What's in a Name?

Leonard Bernstein said,

“A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.”

He did not say a liberal is an anti-conservative. Nor did he say a liberal was a control freak of government. And he certainly did not say that liberals were enemies of constitutional government. He focused instead on desired results. What people of all stripes hope for. In the future. People like you and I.

Liberal is not a term that means something negative. There are liberal conservatives and republicans and democrats. I know this because I was once a liberal republican. Not anymore, the republican part, anyway!

No, I am a person with hope in the future. I’m a person who recognizes problems and seeks solutions to them. I work with people from all ideologies to do this work. I dream of better days where all people are respected and nurtured in their yearnings. Where kids get the education they need to be whole. Where parents are not viewed as enemies but partners in building the citizens of tomorrow. Where businesses work with local communities to build healthy living environments. Where citizens study hard and understand local issues and vote on them intelligently. Where teachers are allowed to teach and not required to parent other people’s kids. Where police make the streets safe by partnering with all the citizens. Where art is appreciated as a communication force and enriches lives.

From Facebook.com/bloggingforchange comes this quote:

“Throughout life, you will meet one person who is unlike any others. You could talk to this person for hours and never get bored. You can tell them things, and they’ll never judge you. This person is your soul mate, your best friend. Don’t ever let them go.”

Another label ~ soul mate. We have them. We don’t always recognize them. But they are there in our lives. So good to have. So fabulous when we know they are there and who they are. That means we are tuned in, aware to our surroundings. Not easy in a chaotic world. No not easy at all. But when the calm comes over us, look for the cause of the calm. Might it be because your soul mate is at hand, on the scene? Do we know who these jewels are? Do we work at awareness?

Kevin Hall, author of “Aspire” shares this idea:

“To teach is to show. You can’t teach what you don’t know. You can’t guide where you don’t go. And you can’t grow what you don’t sow.”

The label is teacher, or guide or consultant. Many variances but the same core meaning. We ask teachers to be so many things they are not meant to be. And by doing so rob them of the time and energy to be really exceptional teachers. I don’t know how to reverse the trend, but maybe teachers need partnerships from us to free them up so they can concentrate on their jobs? This would mean proper day care separate from schools, parenting where it belongs in the home, and alternative growth-oriented activities provided in the community, again, not in the schools. The intellect of a nation resides in its people, in their minds and in the intentional development of such capacity by people who are trained to do so. All the other stuff belongs with the people who can take these tasks from the busy teaching staff. I bet that would make them happy. And the kids much better students. And the future of America much brighter. Maybe we should try this?

And finally, a quote I may have used before, but remains anonymous:

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”

Good label. The best really: yourself. Only you can define you. Don’t stand still while others try to do it for you.

July 27, 2012

Fear and its Trump

To start the day I share this quote from Facebook.com/glbtworld:

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Good statement. Our birth gives us a future to work with and toward. Without it nothing. The second important day ~ when we find out why we were born ~ that’s a loaded concept.

Loaded because if we know why, we can do so much with out life. But sadly many don’t do the homework that brings them to such a realization. Maybe because the homework takes time, patience and hard work. But I have news for them: doing this work is not only necessary, it is rewarding. Yes. It gives us power and a sense of joy. The effort is very much worth it.

From Facebook.com/blogging for change comes this quote:

“What would happen if everyone cared?”

Indeed, what would happen? I can only guess but I think it would carry revolutionary results. Just imagine pleasant people actually caring about your welfare! Policy makers paying attention to the end results of their work benefiting others! Teachers actually teaching and helping students gain self control, self awareness and self actualization. Businesses caring about the needs of their clients and customers, not the profits from that caring. Oh, the profits will be there and in great supply because the customers will be astounded and return for more product and service from those businesses where they can obtain them.

From the Internet, anonymous unfortunately:

“Ignorance is the root cause of all evils. Knowledge eradicates ignorance. People hate out of ignorance and out of fear. So it is our duty to educate ourselves as well as masses around us.”

Armed with facts and knowledge we can understand our world. We can deal with it forthrightly, not in fear or trembling. With those facts and knowledge we can discover still more facts and knowledge. We can learn to learn, do research, come to conclusions about very complex issues. We can discern truth and value. In short we can live more fully and productively.  Without this foundation, however, we not only don’t understand the world around us, we are more likely to fear it. And fear is an element that distorts reality. We are less likely to trust. Less likely to know help when it is offered to us. In short, we make a bad situation even worse. And all by ourselves. The opposite is so much more pleasant. Let’s practice it as much as possible. In fact, let’s start with strengthening the education systems throughout the country.

This next quote was also found on the Internet. It is part of the script from the movie, “A Single Man”. Speaking the quotation is George, played by Colin Firth:

“Let’s leave the Jews out of this just for a moment. Let’s think of another minority. One that…One that can go unnoticed if it needs to. There are all sorts of minorities, blondes for example…Or people with freckles. But a minority is only thought of as one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority. A real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the fear. If the minority is somehow invisible the fear is much greater. That fear is why the minority is persecuted. So, you see there always is a cause. The cause if fear. Minorities are just people. People like us.”

Well, there is the fear factor again. And succinctly put, don’t you think? The power of the minority, at least in the mind of the majority, is the sense of fear it contains. Actually, the fear is baseless, isn’t it? And if the fear were nonetheless present, education would eradicate the fear and show it to be baseless in the first place.

Fear. What a hold it has over us. Fear of differences. Intolerance. Poor understanding of issues. Lack of trust in others. So much negativity.

We hold the power in our own two hands to defeat the fear. All it takes is exercising our right to read, learn and vote. Meanwhile our system of government is at risk merely because others fear. Such irony we live with in America!

July 26, 2012

Sitting Through the Storm

Am sitting at the keyboard at 6:15 am. Sky became dark and darker still. Storm warnings have been sounded. This is flatland Illinois. This is where no mountain, nary a hill, stands in the way between wind source and us! So we take storm warnings seriously. Especially this year. Many heavy storms weathered already. More to come from the looks of it.

This has been an exceptional year for weather. Mild winter, warmer than usual. Good early rainy season, great for planting and rebuilding root systems in trees, shrubs and perennials. Wonderful spring growth season.

Then the heat. And dry period; long, arduous, unrelenting. But dry air. Livable.

Then the storms. 70 to 100 mile per hour winds, backed with lightening, thunder claps so loud you sat stunned, and rain. Lots of rain. An inch here, two inches there, some places getting upwards of 3 inches in an hour or less.

Century old trees uprooted; some blown down, broken mid mast like toothpicks. Electric power out for days. Roads closed for days, too. Fourth of July parades cancelled, fireworks, too. Unheard of cancellations in these parts.

But here I sit looking out the window and nervously typing as quickly as possible before the power leaves us. Rain driven by heavy winds. Trees tossed higgledy piggledy. Dark. Very dark. Spooky.

Just another summer storm of 2012.  We need the rain certainly. Just not the violence and proof that Mother Nature does hold the power!  We are believers, already!

I’ll take a pause here and inspect the homestead for damage or storm’s progress.

All’s well so far. Storm has calmed. Still very dark and a huge storm lies to our northwest heading our way. So more storms, maybe for the entire day.

When I say dark, we’re talking about nearly midnight dark; street lamps are on. Dark!

Later: For hours this went on but finally the dawn arrived around noon and the day began to become a little more normal. By 3 PM we had sunshine. Temps had dropped from the 80s in the morning to 70 as the storm passed. Then afternoon saw temps resume upper 80s and high humidity. Steamy.

News reports say storms did lots of damage, again, but this time to the east of this closer in towards Chicago. Still, 300,000 without power; many more trees down and houses crushed.

Tonight we are expecting more storms and then tomorrow a return to near 100 degrees. A hot summer, indeed. That’s not so bad; it’s the violent storms I wish to avoid.

Just needed to share this with you all.

July 25, 2012

Music or Not?

Many things cross our minds each day. Seemingly they are not connected; but I think they are! Truly they are.

I have interest in many topics as you know. No doubt there are people who think this odd. But I believe that most topics are bound together in some secret chemistry or other. Take art. The entire subject is fraught with complexities. Where do you start in discussing it? Which genre is up for scrutiny? Why this one and not another? From what perspective is the critique originating, and to what end?

I will get to art specifically, but first, let me say how surprised I am to find a well thought out expression of this discussion’s elements on the Internet.  And fully without anyone taking credit for it! Astounding I think!  Here’s what I’m referring to:

Why teach music?

• Music is a science

It is exact, specific; it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.

• Music is mathematical

It is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

• Music is a foreign language

Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English – but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language. Also, many songs we study are from other cultures.

• Music is physical education

It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheek, and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

• Most of all, music is art.

It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion.

So many things to marvel at! Perhaps the most artful itself ~ the intellectuality that expresses all of this. Whoever wrote the quoted material is brilliant, don’t you think? Covered not just music, but art in general, and what it all produces as benefit: humanism, feeling, emotion. I would add thought. Each of the elements covered in the piece provides food for thought and growth. The how music is produced. The why. The fact that it is, and spontaneously so.

The building blocks of a human being’s life are complex. We nurture those blocks into reality with our kids from birth. We teach them melody, lyrics, rhythm. We hum lullabies to calm them to sleep. We mature the musical forms and messages as their brains grow and comprehend more and more material. We do this, don’t we? Intentionally and yet without willful plan: thought out and specific?

And of course we surround our babes with color, and texture. And design. Some whimsical, some geometric, some functional. Some two dimensional while others are three dimensional. All art forms. Right?

Why do you think that is? How intentional is this behavior on our parental or adult part? Is it intuitive? I suspect that is the case, but don’t really know.  All I know is that these art forms are communications. They inform the brain – from ours to the baby’s. Information shared between two minds. Synapses firing away in full force.

If we were plopped down in a strange tribal land and met with the natives, what would we do first? Smile? Shake hands? Cower in fear or extend a symbol of friendship? What exactly would we do?

One thing that paragraph suggests, however, is we would attempt to communicate with the strangers in some way. Communicate. Connect in some knowing way our two different beings.

That process is at its base, intellectual. And the synapses of the brain are the physical attributes that will allow that process to happen at all.

The same is true in developing the brain of a young child. Art is a language that helps us  do that. A very important point to think about.

I think that if we eliminate art education from our schools, we do so at our own peril.

July 24, 2012

Lesson on Being Me

Had a friend long ago who revered Eleanor Roosevelt.  In my family this was not a topic discussed lightly! My folks were not fans of FDR and the whole New Deal era. So I didn’t have much of a chance in my early years to become acquainted with what the nation faced during the time of FDR’s administration. As his story unfolded in much detail through the Great Depression and the beginnings of the Second World War, it became clear that history was telling us of a true American Saga.

As my friend related it to me, the hard work of those years fell to everyone. Farmers and businessmen. Shop keepers and assembly line workers. So too were ‘jobs’ hard for the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and the homeless. Times were much harder than they are today. Politicians scrambled and argued over the spoils while vast numbers of people suffered. Then came FDR and the behemoth of government began to turn effectively toward the needs of the nation in ways it had never done before. Because it had to?

At FDR’s side was his wife Eleanor, a feisty individualist in her own right,  educated and smart as a whip. She was the eyes and ears that served FDR well in those tough times. And she went out about the countryside and talked with people, interacted with them and learned their story. She inspired them to be prideful in their station, and to help one another. And slowly she wove a fabric of ‘can do’ into the American spirit, just when it needed it the most.

She gave the caring and loving front to the nation when and where her husband could not. And the duo worked magic in the land.

Some will argue that big government was birthed in those years. But I would counter with this observation: national government at that time demonstrated its ability to marshal a nation’s will and vision of the future into a formidable power that tamed evil in the world. The depression was slain. So too were Hitler and Japan. And the world was brought to a point of peace to lick its wounds and rebuild.

Rebuild to a better model that captured the spirits of many nations. And the United Nations emerged as a powerful force for good, so too international cooperation and education, and intra border understanding.

Compare that with where we are today! We could use a peaceful visit to those times of rebuilding. Then we were hopeful for the future because we had been through hell. We had been through doubt and fear. But together we had survived it all and prospered to make 70 years of magical happenings. We did it then. Do we really need to re-experience a depression to learn how to cooperate with one another again? Do we need a world war to educate us on how to collaborate with other nations to maintain the peace?

Eleanor Roosevelt helped restore a nation’s sense of itself at just the right moment in history. What would she say about Columbine High School, Or Virginia Tech, or Aurora, Colorado? What would she do about the growing disconnect among voters and politicians?

I do know she said this once: “Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.”

That is a message worth reading several times over. With persistence. With calm acceptance of your own logic from deep within.

A wise man once said, probably a Chinese Wise Man: “In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins. Not through strength, but through persistence.”

May we find some of that in the days ahead and couple it with the courage of Eleanor Roosevelt. I do believe our best days are ahead of us. Together we can make that statement come true. Will you lend your hand to this dream?

July 23, 2012

Mass Shootings & American Culture

What is it with mass shootings in our country? Why here? Now two of the most infamous incidents are in suburban Denver. Why there? What was the motivation? Why males, all relatively young. Teenagers in the Columbine event in Littleton, and now 24 years old in the latest massacre in Aurora.

And of course there were the shootings at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. So Colorado is not alone. No region is alone in this.

Questions. More questions. Struggling to find reason and sense from senseless acts. Getting our heads around facts that seem to be non facts. How do we settle into these happenings? When do we get comfortable with them, at least to look at them, study them and come to some workable conclusions?

Not easy. So many people become enraged over issues, public discussion or bad public behavior – they lose their cool and rant and rave. We see it all the time. Hell, we contribute our own bile from time to time to such happenings – at least in unguarded moments, to blow off steam. That’s our coping skills working.

But we don’t pick up tools of massacre and hunt down people to kill. In cold blood. What gives a very small minority of our fellow countrymen the license to do that? Not really license, at least in our minds, but the unmooring of their conscience enough to do these things? How horrible. How do they rectify their actions with the loss of life, humanity and love?

Unanswerable questions really. We can only imagine the causes. Mental health scientists and practitioners will study these events for years, leaking out theories until something clicks into place.  Meanwhile, we hold our collective breath and live another day, and then another. We recapture our faith that these incidences are very few and we can be assured that peace and sanity will resume.

The trouble is causation needs to be nailed down if we really want confidence in our conclusions. In a land of free speech many people get their jollies by ruffling feathers. They feel good about doing this. They go for the juggler. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe because this earns them a living? Or makes them feel superior? Or in power? Take your pick. Those are just some of the theories behind their motivation. There are many more to consider.

We have political parties manipulating sound bites for both money and votes, so they can exercise control over Congress, or a state house, or the policy setting position at some government entity or other. We have churches, mainline and kook fringe, redefining Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and as many variations as you can dream up! They have little authority to say these things, but they say them just the same. And it is a free country, so we let them. It’s in our culture, right?

And they are listened to. And nut cakes buy guns and shoot innocent people because they can, and it makes them feel in control for a moment or two. Whether they took this drastic action based on what they heard will be open to debate forever. No will ever know. It is the unknowable.

Meanwhile we seek calm and peace. A nook in which we can think. To come to terms with who I am, and who you are, so that we can be at peace with each other. That’s the very least we can do. At a time like this.

May this be the last such time like this. We can hope, can’t we? We can always hope.

July 21, 2012

BSA Homophobic?

So disappointed the Boy Scouts of America have retained their policy of no gays – either among the scouting ranks or in leadership positions. They had an opportunity to redress their discriminatory policy. They even claimed an open process two years long examined the policy from every direction. Yet they came to the old conclusion again; unanimously no less.

Now, unanimous is hard to come by if the process were totally open; and as exhaustive as their two year timeline suggests. Surely someone with an opposing view would have voiced their position. With all the national attention focused on the BSA over this issue, the public felt encouragement to hope that an easing of the policy was imminent. But no; not to be. Let us remember this national pressure has been ongoing for about five years now.

Funny how that worked out. Seems to me that the process of examination was not open and was not exhaustive.

The issue of pro or anti gay rests in the bedrock of their theology, I think. If you are a conservative Christian and take the Bible literally, then you see things that others don’t. You make your pronouncements based on ‘abominations’ you choose to focus on while omitting all of the ‘abominations’ listed in the Bible.

Biblical researchers will help you understand what the Bible said back when it was written. Those researchers will help you understand the culture of the time and what people believed and why. The researchers will also tell you how language changed over the millennia and reshaped meanings of phrases and words. Understanding the Bible in the language of 2012 is difficult indeed.

If you care to really understand something you have to dig. The lazy person relies on the words of others, the work of others, the lack of questioning of others.

The BSA is in the control of fearful people. They love the status quo. They play theologian and Biblical scholar without the credentials. Last I understood the internal BSA management and leadership culture, the Mormons had a lock on it all. If that remains true then it is easy to understand how the BSA came to be this conservative, inward viewing organization.  God and Country indeed!

I see America as being inclusive. I view our nation as one which celebrates the uniqueness of each individual. Ours is a country built on individuality, not lemming behavior of follow the leader over the cliff! I also think the vast majority of Americans believe in ‘live and let live.’ Who am I to judge the other? Why then do they judge me?

The Mormons, and conservatives in general, seem to think that gay people are predators. Why on earth would they think that? Do they think straight people aren’t predators? At least some of them? Who are the pedophiles? Are they mostly straight or mostly gay? Research tells us this is a straight person’s problem. Sure there are gay pedophiles, but that does not define all gay people, no more so than it defines all straight people.

There are gay teens in the BSA. They won’t tell you, but they are there. There are gay scoutmasters; they won’t tell you but they are there. They are there for the same reason that straight boys and scoutmasters are there – to help other people develop healthy lives via the scouting philosophy and educational mission. Scouting is good. It works. It should be supported and embraced throughout the land.

But not as a discriminatory, head in the sand organization. Such will only distort the young minds of the generations entrusted to the BSA leadership.  Shame on them.

If America is good, and I think it is, and if the BSA is good, and I think it is, then there is no room in either for discrimination. And petty ignorance.

If the BSA and its hoped for product of enlightened young men is to live up to its promise, then it needs to get with the reality and truth of the times. Else we train misfits.

What a waste of hope and principle.

July 20, 2012