in the ghetto...

I was walking around on the verge of tears this morning (for various reasons, mostly war and inspired, religious ignorance) and I saw a young woman walking around like nothing was wrong - and then another and another. I thought about how parents protect their children from the dangers of the world, or at least they do what they can, but at some point it's not enough. Isn't it time we moved out of the ghetto?

An Indirect Reply to Peter Berkowitz

I'm no Peter Berkowitz. My bio doesn't include words like "Stanford" or "Senior Fellow" but I kind of like it that way. I read this article by Peter Berkowitz on the Wall Street Journal, it was OK. I mean, I don't take it whole, and by that I mean I don't agree entirely. In fact, I agree more so on a conceptual level than with the articulation of his points. But honestly, I'm just a student, I'm asking you NOT to take my word for it, I'm asking you to look at it yourself because that is what being a student is really about.

When I was twenty five I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," a somewhat plodding but ultimately enjoyable and enlightening mental exploration of a shattered psyche. What I took from this book was the outlook observed by the protagonist, Phaedrus (which means wolf in latin, or something) that he does not go to school for grades but for knowledge. The idea is that you go to school to learn, if you learn, grades will follow. If you go to school for grades, or even just to pass, you might not really learn anything at all (except, possibly, how to pass a class - which may or may not include learning).

I just completed this one hundred level Sociology course, an intro course, and about three quarters of the way through we wound up talking about education, and what was important to education. One of my classmates had just had a realization, that it's about learning not about grades, it's about being familiar with the subject and the material not just about the test scores and study guide syndrome. It's really just some simple logic. Let P stand for, "I learn the material" and Q, "I pass the test." If P then Q. If you have P, you will have Q. If you have Q, you may or may not have P.

Being a student who is currently involved in the system, I might be blind to what Berkowitz is complaining about - I mean - pointing out. But, being a student who is in the system I am witnessing some of what he's mentioning first hand. Not everybody is making the realization of my classmate. Some people are not involved in the material. Some people do not dive in head first and dig themselves a foxhole in the front-row (even if they did, everybody can't fit in the front row, nor does everyone need to, it's more like a metaphor than a truth anyway), submerged in the subject, deep in unfamiliar territory. Some students are busy raising kids, or working to maintain, not just the cost of college but, lifestyles, homes, habits and/or whole families. There are those students who are on the struggle, but there are plenty of students who just don't take it seriously and plenty of others who might not actually be intuitive enough to grasp the concepts early or have been prepped by authoritarian backgrounds and parenting to accept what's presented to them without too much questioning. BAsically Berkowitz, the problem isn't necessarily the system or the focus of higher education but the students, who quickly become graduates. You say it's the system of higher education and the waste of resources, mismanaged and misguided teachers and institutions that lie at fault here, but it's more than that and it runs much deeper.

You, sir, mention some pretty big names that I would appear to be insulting but there is a caveat to my theory, and by implication, to yours as well. The opinions given by the editorialists you mention aren't wrong, though they're not any more right than you or, dare I say, myself, they are opinions. Hooray for opinions. Pretty American, nay, pretty human to have one of those, we're just fortunate to live in a place where we're not supposed to be punished for our thoughts, at least not beyond the scathing retorts, the opinions of our fellow human beings. In a way, the Tea Party is just that - even though I preferred when they called themselves Tea Baggers. Lulz. But my point is this, the Tea Party does represent a marginal slice of a marginalized group (including a slightly highershare of what you called, "clowns, kooks and creeps"); and, when TV personalities promote the event it's not a grass-roots thing anymore (ask any underground club promoter about that kind of nonsense); the Tea Party is getting billions of dollars of support from multimillionaire libertarians (who built on inherited wealth, never ceases to crack me up - way to build it, but you still didn't do it on your own).

When the movement is talking about the need to replace out of touch, incompetent politicians with people who will fight for freedom, the "favored candidates" shouldn't be the ones making "embarrassing statements" or the ones who "embraced reckless policies." That is counter-productive at the very least and paradoxical at worst - ultimately, I agree with you in that this does not differentiate them from the political pack or the political mainstream, but what I believe is important to note is that THOSE are not the PEOPLE who should be chosen. If we're going to say no more slick, self-serving, career politicians do we have to choose idiots, incompetents and regressive ones over them? (And! if the problem lies less with our representatives but with the system of money and lobbyists, wouldn't idiots, incompetents and regressives be MORE susceptible to the machinations of a high powered, unfeeling political machine that's not about truth or constituents' desires as much as the language of cold hard cash?)

But whatever, I'm a high-school drop out from a divorced family - if I see any success in life I will be an outlier on the mathematical models and systematic surveys that proponents of higher education are so fond of. Similar to the mathematical models used to predict politics and what's being taught at our revered institutions, where legions of empiricists are turned out yearly, equipped with that most unfriendly of swords, reason. At least, to a certain degree that they are not just deaf-mute followers without original thoughts and opinions, or total slackers who just managed to get through it all and whose father is connected to some industry so... Favoritism, flattery and nepotism are alive and well in human nature, America is not immune - somehow even in situations of democracy (if not in popular votes, then in the electoral college and I'm looking at you: the supreme court). But honestly, though I don't completely disagree with your disdain for the problems and biases of higher education in these United States, I think you're missing a bigger problem that starts much earlier.

The system is flawed before "higher-education" even comes into the picture. You mention that "leading history departments have emphasized social history and issues of race, class and gender at the expense of constitutional history, diplomatic history and military history." I can't say one way or another on this, but I have a two pronged question to throw your way. (1) Public education needs to be reformed for the twenty-first century, k-12, public education is a government program - moving away from education is not the answer, reform is. Reform takes money, reform takes effort, reform takes time. How do we find a way to educate Americans that benefits American ideals - instead of benefiting a fading blue-collar factory based time-schedule - without public funding and public interest? (2) What if history could be taught in a way that emphasized both what it means to be an American AND the importance of social history? What if we could show students how our social history is a constant progression, something that successive waves of generations shape and reshape through their interactions, while still stressing the importance of liberty? From slave owning Washington and Jefferson, to Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, America is what we make it. From the constitution to the white house.

My problem with your suggestion for shifting historical focus is twofold as well. First, I'm not against teaching military history, diplomatic history or even "constitutional history" as you suggest - but I wonder where you draw the ethnocentric lines, I mean, how biased is this curriculum going to be? Just American, or is it more inclusive? There's been plenty of wars, how many people do you think really need to study that? How deep are you asking EVERYONE to go into military history, or even diplomatic history (aren't they rather intertwined?) Second, at some point it has to be recognized that we live in an unequal world and we either embrace TOTAL FREEDOM and let those inequalities be (which can easily turn into sacrificing one group for the benefit of another - rich/poor; black/white; blue collar union/immigrant and outsourced labor;) or, we look to level aspects of the playing field (like the wage divide between men and women, like the reality of institutional discrimination, and/or the disproportionate representation of aging, white-males in the upper echelons of the private and public sectors).

My problems with the tea party lie in the marginal aspects, and their lack of acknowledgment of the power of the private sector, embracing concepts like conspiratorial "shadow masters" instead of just taking a look at the system prepared to accept that there are no quick fixes, and shift the focus to the long term and to change, not regressive reforms. My problems with Tea Party ideology has nothing to do with their ideas about limiting the power of government and everything to do with the facts on the ground, they are not, I repeat NOT, putting up a higher quality of person in place of those they decry so vehemently. You called attention to that. (Though, kudos to their library mall clean-up efforts, post "restoring honor" rally. My hat is off to those "grizzly mommas" who made it happen with their garbage-bag brigades. We could all be a little cleaner.) It's the demagoguery of our politics and our media that's got this all wrong, nobody is really preaching in the street these days, and nobody is listening when they do - our minds are made up - we just preach to the choir and we talk really badly about the "other" sides - rattle the sabers and get everybody fired up.

Ultimately, even in America with all these freedoms we have to learn to get along with each other or all these fancy systems are just for show and our "freedom" is no better than bull$hit. Our forefathers expected us to be involved and educated, they expected us to be like them, to use our freedoms to thrive not merely economically, but spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically, to be free but more importantly to be wise - because freedom is the ultimate gateway to experience. We have to immerse ourselves in this material, learn it, be it, believe it or we'll never become what we are tasked with being. It is true, we do need to make some tough reforms in our government and social institutions, but a reactionary movement is not necessarily the best direction for the country, especially when it's not putting anything better into office and pushing issues that divide while doing nothing to counteract problems in our decaying representative government, nothing for foreign policy, nothing for the masses and indirectly handing the keys back to big industry (that's shipping our jobs out of the country to increase their profit margins). We can't do much about who's in charge in the private sector, but we can at least vote for politicians who will slow their dominance in the public - regardless of what a marginalized margin of a marginalized group says, no matter how loud they shout.

Oh yeah, and I can't tell you what to do, but I think it's a good move to vote for Russ Feingold on November 2, 2010 (if you live in Wisconsin anyway).

Creepy

So if this is what the world looks like through the eyes of Islamocentrism, darker being more good and lighter being less good, I wonder what it looks like the other way around...


Holy Crap! It's like a negative. No wonder the Islamic world is the last bastion of the unconquered lands and seat of all that is wrong with the world... I mean, the "West" is the ever growing empire that stands for much of what is wrong with the world... oh, whatever.

But srsly, it's creepy.

I have been hung up on something for the better part of a year now: If hardcore puritans of Christianity or Islam are right (regardless of the more mainstream or liberally heretical positions) and Christianity isn't necessarily a ticket to heaven (hard-core Islam-alone), why does God hate white people, and if Islam is a ticket to hell (hard-core christianity-alone) why does God hate non-hispanic browns so much? Or maybe India a marker of God's ultimate breakdown, that the 24 million christians and 140 Million muslims go to heaven while 800 million hindus go directly to hell... somebody do the math, how does the rest of the world figure in? Um, yeah. Things start to make less sense for me when viewed on a global scale that includes numbers in the billions. No offense God, I mean, I'm sure you know what you're doing - just saying that on the ground it doesn't seem to add up too well and we are really getting confused down here.


this was the original find, but the two images above define the line of questioning even better. Highlight of this one is the tiny yellow stars that represent judaism - you'll find them in most of the major cities.

gotta do what I gotta do

when I think it's been a couple of weeks, it's more like a month. That is the course of a semester. So be it. I've got to do some reading and writing for pops tonight, and crank out some sociology in the morning. اللهم أعطني القوة