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Ignorance, Poets and Earth Day

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Two years ago I spent time with my daughter’s family in San Francisco during April, a celebratory time for me encompassing several birthdays along with National Poetry Month and Earth Day. It was post Covid and I hadn’t visited the city in four years.  The downtown business areas were quite muted with vacant storefronts and a sense of loss. However, the abundant natural areas of beauty remained as did vibrant residential neighborhoods.  Its eco-friendly consciousness from outstanding public transportation to recycling, composting, and plastics mitigation efforts are ingrained in the city’s mindset.  From an environmental standpoint, our national efforts to address climate change would be far more advanced if we followed San Francisco’s example.

As good as it might sound, San Francisco demographics have changed in the 20 plus years spent dropping into the city for extended visits.  Perhaps it’s best summed up on a bus ride during a recent stay.  A disheveled rider was getting increasingly aggravated at an oblivious woman speaking loudly on her cell phone.  Approaching a stop at the University of San Francisco’s campus,  he stood up to exit and  stopped for a moment until he caught the woman’s attention. In a resigned but firm voice, he said, “San Francisco use to be a bunch of hippies creating poetry; now it’s a bunch of techies creating ignorance.”

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Emily’s Soliloquy; Then and Now

Emily’s Soliloquy from Act 3 in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town:

We don’t have time to look at one another.
I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life,
and we never noticed.
Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look.
Good-by, Good-by, world.
Good-by, Grover’s Corners.
Mama and Papa.
Good-bye to clocks ticking.
And Mama’s sunflowers.
And food and coffee.
And new-ironed dresses and hot baths.
And sleeping and waking up.

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful
for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life
while they live it? – every, every minute?

Stage Manager’s Response:

No. The saints and the poets, maybe they do some.

Emily’s soliloquy has been an overarching  paradigm in my life ever since using it with students early in my teaching career.  It’s served many purposes ranging from various literary themes, to the power of reflection for writing and in life.  I’ve used the example of the soliloquy often with others, thinking it was a secret recipe for seeing and appreciating the smaller aspects of our daily lives. But recently, as I approach the same age my Mother was, well into her widowhood, I understand that like Emily,  I too am deficient with a necessary ingredient to fully appreciate my day to day being…an innate wisdom.

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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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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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