THERE ARE TWO TYPES!

Bumper sticker and tee shirt writers have a special knack!  They reduce complicated ideas to one line, two at the most.  This is an especially good one: 

“There are two types of people in this world:

1) those who can extrapolate from incomplete data ….”[i]

Birthers believe President Obama isn’t a natural born citizen, Climate Change Deniers believe fossil fuels don’t speed up climate change, some believe that three million illegal immigrants voted in the last election, others that Trump received the majority of votes.  Not one of these examples is true.  Yet, millions of people believe them based on false and incomplete data.  When confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, they chalk it up to “that’s your education talking.”[ii]  Distrust of “educated elites” is widespread and growing.  “Educated” is now a pejorative for many.  

When we grow up steeped in an insular culture or one that puts down those who don’t look like us, have a different cultural background, or don’t believe what our faith teaches, it’s easy to blame others for our situation.  Factory closings become the result of jobs shipped overseas.  Minorities or immigrants take “our jobs.”  Government regulators conspire to close our coalmines.  When the only truth we have is our own truth, we’re going to feel threatened by other people’s truth.[iii]  We extrapolate all these beliefs from incomplete data.  How did we get this way?

H. L. Mencken said the secret of successful demagoguery is “keep[ing] the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”[iv]  Talk radio is a daily harangue of alarmism designed to create fear.  Cable TV, at both ends of the spectrum is in the business of showing how bad the opposition can be.  Political parties no longer aim to govern, but to deride the opposition.  Newspapers and magazines exhibit a bias reminiscent of the era of Yellow Journalism.  Special interest groups pour money into disinformation campaigns, and false data is ok, “alternative facts” some call them.  We are a divided people who only associate with those with whom we agree, only read newspapers or blogs with which we agree, watch TV news with which we agree, and lack trust in anyone or anything different.  We fear the new and the different.  We don’t trust facts, except those we adopted as our own.  We talk past each other.

It’s easy to understand the fear that permeates a large segment of the country.  If you live in a small rural town that relies on the local factory for jobs, and it closes, you don’t have many options.  You can’t make the mortgage payment, send your kids to college, or trade schools.  You are afraid for the future.  It’s unlikely that you can move to another part of the country and take up a new trade or learn new technical skills.  The market for middle-aged entry-level coders is probably weak.[v]  Your local school district likely didn’t allow you and others to develop new skills in new technologies on an ongoing basis..

Tom Friedman,[vi]  a Pulitzer Prize winning author, points out that technology now grows exponentially, so fast that Moore’s Law needed rewriting.  Technological disruption is normal, but the current speed of change is scary.  We need an education system that changes just as quickly.  We need people educated in the new technologies, with new technologies.  Lifelong learning was never so important as today.

 Traditional K-12 models may not meet the challenges we face.  How many of your local schools have “smart boards” in each classroom?  How many have tablets available for each child?  How many teachers can effectively use this new technology?  It’s been ten years since Apple introduced the iPhone, and it changed the world.  Have schools kept up?  We pour billions of dollars into school systems designed to make everyone college-ready.  The truth is, however, that only 33% of adults have a college degree.[vii]  In ten states, less than 25% of adults have degrees.[viii]  It’s also true that most jobs, even highly skilled ones don’t need a college degree.  Less than 50% of college graduates have jobs in their major field of study.  What path do schools offer the 70% who won’t earn a college degree?  The notion that everyone needs a college education is an extrapolation from incomplete data.

Citizens who are well educated or trained can buy a home, provide for their family, and don’t need demagogues to make them fearful.  We know that because it use to be that way.  Not too long ago our schools met the needs of our nation.  Fifty years later, we are using the same model, with a few tweaks here and there.   

Education is the predicate for our future, yet the United States doesn’t have an agreed upon national strategy for education.  We leave education to 14,000 local school districts.  Common Core developed by state heads of education and governors to bring a common set of expectations for schools was a grass-roots effort.  Too many people, however, listened to the fear mongers and believed it was an attempt by the federal government to take over local schools.  In the last ten years, 87% of job losses went to improved technology; robots.[ix]  Does your local high school teach coding, robotics and other practical vocational courses?  The solar energy industry created 300,000 new jobs in the last few years.  Does your local high school teach solar technology, installation, and maintenance?  Cars now run on batteries.  Does your local school teach battery technology and maintenance? 

We are in the midst of a sea change not unlike the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  People who are unequipped to meet the challenge are going to be afraid and listen to the demagogues who want to lead them.  Fear will turn into hate, it always does, and we will continue as a divided country.  A total revamping of our educational philosophy and policies might help change the situation.  We need a national strategy, implemented locally, to educate and train all our students, not just the college bound. 

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[i] Neil deGrasse Tyson, Hayden Planetarium, NYC

[ii] An Insider’s View: The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America   Shane Trotter Alternet

[iii] Why Is Everyone So Easily Offended?  Dwight Longenecker  Patheos 2017

[iv] H. L. Mencken  In Defense of Women  City Journal

[v] My Father-in-Law Won’t Become a Coder, No Matter What Economist Say Dustin McKissen  Lindedin  2017

[vi] Thanks for Being Late  Thomas Friedman 2016

[vii] Census.gov  Current Population Reports Ryan & Bauman 03/2016

[viii] List of U.S. states by educational attainment  Wikipedia 2016

[ix] Financial Times December 2016

The Dream!

Isaiah 40 tells us that every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low; the rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley.  Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all mankind shall see it together; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.  Martin Luther King had that dream for our country; that all God's children would be as one.  He dreamed that his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.  Too many of us believed we had achieved that goal.  Did we delude ourselves?

The slow burning coals of hatred still singe the underbelly of our nation.  People fanned that fire to in Virginia last week; by White Supremacists and neo-Nazis. They brought their own army, in full combat gear and guns, to protect them from the local police and those who believed in freedom and equality for all.

The KKK is our equivalent to ISIS.  They don't represent the teachings of Christianity any more than ISIS represents the teachings of Islam.  In addition to the torch parade we witnessed on TV, and the ISIS inspired use of a vehicle to kill people, C'ville also endured an alt-right conference, lead by speakers for white supremacy.  The President's condemnation of the demonstrations was lukewarm at best, not mentioning the instigators by name.  Pundits projected the idea that his talking points were written by the ult-right wing of his White House staff.

Imagine, our country is to the point where people with white supremacist leanings are members of a presidential staff.  Imagine that our country has reached the point where millions think that is a good thing.

I had thought that we settled these issues back in the 60's.  It looks like we need to start over.  

Why Walls?

In rural Vermont where I grew up and Robert Frost lived for many years, neighbor is a verb as much as a noun, like summer and winter.  One summers at Joe’s pond and winters in Florida.  One can either neighbor well or be a neighbor.  Frost published North of Boston in 1914.  It included Mending Wall.   His friend over the hill declared, “good fences make good neighbors.”  After an afternoon of setting stones, Frost rejoined “something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” [i]

The Great Wall of China (246 BC) kept marauding hordes out of the Qin Empire.  When I walked it, I imagined thousands of soldiers slinging arrows and chariots carrying troops to the next battle.  Hadrian’s Wall, (122 AD) is eighty miles from sea to sea in northern UK.  It kept the barbarians out of Roman lands.  The Western Wall in Jerusalem is a holy place of prayer even today.  Walls kept invaders out.

The Berlin Wall was different.  They built it to keep people in.  From 1961-1989 it divided the city, and its families, until the waning days of communism when people in East Germany had had enough, and tore it down while the world watched and the army shrugged. 

Many believe we need a wall across our southern border and are willing to spend $40 billion over the next few years to build it.  The argument goes something like this: if we don’t control the borders, we won’t have a country any more.  Illegals will take over, change our culture, and make English a second language, take low paying jobs, increase crime, and drain our health dollars with visits to the emergency rooms.  Will we build a wall to keep out the Canadians?  Why are we fixated on the people from south of the border?  Who are we walling in and walling out? Will this wall make good neighbors?

What about the walls of our mind?  What beliefs do we carry in our minds that create our walls?  Do mental walls keep information and beliefs in, or do they keep new opinions and information out?  Do we build our walls based on facts or fear?  I build too many of my walls based on information I knew long ago, or believed long ago that isn’t true anymore.  If you have above average grandchildren as I do, there is constant updating and rolling of eyes.  

We have a million fewer undocumented immigrants than before the 2009 Great Recession.  Mexicans aren’t the majority immigrant population anymore.  That data crashes against one of my mental walls.  Central Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Indians make up a big chunk of undocumented workers.  About two million are from other countries spanning the globe.[ii] 

Undocumented immigrants, on average, have been in the country over ten years, have reasonable jobs, own homes, pay taxes, and send their kids to school and college.  I can hear the stones falling off another of my mental walls.  Undocumented immigrants make up a mere five percent of the workforce.  Another wall smashed.  From 2009-2017, over two million Illegals were deported; 97% of them convicted criminals.[iii]  Another wall torn down.  I wonder what the world would be like if we didn’t cling to our mental walls.

Most Central Americans come because of oppression by the government or drug cartels in their home countries.  They want to stay alive.  They are refugees and we should treat them as refugees.  Some are members of drug cartels who come north to support the retail side of drug dealing.  We should deport them immediately. 

Reality is that we can’t physically deport millions of people.  Reality is that a fifty-foot wall won’t keep people from entering the country when they need to escape tyranny or feed their family.  We should act on data, not on preconceptions; mind walls.  Reality says we can fix many of the immigration issues, legal and illegal if we set our minds to it.   

Frost read The Gift Outright at JFK’s inauguration.  No one who witnessed it will ever forget that moment: “The land was ours before we were the land’s….” “Something we were withholding made us weak until we found out that it was ourselves.”  We are a nation of immigrants; it’s one of our many strengths.  American tradition celebrates welcoming those seeking asylum and a better life: Vietnam, Laos, China, Central and South America, South Sudan, Ireland, Germany, and Italy, and scores of others.  What are we withholding from others?  Neil Diamond told us about immigrants:  Far/We've been traveling far/Without a home/But not without a star/Free/Only want to be free/We huddle close/Hang on to a dream/On the boats and on the planes/They're coming to America/Never looking back again/They're coming to America.[iv]

Shouldn’t we be here to welcome them to America rather than turning them away?  No one turned away my grandparents! 

Our culture, who we are, is written on that tablet held by The Lady in New York harbor.  It urges us to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….

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[i] The Poetry of Robert Frost Holt Rinehart Winston 1969

[ii] Pew Research Center 5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.  September 2016

[iii] Migration Policy Institute  January 2017

[iv] Neil Diamond  America  1980