alone, But what does it mean when a child – when a fellow citizen – doesn’t meet our standard? Does it mean they don’t get to live in this country? Don’t get to be citizens? Does it mean they have to struggle for the rest of their lives, because they weren’t good enough according to our standard?

You ever think about what it says about a student – a child, that is, since I’m talking about K-12 education, and the majority of students are still under 18 when they graduate high school – when we say that student doesn’t deserve a diploma? Hasn’t earned an education? Didn’t prove themselves to be good enough? If all education meant was the achievement of a specific set of skills and knowledges, then it would be appropriate to say those things (though the implication of merit in words like “deserve” and “good enough” is questionable if not outright wrong); but it doesn’t just mean that. We attach quite a number of value judgments to people who “earn” a diploma, and withhold them from people who “fail” to “earn” one. Those who don’t meet our standards, that is. Those children, we determine and decree, will suffer and struggle, because they’re not good enough. Never mind that there are countless ways to live, and live successfully, without ever mastering the skills and knowledges that “earn” one a high school diploma. Never mind that high school diplomas don’t necessarily show that one has or has not mastered the skills and knowledges: a diploma shows that one was able to prove one’s mastery of skills and knowledges to the satisfaction of those who decide who earns that diploma – me, in other words, as a teacher who gives grades, who determines who passes and who fails my classes. Me and all of my fellow educators. We decide who gets a diploma, who has shown to our satisfaction that they have mastered the skills and knowledges we chose for them to master, to our standard, on our assessments.

I think about my wife, who is one of the smartest and most capable people I have ever known (And I’ve known a hell of a lot of smart people), who was not allowed to earn a diploma because she called her principal an asshole. After he told her that she wasn’t good enough to graduate from his school, because he thought she was lazy and disrespectful. She was expelled from the school. She got a GED, a Graduation Equivalency Diploma – hang on; that’s not it. I just looked it up, and it actually stands for General Educational Development test. Huh. Did you know that’s what it was? Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t. Anyway, she earned her GED certificate, and also a high school proficiency certificate, by acing those two tests (because she is incredibly intelligent, if I didn’t already make that clear – they wanted to skip her two grades in elementary school. TWO GRADES. Nobody ever suggested I skip any grades. I’m not jealous, though.) and then went to work: but she couldn’t get a job, because she wasn’t yet 18 and so wasn’t allowed to work in most places in California during the regular school day. She was also told that the GED wasn’t as good as a diploma because she hadn’t shown she had the work ethic to complete the normal schooling program.

So I guess it isn’t just about showing mastery of the skills and knowledges required for college and career readiness. Huh? It’s also about showing oneself to be the kind of person our society approves of. It’s about winning the good regard of teachers, who are by nature and training judgmental. I mean, I’m a swell guy, and surely all of my judgments of my students’ characters are right on the money, and totally should have a significant impact on the lives of all of the students who pass through my classes. Some of those other teachers, though… pretty sketchy.

My wife’s story – this point I’m making about teachers and our generally subjective judgments of students – is one of the arguments behind standards, of course. Because CHUDs like the guy who told her she wasn’t “Aptos High material,” and she’d never amount to anything in her life, shouldn’t be the ones keeping the gates and refusing entry to our citizens. If students can show that they possess the skills and knowledges we expect them to have, then that should be enough: and no individual with their own biases and prejudices should be able to torpedo any person’s progress into productive citizenship.

I agree with that. It’s the one argument for standards, and for standardized testing, which I agree with and support whole-heartedly. My wife got the shit end of this stick because she was what this guy saw as a “troublemaker;” maybe because she is a woman, maybe because she was not in the same socioeconomic class as many students at that school (Though not all the students at the school were wealthy, not by any means), maybe for any of several other reasons. But there are millions of kids who suffer this same sort of fate, being prevented from achieving not because they lack the skills, but because someone in charge doesn’t think they’re good enough: and the most common reason, of course, is racism. I have heard people who know better than me point out that standardized tests, while imperfectly anti-racist themselves, are at least objective and colorblind in their allocation of success or failure: which means a student with racist teachers can still pass the test, can still prove they have met the standards, and therefore should be able to earn a diploma no matter what their racist teachers think. I appreciate that argument, and I therefore wouldn’t want to argue that all standardized tests and grades and so on should be removed, at least not until we can ensure no bias in the people acting as gatekeepers.

I will argue that we should remove the idea of gates, and specific standards of achievement.

But hold on: before I argue against standards entirely – before I show that I do not, in fact, have any standards – I want to finish my point about the standards we all have right now. They are no longer the Common Core standards, which became politically tainted during the 2010’s; though if you think they are appreciably different from those Common Core standards, you don’t know education: we don’t like changing things, we like keeping the old things – or even better, resurrecting the older things – and giving them a new name. The Common Core State Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature [informational texts, history/social studies texts, science/technical texts] at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.” And the all-new, all-improved Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend informational and functional text, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. (AZ.9‐10.RI.10)” You can see for yourself how Arizona is independent, and not still following along with that whole socialist Common Core mandate. WOO! States’ rights!

So my question is, still: who decided what were the skills and knowledges required to graduate high school? Who determined what students “should” know?

It’s not actually a simple question to answer – neither the one about what students should know, nor the one about who decided it. The issue with deciding what students should know is deciding what we think students should be ready to do. Do we think they should be ready to go to work? Do we think they should be ready to go to college? Do we think they should be capable of teaching themselves? Or do we think they should already know everything they will ever need to know? What mixture of those four things is correct, job/college/already know/can learn? But then there are more questions: what should students know to be ready to go to work? What kinds of jobs are we talking about? And what does “ready” mean? I haven’t ever been “ready” for any job, if “ready” means “already capable of every aspect of the job required.” I have always had to learn on the job. Do we want them ready for entry level, or ready to move up to the top echelons of management? Do we want them ready for local jobs, or do we want them to be ready for any jobs? Please note that if we decide to make our students ready for any jobs, then they’re going to be learning a whole lot of things that seem like they aren’t important, because those students will look around their part of the world, look at the people they know, and they will think, “Nobody in my town knows physics, or needs to know physics. Why do I need to know physics?” If our only answer is, “You might find a job somewhere else that requires a knowledge of physics,” we’re not going to convince a lot of students to try very hard in physics class. But also, if we decide that nobody who goes to school in this town needs to know physics, then we are sentencing those students to live only in places and have only careers that do not require any knowledge of physics. Maybe that’s fine: we decided, pretty unanimously, that none of the students in American schools need to be familiar with Mongolian folk dancing; we therefore cut them all off from careers involving Mongolian folk dancing.

Pretty fucked up, guys. Denying our children that avenue in life? Who were we to decide that for them?

But also: how much time and energy do we want to dedicate to teaching Mongolian folk dancing, on the expectation that some number of our students will pursue a life that involves Mongolian folk dancing?

And before you scoff too hard at that: recognize that almost all American students were, at some point in the last several decades, taught how to square dance. We thought that was a valuable use of time and resources. And I, for one, would rather know Mongolian folk dancing than how to do-si-do.

This is amazing.

(Let me also point out, though this is off topic and too large a subject, THAT WE SHOULD NOT FOCUS EDUCATION ENTIRELY ON THE ABILITY TO MAKE STUDENTS PRODUCTIVE AND CAREER-READY. LIFE IS NOT JUST ABOUT YOUR JOB. STOP TELLING STUDENTS THAT EVERYTHING THEY LEARN AND EVERYTHING THEY DO IS GETTING THEM READY FOR “THE REAL WORLD OF WORK.”)

But okay, we’re really only talking about English/Language Arts and Mathematics. (Hey: who decided those two were the most fundamental skills? I agree that communication is vital in essentially everything; but is English the only way to learn to communicate? What if we decided instead to teach every student to be fluent conversationally in three different languages other than English? Or what if we decided that proper communication required an understanding of our context, including our cultural context and the context of our interlocutors, and therefore all students must master 12 years of social studies including sociology and psychology? AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON MATH.) So surely the expectations of what should be mastered in those subjects is more straightforward. Right?

It may be. I object to a number of the standards – for instance, I am supposed to dedicate considerable time and energy to this one: “Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.” (AZELA Standard 9-10.RI.7) – but I can’t argue against the ones which say students should be able to read proficiently and independently, or that students should cite evidence for their claims, or that students should know how to analyze complex characters. And all of the different sets of standards were all written with input from various teachers and teacher groups and other educators.

But not only teachers.

Common Core, for one example (And there are lots of examples, of course. Education is a very profitable business. Lots of companies get involved in trying to create educational resources, and then trying to sell them to the very large market of schools and teachers flush with all that gummint porkbarrel money), was written by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is essentially all of the various Superintendents of Instruction from each of the 50 states. They took input from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the NEA and the AFT (the two largest national teachers’ unions), and various other teachers and educators. I suppose I should point out that most of the chief state school officers have education backgrounds, though not all of them; but more importantly, I think, is that the CCSSO was not the only organization involved: it was also the National Governors’ Association, which certainly has a stake in education at the state level, but generally includes a whole lot fewer educators; and also, a certain non-profit group founded in 1996 called Achieve. (Don’t be too impressed, by the way, by this group being non-profit; the College Board is non-profit, and they’re the ones who make all of the AP tests, and the ACT, and the SAT. And then charge millions of students hundreds of millions of dollars every year to take their tests. But they’re not profiting from it.)

That last one is the interesting one. Because you figure the CCSSO and the teachers’ unions are going to represent what the educational establishment wants: what is best for the current school structure, and for the teachers. And the Governors’ association will represent the will of, if not the people, at least the constituents who have the ear of the governors; which surely includes parents’ groups and the larger constituency special interests. I think it’s safe to say that both groups, the CCSSO and the NGA, of politicians would represent the interests of the monied class in this country: since that is who commands the attention if not the obedience of politicians.

So who did Achieve represent? Maybe the students? The ones who have the most skin in this game, so to speak, the ones most affected by all of this wrangling, and the ones who, as lacking votes and money in general, do not have the attention and obedience of the politicians?

Of course not.

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Achieve’s website tells us this: “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.”

Very nice! That sounds great. But…who are you?

I couldn’t actually find a list of the board of directors on their website (I admit I didn’t look too hard, as I expected to have to go outside of the organization to find what I wanted to know), but I found one on Ballotpedia, interestingly enough; seems like Achieve has some involvement in politics, as well as in education. Well, they said they work with the states, right?

Here are their directors, according to Ballotpedia (Which got the list from the Achieve website, accessed in 2016; unfortunately when you follow the same link to the current list of the board of directors, you get this:

Achieve is led by governors, business leaders, and influential national leaders committed to improving K-12 educational outcomes for all students.

Created in 1996 by a bipartisan group of governors and business leaders, Achieve is leading the effort to make college and career readiness a priority across the country so that students graduating from high school are academically prepared for postsecondary success.

Cool, thanks.)

Here’s the list from 2016:

  • Mark B. Grier, Vice chair
  • Michael Cohen, President
  • Craig R. Barrett, Chair
  • S. James Gates Jr.
  • Governor Bill Haslam (R-Tenn.)
  • Governor Jay Nixon (D-Mo.)
  • Governor Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)
  • Former Governor John McKernan Jr. (R-Maine)
  • Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus

Sorry to use out of date information, but also: Mark B. Grier is listed by Ballotpedia as the current top executive at Achieve, and while he has also moved on to a director position at Freddie Mac, his profile there still lists him as a board member at Achieve, so I’ll take this list as representative if not current.

Who are these people? Glad you asked.

Dr. Sylvester James Gates, Jr., is a badass. An award-winning and influential theoretical physicist, professor, author, and documentarian, his involvement with Achieve could only improve their work. Not sure how much sway he actually has, but his presence on the board is the best thing I found. (He’s also the only African-American on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there.)

Michael Cohen, president (Not THAT Michael Cohen) is actually an educator (Though he worked for Bill Clinton, so he’s a neoliberal educator). He is also the only one with a page readily available on the Achieve website – though to be fair, their Search function is not currently available, and the website hasn’t been updated since 2021. Craig R. Barrett, chairman, is the former CEO of Intel. Mark B. Grier, vice chair (and maybe current chair) is the former CFO at Prudential. (Also: “Grier’s leadership on the board continues Prudential Financial’s longstanding commitment to improving education outcomes.  Former Prudential Chairman Art Ryan served on the Achieve board from 1999 to 2008, and as the chairman from 2005 to 2008.” So again, if the list isn’t current, it’s at least representative. Mark Grier to Lead Achieve Board | Achieve) Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus, is the former CEO of IBM, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee  is also the former president of Pilot Corp, a petroleum company that owns the Flying J rest stops. Former Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri is one of the Democrats on the “nonpartisan” board, and is a lawyer turned politician rather than a corporate overlord, so he wasn’t too bad – but did hand control of Ferguson over to the state highway patrol and later called in the National Guard to put down riots after Michael Brown was shot and killed. Maggie Hassan (The only woman on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there) and Jock McKernan are also former lawyers turned politicians, Hassan the current embattled Democratic senator from New Hampshire, McKernan the Republican governor of Maine in the late 80s and early 90s (And the husband of Senator Olympia Snowe, if that matters), and are generally not offensive.

So that’s who wrote the Common Core. Teachers – but also politicians, and business executives. And who do we think had the most influence, the final say? Probably not the teachers. And definitely not the students.

But is that so terrible? I think I hear you ask. What’s wrong with business executives promoting the standards? Well, inasmuch as they were simply people who understood complicated systems and processes, and who live in this society and therefore may have a stake in its success, nothing. But that’s not all they are. Businessmen, especially executives of these sorts of large, international corporations, are not particularly loyal to any one society; they are loyal to the bottom line: shareholder value. I cannot believe that these men created Achieve, and pushed for the Common Core standards to be accepted nationwide, for any reason other than they knew it would be good for business.

From what I can see of the standards, and the intent of those who wrote them, they are very good at producing exactly what businesspeople seem to want: conformist rule-followers who don’t think very originally, and who don’t question authority, but who are very good at mindless, repetitive tedium, and who seek simple entertainment and satisfaction at the end of the very long work week. Good workers (Remember how the work ethic is as important if not more important than mastery of the skills?) who are also good consumers. Good employees, and good customers.

How do standards do that? In a number of ways. Partly because they are standard: the goal is to make every student the same as every other student, capable of all the same things. If we see those things as a baseline, and give schools room and resources to reach beyond that, then there’s no problem; but that’s not how the school system works – and again, that is because of the same people wielding the same influences. Because the other part of the push for common standards is – the push for accountability. It’s right there in the Achieve mission statement. “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.” (Emphasis added)

See, we can’t have universal standards unless we can be sure they are adhered to. Right? We have to make sure these schools, and those wacky tree-huggin’ hippie teachers, are doing what they’ve been told to do. So in addition to creating new standards that will define what is taught, we will create and implement test after test after test after test, to make sure that the teaching is – well, meeting the standard.

Do you know what happens when you create an entirely new system of curriculum, and a new set of assessments? Particularly during a global recession, when state education budgets are being slashed and burned like virgin forests in logging country? (By the way, Jay Nixon of Missouri was also called the “cutter-in-chief” for all the cuts he imposed on the Missouri state budget. But he did also support investment in education when things started turning around, so. Good and bad, I suppose.)

The schools fail, that’s what. New curriculum takes time to figure out and make functional. New assessments take time for students to get used to them. Even in the ideal testing situation, the whole idea is that you take the results of the test and use it to inform the next year’s instruction in order to raise the scores: which pretty much requires that the first year’s scores are going to suck.

And so they did. And do.

Which opens up a lot of options for those who want to control the education system in this country, say, in order to produce better worker drones and more consumers to buy products.

Any time the school does not meet the standard, any assessment that shows the students are not showing the specific evidence asked for which proves they have mastered the chosen skills and knowledges to the extent and in the manner determined by the people in charge, then the school is failing, the teachers are failing, the students are failing. And when a school is failing, we will sanction it in some way, and follow one of a number of alternative courses: we could use that  failing school as evidence that a current politician has failed their constituents, and thus push for the candidates we like; we could use that failing school to argue that the school system in general is failing and therefore we should promote vouchers for private schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and therefore the state needs to loosen the requirements for charter schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and it is the fault of those damn teachers’ unions. So many options!

We could also argue that the school system is failing, so there needs to be greater emphasis on achieving the standards. Now that we have these lovely standards written, we can push to have them adopted across the country (Maybe in conjunction with a huge federal mandate, which rhymes with Moe Wild Heft Refined, which also mandates accountability…), and then use that to impose more expectations that schools will adhere to the standards, so that every child in every state can have the same results! Won’t that be wonderful? If … Moe wild is heft refined?

(Sorry.)

Once we decide that the school is failing and the most important thing is to make sure that students MEET THE STANDARD, the stage is set for the process we have watched play out across this country: we start teaching to the test; and more devastating, we eliminate everything that is not teaching to the test. Electives are cut, because the students need more remedial instruction in math and English. Which frustrates the students, and makes them feel like the system is not helping them but is instead out to crush their spirits (because it is), and of course they resent it, and so of course they rebel against it: they don’t try as hard as they could on the tests, because fuck the tests, man!

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Which means the school does not meet the standard: and so we can go through another round of whatever-flavor-of-damage-we-want-to-inflict-on-the-system.

My school knows that I’m a good teacher. It’s hard not to: my students generally like me, their parents generally like me; the surveys the school does of parents and students always reward me with sterling reviews. I was even named in a Google review of the whole school as one of the reasons why my school is worth going to. And, if I may presume, I think that anybody who comes and watches me teach will see that I am good at it. (I mean, I’m not always sure I’m good at it, but that’s because I have imposter syndrome and a certain amount of anxiety over my abilities. Never mind. It’s not important.)

But what the school tells me, every single time they evaluate me, (Which in this environment of hyper assessment, is every goddamn year; also I live in a “Right to Work” state, for a charter school, which means there is no teacher’s union to represent me, and therefore no tenure. Can’t let them lazy goddamn teachers just relax and teach! They need to worry about losing their jobs all the time! That’ll keep ‘em in line!) is that I need to provide documentation that I am teaching the standards. I need to write objectives on the board. I need to review those objectives with my students, every class. I need to align my instruction and my assessments, and now my grades, with those standards. I need to write daily lesson plans that show I’m focusing on the standards. I need to give common formative assessments, five times a quarter, to show that my students are progressing in their mastery of the standards.

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That’s what my job has become. Standards-based instruction, with (eventually) standards-based grading. Everything standardized. Which makes the businesspeople happy: and since my charter school is run by a corporation, and therefore by businesspeople, they will be happy, too. They’re pretty dang sure that creating a laser focus on the standards will achieve the results they want: proof that all of our students are meeting and exceeding all the standards, because all our teachers do all day long is try to get them to learn and master the standards. Because, we are told, that is how the school is assessed and graded by the state: according to our ability to make our students meet the standard of mastering the standards on standardized tests.

Yeah, it stopped meaning anything to me, too. Quite a while ago now.

You know what might be the most insidious part? There’s still an argument to be made for standards. As I said, there is nothing wrong with a baseline of ability that all students should be provided an opportunity to reach. I still think we should not tell a child that they are “failing” just because they can’t pass fucking Algebra or whatever, but I do think that a general education is a good idea, and that there are things that should be included in everyone’s education. Yes to that. Assessment of student achievement and ability is an important part of education (Though there are YEARS worth of caveats and qualifications in that. Most of which I’ve already written about, and I’ll get to the rest.), so assessment of a student’s mastery of a standard is a valid pursuit.

Here’s the thing that kills me about standards-based education: you get what you measure. You find what you are looking for. If what you want is to see if students have mastered a standard, and you teach to the standard and then assess the standard, then students will show that they achieved mastery. If you focus harder on the standard and teach it more, they will generally do better. If you point out to the students, by writing it on the board and going over it with them every day, exactly what they are supposed to learn and which standard they have to master, then they will do as they are told: they will focus on that idea, that knowledge, that skill, and they will master it. Which means the student data in that class will improve when you do things like write the objectives on the board and go over them in class every day. It works. And, as I have also written about for years, teachers are so hungry for proof that what we spend our lives doing is worth something, when we see those results, see those data points march upwards, know that students are passing the assessments: we like it. We want more of it.

So we do it. We teach to the standards. We use standards-based curriculum, and standards-based grading. It works, after all; and it’s what’s expected of us.

We stop questioning where the standards came from: they’re just the standards, and we have to teach them, so we do. We stop thinking about how dumb those standards are. We forget about the things we used to teach that weren’t measured by the standards – those things are long gone, and after all, they’re not part of the test, not part of the assessment of the students or the teachers or the school. They can’t be that important.

But they are important. All the things that aren’t in the standards are the things that matter most. The things that inspire people, that make them love learning, that make them grow and change. Things like real literature, poetry and novels and plays. Things like learning, for the first time, the history of the oppressed people and the non-dominant cultures – especially important if you happen to be part of one of those cultures, one of those people. Things like relating to and empathizing with other people. Things like school spirit, and community service, and even sports, goddamn it. These things still exist: but they are fading. Students are losing access to sports because they have to spend their after-school time in tutoring, because they haven’t mastered all the standards. Clubs and service organizations are less active, less involved, because there’s not enough time for all of that: students have to study for tests. Teachers can’t give the lessons and assign the projects that become part of a student’s life and personality, because we have to focus on the standards. All of that gets lost by the focus on the standards. Not least because the standards are, by design, simple, measurable nuggets of information. There’s no standard for the intangibles.

You get what you measure. And you lose everything that can’t be measured.

There’s a guy I used to teach with who I think is wrong about almost everything he’s ever said: but there was one thing he said which I thought was 100% accurate. He said that there should only be one standard, one expectation, one guiding goal that drove all of education: Students will learn to think critically. I would actually add to that something more human, like “Students will learn to love their world and themselves,” but I don’t know that schools should consider that a definite and intentional goal, so I’m willing to keep mine as an unspoken purpose, and focus only on the one.

What else is there? There are a dozen ways to learn to think critically, and all of them are valuable. Every subject, every class, can help students to do that. That one skill, with all of the myriad aspects that contribute to it, is the most important thing that people today should have – and that too many of us today can’t do.

And the best part of all? It can’t be measured. And it can’t be standardized.

That’s something that meets my standards.

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No Pizza For You

Dusty Leave a comment

One of the best things about being a teacher who is really a writer is this: my students and my school and my profession frequently inspire me to write. Usually essays. Usually angry.

This is one of those essays.

Some background on this one: my AP Language class studies argument, and the project that culminates that unit is a class display of dueling arguments. A student volunteers to write an argument, which is due the next day, on any topic they want (that is school appropriate, of course); I project it on the board, read it aloud, and then we critique the argument as a class. Then someone volunteers to argue back, taking a different side of the same topic, with their essay due the next day, and going through the same process. Then if someone wants to argue a third perspective on the same topic, they may; if not, someone volunteers to start a new pair of arguments the next day. Everyone who completes the essay gets a 100% grade; if anyone volunteers to write an essay, but doesn’t turn it in, then the whole class takes a test — that way the peer pressure will overcome the nerves, and I know I’ll get the essays: so long as I can get them to volunteer. If someone starts an argument on a bad topic and nobody wants to argue back, then the first student has to write the second essay, as well, taking a different perspective snd arguing against themself. If no one wants to argue and it’s a good topic, then usually I will argue back against them.

This year I have had some trouble with all this. Students are not interested in volunteering. I got the first four essays, two pairs, all from the students who generally speak up most in class discussions; then I had to struggle to get the next essay. Finally I got one student to volunteer to write about corporal punishment: but then he decided not to argue that. He didn’t want to sound weird, for arguing that kids should be spanked, and so on. This student generally has strong political opinions, so much so that other students roll their eyes when he starts in on them; but he didn’t write about politics, either. No, for this project, he chose to write about — pineapple pizza. He argued that pineapple is just fine on pizza. He wrote a good essay; he just picked a terrible topic, because he didn’t want to be too controversial or weird. Which then required someone else to argue that pineapple does not belong on pizza. Unsurprisingly, nobody did it, so he reluctantly argued back against himself.

That was the essay we got yesterday. it was much too short, because he’d already written a full essay so this one didn’t matter; but it was long enough to show that even with a bad topic, one can write a good essay, or at least an amusing one.

Then I asked for volunteers to write for the next day. I got nothing.

So I read them this.

“Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Okay, here’s the truth. Pineapple on pizza is amazing. If you’ve had it, and you have taste buds with even a minimum of function, then you know. If you’ve never had it, you’re missing out. But in either case, you should never get to have it again. 

Because you don’t deserve it. 

You don’t want pineapple on pizza? That’s fine, to each their own. You’re wrong, but you’re welcome to feel that way.

But you don’t deserve your preferred pizza, either. None of you are pizzaworthy.

Because you won’t fight for it. 

This doesn’t apply to some of you – though I am tempted to use this to label your entire generation, the No Pizza Generation, because Lord knows I have enough students in other classes to whom this does apply, in addition to most of you – because some of you are willing to fight. More specifically, you are willing to argue. You have the courage of your convictions, and sufficient passion to draw the words from within you. Believe me, I know how hard that is, especially now: I haven’t written a word worth reading in a month, and barely any real words this entire school year. But I think I’ve done enough in the past to give me the standing to write this to all of you who have not tried to put down your real feelings, to say what you really believe.

Until you stand up and speak, you’re a coward. A chicken. A lily-livered milquetoast. Heartless. Gutless.

And you don’t deserve pizza.

If you want good things in life, whether it is pineapple on pizza, good grades, the respect of your peers, or a country that isn’t a burning dumpster fire sinking slowly into the rising oceans, then you have to fight for it. And no, I’m not talking about fighting with guns and bombs and sticks and stones: I’m talking about real fighting, the kind that makes a difference, that changes things because it changes minds: fighting with words. Arguing. People talk about democracy, about the value of freedom and equality, of a state where everyone has a voice, where everyone can be heard – and rightfully so; history overflows with the stories of tyrants and megalomaniacs whose voices drowned out, and eventually smothered entirely, the voices of millions of people: people who had something to say, people whose words could have affected someone, people who could have won the argument. But they weren’t allowed to make it. They were not allowed to speak. And they died silent. And the world went on, a little bit worse for the loss of the person, a little bit worse for the loss of their ideas. Want to know how we got to this place, where everything is screwed up? Because too many people have not been permitted to say something that could have made the world a little bit better. We lost too many good ideas because people were not allowed to talk, to speak their truth. To argue. To fight.

But you all are not only allowed to speak your truth, you’re not only encouraged to speak your truth, you are required to speak your truth. But you won’t. It doesn’t even have to be your deepest truth, you are welcome to write about something ridiculous like pineapple on pizza; that was a pretty good argument we saw yesterday. 

But you won’t even do that. 

Democracy only works when people talk. When people argue. Argument is inevitable when people talk, because no two people see the world the same way. Ever. Hell, even one person doesn’t see the world the same way as themselves: sometimes I hate pineapple on pizza. Sometimes the taste of that sickly-sweet/sharply-acidic fruit is overwhelming, and I can’t taste the rest of the pizza, and that sucks. 

That’s what happens when one voice dominates the room. Even a sweet voice. Even my voice: when I’m the only one talking, the sense of my words, my voice, my understanding, my truth, overwhelms the senses of everyone else, the truths of everyone else. It ruins the flavor. It ruins the pizza. 

Most of the time, that doesn’t happen here: but also, most of the time, the other flavors that appear on this AP Lang pizza, the other voices that speak up in this room – they’re the same voices. Over and over again. The same ones who have already spoken, for the most part, on this assignment. I know some of you are working on your arguments, are preparing your truths to share, and good for you, please continue doing that. I’m not speaking to you: there’s nothing wrong with trying to take your time and do a good job, with trying to find the energy, at the end of this very long school year, to say what you really want to say in words that are worthy of your feelings. I have no problem with that: in fact, I appreciate it. I applaud it.

It’s the rest of you I’m speaking to. The ones who just keep saying “Nah. I don’t wanna.” 

The ones who can’t be bothered.

The ones who are too bored, who think that everything, everywhere, always, is too boring. Not because the world is boring: but because you don’t want to deal with it. Having an opinion means being willing to defend that opinion, and sometimes, that’s hard: so you’d rather just not do it. Even if it means you suffer through things you don’t like. You’re the ones I’m speaking to.

The ones who don’t like pineapple on pizza not because you don’t like pineapple, or because you don’t like how the taste overwhelms: but only because you don’t want to deal with it. Don’t want to speak up and say what you like on pizza. The ones whose vocabulary starts and ends with “I don’t know, whatever.” 

The ones who are hoping for a way out of this assignment, as you hope for a way out of everything challenging. Who will let opportunities pass you by simply because catching them is too much work, and you’re busy looking at your phone. Not looking at anything in particular, of course; just scrolling mindlessly, laughing at people being lame. Isn’t it nice? How there are so many losers on the internet? People who you can feel better than? It’s hard, sometimes, to feel good about yourself when you don’t do anything worth feeling good about, because you avoid all challenges, avoid all risks, when you can’t be bothered to care about anything. And because those people snoring loudly on TikTok are so ridiculous, so terribly pathetic, you don’t even have to do — anything. You just get to laugh at them. And do nothing. Or if not that, you can play video games endlessly: because there, you can win, without even trying. No challenge, no risk – just “winning.” It’s so easy to feel good about yourself when you don’t have to put out any effort, when you don’t have to take any risks, but you can still win. Isn’t it?

“What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t know, whatever.” 

“What do you want to do this weekend?” “I don’t know, whatever.” 

“Does anyone want to present the next argument for the class?”

“Does anyone have a topic they want to argue about?”

“Does anyone have any opinions?”

“Does anyone care about anything?”

That’s the last place where you hide: behind opinions. It feels magnanimous, it feels open-minded, to say that people can have their own opinions, and that’s fine. To say, “Well, you said how you feel, but I feel how I feel, so we’ll just agree to disagree.” To use that cliche in all situations: because that way, you can avoid argument. It feels smart to avoid the difficult subjects, to talk about how politics are boring, or how stupid it is that people get all upset about things; it doesn’t matter, you say, Who cares anyway, it’s not like anything’s going to change. I don’t know. Whatever.

That’s not magnanimous. That’s not smart. It’s cowardly. Chicken. Gutless.

That’s how we end up with two days of arguments about pineapple on pizza. It’s how we ended up with a half-dead stooge in the White House. It’s how we will act as we watch all of humanity slide slowly into a grave we are digging for ourselves. Without speaking up. Without arguing. Without fighting.

“It doesn’t matter, nobody ever wins arguments anyway.” 

Have you ever tried?

“Nobody can change anyone’s mind.”

Have you ever changed yours? Then why would you think that nobody’s mind can change? And if you’ve never seriously tried, how do you know you can’t?

Do you agree with everything other people – people in this classroom – with everything they do? With everything they think? Do you think everyone here is right, except you? If any of us are wrong about something: why aren’t you telling us? Why aren’t you calling us out on it?

It’s entirely possible that you all are burning with topics, absolutely bursting with words, that you have a thousand things you want to say, shout, scream at us, or at the world. All I know is that when I ask for volunteers, I get crickets. I get people avoiding eye contact. But why? Are you afraid that you’ll fail? Literally, with this assignment, that will only happen if you don’t try. Are you afraid that people will mock you? Maybe you didn’t notice (maybe you were too wrapped up in video games or TikTok), but we had an argument about pineapple on pizza: and yet no one made fun of that essay. Nobody said it was garbage. It helped that it was well-written, but still, it was about pineapple on pizza. And yet, nobody insulted the author. As far as I know, none of you thought less of him. And let me point out that you all mock and insult and criticize each other all the time: why is this any different? 

People asked the author why he didn’t talk about something he was passionate about, why he didn’t talk about politics. Maybe it was because all the rest of you not only fail to meet his enthusiasm about politics, but you mock him for it. Because it’s easier to mock someone else’s passion than it is to share your own. Isn’t it?

“I don’t know. Whatever.”

Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll do a bad job. I understand that. But I’ve read all of your writing. All of you, everyone in this class: you all write well. More important, you all think well. The only thing missing is the passion to say what you really think, and the single moment of courage to say “I’ll go.” 

That’s all it takes. Making a decision, having an opinion, being willing to fight.

If you aren’t going to take advantage of this opportunity, to argue about essentially anything you want, in this class where everyone is respectful and generous in their critiques: when will it be better? When will it be easier?

Never? 

Are you really never going to fight for anything? Even something small? Even something silly, but that matters to you?

Then it means that you will never get anything that matters to you. Because unless you fight for it, you’ll never get it.

Unless you fight, you don’t deserve pizza.

The Year Of Women (Which Should Be Every Year)

Dusty Leave a comment

I was having an argument on Twitter the other night.

Okay. It was New Year’s Eve. Okay? That’s right. I spent part of my Greatest Party Night of the Year arguing with trollbots on the biggest dumpster fire in all of social media.

Maybe your New Year’s resolution should be to STOP JUDGING ME!

(I’m probably being a little sensitive. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.)

The argument was mainly about how there should be more women in politics; it started with this Tweet:

I went through this thread, started by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand saying that 2020 should see more women elected into office, and I replied to every shmuck I saw who felt the need to say, “Voting for women just because they’re women? That’s sexist! You should support the best candidate whoever it is.”

Like this dude:

And this one:

And, of course, from the Trump Camp:

Each of these replies led to a mini-argument, because both I and my interlocutors are men: we feel the need to always get the last word. (See, that was sexist. Trying to offer helpful illustrations here.) Several of these little tiffs followed the same course. I replied:

Let me be clear about this, so that if anyone reading this blog finds themselves in a similar pit full of vipers, you have something handy to throw at them (Sorry it’s not a brick.). The argument that every single attempt to focus on sex is by definition sexism — like this, which I got several times:

— is a false equivalency. Sexism is not “by definition” any attempt to consider sex as a fact, and as an important fact; sexism is an attempt to oppress or denigrate someone on the basis of sex. When you’re using sex as an important consideration in how you relate to or deal with a person, that is only sexist if your consideration does harm and if your consideration is based on stereotyping or prejudice. If I were considering whether I wanted to date a person, I would consider their sex as an important factor in their dateability as I am a heterosexual male and thus would prefer to date women (A much more important factor is that I am ecstatically and joyfully married to the greatest woman alive, but this is just a f’rinstance); this is not a sexist consideration. If I were an OBGYN, I would certainly consider sex as an important factor in determining which patient I would take on, and how to treat them; this also is not a sexist consideration, even if it means I refuse to treat a man solely on the basis of his sex.

It’s not sexist because it isn’t doing harm: my refusing to date a man doesn’t hurt him (Believe me: he’s better off. I am not a catch. Look at how I spent New Year’s.), and an OBGYN refusing to take on a male patient is a recognition of specialized knowledge on the part of the doctor, and a lack of need of that knowledge on the part of the patient; that would be saving harm, or at least inefficiency as the OBGYN wastes their valuable time trying to help a patient who could just as easily be treated by a general practitioner, thus taking time away from someone who could only be treated by that OBGYN. Now, if it was a medical emergency and the OBGYN was the only doctor available, then it would be more questionable if the doctor refused to treat the man, but it would depend on what the reason was. If it was prejudice or stereotyping– that is, that doctor has already made a determination of the worth or character of this man because he is a man (pre-judging him), or if the doctor refuses because this man is like all other men and all men are scum because of their mannishness (stereotyping) —  and the refusal to treat did harm, then that would be sexist.

Let me also note here that transgendered people negate this example I’m giving here: because there are trans men who do, in fact, need the specialized services of an OBGYN since they are men with uteruses; and of course there are many women who have no particular need for an OBGYN because they are women without uteruses (There are other reasons to see an OBGYN. Forgive my reductionism; I think it necessary.). I do not mean to ignore trans people, who should not be simply considered an addendum, an asterisk, a qualification to the usual or norm or standard; but on the other hand, it is impossible to have a discussion of sexism in this society without talking about men and women, and since I’m advocating for building equity, I can’t talk about moving away from gender entirely, which would also solve this problem. I’m going to write a full post about trans people tomorrow, but I want to finish the point I’m making now, today.

I realize I’m overexplaining; it’s not because I think my readers — who, I have no doubt, are people of taste and discrimination and brilliant erudition — need to be taught the meaning of prejudice or stereotyping, or even sexism; it’s because these words are being misused, usually intentionally, and I think the best way to combat that is with absolute pedantic clarity: i.e., overexplaining. Mansplaining. Which, when you do it to fellow men, is just kinda funny.

Which is what I did with my fellow Twits.

All right, I was also sarcastic there with the “more than one thought at a time” comment. But at this point I was realizing that I was arguing with at least a couple of bots or trolls, and ideally those shouldn’t be engaged with — certainly not in an incendiary way, as that will only piss off the people who agree with the bot’s statements, and I believe quite strongly that, while we should stand up for what is right and argue our points clearly, we also should not try to anger our opponents; good argument leads more often to compromise, but angry diatriabes lead to division and more conflict. So I shouldn’t have said this, but hey, I’m on Twitter too: so I’m either trash or fire. Or both.

The main point is my last sentence there. Seeking equity is not sexist. I typed that half a dozen times in response to half a dozen accusations of sexism. (I would have typed out this entire blog, instead, but there’s a 280 character limit. Sometimes I find Twitter very frustrating. But I consider it my penance: mortification of the verbosity.) That’s the real point I want to make here.

Here’s the deal: when men have created a situation where we inherently, by nature of our sex, have an easier time running for and winning elected office — and we have done that, starting most clearly in this country with a Constitution which did not recognize a woman’s right to vote or hold office but only white men’s — then the best way to combat that is to write laws that specifically include women as equal to men, and eliminate laws that make women unequal to men. In both cases, women will benefit more than men, because in the first case women will gain more than men will, and in the second, men will lose a perquisite they have had up until now. But this is not harming men: it is taking away something we have no right to, unequal privileges, in order to create equity, and justice. It is returning what was stolen. It is balancing the scales.

And while it is entirely true that male elected officials are capable of doing that, and historically some have done so, this is also true:

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

That means the best way to address the institutional inequalities and injustices in our society is not to beg those in power to do the right thing; it is to empower those who have something to gain from doing the right thing. That way we all gain justice and equality, and, quite simply, a better society.

And that means electing more women.

Let’s make it happen in 2020.

 

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about compromise.

When you compromise, when you meet your opponent halfway so that both of you get something but nobody gets everything, it feels like you — just didn’t win. Probably because humans focus more on our losses than on our gains, but maybe because ‘Merica, often it seems that all we care about is that one little bit, that minor surrender to the other side’s will. “If only I had held out longer or fought harder,” we think, “I could have won it all! I could have gotten everything I wanted!” We got some or even most of what we wanted, after all; the other party was willing to give on some things. It feels so close to victory that it hurts.

Compromise sucks. I hate giving in, and giving up something I want to the other side. I hate letting the other side have something they want, because, frankly, they don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve to win, they don’t deserve to get what they want, and they certainly don’t deserve to get what they want at the expense of what I want. Clearly what I want is more important, and if my opponent could just see that, and let me have it, that sure would be great.

But who deserves to win? I want that answer to be me, all the time, but of course that’s not true. I also want it to be the underdog, the little guy, the victim; but it’s hard to tell who’s actually a victim, sometimes. It’s easy to tell who’s the underdog, but I mean, Ted Bundy was an underdog when the State of Florida put him on trial for murder. That’s a case where it was easy to see who the victim was, and it wasn’t Bundy.

I think that the best answer is this: the one who deserves to win is the one who is right. Of course there isn’t always a right side, but if there is, if it’s me, if I actually deserve to win everything I’m asking for, and I can communicate that to the opposition — chances are they’ll let me have everything. Last week Minnesota repealed a law that shielded people guilty of raping their spouse (because marriage implies consent) with a unanimous vote at least partly because one woman brought her case to the public: Jenny Teeson’s husband drugged her and raped her — and filmed it — and then served 45 days in jail for invasion of privacy. The case was so clear, so obvious, that the right side won, completely, without compromise.

When I’m not clearly in the right, when I can’t communicate my rightness to my opponent, then maybe I don’t deserve to win outright. Maybe at that point, I should be willing to compromise. Even if I really don’t want to. Even if I still think I should win everything. There may be some advantage to compromise, then.

When I argue with my students, about an assignment, say, if I can tell them why I want it to be a certain length, and turned in on a certain day, they don’t argue with me.  And not because they respect my authority unquestionably; but because what I say makes sense. Because my assignments don’t have arbitrarily hard requirements, because I always use their assignments as teaching tools, never simply as busy work (Well, almost never), and because I know how to teach my subject, I can show them clearly why an assignment is what it is. My assignments make sense. They can see that it makes sense, and they don’t argue, and they rarely even complain.

The other reason they don’t fight me on assignments is because they recognize that when I am not right about an assignment, I am willing to compromise on it. When I give essays, I ask them how long they think they need to complete it, and when they want it to be due. If they need more time, they can ask me, and I give it. I don’t give length requirements — and I don’t then penalize them for not meeting the imaginary length requirements that were secretly in my head the whole time, which is a common enough thing for teachers to do.

So this is the other side: if there’s not a clear winner based on who’s right, then it has to follow with who’s reasonable. The reasonable side, the side that is more rational and more willing to consider both arguments rationally, is the one who will end up winning: precisely because that is the side that is more likely to compromise. Because really, everything I said about compromise feeling like a loss? Of course that’s only emotion speaking, and pissy, self-centered emotion at that. Reasonably speaking, if I go into an argument and end up agreeing with my opponent that both of us are at least partly right, that has to be considered a victory. Maybe even a better outcome than an absolute victory, because in an argument where my opponent is right and I recognize it, I will learn something, and change and grow. And then afterwards, if I have another argument with the same person, they will be more willing to meet me halfway, to recognize that my side is right at least partly, because I showed that I was willing to give up the things I wanted that maybe weren’t reasonable, or at least were less reasonable than the things the other side wanted.

The problem in this country, at least in politics, is that we stopped wanting to compromise. We decided that we wanted only to be right. Both sides — and it was both sides, regardless of which side you are on and therefore consider to be the right side, the reasonable side, the one that was still willing to work rationally on achieving workable compromises — realized that if they held out, then they could win everything from the side that was willing to compromise; and if their intransigence, their unwillingness to be reasonable and to compromise, led to a collapse of the conversation, which must be rationally considered a loss for both sides because nobody is right and nobody gets anything they want — then they could crow to their fans that they held out, that they stayed strong, and it was the other side who let everyone down because they weren’t willing to accept that MY side, the STRONG side, the side that WOULD FIGHT TO THE DEATH AND NEVER QUIT, was therefore the RIGHT side.

And irrationality wins, and everyone loses.

Compromise is the only way forward, the only way to fix this. We have to get back to a willingness to be reasonable, and a belief in the reasonable will of the other side. We have to be willing to give while we get, always, even with those who are irrational. There are principles one can’t compromise; but that’s not “all of them,” and we have to recognize that the other side also has principles that they can’t compromise, and we can’t simply say “Too bad” and go ahead with our victory dance because we let negotiations collapse.

I know. It kinda hurts me, too.

But I’m right.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I think I have an answer to my question from yesterday morning.

Yesterday, I was wondering what I could say to my wife, to my students, to myself, that would help comfort us in the face of inevitable suffering, and I wished that I could rely on God as that answer, because then I could at least stop thinking about it — and I should have said worrying about it and fretting about it, because that’s the point; it’s not the idea of not thinking, it’s the idea of “let go and let God.” Which I can’t do, but I appreciate that people can.

But I have another cliche that I have gleaned from outside of the fields of the Lord (And that enormously obscure reference is brought to you by the podcast I’ve been listening to, Sunday School Dropouts. Probably also why God has shown up in this atheist’s morning ramblings.), that as I understand it, many churches focus on as the heart of their message (and others may sprinkle in, in between railing against homosexuals and abortion and Democrats in Washington), which is this: God is love.

Once again, that doesn’t work for me. But it comes with another way of looking at it, that I think does fit in nicely with what I’ve been looking for:

Love is God.

That is to say, love is everything. Everything that matters. It is the alpha and the omega, it is the answer to all questions, all doubts and fears. Love. And love, I think, can offer an answer precisely as satisfying  — and not any more satisfying — as can the answer “God.”

What should I tell my students when the future looms ominously over them? Love. Look for love in your life, look for love in what you do; if you don’t find any love in your life, then change it, and if you don’t find any love in what you do, then stop doing it. Don’t work for money, work for love: and I don’t mean to be flippant there, because I am a person who works for money precisely because he cannot live on what he loves; but for me, the money I earn is spent on those I love, and used to give me an opportunity to do what I love, which I am doing right now. So I never mind my job very much, because it is done for love, if not always in love. And yes, sometimes I love my job: I do love books and poetry, and I love writing, and I guess I don’t entirely loathe my students. (No, I love some of them. More, I love the people they become, and the potential I see in them when they are young.)

What do I tell myself when I am in my darkest, foulest, most hopeless moods? Love. I have lost some of my liberal idealism in these last few years, and I have begun to lean a wee bit more conservative; it has made me worry, because I know that this is a common pattern, especially among aging white men, as we start to get a taste of power and become greedy and start worrying about people taking away what we have. And I do not want to be that guy. But I think that so long as I focus on love, so long as my actions and intentions are begun with love in mind, then I won’t turn into someone I would hate. At least some of my shifting to the right is based on the consideration that people on the right can’t be bad people, can’t be evil people, not all of them. (Trump is.) Not any more than there are evil people on the left. It’s not reasonable to take a person’s political leanings as the sole evidence of their morality or their value, or anything else apart from their political leanings; evil people are conservatives, conservatives aren’t evil people. Thinking that makes me give some conservative ideas (like the free market and lower regulation, the independence of states and, perhaps most shocking to me and those who know me, the value of the Second Amendment) the benefit of the doubt, and that makes me move away from my liberal roots.

But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I’m a liberal or a libertarian or a moderate or an anarchist: so long as I consider what is best for my fellow men, and treat them always with respect and with love, then my ideas will never be bad, even if they are wrong.

I also need to remember this for myself when I am disappointed in my writing career. When I think about how old I am compared to other writers, and when I realize how good I am compared to some other writers — and then when I think about how entirely devoid of success I am compared to most other writers; I need to remember: love. I do this because I love it, because I love the me who does this. And so long as I write for love, with love, and out of love, then I can’t be a failure. I am a writer.

What do I tell my wife when she worries about our future, about what we’ll do for money, about where we’ll live, about how we’ll see the world and how we’ll live in it? I will tell her, as I do as often as I possibly can, that I love her, without limits and without end, and that I always will, and that love will see us through, no matter what else happens. Always. Love.

It doesn’t solve the problems we all face. But then, neither does God. I hope that it brings you some comfort, as it brings me some. I hope that it gives us all the strength to keep fighting towards our goals, and I hope it keeps us from hating those who fight against us, or at least in the opposite direction. I hope that the love in your life is enough to make you smile, as it is for me, even on a Monday morning.

Thank you for reading what I write. I won’t say I love you, because I don’t know you, but I love the fact of you and the existence of you, and what you give to me. Thank you.

Now go love!

Winning and Losing and Fighting

Dusty 1 Comment

I wrote this last night.

I just want to say that I have nothing to say.

My fiction has not had the appeal that I always hoped it would; I’m not sure if it’s more because my writing is boring and overly wordy, or because people have largely given up reading, or some combination of the two. But the point is that the ideas I come up with, which I think will get people to buy and read and talk about my books, don’t make any of those things happen.

I’ve also come to realize that, in almost all areas of life that I wish to write about, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I understand teaching well, and to some extent I understand writing and literature, but even there, I realize that I have only one of many perspectives on what I do, and I don’t think I have any real proof that my opinions are correct. I have suspicions that the same urge we all have to confirm and conform and support one another is the real reason why people tell me I teach well and write well.

This means  that I think there  is little reason for me to share my ideas. Those ideas are probably wrong, after all, and not well-written enough to be worth contributing just for the sake of  the eloquent prose and powerful rhetoric. I mostly just babble online, and the books show it. My essays show it. My audience shows it. My continued — shall we be generous and call it a “lack of success” rather than an abject failure? — lack of success shows it. I don’t know that I’ve ever convinced anyone of anything. I suppose I’ve been entertaining, though not on any scale that makes it worth doing.

So since I don’t know facts, and I don’t write lyrical prose, why would I say anything at all? Any time I think about picking a position and going for it, I think that doing so for the sake of fulfilling my urge to write creates an atmosphere of contentious disagreement, and if it’s not a strongly held conviction, then it feels like disagreement for an audience. Back to entertainment, and doing nothing good for my country — which I do love, by the way. But that’s not interesting. I don’t do that because nothing’s going to change my audience’s mind, so nothing I say is going to have any impact on the world. Et voila.

I have felt the urge to write. I don’t do well with not writing. I wanted to write tonight, about an argument that would be worth having. I thought about writing about Trump, but what I’ve seen for the past two years has shown  me that people, whether they agree or disagree  with Trump, will bend over backwards to show how they will never, ever, EVER, change their loyalty, no matter how many reasons they find to do exactly that. On both sides, too: if I were to write an essay praising Trump for what he has done well — engaging with North Korea and Kim Jong Un, maintaining the strong economy, even things like renegotiating NAFTA and getting NATO members to pay their fair share of the defense spending for the alliance — I’d get lectured on what he’s done that’s terrible (Too long a list to include). If I focused on the Naughty list, I’d get these things put forward as reasons why he’s done all the right things, and a dozen other angry disagreements about why I’m wrong and an unAmerican libtard. I don’t know that anyone would consider the points I’d raise, not least because I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.

If I stay away from politics, which would be fine with me, then what do I write about? Teaching? Ugh; talk about beating a dead horse. I don’t think I’ll ever again have an interesting or informative story about teaching that I haven’t already told. So what, then? My dogs? They’re lovely, but I don’t know anything about them other than what I observe, all of which has already been observed by anyone with dogs.  Talking about my family is taboo, especially if I were to try to air the dirty laundry that would make those stories interesting. I could try to write fiction — I am trying, still — but then we come right back to that whole “Your writing sucks and is boring” theory I’m operating with.

Again: I’m not trying to garner sympathy or affirmations. I’m trying to explain why I haven’t been writing, so that other people who are feeling like they don’t have anything to say that’s worth hearing can understand how I got to feel this way. I don’t know if it started with the failures of my fiction career (which are not shocking, as fiction writing is a damn hard business to break into) or if it came with my recent understanding that I am often wrong in my political views, that many of them come from my party loyalty rather than my own rational thought, and that plenty of my ideas are based on prejudice rather than reason. (That also is not a knock against myself: that is a description of how 99.9999% of us act about our own political views, which are generally wrong if not simply irrational. Though this is my own opinion, and as such is highly suspect, as it is based on little or no evidence, like all of my political opinions.)

I’m not sure what my point is. I was trying to write something more in line with my absurd argumentative holiday, but I couldn’t settle on a topic, and then I couldn’t get it going; I suspected that it was because this idea, that I am not fit to write and that my opinions are not worth being written, has permeated my thoughts more and more lately. It is possible I’m being too hard on myself. If so, I’m not sure how to fix it. Maybe if I can share my honest feelings and thoughts — and that, too, is difficult, as my honest opinions and thoughts are exactly what got me into trouble some years ago — then it will help me move past them.

Though I don’t know if there’s anything worth saying on the other side of these doubts, either.

I really don’t know much of anything.

I posted it, and then twenty minutes later, I took it down. I decided people didn’t really need to see my despondency, and while I said in there that I was trying to be honest so people could understand how I felt and how I got to be that way, that wasn’t really my intent; I was sad, and I was frustrated, and I was trying to write something. Anything.

It had already had some effect, though, because I know there are people who get email alerts from this blog which contain the posts, so it went out to those people, at least, and some of them might have read it. And it had some effect on me: by the end of writing this, I was thoroughly depressed, and by the time I went to bed, I was worse. I woke up at 2am thinking about this post, and about my life and my writing; it took me two hours to get back to sleep, and now here I am, first thing in the morning, writing this, rather than doing my usual check of Twitter and Facebook while I eat breakfast.

Here’s the thing: this is not true. I am not a bad writer. I am not a failure. I am not a fool. It’s true that I’m not an expert in the things that I write about, but I am damn good at research, at critical thinking, at deciding what facts to include and what to discard, and how to show a logical path of reasoning to a conclusion. That means I can write a good essay, which is pretty much all I write on this blog, apart from the book reviews (which are also good, I think). There’s nothing wrong and a lot right with my attempts to speak to truth in writing. I don’t have to already know the incontrovertible truth before I do that. In fact, there’s a reason for me not to know everything when I start writing: part of my intent is, as I claimed to be doing here, to show my thought process; I can’t do that as well if the thoughts are already done and set. Besides, even when I really am struggling to find an answer, that still doesn’t mean I can’t write an essay, and a good essay: because the word “essay” comes from the French for “attempt.” That’s what it is, and that’s what I do, and I do it well. Most of the time, I know that. As much as I know anything.

So what happened last night, that left me oozing melancholy onto this blog (My poor blog: you’ve taken so much from me, with never a word of complaint. Thank you for that.), is simply that I set myself an impossible goal. I picked a battle that I could not win, because I didn’t think it through before I started fighting. (There’s a reason I’m using war metaphors, instead of, say, “I set out on a journey I couldn’t complete because I didn’t know the destination, or the path.” That would work too, and if that makes more sense for you to describe a creative endeavor, then think of that, instead.) I decided that I had to write something last night. Had to be done on November 5th. No other option. I decided it in the late evening, around 7:00 or so, and by 8:00, I had — no ideas at all. I did an eminently stupid thing, which was to look on Twitter for possible inspiration; I honestly can’t think of a less inspiring place for genuine thoughts — unless  it’s  Facebook, where I also looked for ideas.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. I started writing something political, but I’ve had a lot of trouble determining my political stance lately — or maybe it’s my perspective — and so I question every potentially political statement I try to make. Happened last night, and I swiftly gave up on writing about politics. (Though that’s why it has a prominent place in the deluge above. That and I do think writing has the potential to make change, and politics is the thing in our society that needs the most changing, I think. Actually, maybe I’m wrong. You know, I’ve never really written about prejudice or hate. Hmm.)

That’s when I gave up. Surrendered. Decided I had nothing to write last night, and therefore, I had failed. And thus, in a stubborn attempt to write something, I wrote about my failure. But I didn’t do it well, which is why I took it down, and why I’m writing this now.

I did fail last night. But only because I was impatient. I created an artificial deadline for myself, and then collapsed when I couldn’t meet it. I think now (this is what I thought about between 2am and 4am) that this tendency to make up imaginary deadlines is a common practice, and not only for creatives; I think a lot of us do it a lot of the time. I have to be married with kids by 30 or 35. I have to have my dream job by 25. I have to be a millionaire by 40, or retired by 55. We pick essentially random points in the future, and we center our sights on it — and charge.

And miss.

On some level there’s nothing wrong with artificial deadlines like this, because it does keep us moving. It keeps us from putting today off for tomorrow, especially when today is the deadline. That’s a good thing, because despite what my students say, there is actually nothing at all good about procrastination. It’s understandable, but it’s never good. My students say they work better under pressure, but honestly, the pressure always comes from within: either you make the thing a priority, or you don’t, and if you do, there’s pressure to do it, and if you don’t, there’s not. Invented deadlines can be a way to convince your underbrain, that lazy lizardy bastard, that this thing is a priority NOW. There are plenty of times when I’ve sat down to write, telling myself I needed to find something to write about — and I have found something, and I’ve written, and it’s been fine, and I’ve won. Most of Damnation Kane was written that way, to be frank, especially the first book. I decided it was going to be a serial, I decided it was going to have a chapter published every Saturday by noon, and so every Saturday morning, I sat down and wrote a chapter.

The problem is what I did wrong last night: sometimes you pick a bad deadline, or a bad goal, and then when you miss it, you feel like a failure. Last night I shouldn’t have been writing. It was Monday: Monday’s a bad day to write. I should have been listening to music and grading vocabulary sentences. It was my own fault that I felt like a failure, because I didn’t create a way for me to succeed. I lost the battle with myself, with my writing, because I didn’t think enough about my strategy, about my plan of attack or my objectives, and so I didn’t win.

Why am I talking about writing like it’s a war? Because today is Election Day. And just as we set imaginary deadlines for ourselves in creative endeavors, so we do in politics, as well.

We’re going to be hearing a lot today about how this is the moment, this is the chance, this is the make or break, do or die, last hope for everything we believe in. I heard on the radio yesterday that today’s election will determine if this is Trump’s America, or not. I had the same reaction to that that I’m currently having to my own bullshit (That was what I was trying to write about last night before I gave up on politics), which is: that’s fucking nonsense.

So let me be clear. Today is a battle. Last night was a battle for me. Neither last night for me, nor today for this country, is the end of the war. I didn’t write something useful last night; here I am, less than twelve hours later, writing something I am much more pleased with (Though it still may not be a victory. It probably never is, which is where the military metaphor fails. I used it to make the analogy to politics, is all.). If this election goes badly — and I mean that, in all sincerity, for people of any and all political positions, because this election, like all of our politics right now, is so supercharged and combative that any result is going to be heartbreaking for one side or the other, if not both — the most important thing in the world to realize and remember is: there is another election in two years. (We should also remember that politics is not all of life, but that’s a different subject.)

The truth is this: the struggle never ends. Never. We win small battles, we lose small battles — usually only when we surrender, especially when the battle’s with ourselves — but we always keep fighting. The victories that progressives have had in the last fifty years have built up the fighting spirit on the conservative side, and that gave us the current situation; that situation is now building up the fighting spirit on the progressive side. That’s maybe even the way it has to be. It’s almost physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and so the pendulum swings, and then swings back, and the farther it goes in one direction, the harder and faster the return swing is going to be. There’s nothing — nothing — that can happen that will end the swinging of the pendulum, other than the death of all humanity. (Which is a fair possibility, of course, and the one that should probably have the most urgency to it, because those deadlines aren’t so artificial.) If Trump was actually Hitler (He’s not) and he took over the country in a fascist dictatorship, then there would be a rebellion, there would be a war, there would be an overthrow. The struggle would continue, and eventually, it would move the other way. There would be untold suffering in the meantime, and I don’t mean to say the struggle doesn’t matter, therefore: what doesn’t matter is the deadlines.

In a creative endeavor like my writing, there is no end. I’ll never be such a great writer that I don’t feel the need to get better. I’ll never write a work so fantastic that I’ll never want to write something even more fantastic. I will at some point write something that I can’t beat, but I’ll always want to. I will want to keep writing until I die, whether I am successful or not, whether I achieve what I want to achieve when I want to achieve it, or not. The struggle — the journey — will always go on.

Last night I decided there was an end to the fight, at least in the immediate sense. And I picked the wrong end, and I failed. I am going to try not to make that mistake again; when it’s a bad night for writing, I just won’t write, even if I told myself that I would. My ambitions have to bend to reality, not the other way around.

Let’s all try to remember that today, okay? Today may be a chance to achieve what we want to achieve. And it may not be the right time yet. Maybe things have to get a little worse before they get better — whatever you think “worse” or “better” means for this country. But today is not the end. Tomorrow we will still have to fight, even if we win today.

Tomorrow I’ll still want to write. Today, I won.

Now I’m going to go vote, and hope. And stay ready.

This is NSFW. And Trump is a POS.

Dusty 3 Comments

So I wrote a blog, 2000 words, about how I’m unhappy with the way things are going because some things are going well, and I don’t want Trump to get credit for that because he isn’t the reason things are going well, but if we give him credit, we may end up with more people like him doing the things he’s done, because they’ll point at Trump as a success story. And I do think that’s a problem.

But you know what? That’s not what I want to say right now. That’s not the blog I want to post.

What I want to say right now is

Fuck Trump.

 

Fuck him all the way out the door and down the steps, fuck him rolling down the street and around the corner, fuck him all the way to the sewage treatment plant: then fuck Trump into the collection tanks, and fuck him step by step through the process, with the rest of the chunky liquified shit until he has been treated, emulsified, centrifuged, disinfected, milled, filtered, diluted, and sprayed onto his own fucking golf course to make the greens grow. And then let a blind man tee off over and over until he has turned the entire green, watered with Liquid Trump, into broken divots. Then mulch those, feed them to free-range farm pigs, let them turn the grass into chunky liquid pig-shit: and then run him through the process all over again. Keep doing that until there aren’t any more Trump golf courses. If at any point we feel there isn’t enough Trump-taint in the gray water, then throw in his fucking kids. (The grown ones; I got no problem with Barron. Or Tiffany.)

I’ve tried so hard. I’ve realized in the past couple of years that my loyalty to liberal, progressive politics, and especially to the Democratic Party, has been unthinking and in some cases counter to my actual desires and values. Not a lot; I still agree with most liberal progressive ideas. But I think political correctness is a blight on the language and the culture; and honestly, while I love animals, passing laws and regulations to limit human progress or achievement in order to save a rare form of tadpole that lives in one stream in Wyoming is stupid – the world will not be a lesser place if the Greater Wyoming red-speckled spiral-tailed hovering-footed tadpole goes extinct. Mainly, though, there’s one thing – and only one thing – that Trump was right about: Washington is a swamp. Both parties are corrupt, incompetent, filled with narcissistic sociopaths who serve themselves and their cronies and not the American people. I’m not too far away from saying that all of our government should go into the sewage with the President.

I am still trying to decide where I should land politically. I want to remain an idealist, which would throw me all the way to the left; but I also want to be practical and realistic, and that pushes me towards the center. Choosing either one seems like a betrayal of the other: and that’s a result of our political morass, as well, that there are purity tests, that people on the same side turn on each other in a heartbeat if they can find a tender place to sink their claws. We saw it with Sanders supporters versus the DNC and the Clinton campaign, and we’ve seen it for years with the Tea Party and how it has destroyed what used to be the Republican party, resulting in – President Shit-spray. Part of me wants everyone to agree, so we can all move in one direction; but I realize – and this is my big epiphany of the last couple of years of learning how to think more about my politics – that when everyone agrees, it doesn’t lead to good results. We get the best ideas, the best policies, the best country out of a constant and honest debate. The worst thing that our two political parties have done is surrender that ideal in favor of winning. That’s why we have legal partisan gerrymandering, inculcated for decades by both sides; that’s why we haven’t gotten rid of Citizens United, or passed campaign finance reform or term limits or strict controls on lobbyists and corporate influence of politicians. They all stopped trying to do a good job, and focused on just keeping the job. I know that’s always been a factor, but it seems to have become the only factor. One of my biggest surprises of the last two years of the Feces Administration was the sudden onrush of respect for Jeff freaking Flake, a cardboard cutout of a Republican who nonetheless resigned rather than suck up to Trump. (I suspect that he is going to continue on in politics, using his resignation from the Senate as a stepping stone for his next ambition; but he hasn’t done so yet, so as of now, I still respect the man for his decision. Integrity over politics. When was the last time that happened?)

So how do I reconcile that? Practically speaking, the way forward is with a party; because I am not a piece of shit, that means I have to support the Democratic party.

I’m sorry for those that offends. I have actually gained quite a lot of respect for the GOP and the conservative ideals they have historically espoused; the attraction of the moderate political position for me is it allows for that honest debate I mentioned which leads to the best possible outcome, that pull between two poles, both with merit, but both improved by being pulled towards the other – liberal ideas are better with a strong inner structure of conservative reality, and conservative ideas are better with a leavening of liberal idealism. The Republican party has served that role, and for a long time, and in a lot of ways, it has done so honorably, and therefore made our country better. But right now, and for the immediately foreseeable future, the Republican party is the party of Trump. Which means it’s the party of shit. You can’t hold up a 300-pound piece of shit and not get your hands dirty, you just can’t. And I don’t even care if he’s having a positive effect, if the economy grows and North Korea disarms and all that jazz: shit makes flowers grow, which is lovely: but it’s still shit. The best thing I can say about the current state of the union is that I hope it makes the land fertile again. Actually, the metaphor might hold true, because confronting the truth of Trump has made us all look much more closely at our political situation, and it is possible that we will get some genuinely good results after this shit-storm has passed. But now is not the future, and now, Trump is shit, and that means the Republicans are shit, because they back Trump. Period.

Where was I? Oh, right. So, if I want to get results, I have to support Democrats. I mean, sure, I could try to become an anarchist, or a pure Socialist, or something along those lines; there’s an attraction in that, in the purity of the ideas. But in reality, there’s no chance of changing the political situation in any way without one of the two major parties. Ignoring reality means people get hurt. I don’t want to hurt people: it’s kind of my main thing. (Note: I recognize the seeming irony of my rant about grinding our President into gray water while saying I don’t want people to get hurt, but you see, shit isn’t people. I don’t mind if shit gets hurt. [Second note: I’m kidding. I don’t want any harm to come to Mr. Trump. I want him out of office and living in the disgrace that he deserves. I’d like him to live like that for a long, long time.]) I want practical solutions to our immediate problems, all of them chosen and thought out with a positive ideal in constant sight; for that, I need to be involved in actual practical politics with real people in this country. A perfect example of this is Bernie Sanders: who was a Socialist, and then an Independent (Which he only got away with because he represented Vermont, even though he’s from New York), and then ran for the Democratic party nomination for President. That’s an idealist working with practical reality, and that’s why he would have had my vote if I could have voted for him. Another perfect example of someone who creates practical solutions while keeping an ideal firmly in mind is Elizabeth Warren, who I would vote for over any other potential candidate in 2020 with the possible exception of Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. On the other hand, the Democratic party is also the party of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and they, from what I have seen, either  stick to the ideals, but give very little in the way of practical solutions – this is how Schumer has handled Trump, and it’s honorable, but it’s not slowing down the spray of shit – or else they surrender the ideals for the sake of practicality, as happened with the ACA when they removed the public option, which was the whole freaking point of the thing, the loss of which has made it useless, and, eventually, a political liability.

Sorry if that got muddy: it’s hard to stay clear when talking about politics. My point is that the idealism is necessary: purely practical compromise ends up losing its way and accomplishing nothing of lasting value; at the same time, practicality is necessary, because pure idealism doesn’t accomplish anything in the first place. Everyone already has their own ideals, and they’re mostly not mine. It’s too hard to get everyone to agree with the same ideals – impossible, in truth, unless you go full Big Brother and set up the Thought Police. This is what upsets me about the struggles within the Democratic/progressive wing, that we are all fighting each other over our ideas, refusing to accept or support people who don’t have all – and I mean ALL – of the right ideas. The fact that the big criticism of Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign was that he didn’t have a lot of support from minorities shows two things: the important one is that the Democratic party has given up its ideals, which means it has ceased to do good work for minorities in this country, which has left them smothered under the shit this country has piled atop them for centuries (Though fortunately, they seem to have found their own power and are clawing their own way out of the shit of history) and therefore Sanders could not simply pull in minority support by virtue of running as a Democrat; the entirely unimportant one is that Bernie Sanders is a white guy from a white state, and therefore has not had a lot of connection with, or influence on, the situation facing minority Americans. And if that made anyone refuse to vote for Sanders, then it helped give rise to the Shitpile-in-Chief; and that is a travesty. (I’m not saying that Democratic infighting led to Trump’s election, just that any vote that was lost because of the infighting is a specific, individual travesty. People that don’t support the Democrats at all, who are Greens or Libertarians or Socialists and so voted according to their conscience, that isn’t a travesty. But it may not have been practical.) A travesty that happened because people hung too much on the power of their ideals, and ignored practicality; ideally, a President should have a strong connection with all of their constituents; practically speaking, Bernie Sanders was the best candidate in 2016.

So here I am. I can support my ideals, and allow the shit to continue polluting this wonderful country; or I can support a party that keeps electing poor leaders: and I do think, in retrospect, that Clinton would have been one of those bad leaders. She’s not a piece of shit, and so would have been a VAST improvement; but I think she has very little personal connection to the ideals of progressivism. She’s too practical to be really great. I still wish she had won. Man, wouldn’t it be nice if all we were dealing with was a president who wasn’t progressive enough?

But all right, here we are with the shit. And no matter who you are or what your ideals, accept this as gospel truth: Trump is shit. The way he attacks everyone he disagrees with, the way he lies about everything, the way every single issue becomes a reflection only and always of him personally – the man is a piece of shit vaguely in the shape of a human. The most recent outrage is the separation of families at the border – intentional and callous and unforgivably cruel, and we all know it – and his attempt to defend it by holding an Exploit-a-thon, where he paraded out the family members of people murdered by immigrants, like that changes the statistics (which clearly show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes despite some terrible exceptions), like that has anything to do with the family separation policy, like that’s anything other than cheap, heartless sensationalism intended to stir up racist fears in Middle America.

He signed the pictures. Did you see that? He signed the blown-up photos of the goddamn murder victims. Look.

And look, another Trump signature.

Clear as day: Trump's signature.

[Source]

Think what your brain has to be like to let you make that conscious decision to do that. Repeatedly, because he seems to have signed all of them, and at no point did he think, “Jesus, what am I doing? Who the fuck would want my autograph on the picture of their dead loved one? Is this really a memento they want? Will they want to remember this hoopla at all?” No, I’ll tell you what he thought: he thought, “These people want to use their grief to win political points, just like I do; I should thank them for letting me use them. Then they can frame this picture and tell their friends how they volunteered to become ghouls for the sake of bolstering up a racist piece of shit.”

So that’s where we are, and the cold, hard truth is this: it isn’t over. Trump is still President. And he’s just going to get worse. And I think the Republicans are going to keep supporting him, because too many of the heartless conservative bastards in charge, the ones who have no connection to the ideals they claim to serve but think only of practicality – the counterparts to Pelosi and Schumer and Clinton and Reid, namely McConnell and Ryan and Lindsey Graham, and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, and the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson and the rest of them – are willing to use Trump as their dancing monkey to distract us all while they pull the country all the way over to their side, strap us all to their pole, and whip us with a leather crop made from the tanned hide of Ayn Rand. (That is to say: break the federal government, give all of the money to the rich and let the poor die – unless they’re in the military. No, wait; they still die, then.) And the closer we get to that pole, to that extreme end of the spectrum where there is nothing but a red so deep it looks black, the faster Trump will have to dance and the louder he’ll have to scream and the more shit he’ll have to fling to draw our attention away from the straps being tied around us and the crack of the Rand-whip. I think that his final act will be a terribly protracted fight over his impeachment, which will probably finish breaking the political system – it will be a miracle, by the way, if the last pieces of the filibuster rule make it through this administration; and it is truly worth noting that the first attacks on the filibuster rule came from the Democrats – and which may end in Trump’s removal from office, but will also end with the final slate of conservative goals being checked off, one by one.

Not only do I want to get rid of the piece of shit, but I also want to stop the heartless money-zombies from fucking everything up that Trump doesn’t shit on. And therefore, I will be supporting the Democratic party, and voting for Democratic candidates, even if they choose the wrong ones. I hope they choose the right ones – but whoever they are, they won’t be pieces of shit, and therefore they get my vote.

Join me in voting against shit this November, and in every election until the final collapse of Trump.

And then after we finally manage that, we’ll have a lot of work to do. And a lot of thinking, as well. We have work to do now, but it doesn’t take any thought. Shit is bad. Let’s flush it away, and wash our hands.

Please.

Book Review: Platinum Magic by Bruce Davis

Dusty 1 Comment

Davis Platinum 150

Platinum Magic

by Bruce Davis

 

I recently bought four small-press novels at the Tucson Festival of Books; I’ve read three of them so far, and though I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, I have to say: I’m one for three. Two of those books are clearly self-published, because no publishing house, agent, or editor would take these books on: the writing isn’t good, the stories aren’t very good, the characters are terrible.

This one, however, is the good one.

All of those elements are, in this book, well done. The writing is quite good, the story is a lot of fun, the characters are excellent if a bit cliché. The best part of this book, actually, is the world-building: that’s often a sort of weak praise, as many authors – of all levels, professional, amateur, self-published or NYT bestsellers – specialize in the world-building more than the writing. I understand; the world-building is the fun part: you get to make stuff up, fix the problems you see in our world, add interesting things. It’s great, and a lot of authors let their imaginations run wild, usually without considering whether or not the world they create is at all realistic or plausible, or a good place to put a story – the Eragon series is a prime example of this, I think. Christopher Paolini wrote the first book when he was a teenager, and it reads like it: dragons are cool! Magic is cool! Sword-fighting is cool! And the hero (a teenaged boy – weird how that works) masters all three things in short order, and then flies off on his dragon to kick the world’s ass. Cool!

But also, lame.

Anyway, enough of other, worse books: Davis has done an excellent job with this world he’s created. He’s turned our world into a magic world – or perhaps a magic world into our world. The main characters are cops, investigating a murder case that has larger implications; and while those cops are dwarves and half-elves, and they use repeating crossbows rather than firearms, they still function like cops, in a world with precinct politics and public pressures and corruption and everything else that cops actually deal with. In some ways, this reads like a police procedural, just in a fantasy world. It reminded me quite a bit of Glen Cook’s Garret, P.I., series, in that the familiar tropes are put into an unfamiliar situation, and bring those old cliches to new life by doing so.

And just like the Cook series, this book has deep roots: there are political implications to the case these cops are investigating, and the political tensions between races and nations are built on a long history which slowly unfolds over the course of the book, just as it would in a novel with a real-world setting; that was well done. Though I will say that this element was also the source of my one complaint: though I appreciated Davis’s ability to avoid pages and pages of explication of his world’s history and politics, I was also quite confused early on in the story, as there were references made to old political alliances and upheavals that had strong implications in the story’s present, and I didn’t know what the hell the characters were talking about, which was annoying for a while. But it did all become clear in the end, so it was only a temporary annoyance.

I liked the mystery, particularly the twist Davis puts on it – no spoilers, but the perpetrators were involved with interdimensional travel and smuggling, which allowed Davis to step outside his own world, and gave a great surprise in the final conflict – and I really liked the characters, especially the main two cops, Simon Buckley and Haldron Stonebender. I thought the romance was a little too pat, a little too cliché, but it was sweetly written, nonetheless; Davis makes a nice point about love between different races which I liked. And I loved the use of orcs in this as second-class citizens, despised by the more powerful races, treated with deep suspicion and contempt by the cops, forced into ghettoes and menial labor and crime. Davis does what good fantasy should do: make a point about our world through the use of a fantasy lens that focuses our attention in a way that a more familiar setting might not be able to. He does it well, without making his allegory too on-the-nose; he just writes a good story, with some themes that should ring true even to those of us who aren’t part elven.

This book alone was worth the purchase of all four. I would definitely recommend it.

 

(The book is available here, if you’re interested; since this is the publisher, I expect the author gets the biggest return from this site’s sales.)