Where Have I Seen This Before?

1773. The colonies are feeling oppressed. An out of touch monarch is ruling from a distance and demanding that his distant subjects continue to bend to the whims of his arrogance. In order to fix the budget crisis across the sea, it was decided that taxes levied on the colonists of this New World would fix the debts run up by years of war and poor spending habits. After the Stamp Act of 1765 had taxed colonists on virtually every piece of printed paper they used, from playing cards and business licenses to newspapers and legal documents, the Townshend Acts of 1767 went a step further, taxing essentials such as paint, paper, glass, lead and tea. 

The tea. That was the deal-breaker. These were, after all, British subjects. Mess with their playing cards, but not their tea.

Oh. And the Boston Massacre. In 1770, those same colonists were fed up with the ubiquitous presence of British soldiers in their streets. A group of unruly types threw snowballs at a sentinel guarding the Customs House. Reinforcements arrived and fired into the "mob," killing five and wounding six. 

Maybe tea wasn't such a big thing after all.

If they were British. 

These were Americans, and they called themselves the Sons of Liberty. Others called them tea smugglers, getting around that heavy tax by avoiding the King's hefty taxes. Men such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams. As an act of protest, a large group of protesters voted to refuse to pay taxes on the imported tea. To make their point more clearly, a group of men dressed in native garb boarded three ships and threw three hundred forty-two chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Men such as Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and the aforementioned Adams and Hancock. No one is really sure who actually did the deed, since they were "in disguise." They hacked open the chests so their contents would be spilled into the water. It took more than one hundred men more than three hours to destroy forty-five tons of tea with a current market value of nearly a million dollars. 

We refer to these men today as "patriots." 

Not terrorists. 

Not thugs.

They knew how to change things in a way that has become known as "revolutionary." 

In two hundred fifty years, I hope that's how they talk about what happened in the spring of 2020. 

What's The Deal?

All we are saying is "give peace a chance."
Except that's not all we are saying anymore.
No justice. No peace.
That seems like a clear enough deal.
Because it's easy enough to sit up on the hill and look down and wonder how this all went so bad. Aren't we supposed to be staying inside and keeping safe and socially distant?
There was a virus that was killing people and we were united in our attempts to survive this global pandemic. United for the most part. Except for those demonstrations surging up from the frightened, angry and confused Americans who were trying to find a way to straighten out their confusion by putting things back to they way they used to be.
So here's the trouble with that: Before mid-March things were not that great. Divisions between haves and have nots, rich and poor, black and white. Nothing was being done to mitigate any of those tensions. Quite the opposite.
Remember that question about justice and peace? If you haven't been keeping track for the past four years, or the past sixty, or the past three hundred, then maybe you feel that we are just fine on both of those counts.
No.
In the United States, the response to COVID-19 shined a light on the way we treat ourselves and each other. This is a country that has tried to talk themselves out of being less of a cauldron of racism and more of the melting pot. Not a lot of justice gets meted out under that kind of heat. Add to that heat a considerable amount of pressure.
The kind of pressure that would kill a man if you knelt on this neck.
This is not justice.
Therefore, no peace.
If you want to give peace a chance, how about a little justice first?

Liftoff

On Saturday morning, American astronauts lifted off from these United States for the first time in nearly a decade. The launch comes at a time when anything resembling good news is a welcome relief. For a generation of humans who were raised on the hope of missions to the moon and Star Trek, this is a reminder of how things could be. Not how things are.
It should be noted that during the sixties when wars and race riots were making life hard down here on earth, there was a cretin in the White House. Richard Nixon is the one who made the call to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they sat in Tranquility Base. Never mind the fact that he was the man who ran against John F. Kennedy and lost. Kennedy was the man who laid out the grand plan to send men to the moon. Nixon, the challenger, sent more men to Vietnam.
And eventually, going to the moon became a bore. A very expensive bore. A "why don't we save some of that money to fix things down here?" bore. Just a few years after the Eagle had landed, the last man walked on the moon.
1972. The year that Nixon won reelection. The year of the Watergate break-in. It would be another decade before the Space Shuttle program would put Americans back into space. It is no coincidence that the first shuttle was named Enterprise. Their decade long mission was to boldly move payloads to space and to repair broken satellites. Not exactly strange new worlds, but it was paving the way. Americans astronauts were no longer white, crew-cut sporting test pilots. Men and women of all backgrounds had their chance to slip the surly bonds of earth. Finally, space looked a little more like Star Trek. 
And what about earth? How did it look? 
Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell probably put it best: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
Maybe when Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken come back from their trip they'll do just that. 
It's time. 

Day By Day

Friday was a sad day. Sad because once again I was saying goodbye to a colleague whom I hold in the highest regard. By our school's history, I should point out that losing just a few people is a victory of sorts when it comes to turnover. And yet, there we were. Once again stuck with these awkward moments near the end when someone had to be the last one hanging around the office. Someone was going to have to leave first.
As is my custom, I was nearly the last person out the door. In previous years, I have had the excuse of leaving to rush home to prepare my house for the year-end bacchanal that traditionally takes place in and around our back yard. There would be none of that this year. In spite of our best intentions, and a Zoom connection, our staff got together one last time before we sailed off into the uncertain future. From the same little boxes that we had occupied for so many different meetings and webinars.
Meanwhile, out in the streets of America, there was no joyous sigh of relief as another school year came to an end. Protesters hit the streets and gave voice to the pain and suffering felt by everyone affected by the deaths of Geroge Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and the list goes on.
And on.
And on.
Oakland is one of those communities that has burned. Not from the protests and demonstrators, but from the double standard of justice that continues to plague our cities. I teach black and brown children who are continue to grow up with a question mark hanging over their future. Wrong place, wrong time? Wrong color.
Wait.
Wrong.
There's nothing wrong with color. There's something wrong when anyone bypasses the content of a person's character to focus on color.
I am a white guy who teaches in a school where I am most definitely a minority. And nobody makes me feel like it. Okay, from time to time it becomes a bit of an elephant in the room, a big white elephant, but the fact that I am there as part of a community to build things up and not tear them down is something I cannot take for granted. I will continue to go back there, until I am no longer needed. Because this is what I do.
The halls felt very empty when I finally left on Friday. But I know that I will be back, and we will work together to make something better. Day by day.

We Have Met The Enemy...

A few weeks ago, I mused with great cynicism about how closing all the schools had eliminated school shootings. Sadly, nothing has been done to curb systemic racism since the outbreak of the global pandemic.
I wrote here recently about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The three men who have been arrested for the killing are white. Mister Arbery was black.
George Floyd died while being taken into custody by Minneapolis police. No. George Floyd was killed by a white man who knelt on Floyd's neck until he died. Mister Floyd was black.
And these are the most high-profile cases of just how far we have not come. One thing that can be said about COVID-19 is that it doesn't discriminate.
The woman in Central Park who called 911 to report a black man threatening her. The man, Christian Cooper is black, and he asked Amy Cooper to please put her dog on a leash. That was the threat. She called the police, "There's an African-American man threatening my life." Horribly ironic, since it would seem much more likely that seems as though it would be Christian who has more to fear than Amy out of these two Coopers. Still, Mister Cooper said later that he was uncomfortable with all the negative attention that Ms. Cooper was receiving.
Uncomfortable? I am impressed by Christian living up to his name, but I do wonder why there isn't more discomfort being felt among white people about any or all of this ugliness. Taking to the streets and demanding that these unfortunate representatives of our race be called out for their abuse of their skin color. To be clear: These are white people doing awful things, and we should be more than embarrassed. We should be enraged.
There is no justice for any one of these men. They were put in untenable situations because of their skin, and this never should have happened. Murdered or harassed or simply looked on with suspicion. It's not "them." It's us.
And sadly there is currently no known cure.

Veronica

"These days I'm not even sure if her name was Veronica" - Elvis Costello
Veronica came to us in the first week of March. When I say she came to us, the proper description would be more like her mother came to our office and registered her. As a third grader. Veronica was not with her on this trip. Neither was the proper documentation to get her properly enrolled. Veronica's mom had what we like to describe as a "hissy fit" and stormed out of the office without completing the process. We did not see her again, but we did talk about her around the office. Not Veronica, whom we had not met, but her very impatient mother.
Then, later that week, a few terse phone calls were exchanged from the student enrollment office on behalf of this distraught mother and we were advised to go ahead and let Veronica become a part of our third grade just as soon as we could make it happen. This kind of thing is not uncommon, since parents have a great deal to say about how our district gets things done. Our district is also very fond of setting up procedures for us to follow that don't allow us to be the nice guys in that equation. We winced in anticipation of our next face to face with Veronica's mom. And getting to meet Veronica at last.
This did not happen since, as history will remind us, students were sent home to continue the last part of their year to avoid exposure to the historic virus. Veronica did not attend a day of "regular" class. Once we had cobbled together our school's distance learning plan, we sent out a phone message and emails describing how students could pick up a work packet and instructions about how to connect with their class on Al Gore's Internet.
Veronica's mom came to pick up the packet, and asked questions about how this whole thing might shake down. We told her what we knew: We were making it up as we went along, according to the district guidelines. This seemed to satisfy her and off she went to quarantine for more weeks.
This past week, we closed up school for this year, still without that clue about what and how we may be doing things. Veronica's mom showed up without her daughter, asking for a report card. Given that we had never actually seen Veronica or any of her work, it was decided that there was no way to give her a report card. We tensed for the reaction.
"Oh, I can bring by her work. She's finished it. She's very bright. She said that it was easy. At her old school her teacher called her 'a scholar.'"
We breathed a collective sigh of relief and told her that would be fine, and we looked forward to seeing her, and Veronica, in the coming year.
Veronica will be in fourth grade next year. At least that's the way we imagine it.

Second Look

So let's get this out of the way right up front: I believe there are very few things wrong with this planet that cannot somehow be linked back to our current "president." So very much of what is vile and bilious can be followed upstream to his gaping maw. He positively emanates negativity. It is his very nature.
But I draw the line at Ghostbusters.
Recently, director Paul Feig has been insisting that it was the pro-Trump and anti-Hillary forces that was the undoing of his 2016 reboot of the 1984 original. The reaction at that time was a loud and misogynistic one. Feig's version, you see, had a cast of women taking over for Bill Murray and his crew. Those voices were pretty loud and pretty vicious. Then-candidate Donald "Rotten Tomato" Trump had his opinion: "And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women! What’s going on?!” A pretty cranky old man thing to say, but compared to his typical anti-woman rants it doesn't hold a lot of weight. The third American president to be impeached has said much, much worse things about women. He has certainly had more awful things to say about the relative state of cinema since he became president. 
And please understand that I am in complete agreement with anyone who suggests that women have a much more difficult path in any industry, and Hollywood may be the nastiest place to find that out. A liberal sanctuary, with all the same testosteroni underpinnings as the rest of the country, often disguised as a more accepting and welcome landing spot. One need only to look at the relative salaries of women in the motion picture business and read just one essay on the objectification of women on screen to feel the need to wash your hands for more than twenty seconds. 
But maybe the 2016 Ghostbusters just wasn't that great. It was a remake, after all. Sorry, reboot. A reboot of an established classic of its genre. Getting past the obvious comparisons is a terrible chore for anyone, and if you don't deliver something profoundly unique then it will probably suffer by comparison. My quick review goes like this: It was pretty funny. There were not a lot of surprises, and I would imagine that if you had never seen the original this would do in a pinch. 
The trouble is when you start pitching an all-female cast as a gimmick. This would be a dividing line between a film like Bridesmaids, which brought its strength from story and characters not just a bunch of women acting just as gross as a bunch of men. Part of my reaction to the 2016 version of Ghostbusters hinged on the idea that "it can't be that bad." And it wasn't. 
It just wasn't that good. 
And that's probably the "president's" fault anyway.