tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26109478079797508132024-03-18T19:43:55.164-07:00Bob Hughes' BlogThis is a public forum written solely by Bob Hughes, Ed.D., Professor Emeritus, Seattle University. Replies are encouraged; however, replies will be screened by the blog author prior to posting and may take some time to appear. If your browser does not accept cookies, you won't be able to post a reply.
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https://www.routledge.com/9781032261881Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-54126798345406128322024-02-06T08:45:00.000-08:002024-02-06T08:48:30.653-08:00 My Gut Tells Me<p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“…still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-0aeda3cd-7fff-fd57-dcec-8806f9520ace"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That line from Paul Simon’s </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The Boxer</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> has been on my mind a lot as I consider a world where many folks only hear what they want to hear. A new idea can be simple or complex, but the challenge when encountering that new idea is always the same at one level: We make decisions whether to disregard that idea. Folks can come to ignore what they hear in favor of what they want to hear. So how does that happen? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I remember when I was teaching junior high students in a semi-rural area early in my career. I was puzzled that so many students couldn’t spell the difference between “which” and “witch.” A significant number of students interchanged the words in their writing; and the problem persisted with seventh and ninth graders who’d had lots of opportunity to learn the difference in prior grades. That problem extended to a lot of other words that had “wh” sounds in them, and I realized that the students and their parents pronounced words that started with “wh” the same as words that began with just the letter “w.” “Which” and “witch” sounded identical to them. It made sense that students would constantly confuse the spelling of two words that they pronounced the same. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I figured I’d be able to solve the spelling problem by pointing out that some people pronounce “wh” differently than they had gotten used to hearing it. I didn’t approach it as a right and wrong way to pronounce the sounds. Instead, I explained the sound variation as a way to make sense of spelling conventions. In class session after class session, whenever I tried to explain the sound differences, my efforts were to no avail. Students laughed at my funny accent and didn’t believe that I knew what I was saying. They had heard these sounds all their lives in a specific way, and no one was going to convince them that there was another way that these words could be pronounced. “Wh” and “w” made identical sounds. Decision made. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That’s the way it was throughout much of my career in education, whether I was trying to convince first-year college students of a logical fallacy they had made in an essay or university administrators and faculty about how online learning might be done in a way that improves education. Getting people to see what they don’t see is, I’ve decided, what education is. The obvious doesn’t need to be taught since people figure that out by themselves. However, what they don’t see takes some skill to get them to see. I guess I could be frustrated by that. Instead, though, it’s always been an interesting component of my work – to tinker with a problem, find a solution, and then get others to see what’s possible. Because education is about people, the challenges and their potential solutions are infinite. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Current societies seem faced with this challenge as some want to make truth and knowledge malleable to their beliefs. People can begin with a belief and then find reasons to support that belief – no matter how bizarre or outrageous that belief. It’s how Couy Griffin, a county commissioner at the time in Otero County, New Mexico, could refuse to vote to certify the county’s 2020 election votes with no evidence supporting his decision. His explanation? “</span><a href="https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-new-mexico-government-and-politics-donald-trump-fa26178d77b421ff7317d1a6ae83e0c4" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #0563c1; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">My vote to remain a ‘no’ isn’t based on any evidence. It’s not based on any facts. It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition</span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">.” Couy Griffin is also someone who</span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cowboys-trump-founder-sentenced-14-days-breaching-capitol-grounds-2022-06-17/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #0563c1; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">was convicted</span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and sentenced for his actions at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. He says that he went there believing that he was under divine orders to counteract the 2020 presidential election result he believed was wrongly decided. Perhaps he's not being honest about this claim to intuitive reasoning and godly guidance. Perhaps it’s a convenient explanation for motives he’s keeping to himself. However, that a public official offered this response, despite whatever motivates it, is startling. We’ve come to a point where someone can comfortably use these defenses and not be laughed out of the room. Personal feelings are as valuable as facts.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The importance of </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">affect….</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Let’s be clear: Learning and knowledge involve more than rational, cognitive thought. Our brains are too complex to be thought of as supercomputers that intake ideas and reach conclusions. Our brains do that, and that’s typically categorized as “cognition.” But a significant part of coping with new ideas also involves “affect.” Affect is a combination of instinct, reflex, intuition, and emotion – components of the brain that are as much an active part of processing new ideas as our ability to rationally process an idea. We hear a new idea or encounter a new experience, and we cognitively process it to see how it fits with what we already know. But we also react on that affective level where we’re filtering the idea through our instincts, intuition, and emotions. Those comprise affect. The affective part of reacting to new ideas is as important as the cognitive part. It’s a pretty complex set of neurological tasks that the brain does so quickly and consistently that we don’t often think of the components of what’s happening. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As neuroscientists have learned more about the brain, those of us who study learning have come to appreciate how the brain operates as a complex web of networks where any thought requires interactions from multiple regions that store and manage different components of any one thought. It’s much more complicated than the phony</span><a href="https://www.spring.org.uk/2021/08/left-brain-vs-right-brain.php" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #0563c1; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“right brain/left brain dominance” myths</span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> that have been debunked for decades and still make the rounds online. Our brains use a lot of parts all at once to produce a response to novel ideas. That complexity involves rational thinking, but it also involves reactions that engage the deepest part of our brains where reflex, instinct, intuition, and emotion lie. That complex response has helped us survive as a species, and it continues to do so. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">How our brains manage ideas is really a marvelous feat of biochemical reaction. We like a new idea or don’t like a new idea, typically without asking ourselves if we’re responding from a purely affective response. Each new experience, idea, or even person gets processed through this complexity. We take immediate liking to someone and decide to be friends with them, and then later realize how much they remind us of a close friend from the past. Conversely, we can confess to a new friend that, “I didn’t like you at first,” because that person looked, or talked, or acted in a way that caused a negative affective reaction that we had to overcome. We juggle affect and cognition to make decisions every moment of every day. In that juggling act, we use what we experienced from the past (both affectively and cognitively) to interact with what’s happening in the moment. So reflex, instinct, intuition, and emotion are central to who we are. They’re part of our learning process occurring with rational cognition. There’s even more to the decision process that just affect and cognition, though. Along with our cultures (customs and beliefs that are passed along to us from the groups to which we belong) and our physical senses (how we hear, see, taste, and touch), we constantly use both cognition and affect to churn, infer, adjust, and affirm new ideas. That’s not just for the big ideas we encounter – it happens with even the small ideas, like when I was trying to convince my young students of the sound difference between “wh” and “w.” Something seemingly that simple involved their ability to process the idea, what they knew about the world, and their perceptions of the person who was telling them the idea. And balancing all that is how we make important decisions like whom to believe and who gets our vote. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So maybe Couy Griffin, the former county commissioner from New Mexico, is onto something when he made decisions from his gut intuition?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Not really. While it’s a natural to have an affective response, when we unthinkingly rely on it, we’re perceptible to falling prey to prejudices and biases. If you never step back and ask why you don’t like someone immediately or why you immediately believe a statement, you may never have a chance to later discover the cause of your reaction. An over-reliance on affective responses can also be manipulated by the right message presented in the right way. “Charismatic” leaders figure this out quickly and know that if they can get enough people to affectively connect to them, they can overcome that group’s cognitive processes that would warn them of danger or misdirection. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Look at any of these leaders from any group and you’ll see some common traits, whether it’s Jim Jones leading the People’s Temple into the jungles of Guyana or Benito Mussolini confidently declaring that he, and only he, could successfully govern Italy. These leaders learned to appeal almost completely to the affective part of decision making – that intuitive part of my junior-high-school students’ brains that told them I was an outsider and when I told them how words sounded, my explanation made no sense in relation to the world they experienced daily. It’s how Donald Trump could make his now infamous comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. From his decades as a huckster and grifter, he learned how to appeal to people’s affect. As he gained prominence, he successfully appealed to his followers’ fears of people different than them, and their fears of being replaced. He knew that the resulting connection he would make with his followers would be unshakeable. He didn’t study history deeply, but he studied human affect well – just as all grifters and con artists do. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">An appeal to affect is more than an emotional appeal. It connects to that which is familiar, that which forms the basis for intuition, and that which, as a result, feels comfortable based on past experiences. If learning were simply about a rational, cognitive processing of information, teaching would be simple because all a teacher would have to do is to present information logically and then know that learners would adopt whatever new ideas the teacher provided. But any good teacher will tell you that won’t work, whether the topic is spelling, calculus, history, or any subject. Learners bring the totality of their learning brains to every course and every learning. Effective teachers learn to weave affective connections to content so that learners are as engaged as possible. Effective teachers get people to see and hear what they don’t immediately want to see and hear. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This complexity also impacts public dialogue. Candidates spend a lot of money learning about the issues that move people to immediate action by bypassing cognition and appealing to affect. The extensive mining of online data, focus groups, polling, and interviews that go into informing even the smallest political campaign is staggering. The result is what passes for political discourse these days. We have ads with scary images that rely on tropes to affectively connect a candidate or idea with voters’ positive or negative feelings. A pro-candidate ad shows that person with children and puppies and soft music. That same candidate’s ads about an opponent show images of dysfunction and disorder. Instead of open debate over the merits of policies and beliefs, we have forums where candidates work at tying their opponent to disfavored images evoked by images that stand in for ideas. By the way, this is how brands are sold, too. If I can get you to smile when you see that cute gecko with the British accent, I get you to form a pleasant memory of both the gecko and my brand. It doesn’t mean you’ll immediately go out and buy my product. But that favorable smile helps when you encounter the opportunity to purchase my product. Same thing with candidates. Instead of giving your cognitive mind ideas to wrestle with, it’s easier and more effective to give you a strongly positive or negative image that will later be there as you’re deciding your vote. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The result is not good. The belief that the U.S. is exceptional allowed the U.S. to fantasize it was immune from the mass hysteria that produced cult-like followers who carried out horrific acts. That belief has always been based on myth. The U.S., throughout its history, hasn’t been immune from demagogues who used affectively targeted persuasive techniques to gain support for war, mass murder, mass enslavement, forced mass relocation, and more. It’s a mistake to see those as the past from which we’ve grown and to which we are no longer susceptible. I grew up with Japanese children whose older siblings and parents were forced into internment camps. My family lived on the Whites-only side of the real estate red line that had been reinforced by government implementations of housing regulations – so I grew up learning about bigoted hate first-hand. I lived through COINTELPRO where the FBI kept files on people like me because our ideas were thought to be dangerous. I was alive when George Bush convinced Congress and the country to initiate the nation’s longest war, based on a lie. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The list of the nation’s oppressions in my lifetime are long. Each of these actions, whether they were in the past or are in the present, are supported by affectively based opinions that the majority of the population was encouraged to keep. Those opinions developed from an appeal to affective beliefs that Native Americans needed to be civilized, African Americans were prone to crime and should be kept away from innocent White folks, Japanese Americans would always be more loyal to Japan because of racial affinity – the list goes on. None of these are rationally developed arguments. The provided rationale comes from an initial affective bias that is deeply rooted in intuitions fueled by fear and prejudice.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So what do we do? It seems to me that awareness is the first solution. Start questioning the basis of what you accept. If you’re believing ideas based on your intuition, your intuition may be right. Or it may be wrong. Take a moment to step back and question your beliefs and let those parts of your brain that look at ideas rationally explore those beliefs. Questioning your assumptions can help you avoid supporting the next mass-developed idea that will create the next national mistake. You shouldn’t be afraid to question your beliefs, but you should be afraid not to question those beliefs. It’s that lack of inquiry that has led nations, including the U.S., into intolerance and danger. You have nothing to lose to ask yourself to look for clear and unassailable evidence to support what you believe. And people in the U.S. have the world’s longest-standing experiment in democracy to lose if they don’t. </span></p><div><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-48280871637616063302024-01-18T21:44:00.000-08:002024-01-18T21:44:24.430-08:00 Reading Internet Addresses – a skill you need to keep from getting scammed<p><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Why?</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-a6293ef1-7fff-53d1-b649-cb6732def3cd"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I’ve been seeing folks I know on social media who’re getting scammed by fake sites. These are sites that look real and act real. The links that take people to them often have the official logo and look of the site they’re supposed to represent. But they’re not real, and they’re looking for ways to scam people. How can you tell? Sometimes, you can’t. But most times, you can</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> before you go to the site</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">You can tell most of the time where you’re going by learning to read the address, (often called the “URL”) of a site. So I decided to write some notes about how to read URLs for folks who don’t have degrees from CalTech. That advice is what’s here. I avoid jargon as much as I can and try to break this all down so it’s understandable. My goal is to help you know where you’re going as you follow links. If you don’t know this information, your chances of getting to a scam site increase. A lot. What I’m sharing won’t keep you 100% safe – I’ve been fooled recently by a site. But knowing this will keep you safer than if you didn’t know it. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A site’s URL is in the address window of a page when you get there. But you can preview the URL by hovering over it with your mouse’s cursor on the page that’s directing you to a site. When you do that, somewhere on your browser window the URL where the link is directing you will appear. Don’t click on it without hovering over it first to see where you’re going. Every browser and a lot of programs show the link in different places, so look around your page to see where the URL pops up as you hover. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A really important rule: </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Don’t follow a link without knowing the address where you’re going.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Step One to Reading a URL</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">First, you read sections of a URL. You do that backwards, from right to left. Start at the right edge of the address and see what’s there. Reading from right to left tells you what you’re accessing. Look at this link:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://docsband.link/So-Long-Westland.wav" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://docsband.link/So-Long-Westland.wav</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Forward slashes separate the sections of an address. The last part that’s separated in this address is:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">/So-Long-Westland.wav</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That’s telling that this address is pointing to a .wav file called “So-Long-Westland.wav.” It’s a specific file because it has a file extension – a period followed by three letters that identify the file type. A “.wav” file is a specific type of sound file that gets played over the Internet, and this address is pointing to a specific .wav file called “So-Long-Westland.” There are lots of different kinds of files you can get directed to, and each type has its own extension name. The most common is a “.pdf” file. PDF files are generally documents, and sometimes forms. Check out this link to the IRS’ 1099 form that you can complete online:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1099msc.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1099msc.pdf</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">By looking at the far right, you can see what kind of file you’ll access by seeing the file extension (“.wav” or “.pdf,” etc.). If it has a file extension that you don’t recognize, you should think twice about following the link because it may be taking you to a site where it’ll download a file you don’t want. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Most times when you click on a link, though, you’re going to a page, not a specific file like the examples above. Again, reading right to left can help you see where you’re going. Look at this example:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://docsband.link/songs/lyrics-slw/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://docsband.link/songs/lyrics-slw/</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The final section isn’t a file name. Because there’s no file extension at the end, the link is taking you to a page. The URL provides directions that tell the browser where to look for the page. The name of this page is “lyrics-slw” and it’s put into a folder on the server that’s called “songs.” It’s like how you use the folders and sub-folders of your own computer to track files. Reading backwards, you can see the subfolders and folders where they’re embedded. You can see the IRS using a similar strategy for where it puts its 1099 form. That file is in a folder called “irs-pdf” that itself is in a folder called “pub.” This is all a way for the developer to manage files and folders. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Step Two</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Continuing to read right to left, then, the next section of the first URL above is: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">docsband.link </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That points you to the specific location on the Internet where the sound file resides. Many times, you can strip out the last section(s) of an address to take you to the main page of a site. If you type just</span><a href="https://docsband.link" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://docsband.link</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, that takes you to the main page for that site. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Sometimes, you’ll see “www” preceding the address. You can get to the same main page as above by going to:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><a href="https://www.docsband.link" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.docsband.link</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Whether or not the link has “www” depends on how the designer sets up the address. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This is a point where jargon can’t be avoided. So let’s get it over by explaining the concept of the “top-level domain.” The folks who manage the Internet (yes, they do exist) decided that each type of Internet site could be categorized within a specific top-level domain. These are broad categories of types of sites. You can recognize the top-level domain for any site by its extension. It was simple at first with just a few top-level domains like commercial sites in one category (.com) and higher education sites in another category (.edu). Over the past 35 years, though, that’s expanded so there are over 1,500 top-level domain extensions available. In the example above, the top-level domain extension is “.link.” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Carefully reading the core address of a site and looking for the top-level domain can help you avoid going to scam sites. Again, though, you have to read the information right to left. Look to see what the final top-level domain extension is in that section. If you’re expecting a higher education site, it should have an “.edu” as its last extension. A site that reads “http://harvard.edu.fp” is NOT Harvard university. If this were a link you found, the final “.fp” extension would be actually taking you to a site in the Philippines since that’s what the “.fp” top-level domain extension designates. You might need to read through a few folders on the address to get to the core address. But look carefully through that top-level domain and address and let them inform you where you’re really going. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Step Three</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The remaining section of the address at the far left is:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That tells your browser that it’s doing an Internet search. The use of the “http” language in web addresses goes back to the days when people commonly accessed more than web files on the Internet. However, these days, seeing anything except an “http(s)” file is rare. There are even some addresses where you don’t need the “http(s)” to get there. If you just type “docsband.link” into a browser’s address window, that should get you to the main page of that site since your browser will supply the needed https:// starter. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2839972727272726; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">However, there’s something important in that part of the address that you need to watch. There’s a big difference between a site that begins with “http” and “https.” That added “s” stands for secure. A site that uses the “https” protocols includes some additional security features that keep it from being hacked. No place on the Internet is completely safe, but accessing sites that use the https protocols keeps you safer. Look for it, and be wary of sites that don’t have it. Most browsers have a setting somewhere that allows the browser to warn you if you’re accessing a non-secure site. </span></p><br /></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-74360292703558483882023-11-14T21:35:00.000-08:002023-11-14T21:40:14.545-08:00 Hand Working<p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Once in a while, when I create something, I post a picture of it to social media. I have a purpose: to show folks in my social media circles that things can be built by marginally skilled folks like me. That seems an important idea to share because I know a lot of folks who see building things as something that only professionals or talented amateurs do. Far too many people I know think building objects is for someone else. It’s not that they see it as beneath them. They just don’t envision themselves doing it.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-05f1a1fb-7fff-2c89-b68d-972220c9b6dc"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I spent my professional life listening, talking, reading, writing, and thinking – all very abstract work. It’s the work I chose, and I always feel fortunate and grateful that I got to do what I wanted to do. It had a downside, though: There typically weren’t tangible products at the end of the work. There were schools I helped launch, programs and projects that I was part of creating, and, of course there were the thousands of people with whom I interacted as their teacher, as their colleague, or as their boss. But education is about abstraction. After all, even building a school or new degree program leaves more people listening, talking, reading, writing, and thinking. It’s purely mental work. In contrast, when an engineer or carpenter creates something, there are abstractions to that creation (like its aesthetic value or its level of functionality). But the perceptible part of that creation is unmistakably real. The builder sees and touches the creation. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Those builders can experience the joy of creation because they have that creation in front of them. When I look at my professional creations, they’re not as readily identifiable to me. Over time, abstract ideas I create meld into other abstract ideas, and they change into what the people interacting with them in the moment experience. Those abstractions mold into the needs of their current users. That’s as it should be. The school or degree or certificate program I helped to launch couldn’t and shouldn’t remain as it originated. For it to be of any use, it needs to evolve with evolving demands and needs. The lessons I taught 40, 20, or 10 years ago are out of date, and I hope the students who were in those classes evolved well beyond whatever I taught them many years before. But the workbench I built 25 years ago is still in service, even though I no longer own the house where it sits. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It's not about “legacy” or a “leaving a mark.” Creating something that’s tangible generates a satisfaction that building in the abstract cannot. When I use the steps or a table or a shelf I built, I see and experience the results of my creativity in ways that I cannot experience with more abstract creations. I’ve manipulated the material world and have tactile evidence of my work. There’s a satisfaction in that creation as I develop and use the required skills to synthesize raw materials into something where the sum of those materials is greater than their separate parts. And the physical product doesn’t have to be complex or ostentatious. I build to the level of my skills and take enjoyment from whatever I build.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I’m not somehow specially skilled. I’ve been fortunate because I’ve had opportunities to tinker and build from childhood forward. And I’ve been around people who were generous with their time to show me new skills. For example, my greatest learning during my undergraduate years wasn’t in college classrooms. Because I had some knowledge of tools, I was hired as a maintenance mechanic at a local newspaper. The manager who oversaw the maintenance shop believed that he could fix anything; so when the press needed to be expanded, he rented a boom lift, and those of us on the maintenance crew came in during down time on the press and installed the addition. Or when one of the loaner bicycles we kept for carriers to use came back damaged, we’d have use an acetylene torch to weld or braze it back together. Large or small, we fixed things. I learned a lot of new skills as a result. While I learned about abstractions during morning college classes, in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends, I honed my mechanical skills. In the 40+ years since, I continue to learn and expand my skills so that I can continue to build and create.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">One worry I have about the future is that many people don’t cultivate ability with their hands. Part of the issue is that even the simplest modern device can have complex electronics that require some knowledge of PC boards and microchips – so it’s become easier to replace than repair. But the other part is that many folks are disconnected from the ability to tinker and build. These folks are missing the incomparable satisfaction of building something that they can see and feel. People don’t need to know about PC boards and software design to use a drill or chop saw. They need a more kinesthetic set of skills that lots of folks aren’t currently developing. I believe that the proliferation of TV builder shows comes from a yearning to build. However, although people may watch building shows on TV, they haven’t done it themselves. Vicariously watching creativity is very different than constructing for yourself. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I’ve had former graduate students remind me that I always encouraged them to learn to work with their hands. That encouragement comes from my own joy and satisfaction from building. It also comes from my belief that it’s an innate humane trait to build. Leave a child alone in a room with any object, and within moments, that child will be imagining that object as a spaceship or a bridge or a car. Natural imagination is the root of our need to build. From years of evolutionary adaptations, imagination compels us forward as a species to create. While compiling software or building new organizations taps into that creativity, there’s something instinctively more satisfying when we can see and touch a finished product. The key is to explore and develop those skills that allow us to build. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I appreciate the “maker spaces” that have popped up in recent years. They seem like an attempt to recapture the desire to build. I wonder, though, if that’s just the latest trend in a society that seeks whatever is novel at the moment – a society that’s mimicking the latest Tik Tok dance one moment and going off to a hot yoga class the next. The good news about maker spaces is that in many communities, they’re accompanied by tool libraries where people can borrow tools for projects. As people master a tool, they can discover many new applications to that tool. You can use a skill saw, for example, to build a bird house, but it can also build a full-sized house. So maybe someone attending a maker course can find a new passion for building and extend that passion into further creations by borrowing the tools to do the work. I’m completely in favor of anything that encourages people to develop a passion for expanding their skills to build. </span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-40511843291508965502023-10-05T22:53:00.001-07:002023-12-03T23:24:25.533-08:00 Unfair Fielding – the lessons of inaction<p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In my elementary school, during free-time PE, the boys would play a unique version of softball. There would be fielders, a pitcher, catcher and batter, but no teams. Because there weren’t enough children or time for two teams to play, the game was intended to be based on individual effort. The roles of players would rotate, based on a set of rules. If the pitcher struck out the batter, that batter would be out, and the pitcher would bat. However, it was underhand, slow-pitch softball where the ball was relatively easy to hit. A batter could stay at the plate for a long time, so there were other ways to rotate batters. Kids would spread out over the field and attempt to catch hit balls. A ground ball was worth a certain number of points, and a fly ball was worth more. Over time, a player could earn enough points to become the batter, the most coveted role. If you dropped balls or caught no balls, you wouldn’t get points. So the key to becoming a batter was to get to where the balls were and catch them. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-0ca8e612-7fff-925a-303b-8336356f4ccc"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There was one other rule: If someone touched a ball but didn’t catch it, the ball was considered “dead” and not worth any points. If a fielder caught a ball that had been already touched by someone else, that catch wouldn’t advance the fielder to the batter’s box. Someone could say, “I touched that one” to any ball, and the fielder who caught it would get no points. To an adult watching on the sidelines, this all apparently looked like a nice, fair game that allowed everyone the opportunity to participate. A meritocracy, right? Ostensibly, everyone would get a chance to bat.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I loved baseball as a kid. I’d stay up late at night and listen to scratchy broadcasts of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett calling Dodger games over the radio on a 50,000-kilowatt station from 400 miles away. I wanted to grow up to be Willie Mays so badly that when I played in a league, I always wanted to be center fielder. Despite what adults told me about how to catch a ball, I insisted on making a basket catch (Mays’ signature move) whenever I could. As a Black kid living in an all-White community, players like Mays, and by extension baseball, became an important connection to my identity. But as a Black kid in an all-White community, I learned about unfairness because of what the adults watching our play time chose not to see.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Like many activities which purport to be merit-based, this one never rewarded everyone’s merit evenly. First, you had to get to the ball. That meant that the most valuable spots were in a line just outside the infield between second and third base. Since most batters were right-handed and most balls were hit on the ground or not very far beyond the infield, those players always caught the most balls. The most aggressive boys and their friends quickly took those positions. It was tacitly understood that those places were for certain people – all others were excluded. These boys eventually all batted. The ones left standing farther in the outfield got little opportunity unless they caught a fly ball that went over the heads of the ones standing at the edge of the infield or caught a ground ball hit too sharply for one of the closer players to make a play for it.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I discovered how the game was rigged whenever I tried to stand at one of the coveted positions on the field. Other boys would come and stand directly in front of me and, over time, subtly push me father into the outfield. Then there were times when I stood in the outfield and caught a ball hit clearly over infielders’ heads or well beyond the reach of any of them and someone would yell, “I touched that one” to deny my opportunity to bat. No one ever directly told me that I wouldn’t get to bat, but it became clear that was an unwritten rule. After that occurring repeatedly, I remember being angry enough with the unfairness of it all to throw down my glove and curse loudly enough for a teacher to hear and scold me. No one saw the transgressions I experienced, but my transgressions were always visible. After a while, I stopped going on the field completely and chose other activities where I could play alone since, as it turned out, all the group activities were similarly rigged to exclude me. It was one among many elementary school experiences in unfairness I had as the first Black child to attend that school from kindergarten through sixth grade. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So life can sometimes be unfair. What’s the big deal? And why am I telling stories about a children’s game? As it turns out, childhood games teach us about life. On my childhood playground, I wasn’t the only one excluded. The school community had already determined a hierarchy of power and privilege that gave everyone a specific status – a status they were expected to accept. The unfairness of a rigged process is a lesson that I, and all others around me, implicitly learned on the playground. And I suspect that by the time we reach adulthood, far too many people, regardless of race or ethnicity, learn to expect unfairness as normative. Some even see advantages because they’re the person who gets unfairly rewarded. When children get so inured to the lessons of inequity which favor a select few, they learn to accept that system of unfairness as adults. That becomes so normal that they can’t see those systems that perpetuate inequities. It all becomes just the way things are. And that’s the problem. It’s a ”big deal” because too many people have become accustomed to asking “what’s the big deal?” when they see inequities. So maybe it’s not just a children’s game if the game teaches people to accept inequities – especially as those patterns extend to systems that, when applied to a whole society, decide such important outcomes like who gets educated, who has political power, who gets appropriate health care, or who succeeds economically. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to make that statement. The U.S. didn’t get here by accident. A nation where only wealthy, landowning men were franchised to vote at its founding excluded most citizens’ engagement for most of its history. My African Americans progenitors weren’t even considered fully human during much of that history. Only in the past six decades has the nation had any serious conversations about being fully inclusive. As a result of its history, much of the nation developed passivity toward unjustness as a norm. However, such a passive perspective is contrary to the demand for justice that needs to be at the center of a vibrant democracy. If the daily lessons of life teach us to passively accept injustice, then we can be assured that injustice will continue. It’s not just a children’s game if the lesson that children learn is the acceptance of injustice – whether that injustice is on the playground or a courtroom. I fear that too many of us have learned acceptance instead of resistance. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This all gets borne out in the statistics about who gets ahead and who doesn’t in the society. However, it’s at the individual level, too. People see someone unfairly maligning someone else, and they remain silent. It’s as if they justify their silence because they didn’t create the injustice. They see an unfairness being pushed onto someone or a group, and they say nothing – perhaps because they don’t see themselves as the perpetrators of that unfairness. The problem is that silence is complicity. People who refuse to confront injustice silently participate in that injustice. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In other words, for inequity to exist, it takes more than the actions of people who create and benefit from the inequity. It takes tacit acquiescence from everyone. The teachers who watched the rigged game that frustrated me as a child didn’t pay close enough attention to see what was happening – or they didn’t care. And any other children on the playground who were as excluded as I was had already learned the lesson of compliance. “That’s just the way things are” was a lesson that they’d already absorbed. It took the inaction of authorities, as well as those affected, for that injustice to continue. We now see that happening on a national scale. We have multiple reports of Republican leaders who privately complained about the 45th President when he was first elected and as he grifted his way through four years of his presidency. Some found their voice briefly after the January 6 insurrection. Yet they were quickly silenced into compliance and inaction. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The term “inaction” is key. If you know something is wrong, yet you don’t act, it’s like you’re standing in a town square yelling “Fire!” and just holding a water hose while the buildings burn around you. Declaring any problem with no offered solution is always inadequate. When the topics are injustice and inequity, a commitment to action should be at the start of any discussion. The end of the discussion should bring a plan of action where people hold each other accountable for those actions. That plan must include leaders and the communities they lead. Everyone needs to be accountable not just for knowledge of the problems, but, more importantly, for their participation in actions that resolve the problems. Being actors against inequity is what children should learn instead of the passivity that children with whom I played learned – the implied lessons that are still too prevalent today. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As Republican leaders have now discovered, the time to act is when you first see the problem. With time, the problem can become too overwhelming to address. Go out and look for other people and organizations who share your concerns and who have a history of upholding rights. Be part of collective action that counters this latest affront to justice. Take an active role by volunteering your time and energy to those people and organizations. If you’ve always been someone who expected that either someone else would do this work, or that nothing can be done, you need to change that perspective. This is the time to act as if there is no other time in the future to keep our rights unless you act. Unlike the childhood games that might have taught us passivity and compliance, inaction now has serious consequences for our future. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Living with injustice is a learned habit, so acting for justice must be, too. </span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-19546962158722949852023-06-28T20:33:00.001-07:002023-06-28T20:34:27.875-07:00 Remembering Eugene<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This is an essay that I didn’t want to write. And if I wrote it, I didn’t know whether I’d share it. As I write these first sentences, I’m still not convinced that I’ll share what I write. But I’ll write and then decide. If you’re reading this, you know what I decided.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7abb6c77-7fff-2c37-8efa-b2cb85f11bfa"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I write to honor Eugene Smith, a friend/mentor/guide/teacher who taught me the most important lesson I learned as a teacher. My almost-40-year friendship with him seems too personal to share – especially since I just learned that he passed away last October. He was 95 when he passed. Though we met many years ago and lost touch for a while, we reconnected in 2011. The last time I had lunch with him was in 2020, just after his birthday and just as the pandemic was starting to keep all of us apart. Then we exchanged e-mail messages during the pandemic until he stopped responding. We lost touch during 2021, and while I reached out a few times, I figured the non-reply was because he was getting more frail and unable to reply. Until that point, he remained vibrant while looking for opportunities to engage in the world around him. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">His retirement years inspired me. One of the joys of my life was being able to edit one of the books he self-published in his late 80s and early 90s. He still had words he wanted to contribute to the world even as he transitioned into his ninth decade. His last book, for which he asked me to write a review and which I read drafts of chapters as he wrote them, was especially meaningful since it was a lightly fictionalized version of his own journey to becoming an educator. In my review, I wrote:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; margin: 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This book is worth reading because of the connection it makes between the humanity of a teacher and the work of a teacher – and how those two complement each other. It is not a recipe for becoming a teacher, but it does offer an image of one teacher that is inspiring enough to encourage someone considering the profession. That image allows the reader glimpses into how that teacher has been able to sustain himself while continuing to teach well into a stage of life when people are expected not to contribute to the world around them.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He gave copies of that book to people who attended his ninetieth birthday celebration. In its pages I learned much about what shaped him. That allowed me to discover his life well beyond our professional relationship. You can read about some of his professional accomplishments in the</span><a href="https://english.washington.edu/news/2023/05/31/memoriam-eugene-smith" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">obituary that’s online</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. However, I now choose to write about the personal journey he helped me make from someone who understood the technical skills of teaching to someone who came to see the importance and value of seeing teaching as principally an act of building relationships.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I’d been teaching for five or six years when I met Eugene. At times, I hear or read someone claim that teachers had a teacher in their life who inspired them. That wasn’t true for me until I met Eugene – well into the start of my career. I often comment that the teachers I encountered throughout my own education taught me how not to teach. I became a teacher to ensure that learners wouldn’t have the same soul-denting experiences I had in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education. Within a few years of starting my career, people told me I was successful at the work. By the time I met Eugene, I’d figured out how to write and deliver lessons, how to organize a curriculum, how to manage a classroom, and how to create engaging sessions. So I didn’t need anyone to teach me the technical side of the work, though he did help me add to those skills. What I learned from Eugene was something more significant than the skills he helped me hone, though. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I majored in English literature as an undergraduate, and that degree left me wholly unprepared to teach secondary students how to write – which seemed more critical than teaching them about Chaucer or Wordsworth. That’s why I applied to and was accepted in a master’s degree program where I could focus my coursework in composition and rhetoric at the University of Washington. I took courses in composition theory and rhetoric, and I met Eugene as he taught one of those courses. In my first year in the degree program, I also applied for the Puget Sound Writing Program’s summer fellowship program where teachers from the region spent six summer weeks focusing on learning about the teaching of writing. In the year after I finished the PSWP summer fellowship, Eugene became the program’s director. So we had many common points of contact. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I learned about grammars from him – and, no, that’s not a typo. He was the first to teach me that grammar is an organization system, and that there are many, formal organizational systems beyond the traditional, Latin-based system that’s typically (and badly) taught in schools. He, for example, exposed me to Chomsky’s transformational grammar that remains critical to how I think about how people learn and apply language. And he taught me about Vygotsky and the connections between thinking and language. It all revolutionized how I thought about what my students did when I asked them to write – and what I needed to do to support them. But those weren’t his biggest lesson for me.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Because I was completing the master’s degree in summers and evening, finishing the degree took me a few years. I outlasted two advisors (one was hired away and the other retired), and the English department eventually assigned Eugene as my advisor. I was happy about that since I’d gotten to know him a little through his courses and as he became the PSWP director. I didn’t need career advising since I had a pretty good idea that I’d be a secondary English teacher for the rest of my career (a good lesson to me, now looking back, on the foibles of career planning). But I did enjoy meeting with him and talking about the work of a teacher. He always had great insights from his own experiences and passion about teaching. I’d share what I was doing in my classes, and we’d discuss what that was working and what wasn’t. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When I met Eugene, I taught in a semi-rural area that was about 50 miles south of the university, and there weren’t any peers with whom I could have those discussions. For example, I told him about the plays my students were writing, and how I, as a personal exercise, wrote an introductory act for one student play in the students’ colloquial dialect employing iambic pentameter to show students meter while stretching my writing skills. At one point, he made the trek to my school to see what I was doing and spend the day with me – not as part of a course or as an evaluation. He wanted to see what the school and kids and classrooms where I taught were like. For two summers, he hired me to teach PSWP’s summer writing institute for kids. He and I had a connection unlike any other I’d had with any teacher to that point. He was genuinely interested in more than papers I wrote and comments I made in a graduate seminar. And more than the lessons of those seminars, our connection contained the most important lesson he taught me. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Eugene taught me that teaching is always about those relationships. It wasn’t that I could or should ignore a course’s content. Learners came to my class to learn whatever content I taught, and having the skill to create a learning environment that engaged them around that content was important. But helping students develop a relationship to that content requires a relationship with each student where they see my care for them and their success first. If you’ve been a student of mine, and you felt that I wanted to know you well enough to understand your needs and to address those needs, thank Eugene. He was the one who modeled that for me and taught me the primary truth that teaching is about relationships. I’ve worked to recreate that for the students I was fortunate to have taught because of how much his care for me meant to me. I may not have been successful at that with all of my students, but it always has been a goal for me, whether I was teaching secondary students, undergraduates or graduate students. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So this is a note of thanks to an amazing friend who taught me the most important lesson in the profession where I spent most of my working life. And I decided to publish it because I want that thanks to be public. Every teacher should be as fortunate as I was to have known and benefitted from such an extraordinary friend. </span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-40981923702467019442023-05-05T14:59:00.004-07:002023-05-05T14:59:37.033-07:00 Defacto secession and what I’m doing about It…<span id="docs-internal-guid-37c0eebc-7fff-920b-1984-726cedec19b1"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, Article 1</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to the 14th Amendment. The last time the nation stopped a group of states from seceding, Congress passed it. It was one of three new amendments ratified as a consequence of the long and bloody armed conflict that began with an assault by rebels on a federal fort in South Carolina. These days, in contrast, secession is more subtle than firing on Fort Sumpter. Instead, states are enacting legislation or imposing regulations that limit or roll back the rights of their citizens. It’s a step backward from progress that has ensured more rights to more people over time – a step backwards that’s contrary to the demands of the 14th Amendment. Unlike the rebellion of 1861, they’re doing it in increments that intend the same impact: to act separately from the nation and oppress some citizens while giving increased power to others. That was the same outcome that the southern plantation class sought in 1861 when they led the nation into armed conflict. This time, the rebellious states aren’t taking up arms. But they are, in fact, openly rebelling against the protections provided in the 14th amendment. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In their actions, these states are seeking to stop an evolution the nation has undertaken in the past 250 years as it sought to live into the inclusive ideals established at founding. If you’re reading this essay because you’re a personal or professional connection of mine, you most likely don’t need an explanation of that 250-year evolution’s necessity as the laws increasingly gave rights to citizens who were disenfranchised and excluded at the nation’s start. So I won’t go through that here (but please do contact me if you need a reading, viewing, or listening list, and I’ll put one together). Citizens’ rights have incrementally become more inclusive of more people since the nation’s founding, yet there are those who would roll back that progress to the point of subverting or ignoring the hard-won rights of the past 250 years. Some have identified that as a backlash to progress, and I agree with that. However, I believe there’s more to it.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What’s happening in these states is an attempt to secede in ways every much as real as the southern rebellion of 1861. More than one governor in these states that are attempting secession has publicly refused to carry out federal mandates or has acted unilaterally to usurp federal power. At the same time, these states’ legislators are creating laws and regulations that take away more rights from more people. Action by action, these changes are, therefore, a </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 20pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: 0.6em; vertical-align: super;">[1]</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> secession from the laws that we’ve evolved nationally to guarantee increased equity, justice, and inclusion. It’s a devolving return toward states’ rights to oppress their citizens. States’ rights to oppress selected groups were litigated and decided in 1865. The result was codified in the 14th Amendment that the nation ratified three years later. Yet these states attempting </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> secession want to relitigate that decision and demand that they be allowed to oppress some within their borders</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My initial reaction was to be thankful that’s not happening in my state. Our legislature isn’t trying to remove safeguards that protect women’s relationships with their physicians; the state isn’t telling parents what kinds of medical care their children can have; lawmakers aren’t creating voting laws and voting districts that lessen the voting power of specific groups. Even though we still have work to do, my state continues its progression to ensure more rights to my neighbors and me. So I thought myself fortunate. And that was that – until I thought back to 1861 and the 14th Amendment. What would have happened if the entire nation agreed to let the southern states’ plantation class secede from the union and continue to oppress my Black progenitors because of where they lived? What would’ve happened if there weren’t federal protections demanded by the 14th Amendment? I’m a citizen of this nation, and any attempt anywhere to reduce anyone’s rights is an attempt on my rights – on all our rights. At its core, that’s what the 14th Amendment is about. My next thought was that I should boycott those states that are participating in the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> secession as a way of voicing my concerns. That’s when clarity came. Even if I convinced others to participate in a boycott, what does that do to support the oppressed citizens of those states who are losing basic and critical rights like bodily autonomy, parental rights, or voting? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This all came into focus for me as I planned to attend a national conference that’s scheduled for Kentucky in the fall. As I was making plans, the Kentucky state legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that prohibits medical care for trans youth while additionally banning any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity in schools. That override makes that law the official policy of Kentucky. It’s part of a national push by Republicans to use the trans and LGBTQI+ populations as a wedge to divide voters and solidify their radical-right base through fear of differences. Kentucky is the perfect example where the legislature is attempting </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> secession from the union. My initial thoughts to ignore the law because I’m in a safe state, or to boycott Kentucky, would have no impact on Kentucky legislators’ actions. So, instead, I decided on a plan of action that would provide support to those people affected by Kentucky’s acts toward secession. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My plan is to offer my time and energy to organizations in Kentucky that are battling against their leaders’ oppressive secession. I’ve started to contact colleagues I know in the state and ask them for names of organizations where I can volunteer while I’m in the state. As I contact these organizations, I’ll offer whatever support they feel is worth having – anything from volunteering in my areas of expertise to folding flyers for mailing to folding chairs and sweeping floors after a meeting. No matter the level of work I provide, acting in opposition, it seems to me, makes more sense than ignoring the attempted secession by these states, or staying away from them. So that’s what I’m doing. I want folks in these states to know that those of us in other states are watching their leaders and are joining the people in the state as they hold their leaders accountable to the 14th Amendment. I want folks, who must feel despair in having actions taken to marginalize them, to know that there are others who work alongside them. Whenever I visit one of these secessionist states, I plan to do the same. That seems a better outcome than ignoring the seceding states or boycotting them. I’m sharing this decision publicly because I know there are others who are trying to figure out what to do. This is my solution. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><hr /><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 17pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: 0.6em; vertical-align: super;">[1]</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> A definition: The term </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is used to describe something that exists in fact, even if it isn’t a law. When people live, for example, in separate communities that are divided by race, that is </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> segregation, even if that segregation isn’t mandated by law. I use the term “</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defacto</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> secession” because what we’re seeing in the nation is, in fact, a secession where certain states are seceding from the rules that the nation has evolved to provide justice and equity for all. </span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-9400653368135977602023-04-14T20:59:00.006-07:002023-04-14T22:09:02.429-07:00 Life, Work, and Maynard G. Krebs<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I turned 18 and people asked me what I planned for the future, I usually said something like, “Eat, sleep, maybe go for a walk.” It was my deflection of that tiresome question older folks ask young folks who are entering adulthood. But the deflection also reflected my beliefs. At 18, I really had no plans and no intention of developing any. My favorite TV character in childhood was Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis’ ersatz beatnik friend. If you’ve never seen </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, watch almost any episode on YouTube, and you’ll meet Maynard. He’s the only reason to watch the show which is, otherwise, another late-1950s, dopey, teen-angst sitcom. Whenever Maynard heard the word, “work,” he always showed a viscerally negative reaction as he repeated the word while his voice jumped an octave and his face displayed a mixture of shock and consternation. My pre-pubescent mind thought that was the perfect response. I’m sure the show’s producers didn’t intend for the audience to see that caricature as positive. They likely expected that the audience would see him as a shiftless ne’er do well; but I thought of him as a role model. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-3ae1a6ce-7fff-b555-f3af-b4b3336ab158"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the time I was supposed to enter adulthood, I was content to follow Maynard’s example and play a little music with friends, hang out, organize a rally or music event now and then, eat, sleep, and maybe go for a walk. I lived in a commune for a while, but that became too much work when we’d have hours-long meetings about the dishwashing schedule and whether drying them afterward would spread more germs than letting them air dry. It’s when I realized that meetings could be more laborious than physical toil. I left the commune and enrolled in a junior college and then found that I could hitchhike to the beach after classes. With time, I realized that I could just bypass the college and thumb a ride directly to the beach. I didn’t see any reason to stay enrolled in college to go to the beach, so I stopped attending classes midway through that first semester. For a good part of that year after I left high school, I successfully sidestepped anything that resembled work. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, by the latter part of the year after I turned 18, I started to feel to the pull of adulthood. As an adult, especially a male adult in that era, everything around me demanded that I needed to be productive and striving. I needed a job to pay bills, and that required that I modify my aversion to work and take a job as a warehouseman. That left less time for strolls and more time that my boss demanded that I be at work. To keep the job, I had to be consistently there, and I needed to perform tasks as well as those around me. If I didn’t go to work on any day, that meant others would have to do my share – something my co-workers, all middle-aged men with families and mortgages, made certain I understood wasn’t acceptable. So I showed up and worked and learned how to be a good warehouseman. And I experienced the unexpected. With time, work became interesting and eventually enjoyable. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could challenge myself to master tasks and feel good about that mastery. Driving a forklift quickly and efficiently required some artistry, as did stacking loads onto trucks for delivery or learning how to drive those delivery trucks. To this day, I still use a flying dutchman knot to snugly secure any truck or trailer load. It was interesting to learn new skills, and it felt artful as I constantly adapted new ideas to perform better. By my 19th year, I began to evolve a different viewpoint that I kept throughout my adult years until I retired. Instead of work being a pejorative, it became one of the defining purposes to my life as working gave me purpose and direction, especially later as I became a teacher and adapted my developed sense of work as artistry to teaching. I reversed from my Maynard G. Krebs-inspired perspective. These days, I’m in the phase of life when going to the beach instead of contributing productively is a societally acceptable approach to any day. But now looking back, I wonder if I went wrong in completely abandoning my childhood views on work. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I now review my employed life of 46 years, three months, and 27 days and question the value of the many weeks, months, and years when I worked 60 or 70 hours a week. It’s a pace that I began when I finally attended college in my mid-20s, and I worked full time while taking classes full time. Once I graduated, I always had reasons to work a side job, take on additional work, operate a side business, or maintain an active consulting practice. I was that teacher who built an after-school drama program, or advised all the school’s publications, or served on multiple committees, or taught in-service classes to other teachers. I was the one who went on to a master’s degree in summers and evenings, and eventually a doctorate to build more skills and knowledge. I constantly found new challenges and new opportunities to engage me, and that meant long hours of working.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When people asked me whether I felt any stress, I always laughed and answered “no.” I really believed that. Retrospectively, I now realize that I’d gotten so habituated to stress in my daily life that it felt normal to experience the pressure of time and task. It wasn’t until a year after I retired that I understood what living stress-free felt like again. Like the frog in the pan of water, I never knew that the water reached well past the boiling point. But it’s not just me. I think this is the experience of many workers. We just feel the drive to work and don’t see what work’s dominance means to our lives. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Workers in the U.S. are among the most productive on the planet. According to the</span><a href="https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s annual surveys, in 2021 we were sixth in number of hours worked per GDP; we were third in GDP per person worked. We were also first in total number of hours worked per worker. The average amount of paid leave that a U.S. employee is given in a year is</span><a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/average-paid-vacation-time-days-by-country/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">among the lowest among developed nations</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Workers in the U.S., regardless of their income levels or education, weekly work much harder and longer than their counterparts in other developed countries. We seem to take a perverse pride in our overwork. We’ve bought into what social scientist Max Weber coined as the “Protestant work ethic” in the early 20th Century. That idea came from an extreme Calvinism that valued work above all else and claimed saintly rewards to all who arrange their lives accordingly. It’s all led to a simplistic bifurcated calculation: Not working is slothful and sinful, so working especially hard must be virtuous. Actually, that polarization should’ve been my first clue that something was amiss because I know that binary choices are typically false choices. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And what’s the real reward for a life spent working? It can’t be the ways in which I’m remembered – what people call “legacy.” Now almost six years after I left the job where I retired, I’m guessing most of the people who now work there wouldn’t recognize me if I walked into the building. A good number of others would need a second to remember my name – even though I was there a decade prior to my retirement. Not much of a “legacy.” It’s critical to note that’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the way things are. To tell the truth, I’d have to think hard about those people’s names if I saw them. I’ve maintained some relationships from my final job, but those are relationships that continued outside of the work we did. In those relationships, we hardly ever talk about that work. Life goes forward and the friendships that lasted are the real legacy – not the work. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For American workers, the real rewards of their overworking habits are, as sociologist</span><a href="https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/sociology/people/faculty-directory/juliet-schor.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Juliet Schor</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> suggests, a shorter lifespan, more stress-related illnesses, and a more unhappy workforce than many other developed nations. We’ve sold ourselves on the importance of work and have forgotten the importance of life. I understand that some folks don’t have an option. If you need to work two jobs to make ends meet, you don’t have the choice but to overwork. But for people who don’t have to have two or more jobs, and to the employers who implicitly or explicitly demand and reward the behavior, that compunction to work seems misplaced. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m incredibly fortunate that I’ve now been retired long enough that I’ve been able to rediscover life outside of working. I maintain some professional interests while conducting some research, consulting on a few projects, and writing professionally. But those are now secondary to playing music or tinkering or just hanging out – living the life I admired Maynard G. Krebs for living. Others may not have that chance. There’s no guarantee that people will live as long as I have and still have the ability to enjoy retirement and live as I now do. I know far too many people who reached my age without the capacity to do what they enjoy doing, and I know as many who didn’t live long enough to retire. I also know some who’ve come to retirement and realized that they don’t know how to do anything besides work. </span><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">According to the CDC</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, In 2020, the median expected lifespan of a child born in the U.S. was 76.4 years, a reduction from 78.8 years the year before that. It’s too early to tell if that decline is a trend. But the truth is that if the median lifespan remains the same, increases, or decreases, life is finite. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given the finite, it seems to me that spending 40 or 50 years without nurturing your inner Maynard G. Krebs is a mistake. Beginning in 2020, as people lived through the pandemic, I heard from multiple friends and colleagues who were still working and came to that realization. As a result, they left jobs or changed positions or pursued new opportunities that allowed them the time to live outside of working. That gives me some hope. Maybe more people will discover their Maynard-ness while they still have time. Maybe that’ll be you. And maybe you’ll make more time to enjoy a good meal, sleep, or just go for a walk. </span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-74514837966586254672023-02-23T06:36:00.001-08:002023-02-23T06:36:33.070-08:00 Being Loud… and Wrong<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The July 15, 1970, edition of the Oakland Tribune offered an example of who I was at the time in an article that began on page 1 and jumped to page 16. As the reporter explained what happened:</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-b216aabd-7fff-2217-123b-e376216128b7"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 27pt; margin-right: 31.5pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“… the Hayward City Council was showered with balloons and protests by a group of 15 longhaired youths objecting to what they charged was police harassment and a city ban on pamphleteering in public parks. The youths, led by Robert Hughes, said they were threatened with prosecution by city officials if they continued distributing political handbills during their free rock concerts at Hayward Memorial Park…. The youths started a carnival-like atmosphere in their protest by sailing balloons through the council chambers, wearing tiny clown caps, and staging in the council aisles a mock monopoly game they called ‘The Hayward Game,’ satirizing the city establishment.” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I learned how to be in the world from folks who raised me. As a result, my sense of right and wrong reaches back to the late 19th century through the stories that those elders told me. That gave me a lot of history to ground me. I suspect that those multiple generations of knowledge, mixed with my own experiences, have now given me some wisdom. I wasn’t born wise, and I can still make foolish mistakes. But I can apply the lessons of my years and the lessons of those who came before me to a lot of circumstances. I don’t believe we should do something now because we did it before. But it sure does save me a lot of headache to avoid circumstances that I’ve heard about or personally seen before.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That reliance on learning wisdom from the past and personal experience doesn’t seem to be universal. For instance, consider the antics of some House members during the President’s State of the Union address. Their reality-show theatrics got them the attention they apparently need, but it accomplished little beyond raising their profiles. They are elected, as the Constitution defines their role, to govern as a critical part of the legislative third of the government. In order for that part of the government to function, though, the framers seem to have hoped that we would elect people with wisdom to fulfill the role. That didn’t happen with some congressional members who seemed to think that acting outrageously for the cameras is what they’re there to do. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s as if UPS hired a deliver driver who came back at the end of the day with a full load and said that it was much more interesting to stop at Starbucks and make drinks for customers. I doubt that UPS would tolerate that. Pretty quickly, the manager at UPS is going to look for another driver who can get the job done. The job as a member of the House of Representatives is to represent your constituents – not to become a spectacle during a Constitutionally mandated event as the nation looks on. My Southern progenitors would call these people, “loud and wrong,” a phrase they reserved for people whose mouths outran their wisdom.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I understand that people can stray from what they’ve learned. That’s certainly the case for me. Even with the lessons that my forebearers gave me, I had to learn some on my own. Early in my public life, I thought that being the loudest voice was important, while assuming that, of course, I was right. I recall that event during the city council meeting in my late teens as I and my colleagues disrupted governance functions in an attempt to make a point. I can also recall how little impact those actions had. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The stunt in 1970 got us attention, but the point we were making got lost. The speech I gave denounced the police who had recently shot and killed a Latinx young man. We demanded accountability for that officer’s actions. The reporter misses those important points in favor of describing our antics and the comparatively minor points about our right to distribute handbills. Our protest was clever, innovative, and got attention enough to be in that day’s regional newspaper. Did it resolve the issue of police harassment and brutality? Now, over 50 years later, the nation is still having that discussion. Nothing changed in the city as a result of what “15 longhaired youth” did in 1970. Maybe clever, but not productive or wise.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The difference between the GOP loud-and-wrong crowd and me 50+ years ago is that I was a radical 18-year-old with little wisdom who eventually got some. In contrast, the current crop of GOP rabble are elected, mid-life adults whom constituents should expect to have some measure of prudence as they focus on the job they’re there to do. As I aged, I learned to find avenues that allowed me to create and sustain the changes I believed should happen. I became wiser. These folks are much older than I was when I was acting out, yet they seem incapable of learning to do more than shout and catcall their way into the national spotlight – with no agenda other than to decry the failures they claim others have had. They offer no competing vision or direction – just anarchical complaints. It took growing older and seeing the futility of my actions for me. As I wanted change, I began to realize the need for more than shouting. Unfortunately, these folks are being rewarded by accolades and additional funding. As a result, there’s not much incentive for them to grow wiser.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In addition to choosing wiser actions, another lesson I learned from my elders and my own life is one that also seemed lacking at the State of the Union: respect for others. Not subservience to others, or belief in the superiority of others. Respect. I learned it from watching my aunt who was born in the late 1800s and by the 1950s owned her own grocery store. I saw her show respect to community leaders and neighbors down on their luck with the same grace. My learning came from watching family and friends with brilliant minds being relegated to menial tasks because of the color of their skin, yet rising to excel at those tasks until the larger world recognized them. When they were ignored and when they later became well-known, they treated everyone they encountered with the same respect. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From what others taught me and from my own life, I learned to respect both those with privilege and those without equally. As a result, I listen respectfully when people speak. If I disagree, I find the time and appropriate place to express my disagreement. Although I now have status and privilege that exceeds where I started many years ago, I don’t abuse that privilege by disrespecting anyone. Wisdom teaches me that waiting for that appropriate moment and venue respects the speaker with whom I disagree. That, in turn, gives me the opportunity to share my disagreement so that was can, at the least, understand our differences. I’m no longer interested in looking clever. I want to see real changes, and that begins when I interact with others respectfully. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This all leaves me wondering about the constituents who voted for these representatives. In one case, it was by a small majority, but most of the others won their most recent elections by wide margins. I’m guessing that their constituents would tell you that they raise their children to be respectful and that they themselves are respectful of others – as most adults I know try to be. The majority of those voters might even tell you that they take some pride in doing whatever job they were hired to do. We’re supposed to learn those behaviors from early childhood. It’s part of the wisdom that gets passed down. But instead of demanding that their member of Congress acts wisely and focuses on legislation effectiveness (the job they were elected to conduct), constituents cheer disrespectful and ineffective actions that are clearly antithetical to the common courtesy these voters presumably practice in their own lives. To follow the metaphor I started above, it’s as if they tell their representative that it’s okay to make drinks at Starbucks – while being surly to the people who come to the counter – instead of making deliveries. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When are these congresspeople’s bosses, their constituents who elected them, going to expect them to deliver on the job they were elected to do instead of acting like they’re auditioning to be the latest loudmouth on TV’s newest reality series? Maybe these voters figure, “Well, at least my representative isn’t out stealing puppies from the Amish,” (as is allegedly the case for one NY Republican House member); but that makes as much sense as the errant delivery driver telling the boss, “Well, at least I wasn’t using the truck to rob banks.” The issue isn’t about who’s worse than whom. The voters in these congressional districts have to expect that the people they elect will act more wisely and respectfully than what we’ve seen so far from the people they elected. They have to hold these people accountable to legislate – i.e., to do the job they were elected to do – and to do it wisely. </span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-50188808359738812622023-01-20T19:37:00.000-08:002023-01-20T19:37:03.928-08:00 Mystic or Greeting Card?<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">FB always asks me "What's on your mind, Bob" as I create a post. Today, I’m thinking about two messages that I saw on the same day with the same quotation purporting to be from two different people. It was possible that one person originally made the statement and then the second one was quoting the first – and somewhere the original attribution got lost. After all, one of the possible sources lived hundreds of years after the other, so that seemed the most likely explanation.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-80e3258d-7fff-e14e-e754-9e18065899f4"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But being an academic, I tend not to be satisfied with half of an explanation. I wanted to know who said it. So I went to Google as a first pass. The first item on the list of responses gave me an answer, and other sources affirmed and corroborated that answer. It turns out that neither of the two people who were quoted made the statement. The statement was written by a greeting card writer who borrowed the ideas for it from a mid-20th century Irish philosopher. The greeting card writer takes full credit for the statement and explains its origins on that writer’s web site. She could be lying, but a number of reputable sources who extensively research the statements of the two purported originators affirmed the greeting card writer’s claim. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why do I care, and why should anyone care? After all, if I believe something to be profound, does the source really matter? Well, aside from a search for accuracy, there’s a problem: Are truth and mendacity so fungible that we shouldn’t care what the source is? If that’s the case, that sort of relative truth making suggests that whatever I believe is what makes something true. That’s problematic. After all, claims of “alternative truth” aside, truth isn’t relative. We can make up our own reality, but that doesn’t make our reality true. There’s a lot of that kind of enchanted thinking happening these days, and we don’t need to look too far into the daily news to see how false statements impact the world. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apart from the demands to know what’s true, there’s also the question of how we create false histories from our beliefs about famous people. Our knowledge of famous people is often based on what they say. Those images get distorted whenever their words are changed, taken out of context, or when words are created for them. Whether it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, the false attributions generate blurry images of the person who gets attached to the words. So people are shocked to learn that Dr. King kept a firearm for self-protection or that Gandhi’s views as a young man (which he later modified) were clearly racist. It’s hard enough to tell the realistic view of the famous without also distributing misinformation into the mix. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It does matter whether that great idea came from someone who founded one of the world’s major religions, or from a modern movement leader, or from a greeting-card writer. The difference in authors means a difference in intent. If the idea is intended as spiritual guidance, that’s very different than it being intended to advocate for justice and change. Context matters so we can really understand the speaker’s intent. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So maybe the next time you want to believe and pass along a wonderful quotation you saw someone post, copy the quotation and paste it into the Google search box. You may find that the person really said it. Or you may find that the origins are somewhere else. And the difference matters.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You may wonder which quotation prompted this note. My omission is intentional because I’d prefer that you wonder about the authenticity of every quotation you see posted somewhere. Rather than saying, “Yeah, that one didn’t sound like something that person would say,” I’m hoping that you take time to question every quotation you see attributed online. And you can even go check the last quotation you passed along to see if it’s the one I checked. </span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-70855761403688870222022-12-29T20:10:00.004-08:002022-12-29T20:10:31.043-08:00 Happy Days? A look past the myth<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">During the holiday season, it seems like we’re constantly being invited to reminisce on happier pasts. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-cd08ca6c-7fff-6c9b-de01-02eedc397b4e"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With apologies to </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grease</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, The Fonz, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">American Graffiti</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and other fantasies spawned in the ‘70s to look backward, there wasn’t a magical period in U.S. history when the nation experienced a widespread period of bliss and harmony. And for many people, the Disney movies of the ‘50s and early ‘60s that solidified that myth weren’t a simulacrum of real life. Ask the braceros who’d been invited to fill in the worker shortage at the beginning of WWII and by the early ‘60s lived in squalid camps and worked under conditions that eventually led to their organizing the United Farm Workers. Ask the west coast Japanese who continued to feel the impacts of loss and exclusion for decades after they returned from the WWII internment camps. Ask the LGTBQ+ folks who lived in daily fear of losing everything, including their lives, if they even peeped outside their closets during that era. Ask Emmett Till’s family – or ask any Black family who lived through that time – how safe they felt when they left the communities where they’d been purposely segregated. The list could go on, but you get the point. The myth of a post-WWII period of “happy days” is just that: a myth. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The myth comes from the post-war economic boom that was fueled by vast governmental spending and a resulting private sector economic expansion. Since the nation typically equates economic prosperity for dominant groups with happiness, there’s a belief that economic expansion of that era must’ve created happy times for all. But to see how the myth breaks down, you only need to look at individuals in smaller groups instead of the macroeconomics. My dad was in WWII, but he wasn’t in the armed services. When he went for a physical at the recruiting station, they discovered that he had an enlarged heart. Despite being a college football standout a few years before, his heart condition meant he couldn’t enlist. So he went to the Red Cross and was hired to go to the South Pacific as a Red Cross director. He wasn’t allowed to serve as a soldier, but he wanted to contribute and serve however he could. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In and of itself, that’s not remarkable. After all, millions of people volunteered in that era. What I find remarkable is that Black folks like my dad were willing to be part of an effort to maintain a society that devalued and, in many ways, sought to harm them. It wasn’t just my dad. The 442nd Regimental Combat team in WWII was comprised of Japanese American men, many whose families were confined to internment camps. The 92nd Infantry Division of segregated African American men fought in the nation’s earliest efforts to free Europe during the liberation of Italy. Black Navy sailors in Port Chicago, California loaded munitions onto ships with no training or safety measures, even after a preventable explosion killed over 300 men. People of color volunteered their lives in service to a nation that would go back to devaluing them at war’s end. For my father, it meant coming back to the U.S. for a few years and then expatriating to Ethiopia where he could work for the Ethiopian government and be treated as an equal. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn’t just the people of color who were damaged by the war and faced the consequences of their experiences in the period that’s mistakenly called the “happy days.” The people who returned from WWII to experience the economic boom all had experienced the horrors of events where millions lost their lives. I remember in the 1990s when my in-laws were at a Catholic mass to honor their 50th wedding anniversary. As they went forward and knelt to receive communion, my father-in-law Art began crying. It was touching to see him emotionally affected in that moment, something I’d not seen him do in the years I’d known him. I assumed that the emotions arose from remembering so much that had happened in those 50 years. As we talked at the reception that followed, Art explained that his reaction was from remembering all the men who fought alongside him when they fought too many battles on too many Pacific islands. At that moment, he was overcome thinking about people who never came home and never had the chance to live the life he’d lived. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I knew that those images haunted Art. In the years immediately after the war, as he was becoming a new husband and father, he was hospitalized periodically with what was then called “shell shock” and now is understood to be post-traumatic stress disorder. He was expected, after each brief hospitalization, to return to his job, his family, and his community to pretend nothing had happened. I know what it was like to be 18 and trying to decipher how to be an adult and find life direction. I cannot begin to understand what it must have been like for a generation of 18-year-olds to find themselves daily in circumstances where they could lose their life at any moment while having to take other people’s lives to survive. Then after a short boat trip, they were sent home to live. The trauma of war stayed with that generation throughout all the years I’ve known them as they struggled with alcohol, being abusive, or became so narrowly focused and goal driven that they risked all parts of their life to reach their aims.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The people of that generation have been called heroes, or, as Tom Brokaw termed them, “The Greatest Generation.” Those are convenient tropes, but as literary devices often do, giving a simple label (especially to a generation of people) misses the complexity of what’s really happening. Both my dad and father-in-law were deeply impacted from the war and they both had to grapple with the effects of the war throughout their lives. For my dad, that meant working full time, and being vigorously political with his time after work and on weekends. He spent little time not driving himself, and he died at 54 of a heart attack. For my father-in-law, it meant having very few close friends and being obsessive about his religion – so much so that when he was older and had dementia, he would wander to the church a mile away in the middle of the night looking for a priest to hear his confession. I knew of few people of that generation who escaped unscarred. And many passed those scars along to their children through overindulgence, demands for high achievement, physical and emotional abuse, or obsessions with material gains – pursuit of unhealthy behaviors to fill the damages in their lives. The “greatest generation” struggled to find itself. Read Alan Ginsburg’s poem</span><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Howl</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and you’ll glimpse some of their struggle. Although some of the adults from that era lived with healthy relationships and healthy, balanced lives, in my experience, the well-balanced in that generation weren’t normative. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The happy days mythology didn’t fit their children’s lives either. I can look to my own experience during the era as an example. I’ve written about this, and I’ve spoken about it in presentations, but it seems worth repeating here: I’m proud that I graduated in the lowest third of my high school class. When I graduated, my high school posted the list of their graduates publicly; and they listed graduates in order of GPA. I was in the lowest third of that list. When I say this during a presentation, I assume that people are imagining that my current pride comes in my accomplishments since that time. After all, I went to earn advanced degrees from institutions where there’s some selectivity. However, that’s not why I’m proud of my lack of achievement in high school. Lots of people earn lots of degrees, and I’m just lucky enough to be one of them.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During my presentations, I explain that fortune. I also explain that my pride comes in appreciating who I was as an adolescent. I was in an educational system and a community that undervalued me as a human and didn’t understand what I could contribute. The entire system was rigged to favor only certain people. I’d have had to change who I was to be able to have even the limited success that the system would allow me to have. I’m proud that I saw that in my youth and opted out. My experiences in that community and its education system eventually fueled my drive to participate in making education something different than what I’d experienced. But at the time, my intuitive reaction was to produce the minimum so that I could get away from both the schools and that community as soon as I was old enough. That intuitive reaction allowed me to preserve who I am. To do anything else would’ve forced me to become something less than that. It was later, as I became an educator, that I gained the tools to fight oppression effectively. So I remain pretty proud of that kid who reacted healthily to oppression by refusing to participate. In my “happy days,” that was the right choice. That’s a choice that I see young people still making as schools and schooling still haven’t lived to their promise of educating all equitably. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The happy days myth keeps some of us from seeing the struggles that were very real then and that keep some of us looking longingly backward instead of seeing the flaws and looking to solutions. It’s what fuels fables that the U.S. was once “great,” and that we should strive to return to that greatness. It’s what has some states and communities reaching backward to regain a past that didn’t exist for many people. The “don’t say gay” rules in Florida and the “anti-woke” legislation that states are considering and passing errantly build from these myths. The backlash that has produced these laws comes from a wholehearted belief in the happy days myth and that anyone who doesn’t believe the myth is anti-American or someone who hates the country and is attempting to distort the past.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mythology is good when it teaches us lessons: Icarus flying too close to the sun; Oedipus’ hubris; the dangers of Narcissus’ self-absorption; and so on. But when we substitute mythology for history, we lose the opportunity to examine what’s happened and learn the past’s lessons. If the purveyors of our popular television, movies, and novels want to use the familiarity of the past as an easy entry to storytelling, let’s appreciate that as storytelling, not as history. Let’s not confuse what we see, hear, or read in those accounts as being an accurate representation of life to which we should aspire to return. </span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-70535690614137222132022-10-20T20:37:00.005-07:002022-10-20T20:37:53.118-07:00 How Not to Evaluate a Grant<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Someone sends an e-mail message. They received a grant that needs an evaluator. They wrote an evaluation plan, and the plan requires an annual report. They need someone to write the report. Sometimes, they’ll call just as the funded project is underway; other times, they call when the report is due in a few months. Sometimes, it’s a private, foundation grant; however, more often, it’s a federal grant. Regardless of the source and the timing, they’re calling me far too late in the process. I explain as professionally as I can that what they’re most often seeking is a compliance report rather than evaluation. If they’re willing, I’ll help them do more than write a compliance report. If they’re not, I wish them well. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-ce1dbbb0-7fff-b43f-43e8-254bc33c6a27"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any funded organization should show compliance to the funder’s requirements and progress in meeting the outcomes they established in their funding request. However, the summative analysis within an annual report is a small part of what an evaluation could and should provide to any project. Because I, and every other person who provides external evaluations, have these discussions often, I decided to write some recommendations for organizations that are writing funding requests so that they can understand what they miss by having a cursory, summary report of their project as their only attempt at evaluation. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recommendation 1: Bring in an evaluator as you are designing your project – and it usually should </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be the grant writer, especially if you’re using an external grant writer. There’s an industry of grant writers who develop ancillary businesses by writing themselves into a grant as an external evaluator once the project is funded. Typically, grant writers understand how to write a successful proposal. That typically makes them qualified to write evaluations that ensure compliance to the outcomes written into the grant. In contrast, an evaluator needs to be someone with a strong set of analytical tools, who can write objectives that are clear, yet provide for ongoing analyses of a project as it unfolds; who understands both qualitative and quantitative measures and when to apply them; who understands organizational development and systems; and who can recommend methods and processes that will assist the project to understand a project’s ongoing progress. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An evaluator shouldn’t drive the aims of the grant, but that person should work alongside you to help you refine those aims to the betterment of your project. That’s much more involved than writing a compliance report of simplistic objectives that you’ll meet each year or at the end of funding. Grant writers usually don’t have the skills required to do all that. If you find one who does have the skills of an evaluator, it might make sense to include that person as the external evaluator. However, in my experience, folks who are busy writing grants sometimes find that they have to back out of the evaluation work as it competes with their more lucrative grant writing (that’s sometimes the reason that I get that e-mail request so late in the process). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recommendation 2: As you’re writing your grant proposal, work with your evaluator to write outcomes and performance measures that will have meaning to you, not just to the funder. Unlike compliance outcomes, the ones that a trained evaluator will help you generate will be more consequential for you as an organization. Those will help you develop a plan that measures how and why the project is succeeding or not succeeding while it’s underway. A skilled evaluator will help you design outcomes that are measurable, but, more importantly, outcomes that are useful to your organization as measures of progress – and measures of causes of that progress. When done well, those measures will evaluate both the project and the organization in which the project exists. Knowing that you met or didn’t meet a goal at the end of a funding year, or the end of the project, is not helpful if you don’t understand how or why that happened – or what those outcomes mean to you organizationally. An evaluator will ask key questions that will help you to measure formatively so that you’re not waiting to the end to see what impacts your project is having. That typically won’t happen if the evaluator isn’t helping to design the evaluation. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recommendation 3: Make certain that your evaluation includes those formative analyses to determine what’s happening in the project as the project is underway. The grants I’ve seen without this have outcomes that are simple numeric indicators that are easy to report. To restate and emphasize this point, that happens because grant writers generally don’t know more about assessment and evaluation beyond identifying summative measures that will fulfill the funder’s needs. But that misses a critical opportunity to learn and evolve from the grant. More than one project I evaluated over the years began with a premise that a specific intervention was the solution that would help meet a challenge. For these projects, as my team and I conducted the initial, probing analyses that an experienced evaluator will build into all projects, we sometimes discovered that the funded intervention is a small component of the possible solution. With all of those projects, the organizations adapted their project to think more holistically and, as a result, had a more significant impact than the project originally intended. That would not have happened if projects had not built sophisticated, formative analyses into their evaluation plans. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What organizations often don’t consider when they’re writing a funding proposal is this opportunity to learn and to grow from the project. Yes, of course, you want to change something about your work. That’s what grants help you to do. But you miss a critical opportunity to help your organization learn from the experience if you don’t build a formative learning model into your project. All the organizations I work with don’t have the time or resources to do the kind of exploration that I’m suggesting in their normal operations. Having an evaluator look deeply at your project can also be a way to leverage the work on the grant into your larger organizational needs. The interviews, observations, surveys, analyses of documents, etc. that an evaluator will use to analyze your project formatively will give you a picture of how the project operates within your larger systems. During one project that I was evaluating, my team’s analysis discovered that the organization’s IT structure and systems were hindering the implementation of the project. We conducted a separate analysis of the IT department and how people perceived and interacted with it. We were able to provide an additional report of our findings about the IT department, and that report had implications well beyond the project. If we hadn’t done that work, the project might have looked elsewhere for the answers to questions about the project’s efficacy. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recommendation 4: See an evaluation as an integral component of the grant’s work. You’re seeking funding that will allow you to do work that’s beyond your organization’s base funding. Take advantage of that and allow the evaluation to inform your organization’s work generally. Use the evaluator’s expertise to help you operate. In grant-funded projects that I evaluate, I typically will either design or implement measures that allow us to review documents, interview, survey, or observe activities to examine what is happening during the project. That provides information about the project; however, it also provides a picture of the overall organization. A grant-funded evaluator cannot help but to give that larger picture, if that work is seen as more than compliance checking. If you’re an executive who has a grant-funded project and you’re not taking advantage of this important byproduct of every externally funded project, you’re shortchanging your organization.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recommendation 5: View the evaluator as a critical member of the project management. All the above recommendations are of no use if the evaluator doesn’t participate in the design and implementation of the model. In my consulting practice, I learned this the hard way and stopped serving as an external evaluator unless I am considered part of the project management team. I don’t see my role as driving the direction of a project; however, as decisions are made by the executive team, I want to be there to offer advice on how to measure the impacts of decisions. I also want to be there as program decisions are made so that I understand what it means for the work I need to provide the client. At times, I’ve even provided support with strategic planning so that the organization could refine its intent and where the grant should fit that intent. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early in my consulting career, I would find myself working on an evaluation measure and in casual discussions with the project manager, the person would offer something like, “But we’re not doing that part of the project anymore. We’ve decided to try something else.” I understand that projects evolve over time. They should. By being part of the project management team, I can be aware of those changes as they happen so I can adjust my work to fit what’s happening. That becomes especially critical when an annual report is due. I can reference changed plans to explain the rationale for those changes if I have my notes from a meeting where the changes occurred. That’s even more critical if those changes involve an activity that’s tied to a key outcome for the project.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Closing Thoughts:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In almost 30 years of evaluation work that’s looked at everything from small, private foundation grants to federally funded projects that involve multiple organizations and locations, I’ve learned that organizations that take advantage of the opportunities that evaluation offers are often organizations that grow and thrive. Rather than chasing funding, they tend to look at grants and projects strategically to help them in their evolution. What I’m advocating for, here, is that organizations be more like that in the ways in which they select and work with a critical role that their funding provides for them. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does it cost more to do this? Yes and no. In the short-term, yes, and in the long-term, no. You’ll have to budget more for an evaluator in a grant proposal than you would pay for an annual compliance review. However, the institutional support you’ll get for this far outweighs what you’d spend to hire an internal employee to provide the kind or institutional analyses that an evaluator offers. Besides, in my recent experiences, private funders especially are now looking for more thoughtful analyses than compliance reports. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are resources that can help you find the kind of person I describe above. The American Evaluation Association maintains a site where you can find members to interview about your needs: </span><a href="https://my.eval.org/find-an-evaluator" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://my.eval.org/find-an-evaluator</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Like contracting for any work, you should interview a few people and get references to make a selection. There are local affiliates of AEA that can be useful in finding people, too. Check out: </span><a href="https://www.eval.org/Community/Local-Affiliates" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://www.eval.org/Community/Local-Affiliates</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. As you’re interviewing, give them this essay and ask how they’d provide the services that I describe. But, as noted above, you should be seeking an evaluator as you’re writing your proposal. Do yourself a favor and don’t do that after you’ve written the proposal. Once you see what a trained evaluator can do for you in designing and implementing a project, you’ll never do anything else.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve waited to write this until I am no longer accepting clients so that no one accuses me of making this statement to advocate for a model that benefits me. Throughout my academic career, I accepted evaluation work to keep current in the field and to have ways to engage my graduate students. These days, I have other priorities. For the past five years, I’ve only accepted a few client projects; and, at this stage, I’m not taking any more. So please see this as coming from a colleague who also managed funding from granting agencies – in addition to having been an external evaluator. Please see this as an opportunity to ask yourself questions about the next grant, the next funding source, or the next project where you’ll seek to better your organization.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wish you all the best.</span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-34173890761549527412022-09-06T20:03:00.001-07:002023-02-22T06:50:25.804-08:00 Back in My Time: Thoughts on education and dedication on the day after Labor Day<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warning: This is an old guy’s tale of “back in my time.” But I think it’s worth telling and maybe even worth reading because I may have a different take on the issue involved than other back-in-my-time stories I’ve heard other old guys tell. As a new school year begins, I’ve been thinking.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-bfa4720d-7fff-13b6-bc80-1c287cd5163f"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My wife and I began our married life with a zero-based budget. Unlike the traditional zero-based budget that’s used to manage businesses, ours was zero-based because we had no money. No doweries, checks that people gave us at our wedding, prior savings as we prepared for marriage. Zero. Every month when we first started, we could spend to the limit of what we earned. It took us a few weeks to move out of the cheap motel where we started and into an apartment. After that, we scraped together $100 to buy our first car that didn’t run very well or often. If we spent everything, we started at zero the next month. You can argue that we should’ve saved and waited to have the resources to begin married life. But that’s not the way we did it. I worked in a warehouse and then an office for our first five years of marriage, and we always had food, shelter, clothing, and a few extra dollars – what we needed. After five years of marriage and living a working life, and after much discussion, I decided to become a teacher, left my job, and became a full-time college student. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We moved to the area where the college was and started over, both getting full-time jobs while I also attended classes full time. During the last couple of years, I worked 40+ hours a week and weekends as a maintenance mechanic at a local newspaper. That job helped ensure that I left college with no debt since I was paid enough to live and to pay for tuition. I was committed to becoming a teacher, so the work was what I needed to do. However, I graduated in the late 1970s, when there weren’t any openings in education. And to add to that, I majored in English – a field where there really weren’t going to be any openings. The joke at the time was that you could find English majors on any street corner with a sign that said, “Will Teach for Food.” Still, I was young (or at least “youngish” since I graduated at age 27). And I had youthful faith in my ability to succeed. When I graduated from college, a private school offered a job teaching high school, and I took it. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In that first teaching job, I took a 50% cut in pay from my job at the newspaper. Teaching at a private school paid pretty low wages, but I was teaching. I was dedicated to making a career as a teacher, so I figured I could work summers and maybe weekends to make enough money to survive. During my first and second summers of teaching, I worked on the maintenance crew for the school where I taught (they even loaned me a pickup truck to drive), and I drove tour buses on weekends and evenings during the school year. I was used to working long hours from having worked full time in college while enrolled in full-time courses. It just made sense that I’d sacrifice early in my career with the hopes that I’d make enough later to get ahead. Besides, my wife was working as a secretary, and she made twice what I was making; so we had enough to live. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After a year at the private school, I found a job teaching junior high at a public school, and my salary doubled. We weren’t going to get rich from the increase, but the salary and my wife’s salary as an administrative assistant allowed us, at that point 10 years into our marriage, to buy a condo and start living a middle-class life. It would’ve been financially challenging if we had kids, but we didn’t, and it all worked. Our lives weren’t extravagant, but I wasn’t pressured to find summer or evening employment and could pursue a master’s degree during summers. As had been the case for my bachelor’s degree, I paid for the costs of the degree as I went along. I also finished that degree with no debt while we traded upward from our condo and eventually lived in a split-level house in the suburbs. The story sounds very American-success-story, doesn’t it? I worked hard, started with nothing, and reached my goals, doing the work I chose to do and being rewarded for effort and dedication. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Except I don’t quite see things that way, especially as that mythical American dream might apply to teachers starting today. I could work full time while completing a bachelor’s degree because of the kindness of an employer who let me work my hours around a college schedule. I had the support of a spouse who took a job as a custodian one year cleaning women’s dorms for spoiled young women at the college where I completed my BA. Her job paid for a half-year’s free tuition for me, a spousal benefit that came with the job. And the cost of tuition at a small, private college then was $2,000 a year. While that tuition was relatively expensive in the mid-1970s, it was nowhere near comparable to the exorbitant costs that today’s students pay. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My tuition was less than 10% of my wife’s and my combined, full-time salaries when I was in college. For a student today to earn similarly while in college, that student would need an income of at least $110,000 for even in-state tuition at a state school in my state. If students attempted to attend a private college and pay for it, like I did, earning a salary where tuition was 10% of their income today, they would need to earn in excess of $300k annually. Yes, I worked hard and got where I wanted to get. The sacrifices I made paid off. I had a rewarding and fulfilling career in education, eventually working in higher education, earning a doctorate, and having the most privileged job on the planet as a university professor. But what I did is impossible for current educators who begin with nothing as I did. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Those teachers begin their careers saddled with crushing debt while being</span><a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-penalty-2022/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">paid well below market rates in comparison to similarly educated professionals</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. We ask educators, as the society asked me, to substitute their dedication for adequate compensation. And many do begin with that sense of dedication and belief that their dedication will be enough to overcome the economic disadvantage their profession creates for them. However, many quickly discover that their beliefs are not enough when they’re working two jobs to make rent and student loan payments while paying for life’s expenses. Unlike me, they can’t look forward to a time when that will change and they will become more economically privileged. Even an English major like me can do the math. The numbers are against them as they get priced out of housing and as they find that rising costs don’t match their often-stagnant salaries. Rather than eventually finding economic stability, today’s educators become further estranged from it each year they remain in the profession. Beginning teachers, especially, have more limited options than I did. Typically, they can be in a relationship with someone else who earns a living wage, resign themselves to living with roommates, move into higher paying administrative work, or leave education to work where they are adequately compensated. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We’ve always expected that new educators trade dedication for monetary reward. That goes back to the earliest days of hiring teachers in the 1800s, when they were expected to stay in boarding rooms that their community provided. What’s different, now, is that educators don’t have a pathway eventually to achieve economic stability. Look in any housing market and see what the median teacher’s salary qualifies teachers to rent or purchase. Look at teachers’ salaries and see how they have remained flat against the cost of living. Look at the enormous debts with which teachers leave college. Look and you’ll find that the opportunities I had two generations ago don’t exist for new educators. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In an era when many equivalent professionals leave college earning $70k and more, the solution for this issue is simple. States need to ensure that educators earn a living wage from the first day they are hired, just like employers in the private sector do. Instead, the data suggest that the</span><a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-penalty-2022/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">gap between teacher and comparable professions</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has gotten worse since “back in my time.” There also need to be pathways for earning advancement that matches the earnings that educators need for their advancing lives. I’m not suggesting a movement toward “market forces” and reward structures that “incentivize” the education profession. These ideas don’t work in any social service employment because they always end up rewarding the most measurable and least important traits, skills, and activities. If you put incentives, for example, on student testing results, you’ll ensure that educators focus on those tests; and educators who work in districts where testing skews against students will be disadvantaged. Instead, it makes more sense for educators to have a salary structure that recognizes their growth and contributions to the profession. For example, the stipends that teachers receive for extracurricular work (coaching, activities advising, etc.) are always pitiful reminders of the worth that educational institutions place on this work. What would happen if educators were compensated for those activities on a pay scale that was comparable to professional wages for anyone else who’s required to have five or more years of education? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, if you think that a $70k starting wage seems awfully high, you may need to come to your own “back in my time” awareness. The National Association of Colleges and Employers</span><a href="https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedfiles/files/2021/publication/executive-summary/2021-nace-salary-survey-summer-executive-summary.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2021 Summer Salary Survey</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of 77,180 bachelor’s degree graduates who completed their degrees in 2020 shows that the average salary for a bachelor’s-level graduate was $55,260, with many earning well above $70k. According to data from the</span><a href="https://www.nea.org/resource-library/teacher-salary-benchmarks" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">National Education Association</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, only the District of Columbia, where the average teacher’s starting salary is $56,313, pays above the overall national average salary for college graduates. Twenty-three of the states start their teachers at below $40k annually. If you started your work life in the 1970s, $35k was a lot of money. Today, it isn’t. In most regions, a $35k annual salary would mean you’re spending half or more of your take-home salary for housing costs or for daycare. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead of coming up with schemes which ensure that educators have limited choices, how about, as their employers, we start investing in their futures like any good employer would? I always find it interesting that some people who are angry with someone in public employment will resort to telling that person, “I pay your salary.” When it comes time to discussing and committing to fair compensation for public employees, those ersatz bosses are nowhere to be found. Instead of seeing how cheaply we can fund education, let’s do what any good business would do and see what the true costs to offer a living wage are and then raise the funds that will allow schools to attract and retain professionals. We’ve believed the prevarications of certain people with agendas who tell us that public service, and education specifically, is filled with bloated and wasteful systems that are ineffective and inefficient. I’d reply with what seems to be former Attorney General Bill Barr’s adjective of choice, but, instead, I’ll respond with a milder version: Hogwash! </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Go into any school and look into its budget. Then, after you’ve done your analysis, tell me where the waste is. Let’s stop talking abstractly about this issue. Really. Budgets are publicly available. Go find a school budget and analyze it and identify the waste. I’ve spent an adult lifetime looking at and managing educational budgets, and I’ve not seen waste and bloat. Schools are actually poorly resourced because of that misperception and our inability to assume responsibility for fully funding them. You can see the impact of low funding in education’s biggest expenditure, salaries, which are typically between 80 to 90% of any total budget. As you’re reviewing budgets, go look at the salary scale for any public school and tell me whether you think that’s an adequate compensation for someone who’s required to have the certifications educators have. The artificially low wages paid to teachers, especially beginning teachers, is the way in which we’ve made our choice to poorly fund education work. Those low salaries are because we choose to believe the myth of bloat and waste; and we elect school boards and legislators who also believe that myth, or they’re afraid to challenge it by allocating the needed funding. As a result, educators and the schools that employ them bargain contracts that distribute meager and inadequate funds. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we’re going to have a stable and committed educational future workforce that can be blessed with a 40+ year career like I’ve had, we can’t rely on an anticipated dedication of a few educators to make the system work. While that worked in the past, it no longer will. We have an educational system that behaves like it’s still 1979. The system that worked from “back in my time” isn’t possible anymore – even though we haven’t evolved to acknowledge that change. In truth, though, it wasn’t adequate in 1979 since paying me poorly was as exploitative then as it is today. I know that there are lots of folks who don’t believe that we need to spend more on education. That’s how we got where we are. But a nation that spends $750 billion on its military can find the money to fund its educational system adequately. </span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-11775950325531883332022-08-18T21:30:00.002-07:002022-08-18T21:51:23.656-07:00 Did something happen to “us”?<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">A recent posting on someone’s Facebook feed contains a picture of the Woodstock music festival in August, 1969 along with a statement:</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-10e85140-7fff-b9c6-bba7-72883ea7c21d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Woodstock, 1969. People of all walks of life, color, religion, sexual beliefs. It’s hard to imagine this many people in one place sitting peacefully. What the hell happened to us?”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since it's Woodstock anniversary time when folks are reminiscing about that event, I offer another perspective. In brief, we really have let this myth go on for far too long. Okay, a half-million people came together and had a relatively peaceful event. But, come on, folks, let’s not confuse that event with any pervasive social harmony and peace that existed then and doesn’t exist now. The Woodstock harmony is a myth that may seem nostalgically pleasant to imagine. But like most myths, it’s fantasy. Don’t believe me? Take a trip back through the front page on the NY Times on the days of the Woodstock concert and you’ll see what was really happening in those days (the all caps are in the original). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On that Friday, here are some headlines from the front page:</span></p><ul style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BRITISH AIRLIFTING TROOPS TO ULSTER; FOUR DIE IN RIOTS</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enemy Drive May Affect Nixon Decision on Troops</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">EAST SOVIET ADDS TO CIVIL DEFENSE</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">4 BERETS LINKED TO SECRET UNIT</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">PRAGUE MOBILIZES ARMY AND MILITIA</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guerilla War Tactics Taught at Scarsdale High</span></p></li></ul><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Saturday:</span></p><ul style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">US-THAI ACCORD ON TROUPS ALLOWS LAOS OPERATIONS</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BRITISH SOLDIERS IN BELFAST MOVE AGAINST RIOTERS</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dublin Calls Up Reserves As a Peace-Keeping Force</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">APPEAL BY BERETS TO C.I.A. REPORTED</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CANADIANS BLOCK POISON-GAS TRAIN</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marine Chief Vows to End Racial Rift</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Red China Charges Soviet Is Mobilizing</span></p></li></ul><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Sunday:</span></p><ul style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MAYORS WELCOME NIXON’S AID PLANS BUT DOUBT IMPACT</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">SHOTS AND FIRES PLAGUE BELFAST FOR THIRD NIGHT</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">VARIED DRUG LAWS RAISING U.S. FEARS</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Refugees Gather at 2 Camps in Ireland</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Survey Finds Public Concerned That Discipline in Schools Is Lax</span></p></li></ul><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And on Monday, as concert goers left:</span></p><ul style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">HURRICANE STUNS MISSISSIPPI COAST AS 200,000 FLEE</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CON ED GENERATOR RESUMES SERVICE, ENDING CITY CRISIS</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">U.S. Copter, Carrying 3, Downed in North Korea</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BELFAST REJECTS A COALITION RULE; CRITICIZES DUBLIN</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ulster Churchgoers Hear Two Views of the Trouble</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MILITARY WEIGHS BIRACIAL COUNCILS</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Poor Nations Spend Fortune on Arms Purchases</span></p></li></ul><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can argue that the gathering in upstate New York was the counterbalance to all that, and the gathering was the opposite energy to the strife that surrounded 1969. And I won’t argue with you if you choose to believe in that fantasy, or any other fantasy, about the triumph of love and harmony. But understand that it is a fantasy because the world didn’t stop during Woodstock and that muddy farm field didn’t become some magical moment that set the harmonious tone for a generation that’s been lost in more recent times. Aside from the half million people frolicking and grooving to music at the festival, real people were living the conflicts, strife, and challenges of daily life. The world was as disharmonious and chaotic as the world today. Don’t believe me? Go read the newspapers of the days during the festival. And if you really believe that the festival brought all kinds of people together, get a photographer’s loupe and count the number of people with brown skin in any photos. There were so few that you’ll be able to do that. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During that time, I was in my late teens then as a politically active musician who when asked about my future plans would respond with something like, “I plan to eat, sleep, breathe, maybe take a walk.” I understood “dropping out” from society because I lived that as a goal. I eventually moved into a commune for a while and was attending and helping to manage outdoor music events (though nowhere near the grand scale of Woodstock). I understand the forces that created Woodstock. But I also understand how it’s become mythicized. I can’t confuse that myth with what life was like in 1969, and I can’t long for a return to a mythical harmony that never existed. Why is that important? It seems to me that if we face the longstanding issues that we’ve been fighting, we will take a step toward change. As long as we remain trapped in fantasies and myths, we can dream about regaining a past that never existed. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If I were writing the description to a picture of the 1969 Woodstock festival, I’d write something more realistic like:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Woodstock, 1969. Mostly White Youth Coming Together to Enjoy Music and Step Away from the Turmoil of the Times.”</span></p><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-82743138584830489082022-07-01T18:33:00.002-07:002024-02-15T11:14:28.570-08:00 Louis Armstrong, Myths, and the Rescue Narrative<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s an article making the rounds on social media and carried by some news outlets that tells a story of how a Jewish family, the Karnofskys, adopted a young Louis Armstrong and started him on the path toward becoming the world-famous musician he later became. Different versions of the story have the family housing young Louis in their home where the mother sang him to sleep with Jewish lullabies. Other versions have them purchasing his first instrument for him because they saw his potential. Yet others discuss how he was affectionately given a Yiddish nickname. It all sounds very Disneyesque as the young child is helped by a struggling immigrant family who brings him into their home and treats him like an adopted child. It’s a poignant story for the times (early 1900s) when both Jewish and Black people were so mistreated – especially in New Orleans where Mr. Armstrong spent his childhood. The story has some truth, but it’s not true. And it’s an example of why those touching stories your friends pass along may not be the best sources to cite. It’s an even more significant example of how a false narrative that feeds misinformation can contribute to harmful generalities.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-6ac3f8a5-7fff-4893-935d-dcb7ec4bcaa0"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First some details about why it’s not a true story. Louis Armstrong was a documentarian. He kept extensive handwritten notes about his life. The notes are in the rough language of someone with limited formal education, and they reflect his times. But they are extensive and allow us to see, in his own words and from his perspective, what his life was like. His handwritten notes are available at the</span><a href="https://www.louisarmstronghouse.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Louis Armstrong House Museum</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in Queens, NY. And there are transcribed versions of some of that material at the University of Chicago online archives. He wrote an extensive comment about his experiences with the Karnofsky family. You can read an excerpt at:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/4065377/Excerpt" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/4065377/Excerpt</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s tough to read some of what’s there because of the times it reflects. His attitudes toward race, though common in his generation, sound strikingly painful today. But the account is worth reading because it provides a more honest telling than the stories circulating online. The relationship he describes with the Karnofskys is one of employee and employer. He worked for them beginning at the age of seven (yes, seven – not uncommon in that era) working alongside the adults or older Karnofsky children. Mrs. Karnofsky would provide him with a meal at the end of the day, after he’d been working from sunup; but then he went home to his mother and sister. The Karnofskys treated him benevolently, and he learned the importance of working hard from them. But when he decided to purchase a used, blackened cornet he saw in a store, they didn’t purchase it for him. Mr. Karnofsky advanced him two dollars of the five he needed to purchase the horn. It was a loan against his salary. He paid back the loan and paid the other three dollars from money he had saved from his salary. He admired the Karnofskys’ ability to work as a family and to work toward common goals – traits that he believed were lacking in the people in his own community. But, no, he didn’t become an adopted member of the family. They were his kindly employers, and no more than that. They didn’t nickname him with a Yiddish moniker of “Satchmo” (a name he got later from a fellow musician who shortened it from “satchel mouth” – because he talked so much). The Karnofskys were models to seven-year-old Louis Armstrong that he didn’t see anywhere else in the world he experienced to that point. As a result, he had a fondness for them that he later extended to all Jewish people. This is all documented in his own handwriting. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So why do we so readily want to believe the story of a family rescuing young Louis Armstrong, and why does it continue to make the rounds, even after</span><a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/louis-armstrong-nickname-satchmo/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Snopes</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and other sources have debunked it? We like stories where there is, at the heart of troubles, a happy twist of rescue. The lost puppy finds home, the abandoned child finds a family, Little Orphan Annie finds a Daddy Warbucks benefactor. Those stories make us feel okay about a world that can often seem otherwise cruel. But there’s more to a story that involves a seven-year-old Black child who goes to work to help his family survive, especially if that child becomes wealthy and famous as an adult. That real story is contrary to the more common myths about Black people. After all, the common story society tells of Black children has been one of generational poverty in generational dysfunction. Mr. Armstrong himself falls into that trap in his telling of the Black experience in his writing. It’s painful to read his views of Black families in the link noted above. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The dominant societal narrative is one of failure and distress for Black children. And that narrative isn’t dependent on political perspectives. Liberals believe it as strongly as conservatives do. It is rooted in the perception that Black children grow up in poverty and they later live, as adults, in deprivation. That was such a dominant theme that it drove much of social service policy and social science research from the</span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moynihan Report</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of the mid-1960s to the current day. It stems from the belief that Black families and their children are flawed and deficient. For them to do better, as the myth emphasizes, someone must rescue them.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So a mythical narrative gets created to explain Louis Armstrong. It suggests that a generous immigrant family</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">helped and nurtured him. They taught him love and lullabies, and that gave him the start he needed to succeed. Except that never happened. While he talks about learning the importance of work and focus from the Karnofsky family, and while he admired them, it wasn’t their love that he took from his encounter. At a very young age, he watched, learned, and adapted. As he later played in a band with his idol, the bandleader King Oliver, or as he fronted his own bands, he understood what it meant to hone his skills through work and determination. He learned how to work from the Karnofsky family, and he took that lesson with him for the rest of his life. While he was clearly an originator on the trumpet whom players still imitate today, and while he was exceptionally talented, it was his work ethic that propelled him beyond being just a brilliant trumpet player. His words tell us that was the value of his experiences with the Karnofskys. His success didn’t come from some mythical nurturing and rescue.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why is that an important distinction to make? It’s important because seeing the truth of it leads you to a different understanding of the Black experience. Louis Armstrong wasn’t rescued. He found a model and then he adapted the model to his own needs. He used the lessons he learned while working for the Karnofsky family to rise from the reform school where he was later sent to playing for queens and presidents as an adult. That’s pretty amazing for a child who grew in the poverty that Mr. Armstrong describes in his writing. And maybe that’s the story we should be passing around on social media. It’s certainly more accurate.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And while we’re at it, maybe we should look at others who succeeded and see what really propelled them to success. I think about this because of my great-grandfather who migrated to Texas after the Civil War. By 1871, when he was 72, he owned his own ranch. By the early 1900s, his sons owned extensive ranch and farm lands in two counties and had amassed significant wealth. When my grandfather visited Galveston in the early 1900s, his arrival was often noted in the Black newspaper. One article in Galveston’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The City Times</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (February 20, 1915, page 1) noted that he was the brother of another wealthy stockman while saying of him, “His wealth, it is thought, will reach the $100,000 mark” (just under $3 million today). That was a remarkable change of fortunes for a family that a generation before would have been considered as property in many states. Although that fortune was systematically stolen by the time the next generation arrived, their success, and that of many other Black families during that era and beyond, rarely gets told. Those stories are not unique to my family. There were many Black families who have a similar story in that era and all the way to today. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s time to look at those stories and stop passing along myths that affirm a rescue narrative that isn’t truthful. We’ve started to be aware of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” because of recent reporting; however, even that’s told as an anomaly. It’s not. When I’ve examined the many stories of Black success, whether then or now, I can see a pattern of striving toward achievement that is often thwarted by more powerful forces. Rather than seeing familial dysfunction, I see attainment that fights against the odds because I know these other stories. That’s why I’m always suspicious of narratives that promote the rescue storyline. The truth, whether it’s about Mr. Armstrong, my family, or Black Wall Street, is much more powerful. </span></p><br /></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-58913625246947841332022-03-05T10:06:00.000-08:002022-03-05T10:06:13.718-08:00 An Observational Exegesis of Popular American Epistemology and an Explication of Expertise<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Go ahead and read this despite the title! I’m using it to make a point.) </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-b823826c-7fff-6f27-24d6-13d8fd7d00ef"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If I can use language like in the title above, it’s clear that I can throw around big words. I generally don’t talk like that, but it seemed that the topic of this essay needed some words that I know from my professional life to help make a point (more on that later). To translate, what’s written here are my observations about how we Americans relate to knowledge, truth, and expertise – a relationship that is currently strained and teetering toward a break up. I hope folks don’t read the title and decide to click past because it all sounds foreign and not something worth taking the time to read. I hope you read the first sentence of this paragraph and decided that maybe the rest of the paragraph is worth reading. If the first paragraph is worth reading, then maybe the second one is, too. And maybe you’ll make it all the way to the bottom and see the whole point. Anyway, I promise that there isn’t any more specialized language like the title. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To get to my point: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I recently read a news account about a religious leader in my community who refuses to get vaccinated. This isn’t a rabid fundamentalist like I’ve</span><a href="https://southseattleemerald.com/2022/01/08/opinion-fundamentalism-and-the-radical-right-a-personal-story/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">written about elsewhere</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This leader claims a connection to one of the oldest strains of Christianity. And he believes that the COVID-19 vaccine is a step toward the “mark of the beast” that the biblical book of Revelations suggests will be the antichrist’s brand on his followers. The priest also further suggested that the government is exaggerating the COVID-19 death toll to create more profits for the medical profession, and CDC statistics are not to be believed. This leader cites, as his source, an unnamed scientist friend who claims that other scientists are afraid to speak out against the vaccine. The religious leader making the claims in the news account offered no data, primary research, or credible sources – just a reported friend with whispers of a deep conspiracy that involves the entire medical profession and the entire government. Because I’m someone who has expertise in an area (though not medicine), these sorts of ambiguous proclamations trouble me because as I understand expertise in any area, it’s never so vague and hidden. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Expertise? Me? As the language in the title of this piece might suggest, I have a college education. But those years of learning aren’t why people who know me will be able to see something I’ve said as having value. My education, especially my advanced education, prepared me to </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">begin</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> developing knowledge and expertise in certain areas. The work I’ve done since I completed those degrees gave me additional knowledge and expertise. I don’t know much about quarks or cellular biology because that’s not what I studied. But in my field of knowledge, I do know something. When I talk or write about those topics, it’s because I’ve developed expertise to do so. I like to say that “I know stuff.” Like other experts I know, I openly share my expertise, and I don’t pass it along in whispers only to a few people I know.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I appreciate and value all levels of knowledge, but let’s acknowledge that there </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">levels</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of knowledge. The meteorology course that I completed as an undergraduate helps me understand what downslope winds are and how thunderstorms develop. But taking a course or reading a book doesn’t make me a meteorologist who can predict the next hailstorm. In my area of expertise, I know stuff because of what makes me an expert. Specifically, I’ve:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conducted my own studies and explored the ideas by looking critically at the ideas of others who also study my areas of knowledge;</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Developed systems and processes that put my ideas into practice;</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tested those ideas and have information that tells me whether those ideas worked or didn’t;</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regularly exchanged ideas with others who do similar work;</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Remained in current conversations that challenge my ideas and force them to evolve. </span></li></ul><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So my expertise isn’t a fixed body of information; it’s a living experience that I expand all the time. I am continually learning about my field of knowledge and continually finding new ideas to explore in that field. That’s what an expert does. You can’t claim my level of knowledge or expertise without having similarly undertaken steps. Maybe not exactly the same steps I’ve taken as an academic researcher, but certainly you would need to go through the same level of rigor that I’ve followed by following those bullet points above. I know expert playwrights who do that by learning to write plays through struggle and focus and time and effort; I know expert beauticians who’ve stood over the heads of thousands of people and gained expert skills; I know truck drivers who’ve spent so much time in the cab of a semi that it feels more at home than their house does. Expertise comes in multiple ways, but it does come, and every expert I know experiences those bulleted points. As a result, there are people who are experts. You would miss taking advantage of that expertise by dismissing what I or other experts say in our areas of expertise because you disagree with it. I’m not an expert in everything, and sometimes my opinion is just that: my ideas that are the same as anyone else’s. But in my field of knowledge, I’m worth hearing before you reject my ideas. That’s not boasting or expecting that others should see me as special. It’s a factual a statement that defines part of who I am. In my area, I know stuff. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why should anyone care whether I am or anyone else is an expert? Unfortunately, with the proliferation of talk shows, social media, and “influencers,” Americans seem to have lost the idea that there are experts who know more than the typical person. And no matter how overwhelming the expert testimony, if some of us hear just one contrary voice declaring knowledge on a matter, we can sometimes ignore the overwhelming expertise and follow the idea that agrees with our opinions. In the pre-COVID-19, anti-vaccine world that meant some people continued to follow</span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">discredited Andrew Wakefield</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who falsified his research to falsely claim a connection between autism and vaccines – and, as a result, lost his medical license. In the current pandemic, there are people who would follow leaders who</span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685699/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">call on their followers to follow medical quackery</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> over the advice of infectious disease experts who tell them to wear a face mask, keep distant from others, and get vaccinated. Or there are others who look askance at the massive amount of data and reports on climate change. The list of topics goes on. Some have stopped listening to expertise and decided that any idea merits belief if it agrees with what they want to believe.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not suggesting a blind following of experts. That would be as wrong as ignoring them. In case you haven’t guessed this (or known it already because you know me), my area of expertise is around people’s engagement with new ideas. I “know stuff” about how people learn and how people teach. I live into the bulleted points above in my professional life. And something my expertise has taught me is that people often follow the path of least resistance to access knowledge, especially if that knowledge challenges what they already know. Blindly following a belief is often the easiest path when the better (and harder) approach is to seek out many sources of information, to weigh those sources of information, and decide which source is most accurate. For example, if</span><a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">97% of climate scientists agree</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that climate change is real, then, at the least, you need to question whether you should be following the advice of the other 3%. The responsibility is to weigh experts’ ideas and determine which ideas are worth following. And that’s become especially important when we have so many sources of information. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Those sources are sometimes difficult to understand because any area of expertise has its own language that helps experts discuss ideas in their field – like the title of this essay. It’s important that people in an area of expertise have a language that they can use among each other so they can talk in the shorthand of that language. I used to teach my graduate students to use the language like the title of this essay so we could have a common language to discuss the nature of knowledge. It’s the language that they encountered while reading other experts in my area. However, while some experts are writing in a language meant for each other, it is critical to find those experts who also share their ideas for those of us outside their world. There are folks in every area of expertise who’ve worked hard at translating their work to an audience beyond their narrow group of fellow experts. I don’t mean the charlatan quacks who have their own talk shows or YouTube channel and offer opinions on everything. You know, the ones who insist on being called “Doctor [Insert First Name Here]” and build a marketing brand around that name. In contrast are others who reach a wide audience and really do develop expertise through careful inquiry and the kind of first-hand exploration that provides them with the mantle of expert (remember the bulleted list I included above). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Think</span><a href="http://michaelericdyson.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Michael Eric Dyson</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><a href="https://president.rpi.edu/president-biography" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shirley Ann Jackson</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><a href="https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neil deGrasse Tyson</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or</span><a href="http://www.nellpainter.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nell Irvin Painter</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. These and many more have learned to be translators of their big ideas to make those ideas accessible to an audience beyond their own profession. These aren’t folks who’ve pandered to a wider audience while losing their drive to gain new knowledge. These public intellectuals have continued to contribute to their field while learning to communicate their ideas. While there could be more of that expertise and knowledge made publicly accessible, it is available; and we all need to go looking for it. If you’ve been on Facebook or Substack lately, you’ve most likely encountered the daily posts from historian</span><a href="https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heather Cox Richardson</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. She’s the perfect example of what this looks like when done well. In addition to writing highly respected books in her field of knowledge, she writes a daily summary of current events that places the day into historical perspective. Her daily comments are free of jargon, and they’re also written in the conversational tone that a letter is written. As a result, her posts are daily must reading for thousands of readers. It’s experts like her who are worth finding.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So how can we be better at consuming information and looking for experts we can trust? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That was easier 30 years ago when there were fewer sources available. Today, the answer to that question isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if we’re going to be able to navigate the complex world in which we live. Like I wrote above, my expertise is in my field of study, so I have to do this, too, with other topics all the time. We all need to have the skills to evaluate the expertise and information that come to us. The place to start is by questioning the qualifications of the people offering the information. My favorite example of misplaced expertise was when Nobel Laureate and chemist Linus Pauling declared almost-magical powers of Vitamin C, to the consternation of medical researchers who understood its limitations. Pauling’s pronouncements had people taking massive doses of Vitamin C that medical researchers agreed had little curative purposes. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Look, also, to see what viewpoints that the expert uses, so that you can understand the biases that the expert brings. Take some time to see if there are other experts who agree or disagree with the expert. In both social sciences and the natural sciences, experts always seek to have our work examined by other experts. The idea of “peer review” means that other experts in our field have looked closely at our work and have determined it meets the standards of our profession. That process has limitations, but it does offer some protections. I mentioned Andrew Wakefield’s anti-vaccination, falsified research above. His study was originally peer reviewed and published by </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Lancet</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a major British medical journal. Over time, though, other medical researchers weren’t able to reproduce his results, and that led to his work being examined more closely. While his falsified data originally passed initial review, it was through further peer review that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Lancet</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> discovered his fabrication and eventually</span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">published a retraction</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of their original publication of his work. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whenever I hear someone complain that “experts never agree, so I’m not listening to any of them” on a topic, I realize that I’m hearing someone who believes that maybe having expert knowledge isn’t possible. That’s not true. In the rapidly evolving information world that surrounds us, we have to sift through that knowledge and educate ourselves how to know which of that knowledge makes the most sense. The challenges in determining the worth of expert advice, however, doesn’t mean that we should give up on assessing it – or that we should accept all ideas as equal. It means that it’s going to be harder to make the judgments. There’s a balance between cynicism and blind acceptance, and we all need to strive toward that balance. I think of it as </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">informed skepticism</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. You don’t have to be an expert in order to assess the value of expertise or of someone who’s sharing their expertise. After all, you just got to the bottom of this essay that had a title that you may not have fully understood because of the specialized vocabulary I used in the title. If I’ve done my job, I’ve conveyed the complexity of my ideas without relying on that vocabulary – so you didn’t have to become an expert to understand my thoughts. You can look at other sources to see if I really do have the expertise I claim, and you can read other materials that’ll tell you about my perspectives and biases. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where can you start developing a process that’ll help you develop skills in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">informed skepticism</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Here are some guides to help:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://library.assumption.edu/factchecking" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://library.assumption.edu/factchecking</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://fordham.libguides.com/FakeNews/Evaluation" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://fordham.libguides.com/FakeNews/Evaluation</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These resources offer you the opportunity to develop your </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">informed skepticism</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by developing your own processes that allow you to evaluate information. Doing that is the only reasonable alternative to accepting information blindly or ignoring it without assessing its worth. </span></p><br /></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-69403863563285190652022-01-01T15:27:00.003-08:002022-01-23T23:09:51.832-08:00 Thoughts on living in my 70th year<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Scanning over the directory of names on my Facebook friends list, I see a few friends of friends; but for the most part, the names that I see form a road map of my life. There are relatives from both my direct family and Mary’s. There are people I’ve known for a lifetime or a few years. A few know me from early childhood. Many I’ve known professionally: they’ve been co-workers, bosses, professional colleagues. There are some whom I’ve gotten to know through community engagements or consulting projects. There are people from the communities I’ve been part of. And then there are the students, a handful on the list who are part of the thousands I taught over the years: people in their late-40s and 50s who are cemented in my memory as teens; and people whom I taught in community college or graduate school as adults and who now have a few more grey hairs than when I first met them.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-eb6622eb-7fff-9ec1-491c-47c25878e0a7"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over my lifetime, I’ve had an odd memory. I’m awful with names, but there’s something that keeps conversations in my mind. I can recall discussions that I had in the 1970s almost verbatim. For many years, I recalled every conversation with that detail; but now with time, age, and volume, my memories of discussions aren’t all as vivid or complete. They’re still there, just in less clarity. While I’ve always had challenges recalling a person’s name immediately, I can still remember enough of our discussion about a mother’s illness, a sister’s triumphs, someone’s struggles whether to attend graduate school, how much the person loved a particular breed of dog, or a hundred other minute details that seem glued to the neural pathways of my memory. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through these recollections of others, I see my own life. I’ve actually learned how to live in the world through others. Sociologists tell us that we become habituated to the norms around us by interacting in our worlds. That’s true for my life. People showed and told me how they survive tragedy, how they celebrate joy, how they cope with challenges and success. And I learned how to follow the examples they set – not mirroring their experiences, but certainly by using them as templates for my own actions. Sometimes those are difficult experiences as I learned who not to trust or who was only out for self-gain. But, on balance, those were small moments where I learned much and moved ahead. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve often heard that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. In my case, it does. It’s a manual that’s authored in chapters of others’ lives, expanded through each interaction with them. I think that’s why I recall so many conversations. Those memories of conversations aren’t just facts about others’ lives. They’re a roadmap of the growth I’ve experienced. It’s a wonderful symbiosis of connections where I’ve grown and evolved and become with each person I get to know. That list of Facebook friends is more than a list of names since each name is the basis of a memory that has helped me to understand life further. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the auto-biographical chapter I wrote for</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/African-American-Higher-Education-Leadership/dp/1433132079/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1641079671&sr=8-2" style="text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">African American Males in Higher Education Leadership</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I noted that my life comes from a long historical lineage that informs and shapes it. In that book chapter, I wrote how my life, like the great Nile as it fertilizes river valleys downstream, was shaped by what comes before until it’s eventually able to offer something to others. Since I wrote that chapter, though, I’ve come to believe that I’m also shaped by more than what came before me. My life gets enriched by each conversation and event that is suggested by the names on the Facebook list and well beyond it. Life, for me, has been a fortunate exchange of ideas, habits, and values. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this stage, I’m fortunate that some folks call me “mentor.” That’s something I’ve learned to be as I’ve known people who’ve shown me how to fill that role. As I was maturing, I had people who checked in on me, helped me to develop the skills and knowledge I needed to have the impact I wanted to have, and let me gently know when I was heading off course. Now, as I’ve become the mentor, I’ve learned that one aspect of that role is living to a standard. The righteous fire to change the world of my youth has been tempered by time and experiences that sometimes give me thoughts about taking it all easy and not taking any difficult routes. However, being engaged with younger folks reminds me to make choices that are often as challenging as the ones I fought through in prior decades. I may not be on the same leading edge that I was 30 years ago, but my interactions with others remind me to keep pushing whatever edge that’s before me. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s more than not wanting to let down others or appearing to look like I’ve given up. It’s actually more about being forced to live by the same internal standards that have driven me throughout my life and not compromise because it’s easier, I’m older and more tired, or a hundred other excuses that I’d otherwise have. To be other than whom I’ve been would negate how I lived the rest of my life. It’s my connections to other, often now younger, people that keep me accountable to remain whom I’ve always wanted to be. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.284; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So at the start of this new year of 2022, as I’m mid-way through my 70th cycle around the sun, thank you to all who’ve shared and continue to share your lives with me. May we all continue to enrich each other in the year ahead. Happy new year!</span></p><br /></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-63198455319653430822021-11-03T19:59:00.004-07:002023-01-02T20:56:24.485-08:00 This Feels Familiar: An observation<span id="docs-internal-guid-c3602596-7fff-970c-624c-94a94c78c1a3"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I feel</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like I've been here before</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Feel</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like I've been here before</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And you know</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It makes me wonder</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What's going on under the ground</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from Déjà Vu by David Crosby</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was a paperboy. From the time I was around 11 until I was 15, I delivered newspapers in my neighborhood. And once a month, I’d go “collecting.” For those not old enough to remember paper carriers and home delivery by children, “collecting” was when I’d take the receipt book that the newspaper company gave me and knock on the doors where I’d been delivering papers. When someone answered, I’d say, “Collecting for the [name of the newspaper]” like every other newspaper carrier did. Then the adult who lived there would reach into a wallet or purse for cash, or they’d go over to a desk to write a check. I was responsible to collect the household’s subscription fee for the month. I’d give the majority of what I collected to the route manager, and I’d keep a percentage as my salary. At a time before automated, computer-driven billing, it was an ingenious system that saved newspapers all over the country from having larger billing and collections departments; and it helped me learn the responsibility of earning and managing money. The job also led to lots of adventures that adults never intended, and those adventures helped shape my world view; but those are for another time. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the most part, the people from whom I collected were pretty good about my collecting. While some of them didn’t otherwise treat me especially well, they seemed to understand the relationship between my providing a service and then showing up at the doorstep requesting payment. The exchanges were polite and formally cordial. There was an exception, however. The John Birch House. That was what I called the house where members of the John Birch Society in the neighborhood lived. I don’t remember ever having any discussion beyond being handed payment, giving a receipt, and wordlessly being expected to leave as the door closed. Like just about every other house in the neighborhood, they had children in school, so the lack of communication wasn’t because the adults didn’t know how to converse with children. There was always silence and the tacit understanding that even in this most American of commercial interactions, having a Black kid on their porch wasn’t what they preferred – no matter the reason.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This less-than-amicable interaction won’t be surprising to anyone who even casually knows the John Birch Society. Think of all of the crackpot conspiracies fomented in recent years by the “Q” crowd and White-nationalist groups that stormed the nation’s capitol building on January 6. All their ideas and beliefs have their antecedents in the John Birch Society of the late 1950s and 1960s. Disbelieve government experts? That was a hallmark of theirs, whether it was water safety or education. Mistrust “mainstream” journalists? The Birch Society believed them to have been infiltrated by communists and communist sympathizers who sought to destroy the nation. Don’t believe that the current president is legitimate? They believed that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the man who’d led Allied troops a few years before, was a communist dupe. The list of whacky beliefs goes on. So much so that the Republican Party of the era denounced the John Birch Society as being outrageous and dangerous to democracy. John Birch Society members were especially hostile toward the civil rights movement that they saw as fueled by communist conspirators who were teaching Black folks to step out of line. Black folks who didn’t know their place as subservient weren’t welcome where members of the John Birch Society lived, even if they were just collecting for the newspaper. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t remember any specific collecting moments during my career as a newspaper carrier except for one at the John Birch House. At that visit, I knocked on the door. When it opened, I offered my standard introduction, expecting the usual silence that accompanied it at that house. The mother of the house who had opened the door, quietly turned and walked back into the living room where a group of men and women sat. As she retrieved her purse, the group that had been talking became suddenly silent as they stared at me. Because I was the paperboy, and because I went to school with the children in our area, I knew all of the adults who lived in the neighborhood. These men and women were unfamiliar. I grew up in a family that was politically active, and I immediately recognized the signs of a meeting, rather than a social gathering. It was mid-day on a Saturday, and seating was arranged in a circle. Some chairs had been brought from the dining room to complete that circle. People’s postures weren’t casual. The group was arranged for a discussion, not in an informal gathering. Some of the people needed to shift their position to look at me. They continued to stare motionlessly at me as the woman of the house brought back her purse and paid me. I wrote her a receipt and she held out her hand to take it, then stepped back and closed the door. It was only as the door closed that I began to see some movement in the group that had been observing me intensely for the few minutes that the exchange took.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you’re one of only a few Black kids in a White community of over 30,000 people in the 1950s and ‘60s, you get used to staring and silence. But I also immediately realized whom and what I’d seen. This was the local John Birch Society having a meeting. They were a very active group in that community as they sought to protect the community from godless communism and fluoride in the drinking water. They weren’t out burning crosses in people’s yards, but they were clearly about maintaining a system that benefitted White men at the expense of all others. Their beliefs were very widely known, but it was difficult to know who was a member. I only knew about the people in this house’s membership because my parents had told me. Catching this rare glimpse of their meeting was as rare as finding an undiscovered flock of endangered birds. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While there were lots of community groups that people could join, the John Birch Society wasn’t a group where you could attend a membership recruitment meeting or an open forum they offered. They met in small groups like the one I’d seen, and they did their work behind the scenes. They started rumor campaigns that employed coded language to rail against Jews as greedy or African Americans as lazy or dangerous in letters to the editor. They ran for the school board under the banner of protecting traditions and history. They were quietly persistent, preferring to be cautious about being open about their group membership. They would never, for example, speak at a school board meeting as the president of the local chapter of the John Birch Society. Their public posture was that they were individuals who cared about values and tradition and their interpretation of important concepts like liberty and freedom. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They never stood up as a group to say, “We’re the John Birch Society, these are our members, and this is what we believe.” That openness of their beliefs often happened at the national level, especially through their founding leader Robert Welch. However, despite their local collective silence, there was a clear local agenda that tied to the national agenda, and that became clear through the actions and comments that aligned to the national organization’s policies. You only knew that local neighbors were members of the John Birch Society if you paid attention to what they said and how they said it when they engaged publicly. Again, as a Black kid who grew up in a White community and who was raised by an activist father, I paid attention. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the local level, they stayed in the background and created small agitations. They’d fight for the recall of a school board member. They’d launch a formal complaint against a curriculum or a particular teacher in schools. They’d appear as concerned citizens at city or county council meetings. On the surface, it looked like these individuals were good citizens who were exercising their individual rights by advocating for their communities. In truth, in the pre-social-media-era, through books like None Dare Call It Treason or Robert Welch’s Blue Book, that they could get from the right-wing American Opinion Bookstore in nearby Oakland, they developed a common ideology. Through meetings like the one I accidentally witnessed, they would plan collective action. But it never looked like collective action; instead, each action appeared like an individual, citizens-led initiative. This was the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their insidious, concerted actions that occurred simultaneously in suburban communities around the country helped to shape actions and beliefs that would later emerge as the anti-taxation movements in the 1970s and, eventually, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At that moment on that porch in the mid- ‘60s as the door closed and I walked away from the porch, I was left wondering what they were discussing. Were they planning the next attack on some unsuspecting teacher because she had students reading To Kill a Mockingbird? Or were they intending to have members of the group show at the next county planning committee to complain that fair housing laws were just a smokescreen to bring down their property values? Or were they planning a letter writing campaign to thwart new taxes that were the result of the wasteful government spending they believed existed? Whatever their immediate topic, I suspected that the conversation shifted to my family and me after the door closed. In the wake of their silent stares, I was certain they would be they talking about the dangers of having a politically engaged Black family around the corner. If nothing else, the family of the house would have to explain how someone like me could find himself in their neighborhood. Guessing their conversation was the best I could do. And that’s the way it was at that time in that place with that organization. I could see the outcome of their actions when they did act, but they planned clandestinely behind closed doors. It was like that often-cited metaphor of only being able to see the top half of the duck as it swims on a pond. There was much happening underneath, even though what was visible didn’t show it.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve watched the news in the past year with much interest. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The nation has now had an attempted insurrection that sought to subvert the most recent presidential election. There are also movements all over the country to create new legislation that restricts voting. Republicans who stood up for the rule of law and fought the subversion of democracy are quietly being replaced by radically extreme people in many localities and states. A woman’s right to make decisions for her health is being challenged. Groups are showing up at school board meetings to protest teaching practices and curricula. There are demands and protests against mask mandates and vaccinations. All these actions appear to be grassroots efforts among concerned conservatives who are answering the call of patriotism. That’s what the defenders of the insurrection attempt, the voting restrictions movements, and anti-women’s choice all suggest. But that’s what the John Birch Society looked and sounded like 60 years ago. While their national leaders made wild claims that were easily refutable, the local followers quietly and persistently agitated for the changes that national leaders suggested. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Donald Trump, his My Pillow sycophant, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, and the others who have a national profile are easily dismissible as buffoons, incompetent, devious prevaricators, or worse. None of what they say is ever proven, and their antics are easily dismissed as laughable. But here’s the danger that my childhood observations taught me: These nationally visible influencers have acolytes at the local level who are much less outrageous, much more covert, and much more dangerous. These local workers push toward the larger vision that the national leaders articulate in a choreographed </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pas de deux</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. National and local dance partners each take their steps to move the nation toward the same kind of exclusionary ideology and practices that the folks meeting at the John Birch House 60 years ago would find familiar. It wasn’t the prominent, national figures of the movement that made that shift. It was the local advocates who remained true to the cause and maintained a determined message that never wavered over time. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An insurrection doesn’t organically happen; it’s not by accident that these voting exclusion laws and vote “audits” are popping up in multiple places; and it’s not by serendipity that women’s rights are being challenged in many places all at once. There’s some serious organizing behind all this. And a significant part of its danger is at the local level. For these actions to happen simultaneously as they have, folks have to be exchanging ideas online, and also they have to be meeting regularly and quietly to plan like my childhood neighbors did. While the national news looks at, and generally dismisses, the national-level nonsense, the lack of local reportage means that these local efforts go unchecked. At a time when local journalism is waning, there aren’t enough local reporters to ferret out the story of local groups and what the impacts of these groups are. The best that local reporters seem to be able to do is to identify the most radical of these groups: the Proud Boys, The Three Percenters, etc. Those are easy to spot, and it’s easy to see what their impacts are. Less visible are the soccer parents or and PTA factions who also meet to plan action. They meet on social media to arrange for the next school board protest or the next campaign to denounce vaccines. We see the duck moving, but don’t know anything about what’s causing the movement.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We’ve seen this happen in the past, and the result isn’t good. Over time, the Republican Party evolved to adopt many of the beliefs and perspectives of the John Birch Society – beliefs that it rejected as laughably too radical in the 1960s. That group patiently acted locally and like a drip that eventually breaks a dam, it persistently pushed its agenda until the party eventually started to believe what the John Birch Society members offered. With time, the steady messaging of these groups from the base creates a narrative that becomes commonly accepted. That slow movement toward the extreme is how</span><a href="https://apnorc.org/projects/views-on-the-republican-partys-priorities-leadership-and-future/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">two-thirds of Republicans in recent polling</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have now come to believe that the last presidential election was stolen by the winner – despite all the evidence to the contrary. At the local level, and online, the lies they hear and see are being spread by people they trust. That trust extends to national leaders like Trump, but it begins in living rooms and in online postings. Over time, those mistruths become facts, despite any evidence to the contrary. These mistruths are spread even more virulently than they were 60 years ago because of pervasive social media. We’ve learned in recent months how a virus can spread physically. In the world of the Internet, viral ideas spread as quickly and as dangerously through contacts that happen every day. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So here’s my question to you: If you’re seeing what looks like concerned individuals who are pushing for the current anti-democracy and fear agendas in your community and state, what’s the local organization that’s really behind what you’re seeing? Like you would for any virus, do some contact tracing. Look for the names that keep getting mentioned in these actions. Look for the names of groups, especially fundamentalist churches that have become a hub, that are involved. In many ways, the fundamentalist church has taken the role that the John Birch Society had in its growth era. Look for the patterns of who is doing what, and you’ll soon find who and what groups are active in your community. I think you’ll be surprised when you uncover the answer to that question. Even more importantly, you’ll discover who is spreading what story. Once you make those connections, then you can encourage the few remaining local journalists who cover your area to look further. There are definitely many local stories there. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because, like David Crosby ended the song, “We have all been here before….”</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-7862863640094662252021-07-30T22:06:00.005-07:002021-08-02T17:32:03.915-07:00 About Systems Failures and a Pandemic<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m annoyed. Really annoyed. I live in a community where, as of today, 92.3% of the population, 12 and older received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That’s the highest vaccination rate in our county. We have an incredible volunteer medical and emergency response corps who put together a vaccination campaign that even attracted folks from outside the community to come here and be vaccinated. Our small, independent pharmacy took a leading role in becoming a hub for vaccinations, and even my dentist’s office purchased a specialized freezer to become a vaccination site. This is all one outcome of living in a community where large numbers of medical professionals and talented organizers live. It’s an older population with a median age of 54 where a lot of experienced professionals – many of them retired – are available to organize and participate in making all this happen. I’m grateful to these people. My wife and I didn’t move here 24 years ago with the intention of someday living in a secure bubble that protected us from a pandemic. We came for the forests and connection to the waters that surround us. But, as it turns out, living here gives us resources that we couldn’t have anticipated – that’s confirmed by our community having the lowest COVID-19 infection rate in the region. So why am I annoyed?</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-79f52276-7fff-ff2f-2c06-e2bb23d7273a"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m annoyed because these privileges stop at the community’s edge. The more ethnically/racially and economically diverse communities in my county have higher infection rates and lower vaccination rates than my community. These other areas also don’t have a large cadre of volunteer medical professionals at the ready to educate them and to organize the medical services that a community like mine can muster. It’s the same problem that the nation has always had. Medical service has historically been available to those with resources. Even in a pandemic where the impacts of no medical service cross geographic lines, the privileged get more services. In truth, though, I am no more safe from the pandemic than the neighboring communities are. In truth, I can’t live in a bubble. When I have an appointment in a neighboring community, when I shop in another community, when someone in those neighboring communities comes to mine – we are all exposed to each other. The effect of that borderless exposure becomes more real with reports of “breakthrough cases” among the already vaccinated like me – even if my risk for being infected is small. It’s clear that the folly of the well-resourced being served and others continuing without those resources doesn’t serve anyone well. That’s always been the case, and a pandemic just makes the interdependence more apparent. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m also annoyed because of how the politicization of this pandemic has ensured that some areas of the state and nation choose not to take caution. We have counties in our state where significant numbers of people see public health precautions as a political issue. Significant numbers of people in these communities are convinced that putting on a mask, social distancing, avoiding crowds, and, ultimately, getting vaccinated are actions that that somehow connect to their personal liberty. Certain politicians, television networks, religious leaders, and online media outlets fuel these ideas. As a result, their followers choose to remain defiant to the virus, or they choose to remain ignorant of its impact; or they believe themselves protected from it; or they believe unreasoned conspiracies about vaccines, masks, and social distancing. These people ignore the warnings of health professionals and the unfolding facts as over 600,000 of our citizens died and over 35 million were infected. All of the current data suggest that these folks being convinced to be intransigent contributes to the pandemic’s spread and impact on all of us – as do the inequity of resources and the politicization of public health measures. Seems to me that I have a right to be annoyed by this as much as I’m annoyed by the inequitable medical system that favors people who live in communities like mine. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, I’m annoyed that economic and political pressures forced an early end to public health and safety measures that were limiting the pandemic’s effect. Those pressures have supported an anti-science approach where political and economic considerations have equal or more authority as scientific ones. During a</span><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/12/15/946714505/fauci-predicts-u-s-could-see-signs-of-herd-immunity-by-late-march-or-early-april" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">December, 2020 NPR interview</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Dr. Fauci said, "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact. But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity." Throughout December through February, as the vaccines were just starting to be reviewed for use, Dr. Fauci and other epidemiologists noted the importance of getting 75 to 85% of the population vaccinated. The current federal administration and state administrations lowered that to a more pragmatic goal of 70% when it became clear that people were hesitant to be vaccinated. Science gets put aside as leaders set about mollifying anti-science believers or their voting base or those with economic interests. Now we’re being warned about another surge in cases. I understand the economic forces, and I understand the political forces, but understanding doesn’t lessen my annoyance.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So is this just a rant, or do I have an idea of substance to offer here? Maybe a little of both. On the other side of this pandemic, when it does end, I like to hope that the lessons of an inequitable health system, the dangers of politicization of matters of social good, and the discounting of science will offer lessons for how we handle the next crisis. I have this hope, but it’s a dim hope. Given the issues above, I hear few people, and almost no leaders, discussing the fundamental flaws that led to the problems. Instead, I hear conversations about the need for technical fixes to existing systems – like providing funding for one short-term solution or other – not the systemic causes we should be discussing. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We’re faced, in this pandemic, with broken economic and political systems that created divisions and favoritism for some. These systems poorly serve all but the very few who benefit from them. These systems are intended to ensure their own perpetuity, yet they can’t continue in the models of failure that is their hallmark. We’re also reaping the rewards of a decades-long anti-intellectualism that generated skepticism for even the most common-sense measures. All of this is leading to a clash between perceptions and reality. This clash will either reshape the fundamental ways in which the society operates, or it will generate little change that will eventually lead to a future clash. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What to do? It seems to me that the first task is to be aware that the failures during the pandemic were</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> systemic</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. If your car’s motor stops working, and you notice that the lights aren’t working, changing the headlights isn’t going to get the car moving again. A dead motor is a system that needs to be fixed. We need to look beyond what’s immediately visible to get at root causes. In addressing the post-pandemic future, now is the time to discuss the systems that failed us. What in our systems allows significant numbers of people in ethnic/racial groups and within certain economic groups to be less well served? What in our political and social processes allows leaders to lie and manipulate their followers with impunity? What caused suspicion of science to become so widespread? These are the questions we should be discussing now as we examine the struggles of the past 18 months. Answering these questions will determine the nation’s future. Creating piecemeal technical fixes to those systems isn’t enough to ensure we can address the next crisis.</span></p></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-89840179341895341392021-07-17T23:21:00.003-07:002021-07-21T17:42:39.938-07:00 And How Do We Learn…? Pandemic Lessons<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I began as a teacher, I thought that teaching was about having good ideas and convincing people of the goodness of those ideas. First, let me apologize once again to those poor students who had me as a teacher in those first couple of years. I wasn’t any worse than any of the peers who worked alongside me, but I had a lot to learn, and being no worse than the average isn’t what learners needed. In the time since, experience has taught me that learning is a whole lot more complex than giving someone an idea. I've seen folks get angry and bitter about that reality when the world doesn't understand the ideas they offer; but I choose to understand it as part of the human condition. In truth, we don't learn from ideas as much as we learn from necessity and circumstances. When I realized that as a teacher, I also realized the importance of three critical requisites for leaning to happen. These three are:</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-196ff672-7fff-34eb-68ac-9abfac2d5240"><ol style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: decimal; margin-left: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Establishing learning environments where people were engaged in solving real problems that mattered to them. </span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: decimal; margin-left: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Building a tripartite relationship among the idea, the teacher, and learners. </span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; list-style-type: decimal; margin-left: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sequencing so that people begin engagement where they understand and continue through an engagement that keeps them stretching their knowledge. </span></p></li></ol><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The pandemic is the perfect exemplar of how all this works.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To explain: For 30 years, I’ve been pushing the idea that technology-mediated learning has benefits. I came to that awareness through my experiences as a teacher and through primary research I’ve done to measure the impacts of technology-mediated learning. I began using computers in my teaching in 1984 and evolved a set of activities that took advantage of technology-mediated learning from that point forward. In my scholarship, I’m second author on what I believe to be the first, published controlled study that measured the effects of the Internet in K-12 classrooms</span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 20pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: 0.6em; vertical-align: super;">[1]</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 1997. If having a good idea and being able to explain it were enough, I would’ve successfully convinced educators to develop technology-mediated learning years ago. People tell me that I’m pretty competent at explaining things.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, despite my interest, knowledge and experience, the response from most colleagues and educational systems to my insistence that technology can aid instruction has ranged from tepid to hostile. When I was hired for what turned out to be the last university position where I worked for 10 years before retiring, I asked what the interest was in distance or hybrid learning. Each person I asked, without exception, said that the institution had a long history of education that didn’t include any kind of distance-based learning. No one was interested. I took the job anyway because I figured that there were other reasons to work there – most significantly because it was one of only four professor positions that focused on adult education in my state.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For years in that position, I worked with other organizations to develop online and hybrid learning. I also created some workshops and certificates that were organized or delivered through video conferencing, course management systems, and other technologies. Educators in those sessions were always, at first, hesitant to participate. With time, though, they found that the flexibility of participation when they could join sessions from wherever they were made up for any physical separation. Also, we ensured that lessons were organized to be active learning environments that paralleled, and in some instances, exceeded the capacity of face-to-face instruction. We also ensured that there were lots of opportunities for personal relationship building. As a result, these were all successful at attracting and engaging learners. Still, though, the response of the institution and colleagues where I worked was to minimize any benefits in favor of what they were comfortable doing. Actually, that reaction was common among many people in education. The response was something like, “That’s just not what we do.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Until the pandemic. When states forced education institutions to close their doors because of the pandemic, schools had to find ways to deliver instruction to students at a distance. They suddenly needed to learn to use technologies they hadn’t previously considered. From the educators I talked to in kindergarten through graduate schools and from Seattle to Riyadh, teachers needed to develop systems and skills that would rapidly replace face-to-face instruction. Teachers and systems scrambled to build distanced-based instruction. As I noted in</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://deanbobhughes.blogspot.com/2020/03/lets-put-on-show.html">March, 2020</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that’s no easy task. However, since that challenging beginning, educators learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Their efforts were sometimes successful and sometimes unsuccessful, but educators I encountered began looking at technologically mediated models differently. That extended into personal lives and professional meetings as video conferencing and webcasting often became the only choice when considering connections to others. Instead of “that’s not what we do,” people began to understand, “this is now how we can connect”; and, even more importantly, many educators began to see the potential benefits of how these technologies can positively impact their work. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During the past 18 months, I helped to evaluate a statewide professional development project for K-12 teachers in 140 teams around Washington state. The project was conceived as a traditional professional development project, but it began just as the state enforced pandemic rules. The project designers made rapid changes and adapted. The year-end evaluation of the project this year had some surprising outcomes. One of them is the lack of complaints from educators about having to adjust to online education. Some of the teams even identified positive benefits. They attributed much of that to the project coordinators who provided distance-based, customized supports to the teams and developed the relationships needed to create that customization. The technologies used (video conferencing, online modules, and a course management system) supported those targeted customizations. Because the project’s content focused on helping these educators address a real need, it engaged them and helped them to learn and begin applying new ideas. By all measures, the project worked well to meet its aims. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t miss the point, here. My point isn’t that technology is better, or that the pandemic had positive benefits, or that I was ahead of or behind anyone. The point is an answer to the question asked by this essay’s title: “How do we learn?” We learn from necessity and circumstances that are based in our real needs. We learn by developing that tripartite relationship among the instructor, the learner, and the content. We learn through a sequencing of experiences that takes us from what we know to what we need to know. During the pandemic, educators, as evidenced by the project I mentioned above where we evaluated their experiences, seem to be discovering new ideas that they would’ve otherwise dismissed. It’s these factors that create the moment in which we can learn. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This lesson on how we learn seems to be a lesson worth keeping, and it offers opportunity for us to examine what we think learning and teaching should be. Rather than seeing education as simply the transmission of ideas, maybe we should think of it as the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">engagement with ideas</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The adaptations that global education systems made during the pandemic should help us realize the importance of that engagement, the importance of ensuring that learning and teaching are about more than relaying information. How do we learn? We learn, as education systems did over the past 18 months, by solving problems, addressing needs that are real to us, and by connecting to those ideas that solve our problems. If that’s how we learn, then school and schooling should look differently. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This challenges much about what we think of education. If we learn through personal engagement with ideas that address our needs, then how we measure learning should focus on that engagement as much as the knowledge and skills. If that tripartite relationship among teacher, subject, and student is critical, then we need to prepare teachers to create and maintain that relationship – and what we define as “good teaching” should be based on teachers’ abilities to do so. If creating opportunities for sequenced, relevant and meaningful learning is important, then educational systems need to emphasize that as much as they emphasize the knowledge which should be an outcome of that.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given I believe this, I don’t expect that the educational system will change itself after a few people read this essay. After all, what’s here are more abstract ideas that I argue above don’t lead to learning. However, abstract ideas can have a place in helping people to wonder what might be possible. I hope this is a spark to think back on our own learning over the past 18 months and to see if the ideas here resonate with those experiences. If you do see a resonance, then perhaps you’ll start an exploration within your sphere of influence, as a community member, as a parent, as a teacher, as a leader to discover how the ways in which you learn can be applied to the places where you, your children, and your community are educated. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><hr /><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 17pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: 0.6em; vertical-align: super;">[1]</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Follansbee, S., Hughes, B. ,Pisha, B, & Stahl, S. (1997). Can online communications improve student performance? </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ERS Spectrum Journal of Research and Information</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,15(1), 15-26</span></p><br /></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-65992909397797856652021-04-06T07:25:00.000-07:002021-04-06T15:24:21.482-07:00 The Silence of Complicity, the Complicity of Silence<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Three years ago, I wrote about</span><a href="http://deanbobhughes.blogspot.com/2018/02/on-personal-attacks.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">personal attacks</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I described the experiences that leaders have when confronted by people who seek to destroy those leaders for personal gain. I’ve watched that phenomenon over the years and am appalled and saddened at how pervasive it is. Organizations lose many wonderful leaders because those people tire of the relentless struggle it takes to lead while fending off the attacks. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-aa358431-7fff-78d9-c71c-a974c01543bf"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I explained in that essay three years ago, these attacks are ruthless efforts to damage someone in a zero-sum game that intends to diminish the attacked and elevate the attacker. The behavior is sickening to watch, yet it’s so common that I continue to talk with leaders regularly who experience these attacks. These ongoing conversations have me thinking: How are these attacks so successful? What I’ve come to realize is that for attackers to be successful, others have to stay silent. Within that silence, people become partners with evil because their silence allows attackers to continue.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This isn’t a Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative issue. It’s no different within any organization in business, education, health care, local government – any place where personal attack becomes normative and is allowed to fester unchallenged by silence. You probably don’t have to work too long in a career to see it. In some organizations, it’s become the common model for showing any dissent to the organization’s direction. There’s no obligation to work out solutions or to talk openly and honestly about concerns. The attack becomes a substitute for solutions, and attackers continue to attack because no one will say anything.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m always taken aback when I ask group members to explain their silence in these circumstances. They typically acknowledge that what they see happening is wrong. “I’ve seen [the attacker] do that before,” they’ll explain in a private discussion. Or “It’s really awful what’s happening,” they’ll quietly whisper. Or they’ll express remorse at seeing the outcome of losing a leader because, “I really liked her/him.” They seem to believe that because they’re not the one participating in the attack, they’re absolved of complicity. But, in fact, they’re silent partners with the attacker. They’re partners because their silence emboldens the attacker and, thus, aids in the attack. It’s what Elie Wiesel warned about when he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1986: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Silence affects more than the leader, though. It fosters unhealthy organizations that live in cycles of dysfunction. I’ve seen that there’s a direct correlation between silence and the rise of organizational pathologies like distrust and dishonesty. People who stay silent as they see someone unfairly attacked also stay silent when they see other kinds of wrongdoing. The silence fosters a culture of looking the other way about everything, no matter how egregious. Enron, the financial collapse of 2008, the Wells Fargo Bank counterfeit accounts disaster – they all began with complicit silence that eventually led to an escalating cascade of unethical acts. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The opposite of silence is action. Action is really the only antidote to the pathology of attacks. It’s really a simple formula: The passivity of silence allows attack; being an active problem solver prevents them. I understand that some people in an organization are marginalized and feel powerless to speak. I also understand that, in some organizations, the ones who feel the power to attack can (and often do) pivot their attack to others. Fear of retribution can come from a fear of colleagues’ actions as much as it can come from a fear of what leaders can do. But here’s the reality: If left to fester and succeed, attackers create a climate of fear and reprisal that permeates all parts of an organization. I’ve seen that climate take hold of organizations and become the common culture that gets passed to succeeding generations of the organization – and last for decades. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve taken a different approach. If I’m part of any group, I take a responsibility to question the group’s behavior. When I see attacks happening, I go to the attacker privately and ask what internal remedies they’ve attempted. Oftentimes in my experiences, they can’t answer that question because attackers aren’t seeking remedies and have tried none. Their point is to destroy, not repair or build. I then ask them, again privately, if they are willing to follow potential remedies. If they’re not willing to do that, my reaction is to publicly call out attacking behavior – note that I didn’t say the attacker, but rather the behavior – and publicly ask people in the group if the behavior is acceptable to them. Having open, frank, and inclusive discussions that address the behavior is, I’ve learned, important. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My starting question is to the group is typically, “I keep hearing personal attacks continue, and I don’t see where these attacks are helping us do what we’re here to do. Is this behavior an example of who we want to be?” I am careful not to further the culture of attack by calling out the person or people, but I do feel responsible to bring light to the attacking behavior. That conversation can allow for the development of new norms where attacking is unacceptable. However, if the group shows by its actions at that point that it wants to stay silent and allow bullying attackers to continue, I reconsider my affiliation with that group. I choose not to affiliate with a group that is willing to allow personal attacks through its silence because, ultimately, that would also be unhealthy for me. </span></p><br /></span>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-76485952094549865432020-10-29T08:35:00.005-07:002020-10-30T03:34:41.824-07:00Who are these people? A reflection on the academy and race pretenders<p>There have been now four academics in the past few weeks who’ve been outed as having spent a significant part of their lives pretending to be Latinx or African American (see links below). What’s happening here? Being a person of color in the U.S. evidently had some self-perceived value to these folks. Now since they didn’t grow up with my family memories or the lessons that my parents taught me, that can’t be the value. It can’t be memories of backyard barbecues or sitting in Syd’s barbershop listening to stories. It can’t be going to the AME church with Aunt Ethel and listening to the organist on the B-3 set the undertones to music that would make anyone consider salvation. These pretenders never had those experiences, so whatever value they got from their charade isn’t from their past. It has to come from their perception of Blackness or Brownness.</p><p>I won’t try to define the complexity of what it means to be a person of color in this country. <a href="https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/23077" target="_blank">I can and did define my experience </a>as an African American male who has been around since the 1950s, but I’m certain that I can’t generalize that to everyone. But something that I do know is that while often denigrating us, the majority society has often appropriated our external characteristics – clothing trends, music, language, the list is long. That’s not something new. The country and western music that’s often popular in places where Black and Brown folks aren’t sometimes welcomed has its roots in African melodies and rhythms. Many of the foods that are American comfort foods have their origins in Africa and Latin America. And if it weren’t for Latinx and Black dances, White teens would be shuffling along with some version of the foxtrot. So maybe these pretenders’ adoptions of racial identity are just extreme cases of cultural appropriation. That seems unlikely, though, because you can go to a club and dance, or listen to music, or eat food all day and night without changing your identity. </p><p>So why would someone forsake their own identity for another? It can’t be for the benefits that new identity brings. It’s not been my experience, as a brown-skinned man, that people are eager to go out of their way to give me preferential treatment. In fact, I experience the opposite as I have to take precautions that my White counterparts never have to consider. I <a href="http://deanbobhughes.blogspot.com/2020/06/everybody-knows-personal-reflection.html">recently wrote</a>, for example, that I can’t show any anger in professional circumstances because that gets immediately defined as threatening. There’s really not a societal status that my brown skin gives me that someone would aspire to having. There are rich cultural groundings that my race and ethnic heritage give me, but unless you’ve had that background, you have no way of even knowing its value. So, still, we need to explain the pretenders.</p><p>It seems to me that a thread that ties the four recent cases together is that they’re all academics. Three have earned doctorates and the fourth is in the process of earning hers. I don’t think that’s accidental. I’ve spent a good part of my life as an academic, and I’ve watched academics from somewhat of an insider’s perspective. What I’ve seen is that far too many of them see people of color as exotic objects of study, as people in need of the guidance that an academic can provide, as folks who need the kind pity that their superiors can offer. Many academics have little connection to communities of color, aside from studying them or attempting to save them as missionaries do. Communities of color aren’t Aunt Ethel or Cousin Jeannie to them. These communities are an abstraction, a concept. It’s in those perspectives that I believe the origins of pretenders’ need to be someone else lies. It’s within this idealization of people they don’t really understand that someone can look and desire to be “the other.” I don’t think I can fully understand what internally drives someone to repudiate their own heritage and pretend to be another, but it seems to me that a view that fantasizes whole groups has to precede that decision. As academics, we’re taught to look for patterns that allow us to categorize and analyze people. </p><p>I can only imagine how these pretenders have idealized the Black or Brown experience. Remember just how educated they are. They read histories or novels about the experiences of oppression and pain. They may even have conducted some formal studies into communities of color, or worked within those communities. There are also the ones who declaim their activist roots marching for civil rights. Then they decide that they need to identify with what they see that experience being and emulate it by assuming it. In their idealized sense of Blackness or Brownness, they perceive that they can mimic it by changing their hairstyle, picking up some linguistic cues, and fabricating a story. What their education missed, however, is that doing so is abhorrent. They clearly don’t see how their actions perpetuate stereotypes and caricatures. The four recent people felt comfortable enough to carry their charade for years. These aren’t deranged or misguided people as much as they are symptomatic of the larger intent to demote the Black and Brown experience to the margins.</p><p>Let’s be clear: My cultural heritage is not for someone’s adoption. I understand that people can appreciate and learn from aspects of that culture, just as I can from many cultures. But no one can pretend themselves into more than an observation of it, anymore than I could eat lutefisk and pretend to be Nordic. In my culture’s case, because of the many attempts to steal, marginalize, or destroy that culture over centuries, a pretended appropriation is a lot more serious than simply eating a food, changing clothes, or mimicking speech patterns. It’s actually another attack. And this one comes from academics who are supposedly among the keepers of knowledge in this society. </p><p>The pretenders are symptoms of a much larger problem of people, academics especially, who maintain a distant and fantasized version of the Black or Brown experience. Academics who maintain a missionary stance toward communities of color are every bit as offensive and destructive as their 18th century, pith-helmeted counterparts’ invasion of Africa, Asia, and South America. Moreover, those academics who see communities of color as a petri dish from which to extract lessons about human pathologies are equally offensive. That perspective identifies communities’ strengths as weakness and misses those strengths because they are different from anticipated norms – norms based on biases and ignorance.</p><p>How do people become this blind to people not like them? In the case of academics, you don’t have to go further for an explanation than how higher education functions. The current system of higher education is modeled on a Medieval idea of knowledge as a sacrosanct virtue that is held within the academy, only to be accessed by a select few who meet certain standards and, thus, show their worthiness to receive it. It’s the perfect model of elitism, power and control that lends itself well to people who succeed in it and, therefore, see themselves as unique and above others. Are all academics that way? I’d like to think that’s not the case, and there are certainly many of my colleagues in the academy who aren’t. But the system of higher education rewards elitism that separates academics from the world around them. So it isn’t surprising that some can develop a savior complex or others see communities of color as objects of study. It’s not surprising to me that there are people who, for whatever personal reasons, transform that pity and objectification into a desire to be part of those groups they really don’t understand from an insider’s point of view. If you’re rootless, you look for roots. </p><p>I understand that my charge of elitism may sound a little like the critique that right wing politicians and commentators take when they denounce academics. But what I’m offering is an assessment that’s more subtle than I’ve heard from the right. Both my analysis and those I’ve heard from the right concern the elitism within the academy. But that’s the only place where these ideas converge. I actually see conservative and progressive academics exhibit the same pathology. They both live in their closed circles of thought where as soon they establish their reputation, they’re obliged to defend it for the remainder of their careers. It’s a reification of perspectives, actually, both on the right and the left. That reification is compounded by the social groups where they interact, where they live, and even what they do with their free time. Such a culture breeds indifference to the real needs of real people outside of that culture. It reinforces the separateness of the academy. </p><p>Within the academic cloister are people seeking something else – in the case of the people who assume another cultural identity, they seek to be someone else. There’s little or no thought of the consequences of those actions or how that theft of cultural identity represents the oppression of generations of forebearers – just as researchers will go into a community to offer an intervention and when the grant funding is done, leave the community as it was prior to the intervention. These pretenders continue traditions that hearken back to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments or the appropriation of Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Hyperbole? I don’t think so because it all comes from the same superiority that allows some to take from others for their own gain. It’s within the academy that such behavior has been normal, and it’s within the academy that these four pretenders found the germinating seeds of their deception. </p><p>Here are the links to the original articles that sparked this essay:</p><p><a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/29/unmasking-another-white-professor-allegedly-posing-person-color?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b28303fa53-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b28303fa53-197563369&mc_cid=b28303fa53&mc_eid=2328f6bff1">https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/29/unmasking-another-white-professor-allegedly-posing-person-color?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b28303fa53-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b28303fa53-197563369&mc_cid=b28303fa53&mc_eid=2328f6bff1</a></p><p><a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/10/more-allegations-racial-fraud-academe?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0722c9d182-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0722c9d182-197563369&mc_cid=0722c9d182&mc_eid=2328f6bff1">https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/10/more-allegations-racial-fraud-academe?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0722c9d182-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0722c9d182-197563369&mc_cid=0722c9d182&mc_eid=2328f6bff1</a></p><p> </p>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-46274869235027643562020-08-15T20:13:00.001-07:002020-08-16T09:32:53.320-07:00 Is the U.S. unraveling? If it is, there’s already a fix in motion.<p><span face="" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">There’s an article in </span><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/" style="color: #954f72; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><i>Rolling Stone</i></a><span face="" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> that’s making the rounds on social media these days. The article, written by Wade Davis, reports that the U.S. is in trouble. Davis offers evidence to show that the grand democracy that is the U.S. is unraveling as evidenced by what’s happening in response to COVID-19. </span><span face="" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span face="" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Davis is a cultural anthropologist, and he offers the kind of detail that a cultural anthropologist does when making a case. Unfortunately, in this case, he’s really looking at the wrong evidence – or at least incomplete evidence.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">If you take a picture of The U.S.’s national political landscape right now, the resulting portrait is a mess. Look at the gridlock in Congress; look at the daily circus that is the presidency; look at our international relations; look at our internal strife; there’s much to see that’s going wrong. There’s not much in that landscape perspective that’s positive. I can see where someone looking at that level would see the nation unraveling. However, I look at a different level. To me, the strength of this nation has always been at the local level; and that’s where I look. By looking there, I see something different than Davis does. I see a vibrancy and a commitment that promises a different future than he sees.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">The sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote famously about “third places.” His work explained how local communities gather in informal places like coffee shops and barber shops to generate a sense of connectedness and community identity. Donald Oliver went further and described not just the places, but the institutions that mediate interactions. In <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/9781885580139/Primal-Modern-Vital-Center-Oliver-1885580134/plp" style="color: #954f72;"><i>The Primal, the Modern, and the Vital Center</i></a><i>,</i> Oliver and his co-authors explain that it’s not just places that are central, but also organizations and institutions. Oldenburg and Oliver have something to teach: A community is the sum total of the places, institutions, and people that bind it together. Building from their ideas, it’s valuable to understand that a nation is a compilation of those communities, and the core of a democracy is always at that community level.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">And that’s what Davis is missing. Davis misses the opportunity to look at the micro level of American society by focusing only at the macro level. It’s at that micro level that the U.S. experiment in democracy really works. We can’t ignore the impact of the larger national political scene. As he rightly points out, the current pandemic has exposed the inequities, fractures, and mismanagement that divide the nation. However, it’s a mistake to confuse that with a complete picture and to assume that those national issues foretell a looming destruction.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">I know this because of what I see. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to work with leaders and organizations that focus at the local level. And I’m now fortunate to have seen decades of those efforts’ impact. What I’m seeing now is that while the national systems are strained, local organizations and leaders are finding renewed strength. The next generation of leaders, those people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, especially, are finding the current crises as opportunities to look at how their organizations can be better at what they do. Local organizations and leaders are bringing people together; local organizations and leaders are using the power of community to build. That looks very different than a dystopian unraveling of the nation. In fact, it looks like people gaining power through their joint and collaborative efforts.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">What does it really look like? The picture is impressive. And rather than trying to tell all of the possible stories, I’m going to leave this statement with a list of a few organizations that are the future of this nation. Follow the links and you’ll see what I’m talking about. These are organizations that perform amazing work every day. They are committed to their communities because they are committed to people. The result is work which makes communities stronger, which makes the nation stronger. If you want to know why I am not in despairing in a belief that the nation is unraveling, follow some of these links and see a small portion what’s going on in just one region of the country. I know it’s happening elsewhere, too. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">These aren’t political action groups, but their actions do have political implications. As they do their work, they change their communities to be more responsive to the needs of those communities – and that’s fundamentally a political act as more people gain the knowledge and freedom to be engaged in a community. It’s the politics of action and change as these groups advocate for and impact their communities’ needs to be responsive to all members of a society. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">The brief list below contains names of organizations from my e-mail interactions in recent months. I used that criterion to limit the list. If I went beyond my recent personal contacts, this list could go on much longer to include many more organizations. Take a minute and look through the list and see how these people are generating and sustaining their communities through engaged, democratic actions. Then let me know if you think the nation is unraveling. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">If you want to add some organizations to this list from your own experiences, include the organizations and their URL as a reply to the posting.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">Kandelia: <a href="https://www.kandelia.org/" style="color: #954f72;"><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;">https://www.kandelia.org/</span></a><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">Literacy Source: <a href="https://www.literacysource.org/" style="color: #954f72;"><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;">https://www.literacysource.org/</span></a><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">Neighborhood House: <a href="https://nhwa.org/" style="color: #954f72;"><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;">https://nhwa.org/</span></a><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">RVC: <a href="https://rvcseattle.org/" style="color: #954f72;"><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;">https://rvcseattle.org/</span></a><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">St. James Immigrant Assistance: <a href="https://www.stjames-cathedral.org/immigrant" style="color: #954f72;">https://www.stjames-cathedral.org/immigrant</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">Seattle Education Access: <a href="https://seattleeducationaccess.wordpress.com" style="color: #954f72;">https://seattleeducationaccess.wordpress.com</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">Seattle Goodwill Jobs, Training, and Education: <a href="https://seattlegoodwill.org/job-training-and-education" style="color: #954f72;"><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;">https://seattlegoodwill.org/job-training-and-education</span></a><span face="" style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in;">South Seattle Emerald: <a href="https://southseattleemerald.com" style="color: #954f72;">httpss://southseattleemerald.com</a><o:p></o:p></p>Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-10500423618611973492020-06-19T15:06:00.001-07:002021-01-17T23:12:42.586-08:00Everybody Knows – a personal reflection<br />
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Everybody knows that hate is wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody knows that it’s wrong to exclude
and discriminate on the basis of race, gender, disability status, age, and a
whole list of characteristics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody
knows that limiting another person’s education or employment or financial
future shouldn’t happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody knows
that people should always be given fair treatment by the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody knows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet these issues continue as if no one knows.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The overwhelming number of recent statements on injustice from
every sector of the society are stultifying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’ve seen corporate statements and civic statements and celebrity statements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Educational institutions all have published
statements, as have sports teams and their leagues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Politicians stumble over themselves to be the
loudest voice decrying hatred, racism, and inequitable policies and
practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody wants to show that
they’re aligned with what everybody knows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But as I scan the statements, they’re mostly pretty
interchangeable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s like reading the
results from one of those word-column exercises where you select a word from
each column to form a sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pick “justice”
from column A, “anti-racist” from column B, “deeply committed” from column C, etc.,
and pretty soon you have a statement that shows that you agree with what
everybody knows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is a cliché
bomb of platitudes that end up saying very little about what will happen to
change what exists.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There’s a deeply personal reason why I find these statements
dissatisfying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From about the age of 10,
I immersed myself in politics and current events to try and understand the
world around me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lynchings, fire
hoses, and church bombings in the south that I read about then happened to
people like my family and me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
targeted murder and incarceration of justice leaders of color in the north by
the federal and state government happened to people like us, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I was harassed on the streets by White
people or cops, I saw a direct line to what was happening in the news to people
just like me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I faced personal and
systemic racism daily in the community of my youth, I knew that I wasn’t alone
because the newspapers and TV news gave me daily examples of what others faced,
too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The journalists typically didn’t
filter it through my lens, but I reframed those stories from my personal
experiences to decipher what was happening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I needed the picture of the larger world that the news gave me to make
sense of the one I experienced every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And I learned to believe people’s actions over their words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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As I became an adult, those lessons continued as I was
denied jobs because of my brown skin, or I was relegated to less important work
by people in organizations where I volunteered or had interactions with people
who assumed I am incapable and needed their paternalistic guidance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Underlying all that is often a general
feeling of un-safeness in public because I know that the experience doesn’t
somehow end magically because someone or some organization publishes a
statement of solidarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite what I
accomplish, what I dress like, how I talk, or what activities I undertake, I am
judged daily by a society and its systems as I negotiate each day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s all a blanket that still covers my daily
life as a brown-skinned man in American society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today and every day. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Between what I’ve learned and what I’ve experienced, I have
a mental picture of what this nation’s values are and how those values are
expressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That image transcends
statements of the moment, and the image lives in the actions I see daily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That picture is not positive, and it’s seared
into the neural networks that comprise my memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I can’t watch murder porn of another man
executed on the streets by police.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
can’t watch cell phone video of another privileged White woman calling 911 in
attempt to create another incident that puts a man’s life in danger because he
challenged her privilege.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t read
about people who created a fictional account of being assaulted by a Black man
in order to cover their own crimes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
been seeing these for most of my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
don’t need to see what they look like today to be horrified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I already have been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a lifetime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I understand people’s recent rage and disgust with a society
that allows these events to continue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Actually, that’s a rage and disgust that I’ve held since I arrived in
this country at age five and heard someone identify me by derogatory words that
were intended to make me less than, or when the local all-White parochial
school told my parents that my sister and I would find a better fit in the
public system, or when parents in my all-White neighborhood made it clear that
their children shouldn’t play with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’ve never surrendered those feelings and have channeled my rage and
disgust into what I hope is productive action as I’ve spent a lifetime working
to make things around me a little better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In my youth, I needed those pictures to remind me I wasn’t alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, I need to rage and be disgusted
without seeing more of the reason why in daily news clips because I already
understand the ubiquity of the experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Equally, it’s impossible for me to see manufactured platitudes of
support as anything of value – no matter how well-intentioned the source.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you read this and ask yourself why this sounds angry when
you know me and think of me as even tempered and always calm, that’s because
you and I may live in two different versions of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my version, expressed anger often has
consequences in how people perceive and interact with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may see my lack of outward anger as a
calmness, but that’s not the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
are stereotyped perceptions of people who look like me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my version of the world, when I show the
least bit of annoyance, I get quickly categorized and labeled as a menace
either to be feared or dismissed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So,
over the years, I’ve learned to sublimate anger into positive action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe that’s healthy, and maybe it’s
not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Armchair psychology aside, it’s how
I’ve been able to navigate to the point where I can have impact, and I can create
small changes in my world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know many
other professional men of color who’ve made that choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s how we cope with our experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not silent about my ideals, but I rarely
show external anger as I express them or make demands for change.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Seems to me that there are two parts to the creation of
equity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s the awareness part where
everyone needs to understand the histories that led to inequities; they need to
see the biases that drive inequities; they need to understand who benefits from
and who is limited by inequity; they need to understand how inequity shapes the
experiences and perceptions of people like me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whether people are Brown, Black, or White, they need a formal awareness
of what all that looks like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, that
seems to be where things end in many groups that are seeking to address
inequity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their thinking appears to be
that if people get educated on the issues, they’ll take that knowledge and
change the world around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That intention to create change through education hasn’t
worked for a lot of reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most
critical is that change in groups, in communities, in long-standing practices,
isn’t easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A nation that’s held racist
and other exclusionary beliefs for 400 years isn’t going to become inclusive
because of what it learns – even by watching a horrific murder on
television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a police officer,
teacher, doctor, or crossing guard isn’t going to change a lifetime of
practices because that person attended a seminar on White privilege.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been an educator for 41 years, and I’ve
learned some truths about the work I’ve done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At the top of the list of those truths is that people and systems don’t
change solely because of what they learn.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So the second part of addressing equity is about
actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has to happen concurrently with
the first part because the reason for action needs to be built on what we
know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, actions aren’t the result
of what we know as much as they are a corollary to what we know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, the knowledge part of
addressing equity doesn’t lead to the other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What we know and what we do need to occur together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Christian Bible describes what this looks
like in the Book of James 2:14-17 when it demands correlation between belief
and action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though this isn’t my faith,
truth is truth, and this one is worth citing:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;">
<i>(14) What does it profit, my brethren,
if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? (15)
If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, (16) and one of you
says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them
the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? (17) Thus also
faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;">
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%202:14-26&version=NKJV">New
King James Version</a><i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The writer then offers an example from the Old Testament
story of Abraham who merged his beliefs and actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, beliefs and actions have to
happen together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Everybody knows,” but from
my life’s perch that knowledge isn’t enough to counter a nation’s values that
are expressed in how it has acted to establish explicit and implicit systems
and rules which intend to diminish people like me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what are people saying when they claim that everybody
knows? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When someone says, “everybody
knows,” that person may not understand that what each person knows gets
filtered through the experiences that give us each different perspectives on
what we each know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That phrase, as you
might guess from what you read here, has little meaning to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have a similar reaction when I hear, “we’re
all alike.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s true that we all have a
common physiology, but how we see the world gets shaped by our unique experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you understand that very important idea,
then you seek to listen and to understand my experience to see what I
know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s very different than
believing that “everybody knows.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because of my experiences, I have a different outlook than
many of the people I know from my professional life where there aren’t a lot of
folks of color who’ve shared similar experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In contrast, many other people of color will
see my story as typical; but that’s because we’ve had to live in what Dr.
DuBois called the “double consciousness” of understanding both the larger world
and our own experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People in the
dominant society haven’t needed to understand our experience for their survival
while we need to understand that society’s rules and norms – especially when
those rules and norms threaten our existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As the nation has become more racially and ethnically diverse, and as
more of us demand to be seen and heard, the dominant society has now had to
start learning about our experiences in order for it to survive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it has to change its actions, not just its
words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So if you want to respond to me or the events around us, start
by asking yourself what you’re going to do besides being angry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not what you’re going to think or say or
write, but what you’re going to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s what I’ll be doing – planning what I’ll do next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you want to tell me how you decided to act
on your anger, contact me personally, and you and I can start a discussion that
focuses on our actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe we can
work together on those actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As you
might infer from what I’ve written, I’m only interested in those discussions
that are about actions right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
really not enough that everybody knows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If you really know, you act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But please don’t contact me with questions about what you
should do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s not my
responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don’t know what
to do, make your first action about educating yourself about who’s doing the
work that makes a difference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you’ve
read this essay this far, you clearly care enough to know the experience of one
Black man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there’s more to know
beyond just my experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Learn the
history that got us to this point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Learn
about power and privilege and the impacts of race.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But most importantly, learn about the actions
you must concurrently take to generate change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As you learn, you can synchronously engage yourself humbly in that
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Make your action your work as I
have made it mine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most powerful
statement that I read recently came in a note from a former student who’s
focusing her actions as a real estate professional to promote justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s that commitment to actions in our daily
lives that will move us beyond what “everybody knows” and into changes that
counter the systemic oppression that now governs our daily interactions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And if you’re interested in what I’ll be doing about current
events, know that there isn’t a new action I’ll be taking because the killing
of a Black man by police or the hunting down of another by self-deputized night
riders isn’t new to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, I
needed to write these paragraphs partly so that I can internally reaffirm the
choices I’ve made in my life – to those actions I’ve already taken and plan to
take.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In retiring from the educational
work that I did in service to justice, I didn’t and can’t retire from my
obligations to channel my rage against the oppression I’ve seen and
experienced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I continue to work
toward a just world; I continue to support people who need that support; I
continue to help build those systems, organizations and institutions that
counter oppression; and, yes, I continue to speak and write – but about action
built on ideas instead of just the ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consequently, I continue to live a life forged by injustice in ways that
build justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How about you?</div>
Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-90518395425758309002020-06-01T20:14:00.000-07:002020-06-01T20:14:00.729-07:00An Important History to Know<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The idea of a “race riot” has deep roots in the historic violence
against Black folks. Before the
mid-1960s, the term was used to describe the hundreds of instances of mob and
often governmentally allowed violence against the Black community. Thousands of Black people died in these attacks,
and few people were ever prosecuted for those deaths. They happened in the south, the north, the
east and west of the nation. They were common
enough to have left an imprint among the vast Black diaspora. Every current Black family still has stories
of their progenitors being attacked during a race riot. We know about them as a part of our history. But these events weren’t just our history. They are the history of the nation because
they form a significant thread in the fabric of the nation’s race relations. When
you ask, “How did we get here?” in response to what you’re seeing on the news, the
history of race riots is one part of the answer. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You should know about them, and here’s a place to start:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://donotforgetourhistory.weebly.com/race-riots.html">https://donotforgetourhistory.weebly.com/race-riots.html</a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My guess is that you’ll find an event from communities you
know in that list. Additionally, I
looked up some reliable sources for a few of these. Here’s a random, geographically diverse
sampling of what you can find. It’s a
gruesome history that you now have no reason not to know.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; mso-border-insideh: none; mso-border-insidev: none; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-table-layout-alt: fixed; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184; width: 634px;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<u>Year</u><o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<u>Event</u><o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<u>Link</u><o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1863<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
New York City Draft Riots<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc=">https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc=</a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<br /></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1866<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Memphis Massacre<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="http://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2019/01/DONALD.pdf">http://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2019/01/DONALD.pdf</a>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<br /></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1900<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
New Orleans Robert Charles
Riots<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1451">https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1451</a>
<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1904 and 1906<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Springfield, Ohio Race Riots<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/ovhpdfs/OVH_V6N1_Blocker.pdf">http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/ovhpdfs/OVH_V6N1_Blocker.pdf</a>
<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1906<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Atlanta Race Riot<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="https://www.atlantastudies.org/2019/05/14/casey-p-cater-electrifying-race-relations-atlantas-streetcars-and-the-1906-race-riots/">https://www.atlantastudies.org/2019/05/14/casey-p-cater-electrifying-race-relations-atlantas-streetcars-and-the-1906-race-riots/</a>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<br /></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1919<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Red Summer<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/red-summer">https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/red-summer</a>
<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1921<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Black Wall Street Massacre<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/hbo-2019/the-massacre-of-black-wall-street/3217/">https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/hbo-2019/the-massacre-of-black-wall-street/3217/</a><o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 40.25pt;" valign="top" width="54">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
1943<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 63.0pt;" valign="top" width="84">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Detroit Race Riot<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 372.25pt;" valign="top" width="496">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 127.55pt;">
<a href="https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/race-riot-1943">https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/race-riot-1943</a>
<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2610947807979750813.post-15635206672715404432020-05-20T13:47:00.000-07:002020-05-20T13:49:29.219-07:00Building an Off-ramp – it takes more than money to retire<br />
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People ask me at least once a week about being retired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Do you enjoy it? Or “Do you find enough to
do?” Or “Do you miss going to work every day?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For the record, the answers are “Yes!” “Yes!” and “Are you kidding?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People keep asking, though, because they hear
about other folks who retired who struggle with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Search the Internet with the phrase "advice for
planning retirement" and you’ll find a list of articles about financial
planning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People think about preparing
for the monetary part of retirement, and if they’re fortunate the finances come
together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they often don’t think
about what retirement will mean for their daily experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my experience, how I prepared to use my time
was as important as how I prepared financially. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I was fortunate to have had a career that I enjoyed and that
I found fulfilling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not every day (or
sometimes month) was rainbows and daisies, but it was a good way to have spent
a working life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an educator who spent
a third of his career in as a junior high and high school teacher and the last
two-thirds in community colleges and universities, I contributed to people’s
lives and helped them dream and build their futures in small increments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even helped a few institutions move forward
and think of the ways that they served or didn’t serve learners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I still continue to do that on a smaller scale, as I advise a
few doctoral candidates as they complete their dissertations, consult with
institutions on issues and programs, conduct studies that I find interesting,
and write and edit articles that I believe are important for the
profession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I haven’t disassociated
from my professional life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what I
have now is the flexibility to do the work that’s important to me without the
demands of a job that requires me to be in certain places, doing certain tasks,
and working at certain times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In brief,
I control my own life with few demands from external sources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Because I control my own life, I also decide how better to
balance my professional life with my personal enjoyments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I’m not isolated from a pandemic, I can
take time on a week night to meet a friend to play music without worrying about
getting up early for work the next morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Or I can take a motorcycle trip along the Olympic Peninsula on a week
day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or I can take the time to work on
something I’m building, and if I don’t like my work, I can undo it and
start over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or I can just relax at home,
or have a standing, virtual cocktail party with friends from around the country
– without worrying that some work demand will interfere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After 46 years, three months, and 27 days of
having a job that scheduled my life, now I’m scheduling my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s an incredible gift that I see as a
privilege and a responsibility as I use my time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you haven’t yet deduced this, though, I’m
really enjoying retirement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I write
this in order to pass along some wise advice I received that helped me prepare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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My already retired colleagues encouraged me, most
importantly, to build what I think of as an off-ramp to retirement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s important to think about retirement not
being a finite point, but, rather, as a continuation, just like a freeway
off-ramp isn’t a dead end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why I continue
to have professional activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
been consulting on the side for 25 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the first year of retirement, my consulting practice had its busiest
year ever, and its tapered a little from that in the last two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t see that work continuing forever into
the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that helped me have an
outlet for the professional energy that I maintained for a very long time
during my career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Similarly, finishing out my doctoral candidates allows me to
continue a teaching relationship with each of them – a relationship that I find
incredibly satisfying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, conducting
a few studies, co-editing an issue of a professional journal, and co-writing
some articles all allow me to make contributions to my profession, while I’m
also mentoring the people who are working with me on these projects and helping
them to gain publications that gain them status in our profession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I left my job and the part of identity it
provided, these were the components of the off-ramp that allowed me to develop
a new self-identity that’s not that much different than the one I’ve had for a
long time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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In my personal life, that off-ramp began about seven years
ago as I built a music studio behind the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We have a small house, and there’s no space for the Hammond organ and
other instruments I play with (note the phrase “play with” as opposed to
“play”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Four years ago, I replaced the
older motorcycle I was riding with one that is better suited for touring
because being on the open road helps me to meditate on life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then two years ago, we finally demolished our
ramshackle garage and replaced it with a much larger one where I built a
workbench with space for tools and working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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The off-ramp also includes people – its most important
component.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My wife and I’ve been
fortunate to have made deep and lasting friendships over the years of married
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, we both have family members who
are important to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although we only
see some of those friends and family periodically, maintaining our connection
to them grounds us in an understanding of the significance of human
contact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s part of the off-ramp
that we started building a long time ago, and it’s one that we continue to
build as we now have more time to nurture relationships.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Okay. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I understand
that some of what I describe about building the off-ramp to retirement takes
money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In our case, it was the good
fortune to have the resources to make choices a few years back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As we had some extra dollars, we would invest
in the off-ramp (e.g., building the studio or replacing the motorcycle with a
newer one).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that’s not any different
than what we did in paying into our retirement accounts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a conscious decision to understand
that our lives were about to change and that we needed to prepare for that
change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In return for this opportunity,
we try to live responsibly in the world around us because we understand how
fortunate we have been to prepare for this time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Like I said, I didn’t come up with this off-ramp idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I learned it by listening to and watching
others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of the people who taught me
did exactly what I’m doing because who they are and how they did it are all
different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The friend who retired and
spent five years as a consultant with various companies providing his
expertise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The colleague who began a new
research center after his retirement in his late 50s and then spent 30+ years
managing that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The neighbor who was a carpenter
and now helps people with construction projects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are also people I know who have made
their hobbies their life, or have completely reinvented themselves in
retirement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The key is that they had
lives that extended from who they were to whom they became.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They built an off-ramp.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So in my third year, I’m still becoming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s interesting that I had plans to do
things that I haven’t yet done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m okay
with them never getting done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike my
professional life, my goals now are now more fluid and less about an end
product than they are about the experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For now, I’m enjoying this latest episode of life, and I’m looking
forward to seeing what it brings next as I transition through this off-ramp to whatever
the fully retired me will be. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems
to me that it’s never too late to start building that off-ramp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if you’re retired already, you can start
thinking of ways to bridge from where you are to where you could be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My wife, for example, has taken up indoor
gardening of late as a way to extend her enjoyment of seeing things grow
without the demands of yard work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
key, it seems to me, is to build forward to what’s next instead of looking back
to see what isn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, going to
what’s next is what off-ramps provide us.</div>
Bob Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01041716180060539827noreply@blogger.com2