bearing blog

Speechless.

Sometimes I don't write at length about something because it upsets me to even think about it.

I can tweet, and I can post links to Facebook, but when I sit down and try to organize a set of original thoughts into a persuasive or at least coherent whole, my heart goes into my mouth and I sit dumbly at the keyboard.

I place my hands in the home position.  I put them back in my lap.

I lapse out of prose.

+ + +

So, if I detach myself long enough to think in a way that feels, to me, like clarity

(and I should acknowledge that it is a mark of high privilege that today's politics can be for me a thought experiment instead of a trauma)

I can observe that the principle of double effect is always at work,

and that it damns those who would do harm to children and families

in order to seek a particular end

(an end of any kind; even an indubitably desirable one)

by means of doing that harm and thereby instilling the fear of that harm;

likewise does it damn those who would, somehow, reason that

doing harm to children and families

is a mere side effect

of an act meant to achieve a good that is in no way proportional to the harm done.

+ + +

 

Are we consequentialists?  The law can be consequentialist; it is not a religious teacher, after all.

But when the lawyers wish to use religion and metaphysical morality to justify the law, 

the law had better have learned its catechism.

+ + +

The next thing that I observe comes from a detractor:

"If it's wrong as you say to separate families

[unnecessarily; that's what I say; and it usually is unnecessary]

at the border

because it harms children,

then it would also be wrong

to incarcerate a great deal of other people

for doing --

you know

-- crimes!"

Well. 

You have said so.

Yesterday changed my mind.

First, the obvious caveats:  I am white and, to be blunt about it, wealthy.

Second, the less obvious caveats:  I have always lived in the Midwest, primarily in cities, and have never lived in the South except for a few months' internship at a chemical plant in small-town Kentucky.

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Confederate flags flying as part of, or next to, state and municipal government flags are awful.  A flag is what you decide to fly to represent yourself right now; you make a decision every morning to haul it up the pole in first light.  If it's a reflection only of your heritage, then it's a reflection of the parts of your heritage that you feel are banner examples.  Thus:  Flying a Confederate flag or an image of one is an implicit endorsement of, or expression of fondness for, the Confederacy.  Full stop.  They don't belong in the government display of any U. S. State.

+ + +

I had a different opinion about Confederate monuments and memorials.  A monument and a memorial are placed by the people of one time to represent themselves to the people of the future.  My opinion was that it would be better to leave them in place.  

Not because I disagreed with the desire to root out the ideology of enslavement and dehumanization that put the monument there, and for which the memorialized combatants fought and died; the desire to take them down from a place of figurative and literal elevation.

My reasoning:  
I thought that it would be a kind of whitewashing that would someday allow the descendants of the monument-builders to pretend that it didn't really happen.  To pretend that the ordinary white Americans who lived and shopped and worked in the communities around those monuments were not participants in the ideology of enslavement, did not really support politicians who openly advocated white supremacy, were just following orders, were themselves victims of oppression (economic, gender) and all the rest of the tired old excuses that never go away.

No, the monuments were proof that the people with the power to make monuments---and the docents love to tell the story, when the monuments have been built not just by the grand benefactors of the day but with children's pennies and young housewives' pin-money---that the people who built the monuments wanted us to know this about them:  they mourned the slave system, along with the men who died to protect it.

I thought it was better that we had that proof, where it could stand out in the open and in the center of the town, shat upon by pigeons and washed by the rain, so we couldn't deny it now or in the future.

+ + +

But this wish was supported by a certain failure of imagination:  the idea that people of all sorts would mainly, and increasingly, see in them what I see, monuments to shame, complicity in the promotion of a truly disgusting set of ideas, and participation in an untold list of violations against the dignity of human beings and of family life.

I didn't really expect them to become once again popular rallying points for people --- violently or without laying a finger on anyone --- who are openly carrying the flags of America's defeated and nearly universally reviled enemies.

Failure of imagination.  Yes, I'll raise my hand:  I am a fool for not anticipating this.  I know about systematic racism.  I know about overt racism and that it still happens even though I am insulated from it.  I've got my own sins and to the extent that I know them I am ashamed.  I have been silent when I should have spoken, when to afflict the comfortable would have meant to afflict myself too.  I have been a coward.  

Failure of imagination.

+ + +

If this is going to be a thing, now and in the future --- and it seems that we have no kind of guarantee that it will not;

If Confederate monuments and the graves of fallen soldiers are to be a rallying point for swastika flags and chants of "Blut und Boden";

If anti-Black and anti-Jew and anti-immigrant cheers are to rise from crowds, encircling the bronze hooves of poor effigied horses bearing graven images of white supremacy on their backs;

then tear them all up, and shove them every one--the more beautifully executed and artistic, the more damning, because white people really did pour their creativity, their resources, and their capacity for beauty into memorials to crushing faces with boots--shove them all into the museums, where people with sense can make rules about maximum occupancy, noise levels, and weapons.

I thought we needed to have it all out in the open, where we would all be forced to reckon with our past.  It turns out that we are not wise enough or kind enough as a people to handle it.  We must, it seems, put them under armed glass after all.

 

Turning a little knowledge into more.

Refugees are people:  men, women, old people, young people, teenagers, children, infants.  

I typed and retyped the introductory sentence for my post and settled on that one, because apparently there's some controversy about that point.  Now I'll move on.

+ + +

Mark and I decide yearly where to send our family's charitable donations.   The summer's news moved me to look this year into helping and welcoming the families who are being directly resettled here after fleeing the violence in Syria.   Of course, there are national and international organizations who could use our money, but I also wondered who, if anyone, was doing that work locally.  

Although Gov. Mark Dayton sharply criticized those state governors who refused to accept people from Syria, I discovered, nobody in Minnesota really expects anyone from Syria to be directly resettled here.  There isn't an established community.  But Minnesota does expect to have welcome an increased number of refugees by the end of 2016.  The largest number, as for the last few years, are from Somalia.  

I knew this, of course, because I live in South Minneapolis, which is home to one of the largest communities of Somali people outside Somalia itself.  The greatest concentration, as well as the most visible cluster of businesses owned by and catering to Somali immigrants, is the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood a bit north of us.   But many Somali people live in our neighborhood as well.  Yesterday evening, a Tuesday, I was at the YMCA a mile from our house, running around the track that circles the second level of the gym; the gym was crowded, half by badminton players and half by basketball pick-up games, and the basketball side was (I estimate) 90 percent Somali.  Mostly young men and teenage boys, but a few little girls in brightly colored hijabs darted in and out, and there were a couple of teenage girls, too, practicing free throws.  Much of the signage in the YMCA is printed in English, Spanish, and Somali, and you'll see this in other places too, like on bank machines and sometimes shop windows.  In the winter, when everyone else at the bus stop seem to disappear under fluffy parkas, the distinctive skirts and hijab of Somali women still stand out above and below the winter coats, orange and green and turquoise and purple against the snow and the gray pavement.

+ + +

We will probably make a donation this year to one or more of the local organizations that work with refugees.  (See below* for a list.)  In the meantime I realized how very little I know about the community of refugees that already lives all around me.  I decided to change that.  

I picked up a book published in 2012 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, part of the People of Minnesota series: Somalis in Minnesota by Ahmed Ismail Yusuf.  It's less than 70 pages long and well footnoted.  The book describes the history of the nation of Somalia, how the fighting started and how its refugee crisis began.  It tells how Somalis began to be resettled in the United States in the early 1990s, almost all in the San Diego area, where there was already a small community of ethnic Somalis that had settled there from Ethiopia earlier.  But at the time, job prospects in the area were poor.  

Minnesota, at the time, had relatively low unemployment.   So when the owners of a single poultry plant in Marshall, MN wanted to expand operations from two shifts to three, they advertised in other states, hoping to draw workers with a starting rate of $6.95/hour (forty percent higher than the federal minimum wage at the time) plus benefits.  A few young men drove to Minnesota to check it out, an event which Yusuf places neatly in the context of the Somali nomadic tradition, in which a few members of a large group would travel ahead to scout out a new, high-quality living site that would support the community.  Those young men were hired immediately; they passed the news to the rest of the community in San Diego; more followed; and that became the cradle of the Minnesota Somali-American community.  Once that community had become established, additional refugees from Somalia began to be settled directly in Minnesota.

Yusuf goes on to describe some of the challenges that this first generation of Somali-Americans has had as it integrates into the wider communities of the local public school system, the Twin Cities, and the state of Minnesota.  Some of these early difficulties, I remember from the local news (kids fighting at Roosevelt High, some taxicab drivers -- Yusuf calls them "ignorant" -- who wouldn't transport dogs or alcohol from the airport) but that publicity had mostly faded away by the time the situations had been resolved.  These conflicts, Yusuf frames optimistically, pointing out that similar conflicts have marked the arrival of many other communities of immigrants who are now well accepted in American society.  He argues that the rapid growth of Somali-American businesses and the emergence of political and social leaders in the first generation is evidence that Somalis are doing relatively well, considering that they have been here less than 25 years and face significant cultural and language barriers.

 The most serious problem at this time is one that Yusuf treats at some length, and that is the active targeting of Somali boys and young men by paramilitary and terrorist organizations overseas.  Not long after I began reading the book, a 20-year-old Somali man injured 10 people in a mass stabbing at a St. Cloud mall before being shot by an off-duty police officer.   (As I write this, the nature of the attacker's connection to overseas terrorist organizations has not yet been clearly established.)  St. Cloud is 65 miles northwest of here, a much smaller city; earlier this year, a local and widely-read free newspaper proclaimed it "the worst place in Minnesota to be Somali."  But dozens of Minneapolis parents have lost sons,  some only teenagers, directly to recruitment from an al-Qaeda affiliate organization  in the Horn of Africa.  One became the first American citizen to commit murder-suicide by bomb in Somalia.  The FBI counterterrorism investigation in Minnesota is large and ongoing, and the topic casts a dark shadow.

Still, Yusuf's book is optimistic and informative, and it left me wanting to know more still.

+ + +

The next thing I wondered was whether I could learn any of the Somali language.  Signs everywhere around here bear phrases of Somali  -- some repeat the information on public signage, others are the names of shops and restaurants, still others appear in advertisements.  Qoraxey is the name of a home health care agency.  Dayax is the name of a grocery store.  I couldn't find any online tutorials; neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone nor Pimsleur offer courses in Somali.  The only textbook I found was kind of expensive, more than I wanted to spend for a brief introduction, so I started with a slim phrasebook and dictionary by Awde, Axmed, and Orwin.

I started at the pronunciation section.  Somali has used a Roman alphabet since it was imposed in 1972, which makes it a bit easier on English speakers, but there are some phonemes not found in English.

Got all that?  

I did find a helpful video online called "Somali Pronunciation:  Just The Tricky Ones."  The narrator, who has a British accent, demonstrates how to pronounce the graphemes x, c, kh, r, q, dh,  and d/t.  I only find c and dh hard, though; the r is just a trill, the kh is the familiar ending of loch and ach! , x is just a throaty h  and q just a really-far-back-in-your-throat k.  There's a glottal stop too.  Nothing complicated.  I think I can get the dh with a little practice.  The c will take a lot.

(It also left me wondering why the Somali spelling reformers decided to go with the c instead of something else.)

+ + +

I've been driving around and noticing signs and looking them up in the dictionary.  The Dayax grocery store is named "Moon."  The Qoraxey home health care agency appears to be named something like "sun" or "sunrise"  (qurax).  The Gargar clinic's name means "help," I think -- at least, that's what the dictionary says gargaar means.  Clearly I have a lot to learn.

Somali isn't Indo-European -- it is a Cushitic language, which means that it is in the same language family (Afro-Asiatic) as Arabic and ancient Egyptian but on a branch between them.  The grammar, therefore, is something entirely foreign to me, but maybe not so foreign as (say) a Sino-Tibetan language would be.  But there are words that leap out at me when I go through the dictionary:  aadami means human (hello, Adam!), roodhi is bread (must be a cognate of India's roti).  Colonialism and technology has left the language with many Western loanwords:  capsicum (sweet) peppers are berberooni, which has to be from the Italian peperoni; a physician is a dhakhtar or dhakhtarad; cheese is farmaajo; oven is foorno.

The other day, while I was running around the lake, I practiced the consonants, pronouncing the Somali word for "beautiful" over and over:  quruxsan, quruxsan, quruxsan.  A soft "k" in the back of the throat, the vowel of "put" twice with a trilled "r" between, then a throaty "hhh-san."

I haven't even started to look at how to put together a sentence, or assign the right endings to nouns and verbs, or differentiate between masculine and feminine nouns (except to delight in the trivia that a masculine singular noun often has a feminine plural, and vice versa).  I have to start with words and spellings and pronunciations, and then move on to a little grammar.  I know many people would start with "Hello" and "My name is" and "Thank you," but I'm a visual learner and an analytical one; I'm going to try to get an idea of the way sentences are put together first, and how words can vary; and I'm going to remember these things better if I think of the words as things that are spelled and seen rather than spoken and heard.  I know, it's not natural-language-learning, but I know myself -- when I hear words in English I see them inside my head, behind my eyes -- and I need the spelled-out words to be the hooks on which I can hang and remember spoken ones.

So this is my tiny side auto-didact project  for the fall.  I can already tell that I am going to need another book, probably the textbook that I'm now going to be willing to invest in, because the Awde book's grammar section emphasizes the importance of nouns' gender while its dictionary section does not list the gender of the nouns (!).  As soon as I can find a Somali-language newspaper in a rack of free publications at the front of a coffee house, I will be snatching one up.  And I'll visit the library around the corner, which boasts a small section of Somali-language children's books.

I'm a long way from even saying "hello," but I hope to crawl a little farther along.

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*Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis serves refugees through their Reception and Placement program, to which donors can designate donations.  The Minnesota Council of Churches provides refugee services as well. ECHO Minnesota provides multilingual broadcast programming and communication.  I'm particularly interested in finding out more about the International Institute of Minnesota, which I noticed when I lived near it in graduate school and looked into when I was considering taking Spanish classes myself; they provide immediate resettlement help but also offer job training and ongoing language education.

"A little knowledge..."

I don't believe in putting bumper stickers on my car.

The caveat here, before I explain myself, is that I don't care if you want to put bumper stickers on your car. Do it as much as you want. It is a matter of personal expression, and I am cool with that. But I don't put them on mine -- I guess you could say that an unadorned bumper is my personal expression.

It isn't that I don't appreciate a well-turned, pithy statement. I am fond of KILL YOUR TELEVISION. I like very much WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME TO QUESTION AUTHORITY? I wholeheartily agree with LOVE THEM BOTH. I have a special appreciation for outrageously large window decals of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You have a lovely stick figure family.

I just ... don't want such things on the outside of my car. Not even the tiniest, most unobtrusive rosary sticker in the corner of a back window. Definitely not anything political. There may be a sticker out there that I would be comfortable putting on my car, but I have not yet seen it.

Once, without consulting me, Mark put a sticker on the Volkswagen supporting a particular vote on a local ballot-initiative. Given that he knew I was planning to vote the same way he was, I think he was probably surprised by how annoyed I was that I had to drive around town in a car with a political bumper sticker on it. I made sour faces, I drove the minivan instead as much as possible for the next several weeks, and I made him peel it off the car on the first Wednesday in November. I didn't just feel annoyed about it, I felt unreasonably angry, and I spent a lot of time behind the wheel trying to articulate to myself why. I didn't quite come to an answer.

The other morning when Minneapolis and St. Paul woke up to the viral video of Phil Castile dying of five bullets in the front seat of his car while a panicked policeman shrieked "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I briefly wondered -- as I have wondered about various political and philosophical statements over the years as they became timely -- if it was maybe time to get a Black Lives Matter sticker. Some of my neighbors have the signs in their front yards. I don't mind signs in my yard as much, we've had candidate signs in the yard and that has never bothered me. I wondered very idly if I, bearing such a sticker, might be more likely to be pulled over. I wondered, too, if the same neighbors would see such a thing with appreciation or with derision, now that virtue-signaling is A Thing.

Two days later after the five Dallas murders I waded into one too many comment sections and I knew from my reaction to them that however sympathetic I may be to #BlackLivesMatter -- and even though I could still do the yard sign thing, like I said, I don't have the same feeling about yard signs -- I wasn't going to put any bumper stickers on my car, not of any sort. And I think I have figured out why.

It isn't that I don't want you to know what I think.

It's that I don't want you to think you know what I think.

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Last December Ken White, an attorney who blogs at Popehat, published an op-ed in the L. A. Times about "culture-bundling." He was writing about the unproductivity of most debates about gun control -- and it's a useful contribution to the discussion on that subject, too -- but what really stuck with me was just one of his three points, namely, the "bundling" concept. Bear with me, I know this passage uses gun control as its example, but I'm quoting it not for that particularity but because of the general concept that I have underlined.

We culture-bundle when we use one political issue as shorthand for a big group of cultural and social values. Our unproductive talk about guns is rife with this. Gun control advocates don't just attack support for guns; they attack conservative, Republican, rural and religious values. Second Amendment advocates don't just attack gun control advocates; they attack liberal, Democratic, urban and secular values. The gun control argument gets portrayed as the struggle against Bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NASCAR-watching hicks, and the gun rights argument gets portrayed as a struggle against godless, elitist, kale-chewing socialists.

That's great for rallying the base, I guess, but that's about all. When you culture-bundle guns, your opponents don't hear “I'm concerned about this limitation on rights” or “I think this restriction is constitutional and necessary.” They hear “I hate your flyover-country daddy who taught you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were 12” and “Your gay friends' getting married would ruin America and must be stopped.” That's unlikely to create consensus.

The original blog post , not bound by external editorial standards, uses a bit more colorful language. I think I prefer it. About an example of a pro-gun-control meme, White writes,

The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

And about an example of a pro-gun-rights meme,

Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."

I encourage you to read the whole thing there.

+ + +

Even for straightforward messages that one might think could not be misinterpreted, the phenomenon of culture-bundling means that people are tempted to make assumptions about each other. The Jesus Fish drags a trail of associations behind it like so much grimy seaweed. The Black Lives Matter sticker is smugly, mentally, made to bow and scrape as a mere corollary to All Lives Matter. Every car can be neatly shunted into the left and right lanes.

Such assumptions are not warranted, ever.

Yes, but...

No. They are not warranted. Not ever. The environmental-responsibility sticker doesn't also mean "People are bad and abortion is good." The second-amendment sticker doesn't also mean "Gay marriage is an oxymoron." The Jesus-loves-you sticker doesn't also mean "Keep evolution out of the schools." The support-our-troops sticker doesn't also mean "I -heart- the death penalty." The opinions behind the strawmen may be correlated one way or another, but human persons are not correlations.

The assumptions aren't warranted. They aren't warranted because when we make them we are seeing a human being as an object: an object of our own self-gratification, the pecular good feeling because it reinforces all the things we already think.

Bumper stickers tempt people to see each other as objects.

Bumper stickers tempt people away from compassion and toward derision.

And that is not even counting the occasional sticker that actually expresses something that's not just unpopular, a minority opinion, or countercultural, but actually vile.

+ + +

And what about Christian witness? Have I got something against proclaiming Jesus Christ on the outside of my vehicle?

Yes, I do. I do not deserve to prominently display the Holy Name on the outside of my car. I have a lead foot. I have a big scrape on my minivan door where I hit a pole in the co-op parking lot on the day before Thanksgiving. I accidentally cut people off while shouting at squabbling kids. The best I can do for a justifiably pissed-off fellow commuter is that super-apologetic "Sorry! My bad!" wave. I don't think my displaying a Queen of the Rosary sticker is going to do either the Queen of the Rosary, or myself, or the guy leaning on his horn, any good in that moment. My mishap may do more damage because of it.

There are shades here of Luke 18:9-14. Being a Christian behind the wheel should mean driving with awareness, attention, and courtesy, not driving the right car or having the right sticker. I need the mercy of God inside my car.

+ + +

And the world needs the mercy of God outside it, too, which is one reason I don't want to tempt anyone to think nasty thoughts. There are plenty of other places to speak the truth: places where, unlike on the bumper of my car, I get to speak the whole truth, put things in context, show my face, be seen as a whole person and not a hashtag.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have seen that this week, to our national grief.

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Laudato Si': Finally finished it.

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, I read to Mark while he drives.  We pick some nonfiction book that we think will spark an interesting discussion -- usually something we think we'll like, sometimes a work that we'll have more fun attacking and poking holes in.    On our recent trip to Ohio, our book for the way down was a 2013 book called The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.  That was a really thought-provoking one, which emerged with only a few holes in it, and I hope to blog a review pretty soon.  On the way back up, we read Laudato Si' from start to finish.

As I read it, I "took notes" by posting little paraphrases on Facebook.  I mostly didn't quote, but tried to distill it down to my own takeaways from the document.  It wasn't by any means a comprehensive summary.

Mark and I are using the long drive to finally read Laudato Si', the ecological encyclical. Chapter 1 tl;dr: Humans can't just do anything they feel like doing. The consequences hit the poor hardest. There are many possible solutions, but only some respect human beings and put the poor first.

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Laudato Si' ch2.I tl;dr: So if this encyclical is for everybody, why am I writing about Christian doctrine? 1. Cultural diversity means our thoughts count! 2. Don't you think if I can call on faith to motivate millions of Christians to steward the earth, I should? (not mentioned: because I am the pope and it's totally in my wheelhouse)

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More Laudato Si' ch2 tl;dr: Actually, we *don't* steward the earth just for the benefit and use of all the peoples of the earth and future generations. The earth and its creatures are a good worth stewarding for its own sake as well as humans'. "Till it," AND "keep it."

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LS ch2: Neither absolute property rights, nor renunciation of them. "If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all."

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LS ch3: The bad kind of technocratic paradigm is: all problems worth solving are solved by completely controlling material objects, and by the way, everything is a material object.

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LS ch3: The throwaway culture that wastes resources and pollutes the planet is the exact same throwaway culture that disposes of inconvenient human beings and buys and sells the bodies of the poor.

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LS ch3. Better laws aren't going to save you in a culture immersed in utilitarianism, because the powerful will always see the utility of subverting the law.

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LS ch3. Genetic modification techniques are to be judged case by case, depending on their impact on human relationships, labor, and well being.

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LS ch4. One problem with trying to solve problems via high-level regulations binding equally everywhere is that their inflexibility limits the flourishing of local institutions and cultures. Consumerism also levels differences instead of allowing them to flourish.

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LS ch4. Overcrowded cities might make people live in uprootedness and chaos, but if people weave strong networks of human bonds this can be transformed into belonging and closeness instead.

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LS ch5: proposals. Developing countries get to prioritize development and quality of life; let the rich countries bear the heavier burden of environmental restrictions.

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LS ch5: Somehow, we need both to respect national sovereignty and local conditions, while instituting a real global transnational political structure to make rules about global problems -- with the teeth to enforce them, somehow. Meanwhile, lots can be accomplished by local projects.

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LS ch5: The burden of proof should be on the proposers of a new project, that it will not cause serious irreversible damage to the human ecology of an area -- not on the local inhabitants to show incontrovertible evidence that it will.

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Cell phone coverage prevented me from liveblogging the sixth chapter of Laudato Si' as I read it, which is too bad, because that is where the advice is. Here goes: "Purchasing is always a moral, not simply an economic, act."

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LS ch6, my paraphrase: Environmental education needs to mean drawing out an *ethics* of ecology, instilling not just info, but habits of solidarity, responsibility, and compassion.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. For those who can afford to consume a lot, it is meaningful to instead make small daily acts of conservation (turn down the thermostat, reduce food waste, turn off lights). It's a sort of "little way" of simplicity and self-control wth respect to resources that are not unlimited, and may pay off in ways we can't see immediately.

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LS ch6: "Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little... That simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack."

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LS ch6. One way to restore the right attitude, on several levels, towards resources is the traditional thanksgiving/blessing before and after meals.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. Encouraging beauty locally, by joining together in groups to preserve a building, a landscape, etc., also is meaningful.

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LS ch6. My paraphrase. To do away with intentional rest is to do away with the most important thing about work: its meaning. In resting we enjoy the fruits of our labor, experience gratitude, and see that it (what we have made) is good.

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LS ch6. Interestingly enough, the encyclical ends with two prayers, one of which is a Christian prayer (i.e., a Trinitarian one) and one of which is suggested for non-Christian believers in God to use, a "prayer for the earth." They are long, so I recommend checking them out yourself.

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Then after I finished paraphrasing, I went back and recorded a few thoughts on the encyclical as a whole, and on our family.

 

LS thoughts (1): Utilitarianism is the wrong way to calculate which policy and personal decisions to make. You could read the whole encyclical as "the state of the planet is evidence that utilitarianism is wrong."

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LS thoughts (2). If I have a lot of resources, and can spend more of my resources (money, time) to reduce damage or impact, I should. E.g. If it costs me more to repair an item than to buy new, but I can afford it, maybe I pay for the repair instead of discarding the item and buying new.

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LS thoughts (3). We do the traditional blessing before meals, but maybe we ought to incorporate the blessing after meals, like before we excuse the children from the table so we can finish the wine and talk together.

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LS thoughts (4). Private property's purpose is the common good. I think this is a "parable of the talents" situation. You can have stuff to use it, to restore it, to share it, to protect it for later, to turn it into more stuff that can be spread around -- lots of possibilities. But if you can't use that item in some way that furthers the common good, why acquire it?

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LS thoughts (5). Be glad for what you have, that's an easy way to start.

___

Yeah, I know, the last one is a quote from a Veggie Tales song.  It's from"Madame Blueberry," which I maintain is the most relevant Veggie Tales episode ever.  But I digress.

I have to say, and a couple of my FB friends also had this to say, that the repeated calls for transnational governing bodies to take up the problems of global environmental health and to enforce agreements make me a bit... uneasy.  Reckless, was the word that one of my FB friends used for it, and I think I actually agree with that designation.  We all know how willing powerful people are to take things out of context to justify doing things the way they want to do them.  

When we hear "transnational governing bodies" we think of the UN, and of the UN often the best thing that can be said of it is that its intentions were good, once.  It hasn't just been a corrupt body; it's been a body bent on calling evil good and good evil, off and on throughout its history.  

If you take the document as a whole, it is pretty clear that Pope Francis is not calling for organizations that operate the way the UN does, with the kinds of goals and governing principles that the UN has.  He is calling for massive conversion of heart at all levels of society including the transnational.  But:  the sound bites will never reflect that.  One can argue that the media will never stop taking Popes (and anyone else who is invested by enough people with moral authority) out of context, and that there are no words which cannot be twisted to suit someone else's purposes.  And Francis does seem to be more "reckless" than his last few predecessors, in a lot of ways.  He's not as precise.  He seems to be more easily taken out of context.  

This is a high-risk situation for a Pope to be in, to be sure, that's what "reckless" means, but high risk might also bring high reward, and I'm hopeful.  St. Francis was himself reckless in many ways and is still taken out of context all the time, and yet, those who look beyond the popular image and deeper at the ascetic, at the historical St. Francis, the holiness of the man himself (not either the pious legend or the impious legend) will find something that calls to conversion of heart and of life.

 + + +

Besides the bits that I summarized above, I took away from the encyclical some concrete advice at the level of family life.  We are squarely in the class of people who have plenty of resources to live a life that is in accord with human dignity, and then some, and so it's that advice for people who live in rich countries that speaks more to us.

We can afford not to externalize the costs of our lifestyle.  It is a false economy, for example, to buy cheap junk which breaks, can't be repaired, is landfilled and then must be replaced with more cheap junk.  Even if a thing costs more to be repaired than to be replaced, perhaps it is more fitting to pay a worker to fix it than to landfill it and cheaply replace it.  We should continue to use a thing until it becomes unusable, and then try to recycle it, rather than get a new version just because a new one is available.  This is frustrating with electronics, which are subject to a system in which they are designed to become functionally obsolete and to force us to replace them before they are "broken;" but we can use them longer than we might, if we are willing to put up with minor irritations for a while, and over a lifetime we might consume significantly fewer electronic devices than if we had listened to the culture of new-and-shiny.

We are tempted to use climate control unnecessarily.  Mind you, climate control isn't evil; we are having a heat advisory right now, and I have the air conditioning on.  Climate control saves lives, in fact, especially in the case of the elderly and sick, and people who suffer from windborne allergies and can't function well with open windows.  But I have found myself over the past few winters slipping into a "doggone it, I can afford to turn the heat up" mentality, and stabbing the button to take it from 68 F to 73 F.  It's true, I could put on a sweater and a pair of fingerless gloves.  It's a small sacrifice, which means that the turning-up of the heat is a very petty luxury.

We can choose to maintain beautiful things no matter where we are, either as individuals or as communities.  One of the things that I really liked about this "ecological encyclical" -- it really isn't an "environmental" one so much as an "ecological" one -- is that it included manmade beauty as well as natural beauty as worthy of preservation.  Pope Francis mentioned buildings and fountains and city squares, along with landscapes and rivers, as worthy for human beings to rally around, form an identity of place around, and preserve.  I have a bias toward cities and the beautiful and useful things that people design and build, the way that we transform the earth into something new and the ways that we concentrate in urban areas and build social networks that have a sense of unity and identity despite a diverse population, and I was delighted to find that this human ecology has received plenty of attention.  So yes, we can join together in civic groups to preserve wetlands and forests, but it's also good to join Friends of the Library, a local historical association, or any number of other civic groups that strengthen human bonds and keep the city from becoming impersonal and ugly. 

We could all do with a little more gratitude for the good things we enjoy.  The Holy Father reminded us that the blessing before and after meals is a fitting way to pause and exercise that gratitude; we do, as a family, regularly give thanks before meals, but we haven't really done the after-meals thing.  We tried for a little while some years ago, but trailed off as we couldn't really find a good time that was the "end" of the meal, as kids asked to be excused one by one.  Mark and I talked about that and we decided we would try to bring that back.  I left it up to him to figure out exactly how it's going to work.  Maybe instead of excusing the kids one at a time as they finish, we'll excuse them all at once, say the after-meal blessing, and then they'll run away and we can finish the wine together.

We could be careful only to acquire the things that we can "administer for the good of all" -- where that might mean for the genuine benefit of our family (the education of the children, the care for each member's bodily needs) or might mean to care for it so it can be enjoyed by others.  (I'm struck by how this resonates to the same frequency as the Marie Kondo book that I read a couple of months ago.  It feels pretty wasteful to get rid of so much unused, non-joy-sparking stuff, but once you've done it, an a-ha! goes off in your head and there's a reluctance to allow any more non-joy-sparking stuff back in.)

We can do all those small things that, we are told, add up to making a difference:  reduce food waste, reuse and recycle containers, cut down on unnecessary car trips, live more simply.  Sure, it's annoying, and it seems to be a drop in the bucket, but in a spirit of sacrifice it may do some good; like fasting, it has worth beyond the value of the food not consumed, if the sacrifice is made as an offering.  Purely technological solutions that do not ask any sacrifice from us don't have the same dimension of value; self-gift is always effective somehow, even if only interiorly, but technical solutions might have unforeseen consequences and risk becoming just a signifier, a status symbol.  Also, small acts of self-sacrifice are available to everyone.  

In our family, one of those drop-in-the-bucket things might be to change our patterns of meal planning so that we don't waste so much food (I throw out SO MUCH RICE it's ridiculous) and consume a more sustainable mix of protein sources.  

• Meatless Fridays are just a starting point (and of course, there are lots of reasons to choose that as a starting point, here in the US where meatless Fridays are optional -- the primary reason one being to take up the penance that belongs to the rest of the Church as a matter of course).  
• We can recognize that in some countries the people must rely on ocean fish as a primary protein source, and it's a limited resource, and we can abstain from it to leave enough for them -- in economic terms, to keep its price low.   (Similar logic might need to be applied to some imported plant foods, such as quinoa, but the economics are complicated.)  
• We can think of poultry meat as more "expensive" than eggs and dairy protein, pork as more "expensive" than beef, and beef as the most "expensive" of all -- not just based on the dollar value at the supermarket, but based on the amount of agricultural land required to support it.  Maybe a three-pound chub of ground beef on sale is not actually as great a deal as it looks.  I'm not saying never eat beef -- if you're in need of dietary iron, for example, it's very hard to beat it -- but it seems a reasonable sacrifice to regularly abstain from it, save it for legitimate feasts.  Some of the costs of that sale beef have been externalized, and if we pay more for less (as we would if we restricted ourselves to, say, grass-fed small-farmed animals) maybe we can take up more of the responsibility for the real costs as well as supporting family farms.

I think that we have a lot to think about here, as a family, and even more to do.  Fundamentally, though, Laudato Si' recommends a change in attitude.  I think that it's very compatible with the spiritualities I have become most interested in over the past few years:  for example, Elisabeth Leseur's ideas that our tiniest actions and words may affect others in ways that we could never fathom, spreading outward like ripples through time and from person to person, which means that we never have the luxury of apathy.   If Elisabeth Leseur's special gift was to integrate her married life with her spirituality, then I think what Pope Francis is calling here is to integrate our economic lives with our spirituality.  Too often we separate them, but in fact we must integrate all of ourselves into Christ, and that means every decision we make is a moral decision.  Yes, even a choice of taste, like whether your ice cream is chocolate or vanilla or strawberry -- or maybe that's a bit extreme; how about, whether your tacos are  carne asada or pollo or frijoles. 

Unmagical thinking.

Okay.... talk me down from this place that Twitter, news site comments, and FB have stranded me on.

Repeat after me enough and maybe I'll believe it:

The country has always been going to hell in a handbasket.  There has never not been a time when the country has been going to hell in a handbasket.  The country will always be going to hell in a handbasket, at least from someone's point of view.

There's nothing particularly special about the fact that right now, it's my point of view's turn.  Right?

+ + +

Andrew Jackson refused to enforce and abide by the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court and nobody did anything about it.  Local, state, and federal laws and practice, in north and south, enshrined written and unwritten policies that literally stole wealth from generations of nonwhite families well into the twentieth century.  FDR thought it would be a great idea to put a few extra justices, something like ten more, in the Supreme Court.  For forty years the most concrete manifestation of a "right to privacy" has been a license to commit murder.  And for all of these outrages and more, there have always been a large number of American citizens who said, "Fine with me," or what's maybe worse, "It doesn't affect me, so, who cares?"

+ + +

It comes down to this:  I don't think that the country has enough political will to put the brakes on the federal government's expansion of powers that arguably violate the fourth amendment.

There are too many people who espouse "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about."

There are too many people who espouse "Anything that makes us safer is worth doing" without asking the question, "How will we know if it makes us safer?"

There are too many people who espouse "So-and-so wouldn't be in trouble if he hadn't done something wrong."

In my sleepless nights I worry that there are a large number of people who figure that there are a lot of benefits to living in a police state, so long as the people with the correct letter after their names are in charge of the police.  

There are so many of these people that, I fear, the anything-for-security people will win.  The political will will not be there to protect the free expression of unpopular ideas.  The political will will not be there to protect religious minorities and to guard against preferential treatment in accommodations for favored groups.  The political will will not be there to maintain Fourth Amendment protections.  And the decisions will be made in secret, with the public's blessing, because the majority of the public will never, never accept that cops and schoolteachers and tax collectors and prison guards and regulators and presidents (with the correct letter after their names) could ever use secrecy in any way except to take good care of us and all the other good people, the ones who follow the rules and like it.

+ + + 

Privilege.  Privilege.  Privilege.  This is what the don't-have-anything-to-hide, anything-to-make-us-safer, he-must've-done-something-to-deserve-it people have in common.  They are speaking from behind a cushion of privilege so soft and warm that they cannot even tell it is there.  The privilege of people who have never been singled out, who don't have something they might prefer quite reasonably to hide, who are the acceptable people.  Who have never had the misfortune to make an enemy with a government job, who have never been embroiled in the justice system or family court, who are content to play by rules without questioning them and have never had the rules come back to bite them, in large part because they belong to the class of people who make the rules.

+ + +

I don't have anything to hide, so why should I care about privacy?

I'm white, so why should I care about racism?

+ + +

The Bill of Rights -- and I confess that I'm here thinking mostly of the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments -- nominally restrain the power of the federal government with respect to the individual.    

It's not hard, however, to read them as a restraint on a pervasively flawed and twisted aspect of fallen human nature, one we would all do well to root out when we find it within ourselves.

And that is our tendency to convince ourselves that bad things do not happen to good people.

If you need Scriptural evidence that this is, indeed, a Big Problem for the human race that we have been well advised to work on, please refer to the entire book of Job.

"Bad things don't happen to good people" is a comforting thought for a number of reasons.

1. Bad things don't happen to good people; bad things have not, so far, happened to us; therefore, all evidence suggests that we are good people.
2. Bad things don't happen to good people; we are good people; therefore, bad things won't happen to us.
3. Bad things have happened to those people; bad things do not happen to good people; therefore, those people are not "good people," and we have no obligation or ability to relieve their suffering.
4. Bad things don't happen to good people; good people are people who follow certain rules; therefore, if we follow certain rules, bad things won't happen to us.

You see how thinking this way is a temptation to many people.  It is also called "magical thinking," because it causes so many good people to believe that they, somehow, can prevent bad things from happening to them by behaving the "right" way, where the "right" way is equivalent to "what good people do."

Go find any news story about a person who has suffered a terrible accident or crime.  Dive down into the comments.  Someone, somewhere, is convinced that the sufferer suffers (or lost his life), fundamentally because he did something wrong.  Cyclist hit by a drunk driver?  You'd have to be an idiot to be riding your bicycle on the street at that time of night.  Injured in a fall while rock climbing, and carried out by county SAR?  We shouldn't be bailing out these thrill-seeking dummies.  Killed in a building collapse caused by shoddy demolition next door?  There's no way I would even have gone to work in that store, it was so obvious that the wall was going to fall down.  Lost a son or daughter to a drug overdose?  Maybe if she spent more time parenting and less time blogging this wouldn't have happened.  

It's an impulse that may seem merely provincial, perhaps ignorant, certainly common.  But it's a root of pure evil, because it convinces us we ought to do nothing to help the poor and suffering, because they probably deserve it.

+ + +

It's this tendency in fallen human nature that the writers of the Bill of Rights were writing against.  They wrote it to restrain the government, because the "bad things don't happen to good people" mentality is particularly dangerous when it is held by the people who have the power to enforce the "rules for being good people."

For instance:

Bad things don't happen to good people.  Being accused of a crime is a bad thing.  Therefore, the accused is a bad person.  

(I mean... just look at him.  Do you really need a jury to figure that out?)

Or:

Bad things don't happen to good people.  We are good people.  Therefore, there are no downsides to permitting random searches of private papers or property or what-have-you, because we are good people and it would be a bad thing if the government used something they found against us, or pretended to find something that really the government agent planted there, because maybe he had a quota to fill or something, and we cannot imagine that ever happening because, like I said, we are GOOD PEOPLE and bad things don't happen to good people and they wouldn't try that quota thing on us because, come on, aren't there some BAD PEOPLE out there, and wouldn't it'd be a lot easier to get away with planting contraband in THEIR personal effects?  

And before you know it, we're okay with that sort of thing.  And it all comes down to ... what?  

I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

+ + +

 As usual, human nature contains multitudes.  There is another, opposite temptation called "bad things that happen to me are someone else's fault," and since humans are nothing if not adaptable, it is entirely possible to hold both of them at once.

This complicates the proposed solutions, to be sure, to the problem of magical thinking.

Electing the pope. Dot net.

Since we're coming up on the papal conclave -- the See will be vacant as of 8 pm this Friday -- I thought I'd point you to a project started by blogger, sometime commenter, and web designer Dorian Speed (of Convolare Design).

Electingthepope.net is a question-and-answer site about the papal election:

Electingthepope.net is a collaborative effort among Catholic writers, bloggers, educators, and catechists. We’ve come together to answer the basic questions that many people have asked about Pope Benedict XVI’s unexpected resignation and the upcoming papal election. Our aim is to provide well-researched, clear answers to questions about these topics and to share other reliable sources of information with our readers....

This site is designed to provide accurate answers to basic questions about Catholic beliefs and practices and isn’t focused on speculation about the results of the conclave or theological discussion. We want this to be a resource for students, teachers, and journalists. ElectingthePope.net is an independent project not affiliated with any Catholic diocese or institution.

Dorian asked me to be part of the site, along with some great other bloggers who may be familiar to you, so I've been having fun combing through the questions and looking for interesting challenges.  

The main result, so far, is that I've become very familiar with Universi Dominici Gregis.  

Several of my posts are awaiting SEO checks and things, but I have a few of them up.  So far the longest one has been an answer to the submitted question, "Will it not appear hypocritical if Cardinal Mahony participates in the conclave?  Is there nothing the other cardinals can do to prevent him from participating?"

(Short answer:  (a) The only person who can stop him, under the rules, is Pope Benedict XVI, and he only has until 8 PM Friday. (b) Following rules is generally thought to be a good idea when it comes to elections.)

(Just as an aside -- you think you are facing a long to-do list this Monday morning?  Wonder what the Holy Father's looks like.  Got to get all of this done by Friday 8 PM.)

Some closure in Indianapolis.

Because I have an unhealthy interest in the investigations that follow upon things that blow up, I have been following the story from Indianapolis about the house that exploded -- in an extraordinarily, unusually powerful natural gas explosion -- on November 10. (It's been on Twitter under the hashtag #indyboom since thirty seconds after the explosion, later supplemented by the somewhat less gauche #indyexplosion after it became clear that people had likely died.)

Arson and murder charges were filed a couple of days ago against the homeowner, her live-in boyfriend, and the boyfriend's brother, who apparently blew up the house in order to split the insurance money.

This lengthy article from the Indianapolis Star details what has to be one of the most boneheaded criminal scheme (in the sense of the criminals' almost guaranteeing that they'd be caught) ever. It would be laughable, if it weren't for the fact that two neighbors lost their lives, other neighbors were injured, 31 houses were destroyed or condemned, and about 60 more houses were damaged.

The piece seems to be a pretty good example of in-depth reporting, assuming that the facts as reported are accurate. I hope the affected families will feel one step closer to justice by Christmastime. Spare the young daughter of the homeowner a thought or prayer if you can; she will have a tough Christmas.

Literature-based American History (III): Topics of the twentieth century.

The other two parents that I co-school with really liked the topic-based format that I used for the year we studied 19th-century America, so I went with that again for the twentieth century.  

There's so much that happens in the twentieth century, it was very hard to narrow down the topics.  In the end I let two principles guide me:

(1) Since this is American history, I would stick with a U. S. perspective on global events.  I wouldn't, for example, explain what led up to World War One over in Europe.  We would cover that material in World History.  So instead I would limit my discussion of WWI to the Americans' entry into the Great War and afterward.  I applied this same principle to a number of other global events.

(2) I would favor topics that would help explain "how we got where we are today."   If something is important in today's news, I wanted to try to give the last hundred years of context for it.

After much fruitful discussion, we came to this arrangement of topics:

• American foreign relations and the roots of the War on Terror
• Economics (including the Depression, the effects of unionization, Social Security, the national debt)
• American mobility (including the interstate highway system, migrations, immigrants)
• Parties and ideologies (FDR, Reagan, the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore)
• Civil rights (women's suffrage, Brown vs Board of Education, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the disability rights movement,  important Supreme Court cases, and homeschooling rights)
• Twentieth-century changes to the American experience of childhood (child labor, schooling, gender and race restrictions are lifted, the American family mutates, the unborn lose protection)
• Communication technology (radio, television, movies, computers, Internet and social media)

Meanwhile, I completed my short list of dates for the kids to memorize, and we did various exercises with the dates all year long.  Previously learned memory dates include:

• 1492, Columbus sails 
• 1776, Declaration of Independence 
• 1860, Lincoln elected
• 1865, Civil War ends; Lincoln assassinated 
• 1900, remember that McKinley was the president at the turn of the century

Here's a week-by-week book list.  "Hakim" refers to Joy Hakim, A History of US.

Week 1------ MEMORY DATE: 1918, the "Spanish" flu epidemic and the end of World War I.

• Hakim vol. 9 Preface about world war I 
• Marquette, World War I 
• Hibbert, In the Trenches in World War I
•  "U. S. Enters World War I" short film at http://www.newseum.org 
• Kudlinski K, Hero Over Here (Spanish flu) 
• Sergeant York (film)

Week 2 ------

• Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II .  This book is twelve kinds of awesome.  You get the stories of women who saw combat, you get a close look at the Pacific theater, and you get lots of interesting details that never make it into textbooks.
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 26, 27, 29, 30 
• The Great Escape (film)  (okay, they were Brits, but it's such a great movie)
• Sands of Iwo Jima (film)
• Leckie R, The Battle of Iwo Jima

Week 3 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1941, Pearl Harbor attack, U. S. enters WWII.

• "Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor;"  "Nazi Holocaust Exposed;" "Hiroshima" all at  http://www.newseum.org 
• Stein, The U. S. S. Arizona 
• McGowen, Battle for Iwo Jima
•  Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II (continued) 
• "The Great Escape" (PBS NOVA documentary)

Week 4 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1945, the first nuclear attack on a city; WWII ends.

• Elish,The Story of the Manhattan Project

Week 5 ------

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read parts through 1957)
• Kallen, The Race to Space 
• Grant, NATO 
• Various books about Apollo and Mercury missions
• Doeden, Weapons of the Cold War
• WarGames (film)
• Russkies (film)  DO NOT LAUGH AT THE EIGHTIES FILM LOVE.  I wanted to show the kids what the pop-culture notions of Russians and of nuclear war were like in the mid-eighties.

Week 6 ------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 7 
• Leckie, The War in Korea 1950-1953 chapters 1, 2, 12, 13.  This is a fantastic Landmark book.  I wish I had had time to read it all to the kids.
• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read from Sputnik to Johnson) 
• Kent, The Story of the Saigon Airlift
•  Discussion question: If the war in Vietnam is over, why continue to argue about whether the US sould have fought it, or when it should have come to an end? 
• Huynh Q, The Land I Lost - a memoir about Vietnam from a Vietnamese refugee

Week 7 ------ MEMORY DATE: 1989, the Berlin Wall is opened.

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (finished)
•  Schmemann, How the Wall Came Down (parts) 
• "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech by Reagan, Youtube
•  "The opening of the Wall at Berlin Bornholmer Strasse 1989" 

Week 8 ------ MEMORY DATE: 2001, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell.  This is a history of terrorism in general.  It is a Landmark book and was revised after September 11, 2001; older editions won't have a discussion of the 9/11 attacks.  It's really wonderfully comprehensive.

Week 9 ------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)

Week 10 -------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)
• Several news articles about terrorism in the past week, to show that it continues to be a significant global threat

Week 11 -------

•    14 Cows for America

Week 12 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1929, the great stock market crash

• Downing, The Great Depression (free browsing) 
• Blumenthal, Six Days in October 
• Sandler, The Dust Bowl through the Lens
• Lange, "Migrant Mother" (photograph)

Week 13 -------

• Appelt and Schmitzer, Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky.  Love.  This.  Book.  

Week 14 -------

• Discuss current economic recession 
• Lauber, Flood: Wrestling with the Mississippi.  This book didn't really fit in anywhere but I liked it so much I wanted to use it, so I decided it went in with economics (since natural disasters are economic disasters, right?)   Patricia Lauber is a prolific writer of kids' science titles.

Week 15 -------

• Paradis, From Trails to Superhighways: The Story of America's Roads to show how we got our interstate system
• Williams, Road and Rail Transportation (pgs 20-26) for a handful of technical details

Week 16 -------

• Stanley J, Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp.  This is an utterly amazing story of how Okie children, rejected by Californians, built their own school with their own hands under the leadership of a visionary and kind public school official.  It is sobering to think how far we have come from the regionalistic xenophobia of just a couple generations ago, when citizens of one state regarded migrants from another state  as dangerous aliens.
• Discuss other migrations (African-American "Great Migration;" Mormon migration; Gold Rush)

Week 17 -------

• Paul, North Across the Border (Mexican immigrants) 
• Springstubb T, The Vietnamese Americans.  I picked these two books not because I particularly favored Mexican or Vietnamese immigrants over others, but because they seemed the best books our library had about the immigrant experience

Week 18 -------

• "The Rainmaker" (from Armstrong, The American Story) about FDR
•  Church and Lacayo, "Social Insecurity," TIME magazine, March 20, 1995 
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 20, 22, 23, 24, 25 
• Discussion about how Social Security works and potential for insolvency; possible solutions.

Week 19 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, ch. 36 and 37 (Nixon) 
• Lewis and others, "5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here" The Washington Post, June 18, 1972 
• Discuss the attitude that one's political opponents are one's enemies.

Week 20 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters about Ronald Reagan 
• Discuss: Reagan as polarizing figure, liberal vs. conservative economic philosophies, pros and cons of progressive taxation, arguments about trickle-down economics, Reagan as "the great communicator."

Week 21 -------

• The American Experience: Ronald Reagan (film)

Week 22 -------

• Discuss 2000 presidential election, close elections, electoral college, Florida recount, mechanics of voting machines, chads; 
• 2008 Minnesota senate race (close race with hand recount) "Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge." Activity from Minnesota Public Radio website,  I printed out the challenged ballots, cut them apart, and had the three kids pretend to be election judges and decide how to allocate the challenged ballots.
• CBS News archive coverage of presidential election night, 2000. 
• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters 46-47 
• Greene A, Understanding the 2000 Election (background chapter)

Week 23 -------

• Separate but Equal (film): first half.  It's a made-for-TV movie about Brown v. Board of Education.

Week 24 -------

• Finish Separate but Equal (film). 
• Read Justice Earl Warren's opinion in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Week 25 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 16 (integration of Little Rock Central High)
•  "1920: Votes for Women" (from Armstrong, The American Story) 
• McKissack P and Zarembka A, To Establish Justice: Citizenship and the Constitution, chapter 10 on the disability rights movement.  There's some adult and controversial material in this book so I excerpted carefully.

Week 26 -------

• "I Have a Dream" Martin Luther King speech, full, on Youtube 
• Short clip of Malcolm X speaking 
• Hakim vol. 10, chapters 14, 15, 19 (Martin Luther King) 
• King ML, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (excerpts) 
• Graves R, Malcolm X (Cornerstones of Freedom series) 
• "The Black Revolution" from The World's Great Speeches (Malcolm X speech to socialists organization, 1964) 
• Discuss Malcolm X and MLK: influences of religion on them, name change, assassinations, opinions of the method of nonviolence

Week 27 -------

• Curtis CP, The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963 (fiction, used as independent reading)
• Writing assignment: Curtis places a real event (the 1963 Birmingham church bombing) in a fictional story. Does it make a fictional story more interesting if it contains a real event? Does the fictional context make it easier to understand the impact of the historical event?

Week 28-------

•  Laws and court cases relevant to homeschooling rights and regulations: 
  • Meyer v. Nebraska 
  • Pierce v. Society of Sisters 
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder
  • Minnesota v. Newstrom (relevant in Minnesota only)
  • Current Minnesota statutes about home schools 
• Discuss: Should the state regulate the subjects taught? Should the state regulate the credentials of homeschooling parents? Should the state regulate the number of days of instruction? Should the state ban homeschooled children from working during school hours? Should the state require public schools to allow homeschooled students to use their facilities?

Week 29 -------

• Discussion about how the lives of children changed between about 1920 and 1990. (consumer safety regulations, equality in education, overall better health but more obesity, labor laws, sanitation, vaccinations, antibiotics, extended families living more often far away, fewer family members lost to premature death, more divorce, working mothers, smaller families, racial and gender diversity of role models) 
• Discussed growing awareness of diversity by discussing the role models who were available to young people. 
• Ryan, When Marian Sang (about Marian Anderson) 
• Weatherford, Jesse Owens: Fastest Man Alive 
• Szabo C, Sky Pioneer: A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart 
• (Biographies of others were available, including Jackie Robinson and Jim Thorpe)

Week 30 -------

•  Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (fiction; first half) 
• Themes of 20th-century child life: divorce, working parents, child support, moving to a new school, small family, lack of connection to extended family 
• Discuss various literary styles of Dear Mr. Henshaw: first- person; "epistolary" or letter format ; writing in dialogue; diary format; book review . 
• What do we think Mr. Henshaw thinks about Leigh? How do we learn what Mr. Henshaw has written to Leigh? How does Leigh express his feelings?
• (this actually appeared a few weeks later and we discussed it then, but thematically it goes here:) "Census: Saying No to Marriage," Star Tribune, May 12, 2011. Less than fifty percent of Twin Cities households include married couples. Read the article, list the main points, and discuss the implications.

Week 31 -------

• Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (second half) 
• Continue discussions of themes of 20th-century child life
• 20th-century child life: Roe v. Wade. Discussion with parent.  (I did not teach this to the group.)
•  My take: 
  • What it means. 
  • How it changed U. S. law. 
  • Current legal controversy (aside from moral controversy) about whether there is a constitutional right to privacy. 
  • Rights of the unborn compared to what we have learned about civil rights, women's rights, and the rights of the disabled. 
  • What mechanisms exist under which the law could be changed? What can an ordinary citizen do about it?

Week 32 -------

• Discuss radio, cinema, silent movies, newsreels 
• "1938: The War of the Worlds" from Armstrong, The American Story 
• Watch: "Keystone Kops: Fatty Joins the Force"
•  Watch: Newsreel of the Queen Mum's 1923 wedding, side by side with TV highlights of Prince William's wedding to Kate Middleton in 2011 
• Watch: Trailer for movie "THEM!" 
• Discuss the social and cultural purposes and effects of movies in different periods 
• Are there fewer moviegoers now? Why? What do theaters do to keep customers coming?
•  For browsing: Parkinson D, The Young Oxford Book of the Movies

week 33 -------

• Kent, Z. The Story of Television. 
• Clarification of the differences among broadcast television, cable television, VCRs, DVDs, streaming video, hard drive storage of video. 
• Discussion of expanding choices; role of advertising; and cultural and economic changes brought about by television. 
• Discussion of genres of television shows. 
• Watch: Two episodes of I Love Lucy. "Switching Jobs" and "Lucy Does a TV Commercial."

Week 34 -------

• Sherman J, The History of the Internet 
• McPherson SS, Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (parts) 
• Stewart GB, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Google Guys (parts) 
• Discussion (mostly of technical details and GenX reminiscings): ARPAnet, Usenet, bulletin board analogy, gopher, email, world wide web, browsers, search engines.
•  How the Web brings people together bycommon interest. "Cyberspace."

Week 35 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1991, the World Wide Web opens to the general public

• Discussion of safety while using email, online shopping, and social media. 
• Predators; viruses; identity theft; inappropriate or dangerous material; privacy settings; information that should remain personal; precautions that kids should take. 
• Risks organized from most to least dangerous: encountering people who intend physical harm; encountering people who intend harm via internet communications; identity theft; monetary fraud; spreading of private or secret information; bullying; malware; inaccurate information or lies; harvesting personal information for targeted advertising.
•  "1500 Crash Birthday Party After Facebook Slip Up," Stephen Spencer Davis, 6/6/2011.  
• Frontline: Digital Nation (TV documentary)

Week 36 ------- final exam.

 

Sins magnified.

One of my Lenten disciplines is going to be to avoid political outrage on the Internet.  I think I've found a helpful mantra this morning, ironically, in a political-economic blog.

From Megan McArdle:  A useful insight about the office of the President, one that extends to politics and politicians in general, and applies to both Dems and Repubs:

To me, a better explanation [for the Obama administration's treatment of accused leaker Bradly Manning, which some argue constitutes torture] --one that explains the fact that there's not that much daylight between Bush and Obama on these issues--is that being president makes you want to do these things.  The president has access to more information than the rest of us...

Not only does the president hear about threats we don't, but he's the guy who gets in trouble if any of these threats come off. The combination of heightened threat-alertness, and personal risk aversion, makes him willing to do bad things to avert the potential threat. And since the president knows that he's a good person, and the people around him are basically good people, he's willing to trust them with power that no institution should have.

...I mean, I used to think that Janet Reno was evil--SWAT teams and tanks in child custody disputes? Really? Then we had a succession of new Attorneys General who all seemed to err on the side of megalomaniacal overreach. At which point I decided that it probably wasn't the person; it was the office. When you're sitting up there in that lofty perch, hearing about all the bad things that are happening in the country, and you know that you could do a lot more to fight them if you just had a little bit more power--well, sure, maybe it's not a good idea in abstract, but you're not going to abuse it, you're just trying to solve problems. Et voila, Waco.

So too, I suspect, with tormenting prisoners, and civil liberties. Maybe if Mark and I were president, we'd support this stuff too. Which is not, by the way, an argument for doing it. It's an argument that we need to serve as a check on the president. Because we're not going to fix it by just electing a better person to be president. Whoever we elect will still be president, with all that implies.

I think this is a good insight because it can help us avoid the temptation to assume bad faith, stupidity, or consciously evil motives -- personal evil -- in the officeholders we disagree with. 

I think if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we all tend to give the guys "on our side" the benefit of the doubt while assailing the integrity of the guys on "the other side."  It's subtly dangerous to our own spirits to divide the political-social world up into good guys and bad guys. 

Good ideas and bad ideas, or good actions and bad actions -- sure!  

Good people and evil people... stupid people and intelligent people... noble people and base people... not so much. 

(And watch out for the temptation to insist, "I'm not saying he's an evil person, I'm saying he has evil motives!"  Since you can't actually observe motives the way you can observe actions and statements, and can only guess at them, to declare someone's motives bad is really just a circular way of declaring him a bad person:  you believe the motives to be bad because you believe him to be bad and therefore incapable of having good motives.  Fess up.)

I get really tired of the "Obama is evil" movement, and am equally tired of the "Bush is evil" movement.  Similarly tired of the smaller "He or she is evil" movements that play out in smaller theaters, like the one going on now in the Wisconsin State Capitol building. 

McArdle suggests that maybe it's just being President that tempts human beings to do apparently bad stuff.  Gee, I can't imagine that -- holding one of the most powerful offices in the world, a severe temptation to evil acts and omissions?!?  Sarcasm aside, it also seems pretty obvious to me that men with different leanings would be tempted to a slightly different variety of evils, but also that universal desires -- say, to increase one's own personal power, or to be thought well of by others, might lead to startlingly similar behaviors even by men of quite different political beliefs.  Hence McArdle's suggestion that this theory explains why President GW Bush's reviled policies towards certain prisoners appear to have been continued rather than reversed under President Obama.

I think we would do well to reserve our indignation towards the personalities of our political opponents, even in the most upsetting of policy debates, even the ones that seem to us the starkest battlegrounds between good and evil.   Better, I think, to recognize that high offices themselves constitute high opportunities to commit dreadful sins and injustices.   Yes, they also present opportunities to do great good... which means nothing more than opportunities to commit terrible sins of omission.  

And it's really just our preference for some sins over others that leads us to condemn some sinners over others, I think.  They're all freaking sinners, as are we.

During this Lent, one way I'm going to temper my political outrage is by avoiding the blogs and websites that tend to exacerbate feelings of irritation.  (That's not all political blogs and websites, incidentally -- some of them generally inform and entertain me without making me angry, at least if I don't go on to read the comments.)    But since it's impossible to avoid political information and opinion entirely, I think it will also help to have in my pocket the little mantra:  "It's not the person, it's the office."   Because without the publicity and power the office has granted, the officeholder's flaws would never, ever have become so magnified as to attract and hold my attention and my judgment, through my own distorted lens.