Tag quarantine

Where Is This Going?

Dusty 1 Comment

Last week, I had no words; it was the end of the school year: when I have to grade everything, when I am not sleeping, when I am frustrated with my students every damn day, when I have to say goodbye to people I like and appreciate, either for the summer or forever. So I posted pictures instead.

The week before that, I was sad; so I wrote about being sad — and I got some…reactions. I’m glad that my writing reached people, and affected people, so that is overall a good thing; and talking about being sad led to more conversations about sadness, which is also a good thing. But it was hard to write that post, and hard to have the conversations afterwards; this shows why it’s important to talk about emotions, particularly negative emotions, so those conversations can get easier for all of us — but I didn’t (and don’t) want to write about all of that again, which was also why I didn’t post last week. The end of the school year is depressing, and that’s not what I wanted to write about.

But now? Now it’s summertime. At last. I have been work-free for two days (Almost. I had one student write to ask why they had not gotten a grade on a paper they claimed to have turned in, and one student whom I have been asking to turn things in so I can give them a passing grade. But both of those are minor tasks, both resolved in a matter of minutes — and both finished, now.), and so I have read my book, and I have walked my dogs, and I have played Minecraft. I have napped. It has been lovely.

So now I feel like I can find some time to put together some words that aren’t just a cri de coeur, or packaged a thousand at a time into a picture. Some of those words are definitely going to go into my book: because by God I am going to finish my third pirate novel, and wrap up the Damnation Kane series — the first series I will complete in my writing career. But some of the words can come here, I think.

So. What shall I write about?

Part of me wants to write about how much nicer it is to be relaxed and happy than to be stressed and sad; but that’s really pretty stupid. Because of course it is nicer. Nobody needs to hear that from me. And some people would probably be bothered hearing that from me, because they might have to think about how they are not relaxed and happy, and then they might feel bad for not being relaxed and happy. Also, I’m not simply nor entirely relaxed and happy. So we won’t be talking about that.

Part of me thinks I should review the political book that I read, which I said I would be reviewing; but I’m not sure that’s important. I have noticed, in looking at the stats for this blog, that my old book reviews and essays are by far the most popular posts over time; that some of my personal weekly essays get a lot of views, but the book reviews (like this one) and essays about books (like this one) are the ones that people keep coming back for, month after month; but those are about popular books, not political books — and not political books that are almost two decades out of date, which didn’t change the power of the book’s message, but did leave me wishing it was more current. Which probably means that fewer people will want to read this particular book with each passing year. So I don’t know how many people want to read my thoughts on that book; and I don’t think I could have fun with the review, as I did with the two linked above. So I think I will probably let it go, and maybe write a review of the next book I’m going to read — Slaughterhouse Five, which I am re-reading for the first time in a decade or two, as part of a book swap with my former student, the one who got me to re-read and actually appreciate John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

But that’s later. For now, right now, what have I got to write about?

I’ve got it. Let’s review this past school year.

This Should Be Good GIFs | Tenor

Now, I haven’t moved far enough past this school year to be able to judge it fairly and logically; also, I don’t think it a good idea to take an entire segment of either life or education and boil it down to a simple rating out of five. (Because grades are garbage…) I just want to give some of my thoughts and impressions of this past year.

First of all, some of the good things: my wife came back to work at my school again this year. That is one of the best things that could ever happen, because my wife is my favorite person in the world; every time I get to see her at work, it makes my day better. This year I got to ride in to work with her every single day. I got to walk her to her classroom. I got to help her with tasks at school. When she left (Early in the day, because she only worked part time, exactly as she wanted to), she would usually stop by my classroom to say goodbye; it made my morning better, every single time. It’s also good because my wife is an excellent teacher, and I’m happy for the students who got to take her classes; even though not all of them appreciated it. She’s coming back next year, but with an even better schedule, because for the first time in her five years of teaching (Not counting her years of work as a sub, or her summer school experience, or the internship program she helped run and the computer skills class she taught as part of that program — want to know why she’s an excellent teacher? Because in addition to being a brilliant and sensitive and honest person, and in addition to knowing every single little thing about her subject, she has a ton of actual experience teaching. Unlike the administrators who give us our performance evaluations every year. BUT ANYWAY.) she will not be teaching middle school students who are all shoved into a mandatory art class that most of them don’t want. It’s awful to try to teach a subject to someone who doesn’t care about it and so doesn’t care if they learn or not, or if they pass or not; it’s especially tough when you love the subject and know the great value it can bring to lives, as my wife loves art, and as I love English.

Another good thing: in addition to the mandatory English classes I’ve always taught to students who don’t always want to learn English (It’s not as bad for me as it is for her: because I teach high school, not middle school. Middle schoolers are demons. My students are just annoying.), I got to teach my first elective this past year. It was a class in fantasy and science fiction literature, and though there were definitely some missteps, overall it went wonderfully well. It was fantastic to be able to select books because they mean something to my world as a nerd and a writer, rather than because they have lessons I think are important for students to learn; and the books I chose, though something of a mixed bag, generally went over quite well. I actually got a whole class full of students to read four complete novels this year, something I haven’t been able to do in the last two decades. They wrote short stories, and they participated in both discussions and in reading — and I didn’t give a single test. For the whole year. It was wonderful. It was also outstanding to feel vindicated in my choice of M.T. Anderson’s fantastic dystopian novel Feed, which I wanted to teach to my regular classes but was told I could not (Because the book uses dirty words, though with a clear and effective purpose), so I taught it to this class — and they loved it. And were deeply affected by it. One of my better teaching experiences.

(Lessons learned, by the way, from my missteps: The War of the Worlds is a seminal science fiction classic, but it is also as boring as snail snot. And Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a fantastic book, and an important book: but it is not much of a science fiction book. And it’s damn hard to read, because it does such a good job of depicting American chattel slavery. I think next year I will teach The Time Machine, and maybe Fahrenheit 451, and maybe Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

Another good thing: all of my best teacher friends were all around me this year, and they all helped support me; and they’re all coming back next year. I have an excellent group of teacher friends at the school, and that makes a world of difference in the teaching experience. As important as it was to me to have my wife there every day, these wonderful people are critical to my survival and stability as a teacher and a person. Thank you Lisa, Aleksandra, Danielle, Scott, and Toni (whom all the teachers refer to as “Not your Toni”) — and let’s add Carrie and Anasazi to the group, shall we? Thank you all for your friendship.

I also had a number of wonderful students this year, both academically and personally, and I think, despite my constant self-doubts, that I was able to help most of them to get better, to learn and improve, to grow as people and as readers and writers. Even though I teach because I need the income, it means quite a lot to me that I can teach well, that I can have an impact on my students, that I can make their futures better, their lives fuller, by imparting to them curiosity and insight and some of my passion for language and literature. That happened this year — it doesn’t always — and I am grateful that it did.

All right, so those are the good things.

YARN | you're still thinking about the bad news, aren't you. | The Office (UK) (2001) - S01E06 Drama | Video clips by quotes | 7e789b6c | 紗

The main thing that went badly this year was something I’ve hinted at in the good news: my friends, my wife, and I are all returning to the same school next year. Which is remarkable (as in something about which I can remark) because there are so many others who are not returning. Out of a staff of 38, there are TEN people who are not returning. More than 25%. I don’t want to get into too much detail about this, about the reasons for people leaving, because it would cross a line I don’t want to cross, in that I would end up criticizing my school for things I think they have done wrong, and I would have to do it in a specific and even personal way; but the real essential reason for everyone who is leaving is the same: teachers are not valued commensurate with our effort and our worth. We are not paid enough, not supported enough, not cared for enough. Some of my fellow staff members are being actively devalued, and some have simply grown fed up with not being valued enough; but the result is clear: the school is going to change. Maybe in some cases the replacements will be better, sure — but not in all cases. In the years I have been at this school, and more broadly in the years that I have been a teacher, I have watched teachers and staff members come and go; and it seems to me that in all cases, over time, the staff replacements have been for the worse. Partly that’s because teachers who care get better with experience, all the way up to the point where we get so bitter and jaded that we give up, and then we become much worse; so improvement generally happens with teachers who stay, not teachers who leave and are replaced; but part of that is because good teachers quit when they aren’t valued, and new people coming into the profession are not always good teachers, just by the law of averages. Now they’re not even coming into the profession: we had one position that just never really got filled this year, instead being temporarily patched by a string of substitutes; maybe they’ll fill that spot with a full-time teacher next year. Or maybe they won’t, and the students will suffer again with subs. Maybe, if they find someone, that teacher will even be a good teacher, or someone who may become a good teacher over time.

And maybe they won’t.

It’s hard to watch your school get worse. I feel bad for the students who come here. Not because they get a bad education; I think we still provide what we always have, a generally good and useful education with some definite holes. Partly that’s because there are still teachers who are staying, and who have gotten better over their years of teaching — and yes, I am one of those — and partly it’s because there have always been holes, always been areas where we lack (Arts, along with CTE and practical skills classes, have always been the most glaring lack at my small charter school, and it is the reason why probably 10% of our students leave the school every year to go to larger schools with more programs. Our graduating class every year is half the size of our incoming class.), so the holes are shifting more than they are growing. When I came to the school, they had an incredibly strong math department; now we have an incredibly strong English department. I don’t think one or the other of those is better or worse: they’re just different strengths. (Okay, the strong English department is better. Because math sucks.)

But though we still do our jobs, it’s getting harder. Because the problems exist which are driving teachers away. Every year it gets more and more tempting to follow them, and that means that every year, it gets more strenuous to stay where I am. I’m getting tired of fighting to survive at my school, fighting to overcome the bad policies, the bad atmosphere, the bad personalities that all contribute to the decision so many people have made to leave. I hope things start to get better, at some point. I really do. But in the meantime, I feel bad for the students because their school is in a constant state of flux. It makes them uncertain, of course, and it takes away their relationships and replaces the familiar teachers with a string of new faces. It strikes me that, every year, the students ask me if I will be there next year. Even the seniors ask this, so it’s not only because they want to take my class, or even to see me in the hall; they just want to know that I will still be there, because I am part of their school as they understand it.

The second thing that was difficult this school year was the students. Hold on, hold on: I’m not going to complain about how the students are getting worse; they’re not. I’m also not going to complain about how the students are the root cause of every problem with education — though they are, of course; I say all the time that this job would be a breeze if it weren’t for the students.

Schools See Big Drop in Attendance as Students Stay Away, Citing Covid-19 - WSJ
See how neat that room looks? How peaceful? Just a teacher by themselves, working on a computer. Bliss.

No, the trouble with students this year was that the students were troubled. I think I have to write about this in more depth, and before I do that I need to talk to a couple of my former students, and get their opinions on how school has been for them; but I think we don’t really know the harm that was done by the pandemic and the quarantine. I do also recognize that it’s too easy to point to that enormous black cloud, the crater that it left in our landscape, and blame it for all the problems we face; I don’t think the pandemic experience is the only factor influencing students today, or the root of all the problems in education, any more than I think students themselves are the root of all the problems in education today.

But it happened. And it happened to these kids. And I think for them, it changed — everything.

All students are different. I tend to think that the trends my fellow teachers always see in the students are generally false. For instance, it has frequently been observed to me that this class or that class is a “bad” class, or a tough class; and my experience has rarely been the same as what my colleagues have told me it would be, based on their experience. I’m sure it goes the other way, too: I have in the past warned my fellow teachers about students and classes I’ve had trouble with, and frequently those students and classes have been great for my colleagues. Because the problem is not that the students are bad: it’s that not every student works well with every teacher, and not every teacher handles everything the best way, nor does every student. Bad circumstances can sour a working relationship very quickly, and often it never really sweetens.

But see, I think that’s part of what happened with the pandemic and the quarantine. The schools didn’t handle it properly. I’m not sure there was a way to handle it properly: my Republican countrymen would argue that schools should have stayed open, but I think there’s no reasonable argument that such a policy would not have led to a hell of a lot more sickness, and that would have had a negative impact on students as well. So I don’t mean to find fault with what we did or how we did it; we did our best. But the reality is that it didn’t work. Teaching a class on Zoom is simply not effective: not when the teachers and students are familiar and comfortable with in-person learning. It’s a separate question whether Zoom made the situation better or worse; it seems to me that simply cancelling school entirely for six months or a year would have been worse — but there’s an argument to be made that giving everyone a break would have been better, and the students could have come back to where they left off, and simply graduated a year later, and so what? I’m a fan of gap years. If I could have used that year to prepare, on my own, for the next year’s classes, my God, what I would have achieved. On the other hand, in that scenario, social isolation would have been much, much worse; I can largely ignore that because I live with my best friend and my four favorite animal friends; but I recognize that many of my students would have suffered even more without being able to hear friendly voices and see friendly faces every day, even if it was just on a screen.

But the gap year, or bulling ahead through sickness, is not what we did. What we did was try our best to pretend that nothing was wrong: when everything was wrong. The students were miserable; the teachers were miserable; the entire world was miserable. The transmission of education online did not work: students were bored and constantly distracted. Teachers were frustrated and floundering. So the result is that teachers lost confidence, because we watched ourselves suck at our jobs for an entire year; students lost faith in schools, because they watched schools fail them for an entire year, and they also lost faith in themselves, because when they were entrusted with the responsibility of being at school while they weren’t at school, they pretty much all failed to live up to it. That is not an insult: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I would have spent the entire school year at home stoned and playing video games while pretending to do my work, if there had been a quarantine while I was a student. The point is that students should never have been given that responsibility. They weren’t ready for it, and so they were set up for failure: and they failed. At the same time, the schools failed: and the students were shown what was behind the curtain of the schools. They saw that their teachers are not wizards, but, too often, traveling salesmen trying desperately to maintain a facade. The advantage we teachers have always had is that, frequently, just like the Wizard of Oz, the facade is enough: students are able to learn enormous amounts on their own, so if I can give them a poem which I myself don’t understand, and then just seem wise when I say, “Well what do YOU think it means?” Students have been able to pull real knowledge and improvement out of that — which knowledge they frequently then teach me. So as long as students had faith that we were really guiding them in the right direction, we were able to move them in the right direction even if we didn’t actually know the path ourselves. Because students could find the way.

But students saw that we couldn’t always get it right, that we didn’t always know the answer: and I think they don’t trust us any more. Combine that with their knowledge, gained from a year so far out in the wilderness that a path forward didn’t exist, and so they couldn’t get anywhere no matter how fast they ran in circles, that they themselves can’t always come up to snuff (This is not true, by the way — but there’s a certain amount of faith, which requires a certain amount of innocence, and these kids don’t have it, for the same reason: they realized that their ruby slippers are just shoes, with no magic at all, and that means they don’t have the ability to make the magic happen. The magic is still there, where it always has been, inside them; but if they don’t believe in it, they’ll never achieve it.), and the constant drumbeat all around in our society these days about how school is maybe not necessary and maybe even bad, how college is maybe not necessary and definitely too expensive — and who could blame them for giving up a little? Or a lot?

So what we have, what we had this year, is a school full of students who maybe don’t see the point of school, and so maybe they don’t do their part. They don’t do their assignments. They don’t pay attention in school. What’s more — what’s made this year much harder — they don’t really care about their grades, or about passing and graduating, no matter what their teachers say. They maybe don’t care as much about what their teachers say, either about the subject matter or about what’s important in life. Because they lost faith in us, and in schools, and in themselves. This is not true of all of them, I have to say; we always have students who are successful, and those show that the school system is not lost, is not entirely broken; but there are a lot of students now who don’t seem to see the point. And as a teacher, there’s nothing harder to deal with than students who don’t see the point.

I would like to apologize to all of my former teachers for what I put them through: because I was one of those kids. I must have been hell to deal with, for a lot of them. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’m getting my just desserts now.

Payback GIFs | Tenor

So that has been this past year. It should be no wonder that I had a tough time with it. It should also be no wonder that so many of my colleagues are leaving now, that so many teaching jobs are hard to fill, and getting harder. I don’t mean to excuse my school, to put all the blame for the departures on the bad situation with the students; my school has made the problem much, much worse. But what’s more important is that the schools, and the teachers, and everyone else involved — including themselves — we all have to try not to make the situation worse for the students. Because they don’t have a lot of options. They don’t have a lot of opportunities to learn what they need to learn. If they can’t do it now, they may never get it right. And the more years they go through without succeeding, by their standards or ours, the harder it will get to actually succeed. If we keep failing them, we fail.

And then what?

How bad could it actually get?

Boy, good thing I didn’t write about sad things this week, huh?

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What We Need In Education: Time and Hope and Change. But mostly time.

Dusty 1 Comment

Okay, I had two preliminary thoughts this morning, which I want to get to before I dive into the main subject, because both thoughts are pertinent. (And then I came here to write this, and had a third thought, which is — holy crap, there are people reading this blog? Hundreds of people?! When did that happen?!? Welcome, and I’m sorry I haven’t been posting regularly, and I will do my very best to change that. Feel free to check out my years of archives, linked on the sidebar. Also you can go to my website and see my other projects. And a picture of me with a sloth.)

The first thought is in regards to what is happening in the world right now. Russia has invaded the Ukraine, and there are people fighting and dying; I thought it would be awful of me, entirely selfish and exhibiting “blinkered, Philistine pig-ignorance” to quote the great Monty Python, to write about really anything other than that crisis. I keep seeing fluff items in my news feed, things like what Meghan Markle wore to the NAACP Spirit Awards, and I keep thinking, “Man, they’re still going ahead with that kind of thing? Now? When Russia has invaded the Ukraine?” So surely I wouldn’t be so tone deaf to the suffering of others to write something about teaching in the US today? Especially if I wrote something hopeful and positive in tone?

But that’s not fair. First of all, there is literally nothing I can do about Russia and the Ukraine. I don’t think I need to do anything to raise awareness; I’m confident that anyone reading this blog already knows, and most of you certainly know more than I do about this. I may have something to say about it, being a dedicated pacifist, because this is exactly the point where pacifism becomes questionable, when there is violence instigated by a clear aggressor, acting without provocation; does that make it acceptable to fight back against that violence? Recognizing that allowing violence to continue — well, it allows violence to continue; being pacifistic while people are fighting and killing doesn’t reduce the amount of violence in the world, and arguably, if fighting against those who are violent would end their violent aggression, it might reduce overall violence in the world. At the same time, I have to honor the choice of dedicated pacifists like devotees of Buddhism who refuse to fight back when attacked: maybe they have the right idea.

Most importantly, though? There is always suffering in the world. There is always violence, and atrocity. And while we certainly shouldn’t turn a blind eye, neither can we let the suffering of others, no matter how terrible and heartbreaking, stop us from living our own lives, and doing what we can to alleviate suffering about which we can do something. If I can help make life a little easier for myself, for my friends and family, for my fellow teachers and my fellow countrymen, then that is a good thing to do, even if it doesn’t help people currently being bombed by Vladimir Putin’s stormtroopers. It’s good to spread hope, and to promote progress on the problems that face the world today, both the existential crises and the slower, less obviously catastrophic concerns: like the state of education. The fact that people are dying doesn’t change the need to make the American education system better, or to maybe help teachers feel a little better about our world right now.

So I’m going to go ahead. For real, and I’m sorry this took so many words for me to get to the subject. And no, I haven’t forgotten that there were two preliminary thoughts: the other was, simply, that things take too much damn time to do. You know? I got up this morning, fed my dogs, drank some coffee while puttering around on the internet, then I walked the dogs, went to get bagels for breakfast, made a run through Target for some supplies and then came home — and cursed out loud when my wife was already up and met me at the door, because I was carrying presents for her birthday tomorrow, unwrapped presents which I was just about to wrap with the shiny new paper I got from Target, and she wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, but the run to Target had taken longer than I expected and it was already the time when she usually gets up on the weekend, but fortunately she’s wonderful and so when I yelled “GO AWAY!” she ran away and went back in the bedroom so that I could wrap her presents, which I did — and then I ate breakfast and now here I am writing this: and it’s almost 11am and I need to stop so I can give my dog a bath which he sorely needs, after which I will need to take my own shower, and then it will be time for lunch and a nap: and I haven’t even gotten to my subject for this post, and I haven’t done the grading I need to get done this weekend. And my weekend, which was a very welcome four-day break (for the Tucson Rodeo! A four-day weekend! After we didn’t have a day off for Presidents’ Day! And this isn’t even a cowboy sort of area any more! It makes no sense! Wheeee!) is almost over, and I need to get back to work. And I’m not really sure what I’m teaching tomorrow.

So that’s the second thought, and I am using this to enter directly into what I want to talk about, which is: what we need to do about teaching in this country. Because the truth is, what we need to do will take time. A lot of time. And while we are doing those things, while we are making the necessary changes, we also need to keep doing the things we are doing now, because if we put everything on hold today so that we can make tomorrow better, then the people in need today suffer. And while it sucks to realize that working on the immediate needs of present students in the present system will delay the necessary changes that will improve the system, especially when we recognize that much of our work now is necessitated by the problems and flaws in the current system, it’s also important to realize just how much work we’re getting done, and how important that work is.

Let me emphasize this. The biggest problem in education right now, for teachers and for students, is burnout. We are overworked and overstressed, and we’ve reached our limits. Students are showing that by acting out and by rebelling, because they can’t change the system, so instead they refuse to participate (which just makes things worse for teachers, but then, it’s not the students’ fault that they have no other recourse [which does not make it any easier to handle them on a daily basis]); teachers are showing it by quitting, retiring, and also by losing our minds. For me to say that we need to keep doing this work, all of it, and that we also need to put in extra effort to reform the system — well, I sort of want to punch myself in the throat for it. But: first of all, not everyone has to participate actively in the reform of the system. We do what we can, and that’s all we can do; most of us will be simply maintaining the status quo, at least for right now. But that is important, because maintaining the status quo? Means educating students. In a flawed and inefficient way, which promotes even greater burnout; that’s why we need to do something to change the system. But anyone who does anything to help a student to learn is doing a good thing. Teachers, who put all of our time and energy into helping hundreds and thousands of students to learn, are doing wonderful and awesome things.

Don’t forget it. Don’t minimize it. Teaching is of vital, critical, importance, both in the immediate and in the long term. If all you can do right now is teach, or do what you can to support teaching and learning, then that is enough. That is amazing and wonderful. I thank you and honor you for it. And I thank and honor myself, because I’m still doing it, too. I don’t want to go to school tomorrow, but I’m going to. And I’m going to teach as well as I possibly can.

Not totally sure what I’m going to teach. But it’s gonna be something.

Look at my morning. I took up hours doing a bunch of things, and it’s tempting to focus on what I didn’t do — writing, or grading — and see the morning as wasted; but instead of that, look at all I got done: my dogs are well cared for, my wife and I had a delicious breakfast, her presents are now wrapped; I even got little things done, like I stopped and did the recycling, and I listened to an episode of my new favorite podcast. (It’s called Unf*cking the Republic. It is political, progressive, and utterly brilliant. Highly recommend.) Time was spent: but it wasn’t wasted.

Time spent working in education is — no, wait; I can’t say it is never wasted. It is constantly and consistently wasted. But, time that is spent actually helping students or teachers is never wasted. It is always good work.

Sadly — and this is why there is so much burnout right now — it’s a lot of work. And a lot of effort is wasted in the process of doing that work. Take ESS (Exceptional Student Services, the new term that has replaced Special Education — and if there’s anything that is more wasted effort than dreaming up new euphemisms to conceal that there are efforts being made to help students learn, I don’t know what it is): I have a couple of pretty extensive forms I need to fill out for a couple of students who are having meetings to consider their individual learning needs and how those needs are being addressed; I have two after school meetings this coming week to discuss the students’ progress in my class. Figure three hours, outside of the time I normally spend preparing and teaching my classes. Multiply that by the six other teachers each student has, along with the time spent by the ESS coordinator to arrange the meeting and make sure that everyone fills out the paperwork, and the time contributed just to this specific part of the process by the student, the parents (Both of whom, students and parents, spend uncountable hours trying to help the student learn), and the administration, and you’ll see something of why teaching is so hard and why we’re burnt out. And the real issue is? What these students mostly need, in addition to their resource classroom, is — consideration. Extra time on assignments, preferential seating in the classroom, and the ability to check in with teachers about progress and understanding are by far the most common accommodations, along with the option to take breaks when needed and to take tests in a more relaxed setting like a smaller classroom or after school. Tell me which of those things would be refused by any reasonable teacher. Of course, the very fact that we have the official process and all the paperwork shows that there are definitely teachers who have refused to allow those and other reasonable accommodations; and that is certainly one of the problems we need to address in education. And I also recognize that having a system in place to provide plans and communicate needs to individual teachers alleviates the students and their parents of the obligation to discuss with every single teacher what the student needs to succeed; I know full well that without that process, most of my students who need accommodations would never talk to me about them, because it is still stigmatized to need help in any way for any reason.

I can’t quite fathom why it is bad to do what it takes to learn. To want to learn enough to look for and find the particular ways that one can learn successfully despite one’s inherent difficulties. I mean, that’s all the ESS students want, is to learn. Why exactly is that bad? Why is it shameful enough that we need to stop calling them Special Education students? Why has our society stigmatized those who want to learn?

So that’s what I mean. There’s too much work, and too much of it should not be necessary — but to make it unnecessary would require different work in different ways. We would need to make it easier for students and parents to talk to their teachers. We would need to get rid of teachers who stand in the way of learning, thereby necessitating a process that forces them to provide what students need to learn — because any teacher who isn’t willing to take reasonable steps to help students to learn doesn’t need to be in public education. And all of that, either the current work that puts bandaids on the problems, or the additional work that would be needed to heal the problems permanently — it all takes time.

It all cascades, you see. The reason why teachers and students are so burnt out right now is because we didn’t allow ourselves time off when the world came crashing to a halt. Instead, we all doubled or tripled our work load overnight. When I left school on March 13, 2020, I was a classroom teacher; when I went back to school two weeks later, I was an online teacher. All of my students suddenly had to become online learners. We had to find ways to do the same work we had been doing, but in an entirely new way: most immediately for me, I had to figure out how Zoom and Google Classroom worked, how to record the sessions (which my school required), how to help my students get into the sessions, and how to present the content through online media. I scanned two entire books, page by page; I recorded audio of me reading those books chapter by chapter. And I spent the same hours I had always spent teaching classes, grading work, responding to emails, and so on. My students did essentially the same things in reverse.

All, of course, while watching our world collapse, and for many of us, worrying acutely over the health and wellbeing of ourselves or our loved ones.

That continued into the fall, when classes were going to be in person, then went online, then went hybrid, then bounced around all three for the remainder of the school year. All of it required me to do my usual work and also the extra work of making my class available over the internet. All while still watching my world collapse and worrying acutely over myself and my loved ones.

All, by the way, without any extra pay for the extra hours and extra effort.

So because I had to spend extra hours doing the same work, what did I sacrifice? Myself, of course. I slept less. I read less. I played fewer games. My wife and I didn’t do the things we used to do to have fun — go out shopping, go to restaurants, play boardgames with friends, and so on. I didn’t take time for myself, at a time when I desperately needed time for myself, to deal with the constant stresses. I had even less time to decompress, as well as less time to help my family and friends, to do the things I normally do when I am not working, even while the need for all of those things was greater, because I had to spend extra time working just to do the same job in the new circumstances. And all of it was harder, because I knew that it wasn’t working. I read dozens of articles saying everything about why and how it wasn’t working: how we needed to go back to in-person school, how we were incurring “learning loss,” how we were doing a terrible job; and also how it was vitally necessary to protect the health and wellbeing of the students and the staff and everyone’s family by having school online, and it was terribly critical for teachers to figure out how to keep students engaged even over the webcam. All that weight was on us.

I can’t even imagine the pressure that was put on health care workers.

So because I was working harder, and taking less time to recover, and also being told (and seeing direct evidence) that my efforts were leading to less positive results, it wore me out. Worse than any year I’ve had as a teacher — and that’s saying something, believe me.

And then this school year started: and on the first day of classes, with no advance warning of any kind (That is the fault of my specific school, though I don’t doubt that other teachers at other schools had similar problems), I suddenly found out I was teaching four online classes at the same time I was to be teaching six in-person classes.

So it kept on going. All through the first semester. Then, thankfully, the online school hired its own specific teachers, and I and my colleagues no longer had to teach two simultaneous groups of students; so I guess this current semester is easier.

But it sure doesn’t feel like it.

So the wear and tear on my mind and my soul make it feel like I have to do more to take care of myself, to destress and unwind; also, the last two years that I have not had the time and energy to pursue my personal projects as much as I would like — which for me is a particularly big deal, as I still consider myself a writer as much as if not more than I consider myself a teacher — have made me feel guilty and sad, and desperate to get back to who I used to be: and all of that makes it harder for me to take the time to do my work as a teacher. Which then makes me feel guilty because I know how much my students need to get back to normal, and how much they need to learn; and that falls to me, because they aren’t really holding up their end right now, since they are also tired and burnt out and stressed and in need of comfort and a break from work.

All of which — and I know it’s too much, and forgive me for ranting, but this is some of what I need right now — leads me to the one thing I am going to say we need to do to change education, the single most important thing.

[Warning: there is cussing ahead.]

We need to take away the goddamn fucking deadlines.

Who gives a shit, WHO GIVES A SINGLE SOLITARY SHIT, if a student takes two years to master a subject or skill while it takes another student only one year? Why on God’s green and verdant Earth do we need to make sure that every student learns the same stuff IN THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME?? Why do they have to graduate by eighteen? (For that matter, why the hell do we sort them according to their birthdays? Rather than making groups of students according to their interests and aptitudes, we group them according to age? Whose stupid goddamn idea was that? But hold onto that one, I’ll come back to it.)

Do you realize how much better this whole situation would be if we had just LET STUDENTS TAKE A YEAR OFF??? If we had let teachers just take a year off??? I realize that means teachers wouldn’t be doing our jobs and therefore we wouldn’t get paid — but let me just point out that we should have simply paid everyone who was forcibly unemployed because of the pandemic and quarantine, the whole time. But anyway. If we have to have teachers working, then it would have made perfect sense to offer educational opportunities to those who wanted them, and to offer childcare to families who needed it, without actually calling it a school year; that’s how we could have kept teachers employed. If we didn’t have to think of it as a school year, I guarantee teachers could have found a way to keep kids occupied so their families could go to work; though based on the number of students who actually went in to school even when we were fully online in the fall of 2020, there weren’t actually that many families who needed the help. There were some, and our system is what provides most families with childcare, so I see the need to continue providing that, within the limitations of the pandemic and the quarantine: but why, in the name of all that’s holy, did we have to try to make them learn? Everything they would have learned if nothing had changed? Why did we need to pretend that we could still teach, and they could learn, with the same rate of success as a normal year?

Deadlines, that’s why. Because letting this specific group of students graduate when they were 19 instead of 18 (Again, those who desperately wanted to learn to graduate “on time” could have made use of the opportunities without driving everyone involved to the brink of insanity) was apparently unthinkable.

And that’s why everything in education sucks right now. Because we couldn’t fucking take a fucking year off DURING A FUCKING PANDEMIC.

Okay, sorry. I’m better now.

I have more thoughts for where education should go in the future, but I’m going to save them. I’ll try to write about them next week.

This week, I just want to reiterate, again and again: things take time. Work takes time to get done. If the work is made harder by circumstances, it takes even longer, because it puts more stress on the people doing the work, who then need even more time to wind down from their work, in order to maintain their productivity.

If you are and have been working to help students learn, you have done good work. Thank you. If you are and have been working to help teachers teach — or you have been helping teachers survive — thank you. You have done good work.

And before we talk about anything else with education, start with this: the only reason, the only reason, we have concepts like schedules and deadlines and on-time progress and “learning loss” in education is because we choose to force people to complete things in a specific time period. No exceptions.

That needs to change.

What are we fighting for?

Dusty 2 Comments

HONK FER FREEDUM

Coronavirus: the US resistance to a continued lockdown

I want to understand the argument.

I don’t. And it’s vital that we understand the argument, even if we don’t agree with it; agreement is not necessary, compromise can be reached, solutions can be found even if we don’t agree.

But if we don’t understand? Then what do we do?

“We believe that the state governor has gone beyond his constitutional authority in shutting down businesses and ordering people to stay at home,” organiser Tyler Miller tells me from the grounds of the state capitol.

In mid-March Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced an emergency proclamation mirroring many issued around the world; closing restaurants and bars and banning large gatherings.

But protestors say that was unconstitutional.

“The state constitution says that the right of the people to peaceably assemble shall never be abridged. We believe that the (emergency coronavirus) proclamations that the governor here ordered violate that,” Mr Miller says.

Mr Miller said he was not protesting against the recommendations from the public health bodies and respected the need to ‘flatten the curve’.

“I even self-quarantined for 14 days back at the very beginning of this myself, when I had an illness that mirrored some of the symptoms,” he says.

“The fact I am protesting does not mean I think it is a good idea to have gatherings, I just believe that the government has no authority to prohibit them.”

Throughout the crisis, Mr Miller has also been able to continue his work as an engineering technician with the navy.

He says the thing that has angered him is what he feels it is an un-American overreach of power by the Democratic governor of Washington.

I don’t understand that argument.

There is a simpler argument, which is just that people are getting desperate: the country has been shut down in places for more than a month now, and people are facing another rent payment, another car payment, on May 1st, this coming Friday. I understand that desperation, that anxiety; I understand and (mainly) support the desire to let government officials know that you need and demand action. I think it’s a mistake to violate social distancing guidelines, and there are people in the article above and others I have seen who say things like “I have a strong immune system, I take care of myself,” who I think are somewhere between ignorant and idiotic: ignorant if they don’t know that Covid-19 has killed young and healthy people as well as older, sicker people; idiotic if they believe unfounded statements (Mostly from conservative “news” sources) that the novel coronavirus is no worse than the flu.

(This may be too harsh: this is an interesting article about how we are wired to be intuitive, and so underestimate the evidence that comes from outside our experience. I know I was telling my students in March that any shutdown of schools would only last a couple of weeks and would certainly not affect their graduation. On the other hand, I am not saying the same thing now, because I have learned better; I’m not sure why these people haven’t, but my two options above are certainly possibilities.

(Also, this ad popped up in that same article about people being too optimistic. Lol.

Screenshot (6)

(If you believe not only that a miracle stretch relieves years of back pain, but also that chiropractors are stunned by it, AND that chiropractors are the authority whose stunning represents a medical breakthrough, then you are unquestionably in this overly-optimistic bunch.)

But while I understand and sympathize with people who are desperate to get back to work and pay their bills, and I believe (and am infuriated) that the federal government has once again bailed out large corporations with deep political donation pockets and left average citizens to twist in the wind, I don’t understand the other argument. The freedom argument.

I don’t think it’s a reasonable argument.

Listen. I worry about government overreach. I won’t say I’m learned in history, but I know about the Japanese internment camps during World War II, and I know some things about the rise of the various authoritarian dictatorships that plagued the 20th century. I have hated the USA PATRIOT Act since it was imposed on us, during the paranoid jingoist nationalist fervor that swept the country after 9/11 and swept us into a neverending war. I know that it gets renewed every time it comes up because the government doesn’t like to give away power that it has seized. Because of that experience, I have been pointing out to my friends who argue against the lockdowns that the thing we need to worry about is the powers the government arrogates to itself after the crisis: the new regulations and limitations, and invasions of citizens’ rights, that follow a partial return to normalcy, and that are intended to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again. We have to watch out for the permanent changes, or for the attempts, often subtle and underhanded, to make temporary changes permanent.

I don’t doubt those will happen. I think the first attempt will be by President Trump, when he decides to make his temporary limit on immigration permanent.

But see, I think that because Mr. Trump has a long history of a clearly established position to end immigration. I think that because I have read reports that Trump’s anti-immigration advisors have talked about this pause into something more long lasting. Because this article quotes DHS acting secretary, Chad Wolf, as saying to Fox News that

his agency will soon recommend a move to limit temporary work visas as well.

“That is something that the department has been looking at for the past several months, so we are well underway and look forward to presenting to the President those recommendations for additional steps,” said Wolf.

So there’s your government overreach, as part of an established pattern of behavior, aiming at known long-term targets. After the fact. Once the danger has passed. The current actions are not government overreach: they are government responding as government should to a crisis. The stay-at-home orders were issued during a crisis, and in line with scientific facts and the advice of experts. This is exactly when, and exactly why, people’s rights can and should be limited. We have the right to protest, but if you decided to walk into a burning building in order to protest the fire, people would stop you: and they would be right to. We have the right to freedom of speech, and of assembly, but you cannot gather with an army and plan the destruction of the United States: the right is to peaceably assemble, and free speech does not include sedition or criminal conspiracy. Individual rights are not limitless, not under any circumstances; even the most libertarian of us would state clearly that one person’s rights cannot be permitted to infringe on another’s, that your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. And of course individual rights are limited in an emergency, because the free exercise of one’s rights puts others into danger.

This is what government is for: to protect people from danger. Now, if you want to argue that the coronavirus is not that dangerous, then you’re in the wrong place. Start with this.

Then read this.

Then read this.

Then read this. 

(Especially that last one; it’s about the infectiousness of the coronavirus. And lest you think that the infectiousness of Covid-19 is lower than SARS or MERS, both of which caused fewer problems and killed fewer people, go back and read those other articles again, and then also pay attention to this quote from that last article:

“An R0 value of 1 means the average person who gets that disease will transmit it to one other person; in that case, the disease is spreading at a stable rate. An R0 of more than 1 means the disease spreads exponentially.”

And then read this essay about exponential growth.

Okay? Okay.

As I said, the government has the right and the responsibility to limit individual freedoms in response to a crisis, in order to protect the people from that crisis. (I’m aware that some people don’t agree with this: some because they don’t think the coronavirus is a crisis, and if you still think that, go back and read the above articles, but this time with your eyes open; and some because they think that nothing should ever limit individual rights under any circumstances: my above examples of protesting inside a burning building, or convening an army to overthrow the US government, are just fine, for them. I will be writing another blog about that. I’ll let you know when it’s done. The important thing is that, while I don’t agree with that argument, I understand it.) I think, though, that the basic argument behind the protests, the reason that President Trump tweeted support for people trying to “liberate” the states that have both lockdown orders and Democratic governors, is that the government is not trying to protect people from the crisis: the government is trying to control people. To take away their freedom. that’s the argument I don’t understand.

(I am also not going to write here about the elephant in the room, namely the upcoming election and the similarities — remarked on in the BBC article I linked first — between the anti-lockdown protests and Trump rallies. People who are going to the rallies just to support President Trump are certainly not reading this, and are not worth the time to put forward an argument. President Trump is probably trying to use the rallies as a way to hype his base up for the election, but he also said that he thinks Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is opening his state too soon, so I’m not going to jump on Trump today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow. Also: I understand this argument.)

But here’s the thing with tyranny: it makes sense. There is reason behind it.

That’s what’s missing from the freedom argument of the protests.

Break it down. Think it through. Okay, the government — pardon me, the govment (Read this article that I wish I wrote) — limits people’s rights to assemble and move freely, to run a business and participate in the free market economy. Because they want to establish tyrannical control over the free people of these United States.

Why?

I understand that the government has taken on, for most of the people who support these protests, the aura of Darth Sidious and the Sith: evil just for the sake of evil; power hungry just for the sake of power. But, see, that’s a character from a movie franchise, and it’s not a realistic one. I admit, if the Democratic governors were trying to raise a clone army from a mysterious source; or they were trying to corrupt a Jedi knight with incredible power but terrible self-control, then I would see the danger.

Why would the Democrats, or the government in general, want to lock people inside? I saw someone argue that the Democrats exaggerated the danger of Covid-19 in order to justify the lockdown expressly so they could destroy Trump’s economy, because that’s the only way they could beat him in the next election.

Come on.

(An argument I have seen but will not be rebutting is that Andrew Cuomo of New York exaggerated the need for ventilators so he could get…a huge excess of ventilators. Sure. As you do. He’s going to put them in one huge room and then go swimming in them like Scrooge McDuck. Swimming through the ventilators.)

First of all, there’s no way that an economy ruined by Democrats would be pinned on Trump. Trump is already positioning himself to argue that it was the Democrats who did the harm in this crisis. (Elephant in the room…) If this is provably true, if Covid-19 is really not that bad and the Democrats have exaggerated the danger, we’ll know it before November, and this Dem gambit will fail. Secondly, and more important, if they ruin the economy, they not only have no hope of winning the next election, but they lose access to the money. If  the Democrats, or the government in general, are corrupt,  they want money. Money does not come from enforcing a stay-at-home order. We are all losing money, including the government. I know they are flinging money around like it’s meaningless paper (…), but there is a limit to that because at some point the economy will actually collapse, and the more they spend now the closer that outcome gets: and why would anyone in power want that? To destroy the economy that underpins the entire system they are ostensibly seeking to control? Nonsense. There are people who want the government and the entire society to collapse, but they are not the ones in power: they are the ones without power. That’s why they want the system to collapse, because they don’t currently gain from it. The ones in the system, the Democrats in Washington and the state capitals, very much want this current system to survive, even if they are corrupt, because this system is how those corrupt people get what they want. The corrupt actions the Democrats take (And yes, many Democrats are corrupt; not all of them or only them, but yes they are.) are clearly intended to increase their wealth and their ability to stay in their current positions so they can continue increasing their wealth. That’s why we still don’t have term limits or meaningful campaign finance reform. Nobody wants to make the money go away, least of all corrupt Washington politicians.

So what’s the reasoning? Because the Democrats are secretly anti-American communists? Okay, let me try to address the idea of Dems seeking power for power’s sake; I still think that sounds like the Sith, but sure, let’s imagine that they are simply evil and that’s their reasoning. Communists, or anyone trying to overthrow the government, would be trying to seize the reins of power. They would be going after the sources of power, trying to control those so they could then get the next source of power, and so on; it’s like Risk. You conquer territory that lets you conquer more territory. You don’t just act arbitrarily, you seek the means of control. In this country, the means of control are (in no particular order): violence and force; the ballot; information; and money.

Which of those things are the Sith-Democrats gaining through the lockdown? Not money; I already talked about that. (Sure, the government is giving money to corporations, who paid the politicians. But those corporations make more money in an open economy. The same goes for people arguing that the government is trying to make people dependent on government handouts rather than their own paychecks: the money will run out if the economy doesn’t open. then the system collapses and the people in power lose.) Greater control over information? If there are secret things going on that we can’t see because we’re all staying home, then I take all of this back and apologize; let me know if the clone army executes order 66, or the Final Order fleet rises from Exegol. Otherwise the press has not seemed limited by the lockdown, and I don’t really see how it would be; limiting reporters’ physical movements seems a loser’s gamble in a world of the Internet and drones with cameras. The ballot? I mean, we’ll see when the election comes, but at the moment, the lockdown seems to play more into Republican hands because it limits voters’ access to the ballot box, which tends to favor conservative politicians.

Does the lockdown give the government more ability to commit violence, more ability to use force against the people? I honestly can’t see how. I mean, I guess they could be trying to force us to obey so we get more used to obeying, so that the next time they give us an irrational and arbitrary order, we’ll obey just because that’s what we do now. But if that were the case, they wouldn’t be using Covid-19 as their cover. Because that gives us a reason, and that means they’ll need to have another reason, as good as this one, to support their next attempt to tell us to stay home: that progression only works with weaker and weaker justifications. Using a global pandemic is not a weak justification; quite the opposite. (And notice that even this one isn’t working…)  Read 1984: O’Brien wants Winston to not only tell him he sees five fingers, he wants him to actually see five fingers; and that’s the only reason Winston gets for the months of torture he undergoes. He is very intentionally not given a reason to obey Big Brother: he just has to do it, or else he suffers. In this case, if we don’t obey, it’s not that we suffer the wrath of the government — it’s that we get sick. (And this is true.) If you want to create a totalitarian state, you need to create loyalty to the state without reason: loyalty to the state based on an emergency doesn’t cut it. Because the loyalty ends when the emergency does.

Now: if this lockdown turns out to continue past when the virus disappears. Or if the virus doesn’t disappear, either because the press is controlled and doesn’t report the true numbers of the disease (And I know people think that is happening, but I’m talking about the press saying there are thousands of cases when there are none, not the medical authorities miscounting the thousands of cases that are in existence; if anything we are undercounting the actual cases, and we all know it.), or because the government takes actions that continue the spread of the coronavirus (I mean, maybe tweeting support for protests that seem to be increasing the chances of the disease spreading would qualify as that?). Then I will agree that this is an attempt to establish tyranny. But you see what the actually despotic actions are there? Enforcing control over freedom of movement when there is no crisis. Controlling the press. Actually using biological warfare, directly or indirectly, against the people. Those are tyrannical actions.

Asking people to stay home is not tyranny. It’s concern. Even if you think it is unfounded concern, I don’t see any reasonable way to argue that it is anything other than concern.

But you know what really concerns me?

People are acting based on this argument. This argument that doesn’t seem to have any real rational basis. It honestly seems to be just “You can’t tell us what to do. Not even if it’s in my best interest.” Rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Cowboy shit. Cowboy shit that has no particular goal, no particular target; it’s just people wanting to act like cowboys. Rebels. March and wave flags. That doesn’t make any sense: but people are still doing it.

The fact that I can’t figure out the argument doesn’t concern me as much as the fact that people seem willing to act even though they don’t understand why they are acting. That’s irrational.

I don’t know how to argue with irrational people.

Even worse, I don’t know how to live in the same country with them.

People say this country is founded on the rule of law, or on the Constitution, or even on the will of God; none of that is true. It was founded on reason. The argument for the Constitution and the rule of law is reasonable, it is rational; it makes sense. The way the Constitution sets up our government is rational, every aspect of it. Hundreds of reasonable people argued — argued! Gave reasons and explanations! Appealing to the intellect of their opponents! — for years to write it. Some of the arguments were wrong, and some of the beliefs were wrong; the people making the Constitution were imperfect, and had some bad reasons, which should give way to better reasons over time — but that’s the system they set up, one in which better arguments, better reasons, will win out over worse ones. It’s all founded on reason.

The country can live through any danger, even the coronavirus. But it can’t live through the death of reason.

That’s what scares me. That’s why I want to understand, because if I can understand, I know that my opponents, even if they are wrong, are still listening to reason, and that means there’s hope.

I hope I can understand.

What Should Be Saved

Dusty Leave a comment

I’ve seen this piece making the rounds today. It is worth reading.

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

After reading this, I started thinking about what I’ve experienced over the last month or so. I tried to decide if there was anything that I would want to keep in my life, and changes that I would want to make permanent, after things — “go back to normal.” It’s not so much about keeping, because everything right now is honestly pretty hideous; I don’t want to keep anything to do with this pandemic once the coronavirus goes back to lurking in the shadows. But the author makes the point that we have a unique opportunity now to step outside of our daily lives and regular routines, and observe,and make decisions about what we really want, what we need, what we want our new normal to look like. Everything will change, we all agree: so the question is, what do we want to keep in the new world after Covid-19, and what do we want to discard?

The first thing that came to mind is something I do not want to keep after the quarantine ends: teaching remotely. When it started, I joked that this was the dream: teaching without actually having to see and interact with students — and also, largely, teaching without grading. I’ve joked for years that teaching would be 1000% better if I just didn’t have any students. Well, now I sort of don’t have any; and since we can’t guarantee access to online material for all students, the school’s policy is that no grades can be applied that would lower the students’  grades from what they were before the quarantine started; so there’s not much grading to be done.

And I hate it. I miss my students. I miss talking to them personally, about their lives and their joys and sadnesses; I miss answering their random-ass questions; I miss being able to interact them while I teach them, because, it turns out, teaching people who aren’t there in front of you is not good. It’s hard enough to get teenagers to participate voluntarily; take them out of the room and put them at home behind a video camera, and participation essentially stops dead. I run a discussion class because that is both the most effective and the most interesting way to teach literature, and now I’m forced to do little more than lecture to a silent room. And it sucks. I miss being good at my job.

However: while I’ve been doing the distance learning online, I’ve been reading The God of Small Things to my AP Literature class; it’s an incredible novel  that I’ve written about before, and reading it to them has so far been worth the time. It works fairly well online, because they can relax and listen to me read; I like that it is helping them reduce stress while also helping them experience the story. It may be somewhat different in the classroom, but also, students need to reduce stress pretty much all the time; that’s not going to change by next spring. So I think I will do it again next year, when I have them in front of me. I think it will be worth it to shift other parts of the class to homework and independent study, and really use the time in class to understand and appreciate this work. So I guess I’ll — keep — that. Also, I am pretty happy to not be grading anything. Sadly, I won’t be allowed to keep that aspect. Ah, well. C’est la guerre.

I miss my coworkers, too. I talk to them pretty regularly through social media and texts, and we’ve been having weekly video chats; but it’s made me realize that I like having them around more than I thought I did. I’d like to spend a bit more time being a bit more social. I think I’ve probably focused too much on my introversion, using that as an excuse to not spend more time talking to people I like talking to; I should stop that. I am an introvert, and there are definitely days, especially as a teacher surrounded by teenagers who demand far more attention than I could give, let alone am willing to give, when I just want to go home and not talk to another human (My wife of course does not count: she is a goddess.); but most days, I think I should stop in to my friends’ classrooms and say Hi.

The dogs and I have been taking extra long morning walks, which I’d love to keep; but that’s more to do with the amount of time I have in the morning before work, rather than because of my preferences. I would like to keep longer, slower mornings; but, c’est la guerre. I’ve always done longer slower mornings on weekends, including extra long walks, so that will stay. I have also been taking short evening walks with my wife: that I would definitely like to keep, at least until the Tucson summer clamps down. It’s less fun to walk around the block in 100-degree heat. I’ve been seeing more of my neighbors out and about on the walks, both in the morning and the evening; I’d love to keep that even after we can all go back to driving everywhere all the time.

My wife and I have been good about doing our long-term meal planning, so we can minimize trips to the store (Don’t give me that look: Tucson has not been a hot spot, and once  I stopped going to school every day, back on March 13, we were entirely within the social distancing guidelines. So no, I have not been locking down and sheltering in place, I’ve been still buying groceries. If it helps, I need to buy fresh produce to feed my tortoise. So it’s not just for me.); we’ve gone up and down on this in the past, because in Oregon the grocery store was a pain to get to, so we shopped large once a week and then bought small items as needed, but here in Tucson shopping is much easier and so we have tended to decide what we want for dinner on the day of, and then do our shopping on the spot. But this is better. We’ve always known it, we just haven’t pushed it; I think we will keep that one.

I’m definitely keeping the podcast. I’m pleased with how it’s going, and how it’s been received; I like doing it and I think I do it well. I’m certainly at a stage in my life where I want to stop wasting time on idle pursuits and I want to be more productive; I don’t know that I can always find it in me to write serious fiction, so I think it will be good to keep different projects going, to use different skills and make different kinds of content. I’ve avoided doing things like this in the past because I think of it as taking time away from my main pursuits: the days I spend making podcasts are days I am not writing. But you know what? I don’t spend all of those days writing, anyway. I spend more of them just taking it easy. Which is good, but not the thing I think I need to do. I’d rather work a bit harder and be more proud of myself; that will be easier if I have more ways I can work, and more things to be proud of.

I think I may keep the daily blogging. I did it for a while last year, and it was great, though it was hard sometimes. It’s been the same this last week: sometimes I have no idea what to say, and sometimes it feels like I don’t have the time to dedicate to writing something serious, and sometimes when I have something to write it takes more time and energy than I thought it would, and so other things don’t get done; but it’s good for me to write. I don’t know how it is for you all to read my ramblings, but it seems like some of you like it, and the rest of you don’t do it, so. I will try. I will also not be too obsessive about doing it EVERY day.

That’s probably the big one. I’ve been working on forgiving myself for not being productive, for not always having the energy to do something “useful” or “valuable.” Because right now, the most important thing we can do with each day we have is — get through it. Stay alive, stay sane, stay ourselves: just keep going, every day, on to the next day. Because each day is a new chance to do something more than that — but if you don’t do that, then you won’t do anything. We have to keep our minds on the main goal, on the most important thing we do: keep going. I’ve learned that, and I’m being better to myself on the days when I don’t have the strength to do more than make it through: because I’m aware that that’s the only strength I really need to make sure of. Just enough to keep going. So long as I have that strength, the other strength will come back. I will be able to do more on another day, and I will still want to. I’ve never believed the conservative  argument that people on welfare want to stay on welfare because they’d rather be lazy; I don’t know why I thought it about myself, but I always have. It’s not true, though: I’ve been lazy, and I’ve been productive; I would rather be productive. So after I rest, I work.I want to work. I look forward to it.

But sometimes I need to rest. It’s okay to not be productive sometimes, even a lot of the time. When I can be, I will; and when I can’t, I don’t have to be mad at myself about it. I can relax about relaxing. I have been letting myself do that, and that one, I’m definitely going to keep.

Full Offense Meant.

Dusty Leave a comment

(Warning: this blog is upsettingly, egregiously offensive. I got very exercised by what happened here, particularly because it concerns my wife. The language here is not safe for work, and not appropriate for innocent eyes. But I will not lighten up.)

My wife had a thought.

“I would like to put out a thought that I had today.
Our economy as a country, as a world is going to suffer from this pandemic. Hopefully the government will come through on some kind of relief for business but we all know that most of us small businesses will not be offered the same kind of relief, if any, that the larger companies will get so I propose this: let’s start a movement of sorts.
Let’s as a country, hopefully as a world, make a pact to buy gifts only from small businesses this year, birthdays Christmas, anniversaries, weddings, etc. Buy in person from a local small business or online from one farther away. Let’s not forget the entrepreneurs who create everyday without the safety net of a regular paycheck in this time of crisis.

We’re all in this together.

Thank you.”

It’s a good thought. There are pretty clearly two stages to this whole crisis: the first stage, the one we are in now, is when we focus on mitigating the pandemic, limiting the spread of the disease, flattening the curve. Here is where we sacrifice for the greater good: we stay home, we distance ourselves from one another and limit contact with other humans. We do what we can.

We lose our jobs. We can’t pay our bills, and we have to borrow money or beg for help. We might lose our homes, and our businesses.

All of us are at risk. (Of course the very wealthy are not at risk as they are never at risk; I don’t include them in “us.”) All of us are feeling some of the same fears, and the same pressures: we feel the need to do something, anything; but we also know that the best thing we can do is  — nothing. Stay home. Stay away.

It’s terrible. I want to go to school, if you can believe that. I actually want to teach. I want to talk to my students, reassure them that everything will be fine. I’m good at that; they like and respect me, and they listen to me, at least partly because I listen to them, and partly because I am honest with them. And that is the honest truth: everything will be fine. In the grand scheme of things, that is, because of course some people will suffer mightily as a direct result of this disease, some people will lose their lives, others will lose their loves. But that is inevitable, and even in the face of the greatest loss, everything will, so much as it can, be fine. I feel comfortable saying that, and I wish I could say it to my students. I wish I could give them some normalcy.

There’s an old regret of mine: I was teaching on 9/11, in 2001. It was my second year as a teacher, only a few weeks in; the students barely knew me, most of them, but they already generally liked me and trusted me. The planes had already hit both towers and the Pentagon by the time I got to school, 7:15 California time; I was watching in the office, open-mouthed, as the first tower collapsed. The next four classes I spent watching news updates on the classroom TV, talking to students, telling them what we knew (not much) and reassuring them as much as I could (even less). They kept asking me if we were going to be sent home, if the district would close schools; the news kept showing other school districts doing just that, and I was waiting for the same thing, without any answer as to why they didn’t; I had no idea what the district was expecting us to do, other than watch news updates and talk about what little we knew.

My last class, though, as soon as they came in, they asked me if we could turn off the TV, and not talk about what had happened; I said, “No problem,” and turned it off. “”What do you want to talk about?” I asked. The same student, speaking for the class, said, “Can we just do English?”

So I taught English. I taught Antigone, Sophocles’s third play in the Oedipus cycle, about family and death and respect and the law. It was awkward and terrible, and I hated it. I hated that I did that: it felt disrespectful to those who had died, and those who were dying, right then, the first responders in New York who were being buried in rubble and dying in fires.

But now I’m realizing that teaching Antigone was the best thing I could have done. I showed at least one class of students that things could still be, if not normal, at least nodding towards normal. It didn’t change the situation, but it did show them that the situation would change: that no tragedy, no crisis, howsoever devastating and all-encompassing, could last forever or take over every  part of their lives.

I wish I could do that now, for my students first, but also for everyone else.

But I can’t. I can’t fix this problem, and I can’t make it seem less than it is: because here I am at home, instead of at work, and instead of talking to my classes, I’m writing this blog. And the worst part about this is that we don’t know how long it will go on– and we don’t know how much it will help. I hope we all know by now that we’re doing the right thing, but we don’t have any idea how much of a difference it will make. Especially for those who are harming themselves through staying at home — losing income, losing business, suffering the emotional effects of the crisis and of the quarantine — not knowing how much good it’s doing and not knowing how long it will last is absolutely devastating. Because we can’t do the usual calculation necessary with altruism: how much good can I do with this sacrifice, and how much will it cost me? We just don’t know. Because the disease is new and unknown, and also because our government is still scrambling to figure out its response, we just don’t know.

And that’s just the first stage of the crisis.

The second stage is the aftermath.

There’s some indication that things may be improving: China, after instituting serious quarantine measures, has reported no new cases in the last 24 hours. (Yeah, yeah, I know — if we believe them. And they should not have covered up the beginnings of the epidemic. But if you for one second think that our government, that any government, wouldn’t have done precisely the same thing for precisely the same reason, you weren’t paying attention when our government did precisely the same thing for precisely the same reason. Or that other time our government did precisely the same thing for precisely the same reason. Or that other time our government — you get the point.) People are, in fact, making this sacrifice for the greater good (Most of us. For the people who are ignoring the greater good because they still want to get drunk for Spring Break, or because they don’t want to miss out on the father-daughter dance, and especially this douchebag, may I tip my hat with a hearty Fuck You.) despite the pain and uncertainty I’ve been talking about. And though this hurts, and though the benefits are uncertain, it is absolutely true that as a group, we are making a difference, we are doing the right thing. We are saving lives.

But what happens once that ends? Once the disease slows down or stops (It’ll never go away, I know, but it will hopefully join the ranks of SARS and MERS once this pandemic spread stops and we have successful treatments and reliable tests and, especially, a vaccine), and people can go out again — then what?

Our president says that the economy will come roaring back, and be quickly stronger than ever; but our president is a lying fucking idiot, so that prediction can safely be ignored. The truth is that some people may still be generating income, and will have built up plenty of money and be desperate to consume; but for the most part, people are going to be either more cautious, or broke. Many of us will be looking for jobs, and will have accrued pretty serious debt while having been out of work. And since many of those jobs existed because of the demand created by the booming economy and the low unemployment and the high consumer spending that resulted, it’s going to be slow to recover — and the federal government having completely shot their wad in emergency measures to stanch the bleeding during this quarantine (It was the right thing to do and I’m glad they did it, but still) will be unable to do much of anything to make it better after we all get to go out again.

Which is where we come back to my wife’s good idea. Because as she says, the small businesses, the ones without large cash reserves or the potential to create savings by cutting costs without closing the company down entirely, are the ones that will suffer most during this. They are the businesses that will be slowest to recover because their profit margins are smaller. And they are the ones that are most critical, because somewhere around 50% of Americans work for small businesses. Even more difficult in terms of survival through the quarantine and then recovery afterward, 16 million Americans are self-employed, and self-employed workers and those working for them account for 30% of the workforce. At the same time, of course, the rest of us (mostly) will not have a lot of money or a whole lot of confidence about spending everything we’ve got in supporting small businesses once we get to the second stage of this, the long, difficult economic recovery period.

So this is why this is a great idea. Not “SPEND EVERYTHING YOU HAVE AT SMALL BUSINESSES!” Not, “GIVE ALL OF YOUR MONEY TO SELF-EMPLOYED ARTISANS!” Just — gifts. Occasional, special purchases, when you generally want to get something more unique, better made, more thoughtful and meaningful. When you might be willing to spend a little more money to show you care. Not every time, not every gift, of course not; but when you are looking to spend a little bit more, be conscious of where you spend it: make an effort — not “FEEL A MORAL OBLIGATION” — to give something nice to two people, both the person receiving the gift, the small business or individual creator who would love to sell you the gift. Do what we can, when we can; not the primary focus, not our personal responsibility — just a little more thoughtfulness, that’s all. And not, of course, right now (Though honestly, if you are one of those people who has some extra money right now, even though most of us are not in that situation, if you could send a little of that extra  money an artist’s way, help them pay their bills and eat while they are giving up the markets and sales opportunities currently cut off by quarantine, that would be wonderful), but mainly going forward, once we are into the second stage of the crisis.

Which is why it pisses me off so much that someone out there  felt the need to send my wife this message on Facebook:

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This was actually the middling-worst of the three negative responses she got: one dude that I know commented, on my post sharing my wife’s thought, that he saw no reason to spend more money at small businesses when he can get everything cheaper at Walmart. Okay, sure, fine; that’s your choice, even if I don’t agree, but I’m not sure why you need to share that, so I just pointed out that gifts often cost a little more and we are willing to spend a little more, but if individuals are happy with the cheap shit they get at Walmart, go off, king. And there was another guy who was much more accusatory and insulting to my wife in a separate message, calling her selfish for asking that people spend money at small businesses instead of large businesses that employ more people and (in his view) do more for the economy.

To both of those anonymous commenters accusing my wife of being selfish, I have this to say:

(Warning: this is going to get profane. And considering how much I swear casually, please take that warning seriously.)

Fuck you. FUCK you. Fuck you for being as stupid as a shit-stuffed carcass of a dead fucking tapeworm, and fuck you for being so fucking callous and devoid of human feeling that you somehow fucking think that an artist asking for people to buy art is fucking selfish. Fucking what? Motherfucking selfish, to advertise one’s craft? Even apart from the effort — no, fucking wait, I will not put that aside: you shit-stupid fuckbrain, do you have any fucking concept of how hard it is to make art, how much of a person’s (That’s a human fucking being I’m speaking of, not the syphilitic wart on a baboon’s dick, like you) soul has to be put just into generating the work? How much time and effort and confidence an actual fucking artist needs to put in to make actual fucking art? Not only in the crafting of a single piece, but in the years, the DECADES, the MOTHERFUCKING LIFETIMES that go into the training of the mind and eye and hand and heart, the sensitivity and altered perception required to conceive of art  in this bleak, heartless world — made even more bleak and heartless by diarrheal hemmorhoids like you, you fucking twat — and then the discipline needed to turn that concept into an actual piece of craft? Of course you don’t: your skull is too full of that bullshit you’ve been lapping out of your own ass. But even though you couldn’t ever understand what it takes to be an artist, you dick-shitting fuckbucket, maybe, considering how appallingly, grotesquely self-centered and insensitive you are, you could potentially grasp how vital it is in a capitalist, individualistic society, for everyone to promote their work, their company, their source of income? Did you somehow miss that advertising and public relations are the heart of our society, in every single aspect? Are you so fucking blind (Must be the fucking syphilis — or else the shit in your head is leaking out of your eyesockets) that you didn’t see that literally the only way the free market could ever function is if people are aware of the products for sale? That our entire goddamn society, our way of life, is reliant on people holding up signs that say “BUY THIS HERE?”

And then, because this is a free society, a free market economy, allowing people — people, not you, you pus-blooded vomit-eating whoremonkey — to make their own free choice of what to buy and what not to buy?

Apparently you also missed that this was a GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING POST ON FUCKING FACEBOOK AND IF YOU DON’T FUCKING LIKE IT YOU FUCKING KEEP FUCKING SCROLLING, YOU GANGRENOUS YAK-SCROTUM!Dory

Just fucking move on. You can fucking smile when you do it, too.

Kermit

If the fucking message doesn’t speak to you, how fucking manically arrogant do you have to be to think that you need to respond to it? Fucking walk, you fucking mook.

Thinker

I expect you not to think, but that you would take extra time and effort to hurt someone who clearly wasn’t speaking to you, clearly wasn’t someone you care about or agree with — who the fuck are you?

Noharmdone

I mean it. Fuck off. The bunny hates you too.

Deniro

 

Because not only am I an artist who will defend other artists, I am a human being who understands the need to both support our fellow human beings and also the vital necessity of allowing other humans to be humans themselves, to allow them to put forward their ideas, their opinions, and their art, AND their business, without being criticized for simply speaking out — especially when they, like my wife

*DEEP BREATH*

ARE NOT EVEN FUCKING ADVERTISING THEIR OWN FUCKING ART BUT ARE JUST BRINGING UP A THOUGHT THAT PEOPLE SHOULD CONSIDER AS A WAY TO SUPPORT AN INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT PART OF OUR ECONOMY AND OUR CULTURE IN ADDITION TO JUST BEING PEOPLE, SMALL BUSINESSES AND INDIVIDUAL CREATORS ARE FUCKING PEOPLE AND IF YOU’RE TRYING TO BE KIND TO PEOPLE YOU SHOULD FUCKING BE KIND TO THEM, AND MY WIFE, WHO IS THE BEST AND MOST KIND-HEARTED PERSON I KNOW, WAS JUST TRYING TO SUPPORT OTHER PEOPLE DIDN’T EVEN MENTION HER OWN ART EVEN THOUGH SHE IS A BRILLIANT ARTIST AND SHE IS SUFFERING IN THIS QUARANTINE JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE BUT SHE DIDN’T FUCKING MENTION THAT DID SHE, NO, SHE DIDN’T EVEN DO WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE AND THROWN IN A LITTLE “LIKE MY ART, MAYBE” SOMEWHERE IN THAT REQUEST, THERE’S LITERALLY NOTHING HERE THAT COULD EVEN BE CONSTRUED AS FUCKING SELFISH BUT THEN YOU HAVE TO COME ALONG AND SHIT ALL OVER IT AND HER AND FUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK YYOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

 

So. Like my wife said. We are all in this together. I want to thank everyone who is sacrificing for the sake of others’ health and survival, and express my sympathy and my support for people who are being hurt by that sacrifice. I will do whatever I can to help you, both now and in the second stage of this crisis — and even after that.

But if you are the kind of person who would say this shit to my wife, get the fuck off of my world.

Bro, Do You Even Socia-Lift?

Dusty Leave a comment

I’ve been seeing these memes and similarly-themed posts on social media:

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I also saw (but cannot now find) a response meme that was exactly right: This isn’t a test run of a Sanders presidency, it is an ACTUAL situation under the TRUMP administration.

It is the TRUMP administration that was so lax, so apathetic, so inefficient and corrupt and broken that they could not prepare properly for a crisis even with MONTHS of lead time. It was January when we all knew about this outbreak, because that was when the Chinese New Year was canceled; and then we all knew that it was something serious. January. And what did the Trump administration do to get ready for the inevitable, when the disease came to the United States? As all diseases do, because there is no realistic way to quarantine any nation in this globally-connected world? As SARS did, as MERS did, as swine flu and avian flu did, as even goddamn Ebola did?

Nothing. They did nothing.

Okay, not nothing. They restricted travel by limiting visas, and quarantined people returning from China where the outbreak started in December; and these tactics have some positive effect, because they slow the spread of infection and give the medical community time to react and plan and prepare. Except the Trump administration did not allocate additional resources: did not stockpile test kits or obvious useful supplies like masks and gloves and sanitation materials; did not rapidly begin increasing capacity in intensive care units or even start planning for a possible rapid increase. No: the president tweeted, and his cronies repeated, that the border was locked “airtight” and everything was fine.

And then, when the shit started to hit the fan, and people responded entirely predictably, with panic-buying things they thought they would need, the administration did — absolutely nothing. This is also entirely predictable, because it is a tenet of free market capitalism: let the markets determine supply and demand, price and availability. The market determined that, at the current price, the supply of toilet paper and sanitation supplies was insufficient to meet the demand.

So be it. Sometimes things go sideways, and while there are some fucked up people who do fucked up things, and who should be stopped from pulling that crap  — like these guys, who were stopped, and who now just get to sit on their hoard while they are investigated for criminal price-gouging; or these women who fought each other over toilet paper (I will note this happened in Australia) — for the most part, it’s manageable. I mean, some people may run out of toilet paper, but they can still poop.

In the end, as long as we are alive, we can all still poop.

That’s clearly the larger point, here. As maddening as it is that people are panicking, and while it’s certainly true that some people will suffer because they cannot get supplies they need, those things will almost certainly not be life-threatening. (I have not heard that medicines are being hoarded to the point of shortages; if that is happening, then it is life-threatening. I hope not. The novel coronavirus is bad enough without us killing each other.) I don’t believe that life is always the only thing that matters; but certainly it always matters more than toilet paper.

As important as that point is (And as much fun as it is to say it), it was not the point I wanted to make here. The point I wanted to make here comes back to that meme about Bernie Sanders: it has to do with the biggest issue that voters seem to have with Bernie Sanders, and is apparently the reason why Joe Biden is currently winning the race for the Democratic nomination despite being the worst available candidate: it’s because Bernie Sanders is associated with…

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Look at it! LOOK AT ALL THAT SOCIALISM!

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(That last one is my wife’s favorite. Because skulls. Though she also likes the hammer and chain image. By the way, my wife is the amazing artist found here.)

That’s right, socialism. Scary, spooky socialism. You know: the

 political, social and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership[1][2][3] of the means of production[4][5][6][7] and workers’ self-management of enterprises.[8][9] It includes the political theories and movements associated with such systems.[10] Social ownership can be public, collective, cooperative or of equity.[11] While no single definition encapsulates many types of socialism,[12] social ownership is the one common element.[1][13][14] It aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system in capitalism.[15][16][17][18]

Come on, guys. Come on. Even Wikipedia knows that there are different kinds and layers of socialism. Democratic socialism, which is what Bernie Sanders espouses, is not Marxist state-controlled socialism. The argument that Sanders’s socialism will lead to Castro’s socialism is an absurdly precipitous slippery slope argument — and anyone who has ever got caught drinking or smoking pot, and who then had to listen to their parents tell them that they were going to be shooting heroin within a matter of hours, knows the problem with the slippery slope argument.

Pot is not a gateway to heroin. Neither is alcohol. There is no logical reason to assume that one thing will inevitably lead to another related thing, particularly not when the guy you are accusing of pushing us down that slope has a very clear record of fighting the centralized authoritarianism that is the actual threat in full-blown Marxist socialism; even his opposition to gun control is evidence of his desire to spread power among the people, to reduce the ability of the central government to control its citzens.

Sanders is not a gateway to Mao Zedong.

I know this has been pounded on again and again; I’m sure that people are tired of hearing it, and me saying this is probably not going to change any minds, or any votes. But this current situation seemed like too good of an opportunity for me to let it go by without making this point.

The things that people are doing right now that are driving all of us up the wall? Perfect nutshell depiction of capitalism. Resources are allocated not according to what is most practical or necessary, but according to demand, which is influenced by, among other things, perception and emotion. There are booms and busts, surplus and scarcity; and we just have to roll with the punches in every case. Which is made harder by the assholes doing asshole things, driven by greed, by the profit motive.

The things that people are doing right now that are showing us that we can still have faith in humanity? That’s socialism. People are sharing. Helping one another. Trying to intentionally ration so that other people can get what they need — particularly those who are less independent, who are in greater need. People are sacrificing for the greater good — you know, acting against their own economic self-interest. We are still, to some extent, acting out of self-interest; but the profit we seek is not money: it is perhaps reputation in our community, but most likely, it is simple altruism. Kindness. Our profit is in feeling good about ourselves and our world, because we were able to help someone in need.

I don’t think that this kind of community spirit should become the organizing principle of the country. It wouldn’t work on a national scale, because we can’t always give, but people in need can always take. I don’t think the country should become a classic Marxist state: central planning is deeply inefficient, as has been amply shown by every nation that has tried to pursue it, all of which have turned back to some kind of market economy — which is dangerous in its own right, because individual people can manipulate the market in a hundred terrible ways, and do harm to everyone else in order to profit themselves. And the centralization of power does create opportunities for the rise of authoritarian autocrats like Stalin and Castro. Where capitalism creates opportunities for Jeffrey Epstein, for El Chapo, who could buy the ability to cause enormous suffering with impunity, simply because they were very good at collecting money  and then spreading it around.

Clearly, clearly, the answer lies in between: in moderation. In some blend of a market economy, with shared resources managed by some collective body, particularly to create a social safety net for when the market goes ker-blooey. Like now.

There’s no way the free market could handle the coronavirus. Quarantine would never be organized enough to limit the spread; the best a capitalist could do in a pandemic would be to Red Death it: lock themselves away in a castellated abbey and die when the clock strikes midnight on their revels. Any company that could create and charge for the various necessities, particularly tests and vaccines, would charge so much that the rest of the economy would be devastated. Without some kind of central government organization looking after things, there would be so much rampant fraud and exploitation, because  everyone is desperate and panicky, that again, the economy would be devastated, and the death toll would be astronomical as people relied on whatever snake oil was offered to them in a compelling way — like the crap being pulled by this shithead, who hasn’t committed a crime (Not this time, at least), but who is at least getting sued by Missouri.

This isn’t even an argument: nobody seriously thinks we should do away with the CDC, with the FDA, with the national guard, with the entire government. So since we are all willing to accept that there are some things that can only be done reasonably by a nationwide government, can we please, please stop pretending that socialism will be the downfall of America? When right now, capitalism and capitalists are clearly the bigger threat?

AS THE NEW CORONAVIRUS spreads illness, death, and catastrophe around the world, virtually no economic sector has been spared from harm. Yet amid the mayhem from the global pandemic, one industry is not only surviving, it is profiting handsomely.

“Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.” The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.

“They’re all in that race,” said Posner, who described the potential payoffs for winning the race as huge. The global crisis “will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits,” he said, adding that “the worse the pandemic gets, the higher their eventual profit.”

Source

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, my school has been closed temporarily, even though most of my students aren’t in any real danger, so that Covid-19 won’t spread to vulnerable populations. And though I could therefore take a nice, long, paid vacation, I’m going to try to figure out how I can deliver the best possible education I can through remote distance learning to my students. Even though it will take extra work, for which I won’t earn any more money. I’m not in it for the profits — though I am in it for the paycheck. Isn’t that remarkable: a mix of profit motive, and altruism. Sounds pretty American, to me.

Oh– and I’m also going to vote, on Tuesday.  For a Democratic Socialist who I know would have handled this crisis better in every way than the billionaire currently sweating on the toilet in the White House.

Do the right thing, everybody. Both with the coronavirus, and your ballot.

Just because it’s the right thing.

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