an attempt to examine issues from a number of sides in order to find sound reasoning

Strange Notions of Motion

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:27:11 -0600

While driving over the hills on an overcast, drab day, listening to the radio news, I hear for the five hundredth time in the past six months, “... Baby Boomers are getting old, and ...”

We’re gettin’ old, baby! Old, old babies. A familiar, old song comes on. Yep, I’m “an old [baby], and [I] don’t know what to do ... .”

“Floaters” hover in front of my eyes. “Floaters,” they call ‘em. They’re one of many badly named phenomena. They don’t float! They’re always moving around. They’re little brats, darters and dashers and sinkers. They seem to drift downward when I hold my gaze steadily on the road ahead. They look like paramecium, or some other microscopic organism, grown now huge, occupying significant portions of the driving lane. Some are getting very familiar. There goes that big one again. I get the strange impression that these thousands of swollen, one-celled organisms are steering themselves under my wheels with their whiplike flagellum. They must be terribly flat critters. They do not disrupt the wheels in the least as I pass over them. Paper thin roadkill.

I look around a little, keep my eyes moving. Then I don’t notice the little brats so much.

Growing old is a strange experience. I can see fine at some distance, but I can’t focus close up. Need reading glasses. Got these eye glasses, trifocals. Mild correction for distances, nice driving glasses. Lenses darken with the intensity of light, even on overcast days, in response to the snow glare. They got little, squarish lenses, and they make me look like “an old hippie, and [I] don’t know what to do ...”

My joints ache. It is oddly pleasant, though. The aching stops when I rest in the right position, and when I repeat a movement, slowly, the pain subsides. So I do these strange exercises while driving, lifting my hand and rotating one shoulder joint forward, eighty times, stopping, of course, when I encounter oncoming traffic. People in those vehicles would mistake my antics for meaningful communication, perhaps, or they may even be offended. Who knows? People are easily offended these days.

I cheat a little and get in the last five reps with my right arm as a semi approaches. The driver sees me exercising and gives me the finger.

Moron.

Then I steer with the right hand and exercise the other shoulder. The feeling of fatigued muscle tissue instead of stiff joints is delicious and reminds me of youth. Three sets of eighty, each shoulder.

The prairie passes by. I’m not moving at all anymore. The world is rotating under my wheels. My vehicle strives to remain motionless in space. I am keeping the wheels aligned perfectly with the center of the driving lane as it screams past, so the vehicle’s only discernible change in position is up and down. Gravity insists that its tires remain in contact with the rotating globe, and some ruts and ridges in the pavement jiggle the vehicle. My wheels spin faster now, to accommodate the ponderous acceleration of the earth. My speedometer tells me how fast the globe is turning. Now it turns at sixty miles an hour. Now it accelerates to seventy. Seventy-five. Must be careful. I have no cruise control in this van. A Highway Patrolman might get the wrong impression that I’m intentionally speeding if the van’s wheels spin too freely with the motion of the world.

“Well, officer, you see, the world started to spin faster, and my wheels just responded by turning faster. And you were sitting there at the side of the road with your wheels stationary. In fact, you were the one moving eighty miles an hour! My van was just trying to remain steady in space, and the road was passing at such a tremendous speed, that you got the wrong impression.”

The Patrolman says, “You were speeding there, Gramps.”

“Time and space are relative. So is the sensation of motion, Officer.” (Do these glasses make me look like a “Gramps”? I wonder.)

“You’re no relative of mine. I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

I continue to plead, “Officer, if you were standing on the moon and saw the earth with the South Pole at the top and the North Pole at the bottom, you wouldn’t say the earth is upside-down, would you?”

Something tells me a Patrolman would not be capable of following such an argument, so in spite of the road’s insistence that it move faster and faster under the van, I ride the brakes a bit and fight the motion of the earth. Back down to seventy, at least.

I focus on the pavement again, guiding my wheels down the precise center of the lane, and the paramecium return. Damn them.

Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty. Last set, left arm. Start on the right. Wait. Another semi driver. He waves. Why do all these people wave at me? Moving too fast again? Slow down. Eighty, seventy-nine, seventy-eight. The prairie wants to go, go, go ...

Where am I on the reps again? Oh, well, start over: One, two, three, ...

“Yes, he’s an old hippie, and he don’t know what to do ...”

Differences

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:15:25 -0600

Conservatives and Liberals have a difference of opinion on industry, business, the free market, and human nature. But they agree on one thing: Don’t jeopardize their profits.

A perfect illustration is how various politicians view outsourcing of American jobs while refusing to acknowledge the hideous shortcomings of the practice. Over the past two decades and more, the Conservatives (with the quiet consent of Liberals) have advocated the relocation of American industry to places where something approaching slave labor can be had, thus allowing the gutting of the middle class through dissolution of factory jobs and living wages. The mantra: “Keep costs low and provide ‘more jobs.’”

I have slurred the last into “morejobs,” as the inimitable Dubya transmogrified it. Bush’s “morejobs” - at Wal-Mart and other places - gave his friends the opportunity to obtain something a little closer to slave labor within the borders of this country as well, by hiring lots of former factory workers at a fraction of their former wages without providing health benefits or pensions. “Wal-Martification” holds costs down. Stock prices go up. Dubya’s friends are happy. They are richer, and able to buy more stuff.

Of course, common people can’t afford to buy as much stuff anymore, even at Wal-Mart, but that doesn’t matter to the profiteers. Inflation and costs are under control, particularly with regard to employee benefit plans and wages that actually provided a living to common people at one time.

It’s a world market now, and to work with it, all Americans have to share the pain of cutting back their standard of living. But naturally, those in power will make certain that the rabble bears most of the burden. A living wage for common labor? Not anymore. Ridiculous idea, in the judgment of Conservatives. Tax cuts for the rich? Great.

What do Liberals have to say about it? No comment.

The “morejobs” refrain gathered momentum throughout the Bush administration. Liberals now float similar choruses regarding healthcare. They’d like to help the rabble a bit by “Wal-Martifying” it also, giving the pathetic masses “morecare.”

Conservatives might be interested in doing a “Wal-Martification” of healthcare if they could, but they know it won’t work. Too many of their friends run the business here in this country. It’s highly profitable, and besides, you can’t ship American healthcare to foreign slave labor like you can auto factories. The Conservative catch phrase again is, “Keep costs low.” Inflation would be “reined in” if we “keep costs low.” Businesses could again grow, stock prices could rise, rich people could be richer still, and we could provide some more of those “morejobs” to the rabble.

However, Liberals want to do something that looks a little, well, Liberal! The most Liberal of Liberals have this absurd dream that we can do them some good and reduce costs by making sure the rabble are healthier, albeit incapable of affording a decent standard of living.

Conservatives fear generic healthcare for what it might mean to themselves. They do not see themselves as members of the masses. They certainly would never dream of taking one of those “morejobs”! They don’t want “morecare” either! They want the same exclusive health care they’ve always received, the kind they get from having exclusive financial advantages and being able to hoard and pay out “more money.” Besides, although they don’t admit it out loud too often, Conservatives believe the rabble deserve exactly the healthcare they can afford, and no more.

Other politicians on both sides of the aisle are getting tired of the healthcare controversy, and would just as soon see it go away. Eventually, if they stall long enough, the last of the middle class will die off, and so will the controversy. Let the rabble continue having lots of ignorant kids. Let the parents die young, from alcohol or drug addiction, from heart failure brought on by mental and emotional stress, from neglecting to take blood pressure medications they can no longer afford, or from anything else. And keep snowing the offspring with “morejobs.” Just wait it out, and it will end.

It must be a solution worth pursuing. Their standard of living continues to skid, but because their parents, who used to be middle class, are dying off, the uninformed rabble remain largely unaware of what is being taken from them.

Since the politicians’ strategy is working, we can expect moreofthesame from them, I’d guess.

Pressure

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:30:03 -0600

I’m endeavoring to create an entry each day without missing TOO many. And I’ve got to head to work now. It’s difficult to come up with something profound at the drop of a hat, so to speak, but here’s the best I can do:

My father spoke with a German brogue. He talked of us kids “brushing our teat.” He had a tendency to pronounce his heavy “th” sounds (as in “teeth”) like a hard “t,” and his light “th” sounds like a hard “d.”

At times, it was interesting. We brushed our “teat.” When we took a brush to the cow’s teat, dough, it was wrong. “No, no. Not tits. Teat. Da udder teat.”

It gets complicated. And extremely profound observations are forthcoming. More later.

Fenceposts

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:47:55 -0600

Your mind wanders like fence lines, over the hills. And you begin to wonder about fence posts.

You’ve been driving a long, long time, and you’ve seen fences, fences, and more fences. You see a few remnants of old, slab corrals and other structures, but most of these fences are barbed wire. Many, many steel posts support the wire, but at least as many old, wooden posts also, and it’s difficult to say how long they’ve stood there. How many miles do you have to drive before you’ve seen ten thousand of them? Not that far. You can see a long, long way out here.

You realize, it is a sort of “gathering,” a demonstration of sorts! Fence posts must be meaningful, somehow.

I helped build barbed wire fences in the 1960’s. We used wooden posts. Dad advocated the use of trees when they were available. If a tree trunk happened to be on a fence line, we used it as a post. And in northern Minnesota, there were lots of them.

Even back then, steel fence posts were preferred. They were stronger, and they went in quicker. But we used lots of wooden ones.

Anyhow, if my calculations are correct, many of the wooden posts I’m looking at are fifty years old and much more. I’m perfectly aware they’re not all fifty years old, but farmers don’t go around replacing entire fence lines when their fences break. They take out a bad post and replace it with a new one. And even in a bad year, they’ll replace maybe ten percent of their posts, more or less.

Then I start to realize that some of these posts must be older than I am. How many are seventy or eighty years old? And I’m wondering how many of the people who put them in (mostly men and boys, but some women and girls too), are long gone by now.

So there it is, a fence line, surveyed by the eye of a farmer. He is perched on a hill on a sunny June morning in 1948, maybe. His sixteen-year-old son stands knee-high in grass a couple hundred yards away with a roll of wire. As his dad points left or right with one hand, the son steps a few inches this way, then the other. And Dad, with one arm held high above his head, and the other pointing left or right, hollers, “Just a little! A foot this way! Six inches back!” When his son is exactly where he wants him, lined up perfectly with a corner post, tamped into the clay on a hill about a thousand yards further on, he drops his arm.

And there stands an old, old, stout post, planted where the son marked the spot.

And the son maybe has passed on already. He might have gone to Korea a few years later, and never returned. Maybe he died in a farm accident. Maybe he lived a long, happy life on the same farm, and raised seven kids of his own, and maybe they’ve all been there, placing posts, digging, tamping dirt.

It won’t be too many years before we’ll be gone too.

But for now, we’re all middle-aged farm kids at heart, and are capable of respecting the honest effort it took, through the sweat and summer heat, to plant that post. And how many thousands of them do you see on the road driving from Ashley west, until the church steeple in Hague first comes into sight?

Dilapidated Barns, Schools, and Feedlots

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 07:05:27 -0600

You drive past the remains of one of these glorious Dakota barns and think, “Man, that must have been a beautiful structure in its day. Must have been some great barn dances there!”

And then you turn a corner and drive up the road a ways, and you see a school, and the same thought lingers. American education, another feedlot from the old days, and we’re still trying to make it work.

American education is known as mainstreaming. That means “cheap.” You got one program. Show up, sit down, shut up, listen. If you get it, OK. If you don’t. Well ... Next!

North Dakota is the poster child of agrarian education. Nine months of school, three months off so the kids can work in the fields. Learn ‘em good! If it’s not good enough, learn ‘em some more. Bump up the requirements for graduation. That’ll take care of it.

North Dakota consistently ranks at or near the top of American education in terms of achievement tests and college entrance exams. Trouble is, the American educational program was built for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those centuries are now in the past. So are we. World education has swept by us. American education at the pre-college level is mediocre by world standards. North Dakota’s program is the best of mediocre, no better.

The United States is one of the few modern nations that still mainstreams its educational system. Even Canada has more intelligent programs than ours. Check out the rankings; see for yourself. In America, we need engineers. So we sit ‘em all down in rows and teach them math, science, and calculus. We teach ‘em stuff most of us can’t understand ourselves, and would have trouble learning if we were put in the classrooms with ‘em. But we shovel it at ‘em, like silage at cattle in a feedlot. They’d better get busy and gorge themselves if they want to survive the long Dakota winters here, by God.

But imagine what happens if only a quarter of the cattle show up to eat while the others merely watch, lying in their own excrement.

Most kids aren’t ready to learn at an accelerated pace. So we chop up the silage to a finer consistency. We add stuff to make it more appealing. We force ‘em to eat it. Rope ‘em, winch ‘em in, and shove their face in it. We parse knowledge to a creamy paste for the benefit of slow and average learners. As educators, we are forced to spend most of our time giving it to them in little bites and ramming it down their throats.

Those ready to learn in adult-sized portions find it all extremely repugnant. They are the ones who starve. They want more. They want to go on to the next step and the next. But no, not in America. We mainstream here. Take it the way we give it to ya, or leave it. Those are your choices.

In other countries, kid are tested at the middle school level to determine their status as learners. Their aptitudes, skills, interests, and learning styles are evaluated. Then their educational programs are established. In Canada, kids and parents are counseled and allowed to choose which program they will follow. In parts of Europe and in China and Japan, they are locked in, based on test results. They are separated. Call it separation by levels if you wish. Call it education for the elite. Call it discrimination if you want. Call it what you will.

The point is, a lot of money is spent providing students an appropriate, free education, based on their unique characteristics as learners. Kids whose interests, skills, and talents draw them to tech jobs get tech ed. Those who are inclined to vocations get vocational education. Those who need real help surviving in the modern world get real help surviving in the modern world.

Those who excel at book-learning get book-learning. They get lots of it. Lots and lots of it, in big gulps. They leap forward at astounding rates.

The result? Achievement tests in those countries leave the United States, yes, even North Dakota, in our own prairie dust. American students are only marginally ready for college. Too many of them need “catch up” classes. Kids who go to college in Finland, Denmark, Germany, China, Japan, and Ontario have no trouble acclimating themselves to the rigors of the program. Of course, only those who graduate high school with a true college prep degree are allowed into college. Kids with vocational certification in several fields are eligible to join the workforce. Those with tech degrees begin work at places where their talents are needed. If you want to go to college, you can, but first, you need to take extra time, and maybe spend a little extra money also, to attend a college prep program, and graduate from there.

What do we have here? We grow ‘em fast and fat, the old fashioned way. We get by as cheap as we can, always looking to save a buck. Go into those schools sometime. They’ll look pretty familiar to you. They’re the same old schools, and behind the computer screens and the “smart” boards, they’re the same old programs. Look closely at the kids’ faces and tell me they’re happy learners as we shove this stuff at them. Same stuff we had to consume; just a lot more of it, ground to a finer consistency.

We treat ‘em like cattle. We force it down their throats. Must figure feedlots are good enough for American kids.

Maneuvering Your Vehicle Through Fog: Be Conservative

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:33:33 -0600

As a delivery man, I drive about 250 miles every day. But because I am a retired humanities teacher as well as a delivery man, my mind, reflecting upon the conditions, turns to philosophical matters (as it frequently does when I am engaged in such activities), and to politics, a subject entirely foreign to philosophy. It would be nice if the two of them could shake hands sometime, but they absolutely refuse to comprehend one another. Maybe it’s no use.

But I keep bringing the two together. I just can’t help it.

Just today, it occurred to me, as I was driving through a fog, that I was naturally going slower when the fog was heavy, and faster when it was light. It was a Conservative approach. (I am a Conservative, at “gut-level.”) I simply could not trust that the road was clear, farther ahead than I could see.

And then it struck me: That is how Conservatives usually behave. They do not allow themselves to overdrive their ability to imagine a clear path ahead of them. As a matter of fact, fear comforts them in very strange ways, and so, they tend to gather fog about them, because it provides them an excuse to avoid going too far too fast.

They are afraid. That is the heart of Conservatism. As a gut-level Conservative, I know that. I also know that Conservatives love to gather possessions, and since they want to preserve what they have, gathering a fog also, or creating it, makes it easy to explain why they, and all of us, must “stay the course,” but “proceed with caution.” The fog also explains how one might imagine horrible obstacles hiding ahead, such as “weapons of mass destruction.” It helps to spread fears that there is so much we don’t know about our enemies. It begins to seem therefore wise to send bombs and sacrifice young soldiers off into the fog ahead to destroy those we fear, to “shock and awe” them, so that our path is easier. When we find giant ruts in the road later as a consequence, Conservatives merely tell us that we must destroy some of what is good in order to survive in a world like this one. When asked why they detest health reform, those steering the vehicle respond, “What are you talking about? I’m healthy. I feel fine. I like my health benefits. I don’t want to change them. We need to proceed with care. We can’t handle health reform right now.”

But Liberals are another matter. They drive “with the pedal to the metal” in fog. They just accept the fact that they’ll hit the ditch sooner or later. They are comfortable about subjecting their vehicle to a little stress in order to hurry, hurry hurry onward. When you run the whole works off the road, you pull it out and continue. Only when they have a map that shows the ditches are particularly steep and treacherous, do Liberals slow down. But they don’t much like maps, and they love exploring strange new roads. They adore scenery, and they are wonderful at dispelling fog, but they can’t get rid of all of it. They abhor the Conservatives’ tendency to gather fog and remain blind, but Liberals have another problem: Because there’s so much scenery, they get distracted often, and wherever they gaze, that is where the vehicle wanders, until it ends up in someone’s pasture.

You’d think the two groups might find a driver who could get us someplace in a reasonable amount of time without finding comfort in fear, but also without becoming foolhardy and distracted.