Hearing?

 

Do you always hear what you heard? I don’t.

More than once, someone has said that I didn’t hear what I heard. Hearing isn’t just sound, it’s understanding.

There is a lot going on at the legislative level in a lot of states. The message of the month seems to be that parents don’t have enough control over the content of their kids’ education and that some textbooks need to be rooted out of the system. I’ve heard it on the news and read about it in newspaper blogs, but I simply scoffed, as one would if they hadn’t heard.

Sometimes, more often than I like, someone has to hit me upside the head and chisel my brain open, before I hear what I heard.

Charles Blow, a highly respected opinion writer for the NYT, opened my eyes, opened my head, the other night on one of the talk shows. I read his opinion piece in the paper the day before and moved on.  When I heard him talk, it bothered me that what he had written hadn’t sunk in. Hearing him was a better way to hear him than reading him.

Much of the brouhaha at fractious school board meetings around the country is much ado about nothing, except the coming elections. It’s a full-on attempt to scare voters and create a further divide in the country.

Parents, governors, and legislators are concerned that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is taught in public schools. It isn’t. They are concerned that if anything but white history is taught in the schools it will make children uncomfortable. But, which children?

Most of the bills introduced in state legislatures around the country are designed to prevent white children from discomfort with the racial history of our country. Isn’t that a form of racism? What about the Black and brown kids, the Asians, the Native Americans, don’t they deserve to hear about the history of their country and about the way their ancestors were treated? Charles Blow suggested that most, if not all of these new laws are just Trojan horses. I agree.

I taught junior and senior high school U.S. history and other social studies courses for several years many years ago. Hindsight shows that I taught a white euro-centric version of our history. That is what the textbooks contained at the time. Winners write history. Large influential groups write history. School is where we teach culture, where it is practiced, and where it is inculcated. The content of the history books is the country of the future. Mao taught us that if you want to change a country, first take over the schools.

Our early history was replete with immigrants from northern Europe. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, formed our experiment at the intersection of what was and what was dreamed of. Jefferson believed all men are created equal while he owned hundreds of slaves. White history didn’t teach that. Grant owned a slave while he commanded the Union forces in their effort to stamp out the original sin of our nation. But, White history didn’t teach that, either. If one lives in a culture that is predominantly white and believes that we are a country for white people or only a certain type of Christian, then the true history of our country can be scary to those who don’t know it. What if we aren’t what we always said we were?

 I googled Big Ideas Learning, a math textbook for second graders.  The Florida Education Board rejected it recently, along with scores of others, because . . . Well, they didn’t really say why except that too many of the math books contained CRT and other unspecified content. Somehow, teaching a second grader to add and subtract numbers equates to CRT if the illustrations depict other than white figures.  Go figure.

The mantra of the month is parental rights to control what is taught in the schools. Forget that it has always been that way. We elect school boards that hire teachers that are professionals and whose suggestions we should trust. No, this isn’t about the content of math books.

This is about scaring white suburban housewives and getting them to the polls in November. I wonder what the mantra will be next month.

I am waiting to hear it when I hear it.

 

 

 

 

 

EVIL!

We have seen evil this past month. We experienced evil each day of this past month. Evil is what Russia is doing to Ukraine. Evil is what the leader of Russia is ordering his armed forces to do to innocent people. The personification of evil is Putin, the President of Russia.

Russia, for no reasonable reason, invaded a free and independent nation. It claimed that all of Ukraine was really part of Russia, full of Nazis, and not really an independent country. This is the second time Russia invaded Ukraine in recent years. In 2014 it invaded and annexed Crimea, claiming that it was part of Russia. We stood by and let it happen. This time we galvanized democracies around the world and especially in Europe to oppose the Russian efforts. This really is a fight between autocracy and democracy.

After WWII the nations of the world agreed not to invade each other. Some of those mighty proclamations were on signed treaties and others were “gentlemen’s agreements.” The new world order made it unacceptable for one country to invade another.

Last month, however, overnight, Russia challenged and changed the world order that had been in place for over 80 years, four generations.  

Ukraine did not join NATO after the breakup of the Soviet Union as so many other Soviet Republics had done. Those who joined wanted protection from possible Russian invasion. As everyone knows by now, Article #5 of NATO’s charter states that if one nation is invaded, it is an attack on all thirty member states. NATO invoked Article #5 once, on September 11, 2001.

The atrocities are unacceptable, of course. Cities have been wiped off the face of the map. Millions of people were forced to flee their homes, families separated and exiled to other countries around the world. War crimes are in evidence across the country. The Geneva Conventions are treaties that relate to the treatment of “hors de combat,” people incapable of fighting: civilians, POWs.

Thomas Friedman, a NYT columnist, points out that Putin had no idea that his war would be a war watched in real-time by the rest of the world, with the exception of most of Russia itself. Elon Musk moved some of his “X” satellites over to Ukraine to help sustain the internet and cell phone capabilities of the nation. The smartphone enables us to see hospitals that have been bombed, a war crime, schools that have been bombed, a war crime, fleeing civilians who have been gunned down, a war crime; villages of people shot on sight on the streets, a war crime. President Biden has called for a war crimes trial for Putin.

The democracies of the world, fearing an actual war with Russia, are using economic sanctions in an effort to destabilize their economy. The results are mixed because some countries in Europe are unwilling to stop using Russian primary trading commodities, oil, and gas. If they did it would cripple the big bear. Meanwhile, billions of dollars of munitions are pouring into Ukraine and being put to good use as they push back and regain the land. The only good news is that the Russian ground forces are less capable than expected.

 So what is the free world doing? What can it do? We know that the autocratic world is watching. The recent reelection of Viktor Oban, a pro-Russian-pro Putin Hungarian Prime Minister tells us that autocrats can still be elected in some countries. Other countries are watching the response by democratic countries to this onslaught. China is watching, Ethiopia is watching, Taiwan is watching, Sudan is watching, Burkina Faso is watching. Guinea-Bissau is watching.

If Russia is allowed to get away with the invasion of a free country, and the changing of the world order, it will give a green light to those who want to destroy liberal governance and democracy. It will give credence to those in the U.S. who want to destroy the democratic ideals of our experiment in self-government by the people, those who want to limit the diversity of the nation, and those who want to suppress the right to vote.

Even as we see the results of the Russian barbarism exploding across the Ukraine cities and villages, we still have powerful talking heads on cable TV extolling the virtues of Russia, of Putin, and the downsides of the invaded nation. These same people constantly call for the diminution of the free state.

If Russia succeeds, European democracy will be put to the test and American democracy already balancing on the edge of failure might be pushed over the side. Russia cannot be allowed to win, and when she loses she must be punished.