Conjunctions, Pronouns, and Ideological Absolutes

A version of this posting appeared in a column in the Daily News of Newburyport

 

Ultimately, … we must hold every school and district responsible for whether it has provided an education for all children that can be documented to increase choices of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That is an American education.                        

Carl Glickman, author and Professor Emeritus University of Georgia

 

With Pride Month, the ongoing debates connected with policy and identity always get more pronounced.  It’s a month when I  find myself reflecting on my time teaching an Educational Structure and Change graduate course at the University of New Hampshire; and before that, as a middle and high school English teacher.  Dichotomizing Education: Why No One Wins and America Loses by Carl Glickman was one of the seminal readings in the course. It reminds of the power of conjunctions in our language, and how those small insertions in our writing or speaking hold an almost subliminal power.  A power of exclusion or inclusion; division or understanding…a power that seemingly “allows only one group to hold the truth and demonizes others.”

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No Wonder They Call Me Bitch…A New Connection

 

 

 

The opening lines of Anne Hodgman’s creative non-fiction essay, No Wonder They Call Me Bitch, are, “I’ve always wondered about dog food.  Is a Gaines Burger really like a hamburger? Does dog Cheese taste like real cheese? Does Gravy Train actually make gravy in a dog’s bowl, or is that just liquid dissolved into crumbs? And exactly what are byproducts?”  Living life as a writer and reader is much about the intersection of thoughts from what one is reading to the stories it conjures up through their lived experiences.  Hodgman’s essay has served me well in this regard over the years since I first discovered it in the 1990 edition of Best American Essays.

As a lifelong, avid dog owner, her unique writing voice drew me in. The bonus was that I found myself learning something about dog food, which until then, I had thought nothing about… its ingredients or what is consumed by animals we eat, chickens, pigs, cattle, etc. My  first connection while reading was a memory of my elementary school-aged daughter munching on one of our dog’s peanut butter flavored Milk Bone treats, which coincidentally found its way into Hodgman’s essay. It was like my daughter channeled her inner Hodgman with her sampling of a dog treat consisting of bone meal and chicken byproducts amongst the ingredients along with artificial peanut butter flavor. At the time it was more entertaining than thought provoking, and I didn’t pay much attention to the ingredients label on our dog’s food or treats during my early pet owning years.

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What a (in)difference a Day Makes

 

A version of the following blog post appeared as a column in the September 27th edition of the Newburyport Daily News

https://bit.ly/49AhomT

 

It would seem many of us have used the expression, “What a difference a day makes.”  It generally follows some weather event; recovering from feeling poorly; or perhaps some solution to a problem that has been an ongoing issue over a period of time.  For me though, it’s been the indifference…the non-act that leads to a larger difference for a local, regional or national community not being the best version of itself.

Recently, there were two intersecting occurrences that has me thinking more about our indifference to the choices we make personally and collectively that impact all of our lives. Those impacts include the human and economic costs we just don’t think about from day to day even though we acknowledge, sometimes loudly, that they are problematic and require action. It just seems too many of us don’t want to take the necessary action to make our community healthier overall.

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Language Builds and Divides Culture

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It seems the dysfunction in communicating with each another; of hearing one another; or looking to gain a sense of understanding with one another is a centuries old phenomenon  playing out with increasing intensity in today’s political environment.  I was reminded of this when I checked out a  recently published book, The Power of Our Language by Viorica Marian, at our local library.  The first few paragraphs of her Introduction used Peter Brugel’s renowned painting, The Tower of Babel, to make a point and brought me back to a visit to the Historical Art Museum (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in Vienna, Austria where the original painting graces its walls.

The short version of the story behind the painting is that God considered it blasphemous to build a tower to the heavens, so he created multiple languages dividing people into linguistic groups, rendering them unable to understand one another. The result was a palatial building that went sideways instead of up. I purchased a print of the painting at the museum, had it framed when I returned home, and it hung it in my office as a high school principal. It sometimes provided a reference point for centering discussions to build common understandings as we worked with students and each other to make teaching and learning more constructive.

Today, our democracy seems to be moving sideways, perhaps our version of Tower of Babel, due to an increasing inability to speak with one another. In a recent Atlantic Magazine article entitled, “Do You Speak Fox?”, Megan Garber describes our current state of discourse as both a national and personal crisis. She writes that Fox uses two pronouns, “you and they…that you are under attack, and they are the attackers.”  She notes that Fox language includes words like mob, socialist agenda, hoax, and invasion or open borders… and it’s continually a language of grievance.

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Book Bans and False Altruism

Everyone has a moment when a world event occurs, great or horrific, when they remember exactly where they were at the time. Some such moments for me… The Kennedy assassination and my 7th grade science class; the space shuttle explosion and a high school library; the ball going through Bill Buckner’s leg for a Mets World Series win and my darkened home living room illuminated by the television; and again in our living room, this time brighter, as Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential race. Such moments can be triggered by other events over time bringing you back to those instances.

I find the surge in efforts to ban books in school curriculums and libraries along with the incursion on individual rights under the guise of parental control bring me back to a moment when one of the best basketball players in the world announced he had HIV/AIDS. At the time I was the K-12 Director for Health Education along with athletics and physical education for a New Hampshire school district made up of nine rural communities. I was in my car traveling between schools while listening to a live press conference regarding Magic Johnson’s sudden retirement from the NBA. My mind immediately jumped to thinking about the consequences on local health education issues as well as state policies and guidelines regarding sexual health education.  We had built good relationships and trust with parent and religious constituencies with our health curriculum, but this news inserted a hyper level of concern and oversight for what was being taught in health classes over the subsequent months and years.

It seems a through-line exists from the HIV/AIDS era’s hysteria to today’s conservative adult and political agendas for suppressing curriculum and limiting essential knowledge in health, science, and history. Certainly, the arc to ban books for adolescents spans the decades and include authors such as Judy Blume, Jason Reynolds, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison to name a few. Supercharging the book banning efforts are politically motivated endeavors to limit or ban speech connected with sexual and emotional health and emerging LGBTQ issues as evidenced through changes in instructional and curriculum policies from the AIDS era to Florida’s most recent ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. Florida isn’t alone in these efforts to silence voices or rewrite history. According to a recent NBC News report, 26 states have banned or opened an investigation of over 1,100 books over the last 18 months.

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