EDUCATION

 We read where a lack of education is causing our national catastrophe and is a part of the ruling party's plan. Maybe so. But I think that kids are learning. Depending on the source of their education, they receive such tidbits as:

The universe came about in six days at the hands of a mighty Deity of unknown origin some 6,000 years ago.

Gender is a meaningless designation that should left to the choice of a pre-teen.

Understanding computers is the dominant achievement of the modern world.

And many useful things about being a financial and social success in life.

What they don't learn is to cognitively process such questions as: If A equals B and B equals C, does A equal C? 

URBAN PLANNING

TRANSPORTATION 

More on my current readings on urban planning. Writer and planner Lewis Mumford once observed that transportation is simply a tool. It can be used to transfer goods from the farm or manufacturer to seller to buyer. It can be used to connect areas of commerce and trade and to connect cities for mutual benefit. It can be used for leisure, entertainment, and education.

Not so much these days

These days it is used to a great extent to support the exponential growth of entities that profit from its existence, primarily the automobile industry and the businesses that profit from highway and bridge construction or the production of fossil fuels.

It allows parents to choose the type children with whom their children will attend school.

It provides frontage and access for business, no longer neighborhood ones but city and regionally oriented chains and mega-facilities.

It is now a winding, slithering monster that controls our lives with scant regard for serving the overall public good.

Urban Planning

 Still on my mission to review thinking about urban planning since our legislature made such of an issue this time around. One thing that emerged to, perhaps, focus our attention. That is the new realization that there is more to urban planning than bike paths, pickleball courts, and roundabouts.

Now I'm Re-reading "Design With Nature" by Ian McHarg. The result? Reading it at my age makes me wish I had paid more attention when I read it in my 20s. For example, he wrote:

"Show me a man-oriented society in which it is believed that reality exists only because mean can perceive it, that the cosmos is a structure erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given domination over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I well predict the nature of its cities and their landscapes. I need not look far, for we have seen them—the hot dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, dysgenic city and mined landscapes. This is the image of the anthropomorphic anthropocentric man; he seeks not unity with nature but conquest. Yet unity he finally finds, but only when this arrogance and ignorance are stilled and he lies dead under the greensward. We need this unity to survive."

Hard to argue with that.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 I'm not prescient, or smart, or highly educated. Well, that last I am by the standards of my state. But after the Covid epidemic slowed, and people got checks, my nephew and I decided that there was money to be made in day-trading stocks of sound, but undervalued, retail companies.

The decision rewarded us quite well. When, unlike Elon Musk, I decided I had enough, I ceased the enjoyment and concentrated on Life-Partner, her animals, and my guitars. By then, fixed-income vehicles had moved into yields of nearly five percent. Following conventional advice (I ain't smart enough to figure it out on my own) I moved us from equities (except for that little percentage on the top of the investment pyramid that can't hurt but might provide some fun in the autumn days of life) and sat back.

Now that America has chosen a band of thugs, charlatans, neo-Nazis, and grifters to run the three branches of government, I realize how temporarily fortunate I am. I say temporarily for I know I talk too much for them to grant me immunity for long. So these days I enjoy my good fortune and work on what I'll utter as my last when they line me up against the wall. I've narrowed it down to:

(1) Foxtrot Delta Tango
(2) I told you so.
(3) What were you thinking?
(4) You gotta hate people of color awfully bad for this, and
(5) Would someone please buy Donald Trump a banjo?

I guess the bottom line is that choosing someone to govern the country ain't like picking a favorite on a reality-TV show. Too bad 77,302,580 Americans didn't figure that out in time.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 When I was eleven years old, a beloved English teacher suggested I read “Jane Eyre.” When I said that I didn’t like books written by women, she told me that I was “too smart to be prejudiced.”

I looked up the word and contemplated it. I allowed it to change my path in life, a journey that led me from Brontë to Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath, among so many others, not to even mention James Baldwin.

I think I wasn’t as prejudiced as I was badly programmed.

Now, I’m afraid that we are losing the ability to see progressions in language, vis-à-vis, the journey from unlearned, to badly influenced, to prejudiced, to ethnocentric, to xenophobic, to bigoted, to paranoid, and, finally, to racist.

The labeling of any nuanced action as the unassailable extremity of racism seems, at least to me, to pass over so many lesser manifestations that might possibly be treatable via gentle teaching, thus halting a journey that is bound to end badly. There should be a hole in the prison wall of distrust through which one could escape ere hatred takes hold.

Failure may doom us as a society if we force the young to choose poorly and permanently, via the placing of labels. We begin life so full of wonder. What happens along way?

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 There’s a French term: “L'esprit de l'escalier” or  ”staircase wit” meaning the predicament whereby one thinks of the perfect reply too late, i.e. as when going down the stairs. One for me in 2024 came from overhearing two well-educated young men discussing the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

“I don’t like either candidate,” one said.

“I don’t either,” the other said, leaving the conversation hanging like the Sword of Damocles.

Many times since, I’ve wished I’d said something along the lines of:

Fellers, it’s not a popularity contest.

It’s not a reality-TV show where the principles of theater determine a winner.

It’s not an issue to be regarded as lightly as choosing a coffee shop.

It is the result of a hard-fought battle that allows you to cast a vote for the future of your country.

It requires complex analysis in determining which party, admitting neither meets our beliefs exactly, will leave our country in better shape.

On a planet with probably less than 100 years of sustainable life remaining, it is a chance to choose leaders that may try to lengthen that life.

It is a chance to choose a party that will offer succor to "the least of those among us," for your near ancestors were likely among that group for a time.

It is a change to pay homage to decency in America.

It is complex situation like the Greek myth of Scylla and Charybdis in which a choice must be made between two less than perfect outcomes.

You men will not face the situation I faced in which a faceless Draft Board could send your young bodies to war. But you face your own test of love of country. For goodness sake, treat it with the respect it deserves. Your children and grandchildren demand it of you.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 An acquaintance of mine, formerly a friend, finished a long career recently in the federal government caring for “the least of those among us.”

If that person was still employed, at any moment a 19-year-old thug could walk in, tell them that they were fired, their email was discontinued, and they had only a few minutes to exit the workplace.

The odd thing is the fact that the person is a confirmed MAGAT, dedicated to supporting the dismantling of America government. The only discernable reason is adherence to a set of life-rules set down by anonymous bronze-age scribblers.

Aliens of the future who study the ashes of this planet will shake whatever serves as their heads at findings like this.