Sunday, October 18, 2015

My Brush with the Academy


Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I know that it has been three weeks since I last put my missives in electronic form for the eyes of the world. I have been busy. It is the first time that I have had a three week vacation from writing. I thought that I would have plenty of time to write last week. The lovely Miss Beverly and I spent last weekend with friends at a rental house built into the side of a tall dune in Beverly Shores, Indiana; a scant 200 yards from the shores of Indiana Lake. Yet, the weekend slipped away; time sitting on the beach, time going out to fine dining, time playing games in front of a fire place as the temps outside fell quickly during the evening.

Thankfully, people looked at their calendar instead of their thermometers when making decisions about how to spend this weekend before the day we pause to pay homage to the Capitol of Ohio. By not paying attention to the thermometer, we were left with a wide open beach and balmy 75 degree weather. It wasn’t warm enough for swimming but I wasn’t going to do that at any temp below 90.

We certainly have pushed the first frost date of fall around this year. The tree color has suffered but my greens garden has flourished. With the help of a little plastic and some hoops, I may have arugula for Thanksgiving. I look forward to it. It was close; this race with Jack Frost.

Each fall, the lovely Miss Beverly and I play a game of chicken with the first frost. Every year on August 1, we plant 500 sunflowers and sit back to see who will blink first. The sunflowers are a 75 day variety, but they seem to sense that time is short and usually get the job done in the 61 days allotted. With frost coming nearly two weeks later than usual this year, the sunflowers came, saw and even produced nice seed heads for winter aviary consumption.

While the sunflower frost chicken game was uneventful, the fall has not been without high drama in the garden. We have been too busy to bring in basil and cilantro. Bev makes a great curry sauce with basil, cilantro, garlic, onions, and cumin. She uses it in a couple of yummy dishes. The recipe calls for copious amounts of basil and cilantro. I had planted a couple of rows late in August. It had not grown very fast with all of the dry weather. It was getting close but so was the frost. I thought that we were sunk on Wednesday morning. The frost wasn’t on the pumpkin but this far out from the big city heat sink the frost was on the top of my car as I left for work. Thankfully, the frost didn’t make it all of the way to the ground. A trepidation filled trip out to the garden after work showed that we had barely been spared. So it was out with a knife and a plastic bag for some harvesting. An afternoon of hard work later the lovely Miss Beverly has a winter’s supply of curry sauce safely and a bit ironically in the freezer.
 
In unrelated news, I have had occasion to help with the youth of America’s homework. The reason for this close encounter is complicated and unimportant to the theme of this entry into my blog. So don’t worry about that. Two weeks ago, I came across two assignments that have given me pause. The assignments have been part of packets that were sent home to be completed over the course of a week in an attempt to convince the youth of America to not procrastinate; to show that a little bit of work each night is easier than a last gasp effort on Thursday evening.

The first pause inducing assignment had a man holding up a sign that said the following:

VOTE FOR STEVE JONES FOR MAYOR.
STEVE IS HONEST.
HE IS SMART.
HE HAS LIVED IN THIS TOWN HIS WHOLE LIFE.
STEVE WILL MAKE OUR TOWN SAFE.

Then the youth of America were given a series of statements that they were to agree or disagree with based only on the information provided above.

  1. Steve would not make a very good mayor.
  2. Steve is the best person for the job.
  3. It is important to have lots of money to be mayor.
  4. People want to feel safe in their town.
  5. Steve does not like the old mayor.
After reading this tripe, it was all that I could do to instruct the youth of America not to respond HTFWIK. There is no information there. It is basically a tweet by someone who may not know anything. Why would the academy try to show that tweeting is a good basis for making informed decisions about anything? Of course, it is the kind of communication that the youth of America know about. However, I thought school’s purpose was to teach us things that we didn’t know.

Steve may not be honest. He may have paid this poor schmuck to tweet out this message for $15. This poor schmuck may not have been a poor schmuck but a local celebrity to which Steve paid $1500 for his endorsement. We don’t know if Steve likes the old mayor or not. He doesn’t call him any names in the post. We haven’t seen if Steve has written any scathing letters to the editor calling the mayor a repugnant, money grubbing, pedophile. There is no opinion expressed about the old mayor. For all we know the old mayor is old and is retiring from his many years of selfless (and low paid) public service. For all we know, Steve may want to give millions of $ to an NFL franchise to move to town, so he can make sure that the city has a suite where he and his cronies can watch the game in comfort.

The thing that gives me the most pause is this is what public life has become; a series of tweets with no depth of thought or analysis to the situation. It is not an indictment of the academy. It is an indictment of a society that chooses to make public discourse a hashtag for solution. An indictment who’s most egregious charge of lazy, shallow discourse was embodied by the picture of the first lady holding up a sign saying #bringbackourgirls. That was a year and a half ago and to date none of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram have been returned or rescued. Can you imagine the horrors suffered by those girls and their families? Yet we feel like we did something.

The second assignment had the youth of America use their imagination to invent a scary monster that had super powers and would unleash those super powers on a defenseless community. The assignment went out of its way to say that the monster could be humanely trapped and taken away. It would not be killed or harmed in any way. I mean the assignment went way out of its way to communicate this message.

It is a bit ironic that free public education will be replaced by paid psychological sessions where the therapist will help the adult patient kill those old irrational fears that were humanely trapped in the youth of America’s mind many years earlier. Isn’t there a thoughtful way to teach that the scary monsters in our head should be killed, banished, trussed up like the wild nasty vile things that they are and done away with? I can guarantee you that given enough time to grow and ripen they will not go quietly into the night. They will gnaw at the wires of your humane trap and demand to be released because “you are hurting me.”

It isn’t like the youth of America aren’t learning to kill the enemy in HALO, or Assassin’s Creed. There is plenty of killing going on. It just strikes me that the adults want the youth to learn that off by themselves; away from the adults where uncomfortable questions will have to be answered.

In that vacuum of teaching, we let the weeds grow. Not uprooted by critical thinking, those weeds flourish unchecked, choking out the facts and insights that will permit learned, mature development which could someday lead to a race well ran against a “frost” that has no intention of humanely trapping us.

Take care.

Roger