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.
- Steve would not make a
very good mayor.
- Steve is the best person
for the job.
- It is important to have lots
of money to be mayor.
- People want to feel safe
in their town.
- Steve does not like the
old mayor.
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
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