Call A Doctor

At last check, there were more than seventy-five candidates for the Republican Presidential Nomination. This was after forty-two of them had dropped out of the race because they couldn't raise the billion dollars required to stay in, or they ran out of red ties, or just couldn't get the cameraman to pan far enough to the left or right to catch them on the edge of that overloaded debate stage. Or maybe they were just afraid of being bullied by Donald Trump. 

This is hyperbole, of course, since there are only a dozen or so "serious" candidates, all waiting for that opportunity to get their chance to stand on the same stage and be bullied by Donald Trump. Up until quite recently, one of the safe choices was brain surgeon Doctor Ben Carson. That hissing sound you hear is the air being let out of his presidential aspirations. I blame the Hippocratic Oath. 

In much the same way that Donald Trump can puff up his chest and say that he is a billionaire, Doctor Carson shows up with his ticket to the convention bearing that title: Doctor. What better certification would one need to show up to a political arena than as a healer? Repairing the rifts that have causes so much suffering in the is great land of ours? Mend the wounds we have all experienced over the past twenty years? Somebody get me a doctor.

But probably not one who laughs nervously when asked to defend his assertion that charging a gunman would be the best chance any of us would have in the event of a mass shooting. The same guy who said, when asked to explain his theory that Jews in Europe might have survived the Holocaust if not for laws prohibiting guns,  “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed. I’m telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first.” Couple this with his assessment of the recent murders in Oregon, “There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking,but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away," and you might expect to see one less podium on that stage at the end of this month.

Then again, if the measure of front-runners in the GOP is how outrageous one can be without actually frothing at the mouth, then this may be the move the good doctor needed to make in order to overtake the ugly flurry that is the Trump campaign. 

And never mind the Hippocratic Oath. It was written a long time ago by people who don't understand today's reality. Yeah. I get it. 

How Much?

A lot of us got into the teaching biz because we wanted to affect change. There aren't many of us who got into it for the big paycheck. Maybe that's just the six figure checks that some teachers are banking in New Jersey, but it could also be a little bit of hyperbole on the part of that state's governor. People who want to make big money, at least in New Jersey become talk show hosts or singers. For the record, Governor Christie is making a six figure salary, and his family is pulling in a reported half-million. Nice work, if you can get it.
On this side of the contiguous United States, the salary is still somewhat negotiable. Not by me, but by my union. I tend not to wrap myself up in that process because I have been told by the guy signing people up for a newspaper subscriptions for free T-shirts that teachers don't make enough. I get it. I am doing this job because I want to make a difference.
For the better, in case there was some question.
In my first year, it was a romantic idea: riding into an urban school to bring my own particular and peculiar vision of how things could be to a generation of youth hungry for whatever it was that I had to offer. That creative writing degree, for example. My esoteric sense of humor. My tireless energy. My ability to wait for hours before I go to the bathroom. These were my calling cards. Those, and the fact that I felt I was "good with kids." When I said this to the recruiter for the district intern program, he laughed. At me.
That was nineteen years ago. I've been going back to school. Day after day. Year after year. Trying to affect change. Here's what I have figured out: I am not making the kind of change that I had imagined way back in the previous century. I continue to be surprised by the lack of change I seem to be able to affect on the children with whom I am supposed to be so good. Then I realize that I never went to school without learning something, even if it was that I didn't want to go to school anymore. What I learned was that the change is in me. I am not the fresh-faced idealist I was back in 1997. I am a veteran, but I have seen a generation of children pass through the doors of this school. So much so that I am now teaching a couple of children of students I had way back in those earliest days. Can you put a price tag on that?

Gamboling

So, here's the deal: I can go down to the local card room and sit down to a "friendly" game of Texas Hold 'Em. For money. Real money. Real winners. Real losers. They are quick to point out that they don't participate in the play at any level, except to give folks a place to sit down and play a friendly game of Texas Hold 'Em. For a little fee. And they'll bring you cocktails. Just like they have since 1895, the year my house was built. It's historical.
And it's hysterical. Because, if the Oaks Card Club did participate as "the house," then it would be a casino, and it would not be legal. Unless that casino was on property owned by Native American tribes, then it would be legal, since they are considered sovereign nations and they make their own rules. Like they have to hit a soft seventeen. In a "way too little and way too late" kind of solution, we are letting Native American Tribes use legal gambling as some sort of karma leveling for the atrocities we waged upon their people and lands. Loose slots indeed.
But that isn't really what I'm confounded by. There are rules and laws governing those enterprises that make some sort of sense. Just like there are rules defining how much I can win or lose in my Fantasy Football League. I know that there are people making lots of cash by getting involved in the exploits of their favorite and not-so-favorite professional athletes. Using sports figures as avatars is nothing new. What is new is the way we have become suddenly used to how we play. Friendly little twenty dollar entry fees are no longer in vogue. That used to buy you in for a season. Now you can spend hundreds of dollars each week on the Fantasy Football Sweepstakes. Sure, some will win. That's the nature of things. Some will lose. Big. That is how we get big winners. And some will cheat. Big. DraftKings employees have won millions of dollars playing on their rival's site, Fan Duel. Sounds like insider trading to me. Of course these are all enthusiasts who love the game so very much that they can't keep their gaming impulses to their own jobs, so they feel the need to spread it around, right? Or maybe they are using an unchecked system of barely legalized gambling to profit from those same schlemiels who are buying fifty dollars worth of Lotto tickets each week in hopes of making it rich. Quick.
Why not just send the folks at Fan Duel or DraftKings a check. Sooner or later I'm sure they will send you one with an even bigger number of zeroes. What the heck. Take a chance.

His Sto Ree

The old saw has us believing that "history is written by the victors." The idea that history is subjective needs no further test than the discussion of the word: His Story. I went to college at a time when Womyn's Studies challenged our mndset as well as our spelling skills. So much of what we know is based on an agreement made by a relatively small group of individuals about what would be taught in our school. What is objective reality? Would it be okay to teach two plus two equals five in one state (I'm looking at you, Texas), while others stick with the traditional and safe answer of four, keeping the door open for larger values of three?
We can be pretty sure that Richard Nixon did resign from his second term as President of the United States. There is a lot of evidence to prove this. Exactly how and why this came to pass is subject to some debate. Not unlike the manned moon missions which have only recently become conspiratorial fodder, everything it seems is now up for debate. I don't get Columbus Day off because we now know that Chris was a lousy navigator and an even worse public relations risk. Fourth graders don't tend to take tours of our nearby missions because it turns out that they might not have been the peaceful stops on the Camino Real. Alas, so much of what I was once taught turns out to be whitewashed gobbledygook made up to make us all feel better about genocide.
Which brings me to Roni Dean-Burren. Ms. Dean-Burren is a concerned parent of a Texas high school freshman. She got a text from her son that included an illustration from his class' ninth grade history text book. Below it, he wrote this message: "we was real hard workers, wasn't we" and he closed with a frowny emoticon. Clever enough for her son to make this connection to the absurd suggestion that "the Atlantic Slave Trade brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations." Well how about that for a revisionist view of dispora? Mom took it to social media where it started to get the kind of attention it deserved. McGraw-Hill will be revising the text of their history.
Any bets on exactly how that will turn out? Stay tuned.

Ready, Aim, Misfire

It was Stephen Colbert who suggested most recently that we as a nation are perilously close to redefining insanity: We keep doing the same thing and we expect different results. He was referencing the shootings in Oregon last week, but it was a refrain to which we are all beginning to fall prey. Pun intended.
There have been forty-five school shootings so far in 2015. My quick math suggests that works out to be five a month, which is troubling since we just finished summer vacation and it doesn't seem that we got any sort of break from the carnage. Maybe your prefer your body count in an easier to digest form a la USA Today: The friendly folks at The Guardian have made a nice pictograph showing nine hundred ninety-four mass shootings in one thousand four days. You can trust the Brits to make us Yanks feel just a little obvious with out ninety-nine percent shooting per day ratio. That's the United Kingdom, where owning guns is not a right, it's a crime. They find this whole mess rather distasteful and confounding.
Back here on our shores, the politics are pretty simple: Red is pretty gun crazy and blue is apologetic for being gun crazy. Always that fine line. It took Jeb Bush nearly a week to live down his reaction to the shootings at a community college in Oregon. His wisdom on the matter: "Stuff happens." Very zen, Jeb, but maybe you're just a little north of that sincerity mark that would have put you squarely on message. You know, sympathizing with the victims, but insisting that some "good guns" would have made all the difference.
That's what Donald Trump believes. He even went so far as to assert that these kind of things are an "unfortunate inevitability." If you didn't want to be shot, why did you come to this country in the first place? He's got a concealed weapons permit because "it's a right, not a privilege." This should come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to this man for more than thirty seconds. Each sound bite from the Donald is a meal. His supporters wholeheartedly believe that a crazy person will get a gun and there's nothing you can do about it except get a gun and shoot first.
And ask questions later. Better yet: don't ask. We already know the answer.

Gotta Go

The phone rang, and for a change of pace, it wasn't a number I recognized immediately as calling for my wife. It was my son. This set off a different set of alarms than the ones that I had spent so many years preparing myself to deal with. The last couple of years have given me a new awareness of my son's whereabouts. When he was younger, we used to get phone calls from his friends' houses, letting us know that he was staying for dinner. Or spending the night. It was the second of those two calls that would raise the defcon status at our house. His mother and I would then spend the next several hours hoping that this would be the magic night that would give us all the relief of a night away. This was not a skill I was able to pass along to my son effectively. Instead, I seem to have passed along the homesickness virus that plagued me as a kid. The phone calls we got from our son in the middle of the night were painful for all of us. We struggled with "the right thing to do." Should we let him tough it out, or should we go up in the middle of the night and rescue him?
For a while, we didn't get those calls. Not because he conquered the fear, but because he just stopped trying to sleep over at his friends' houses. And then one day, he was ready. He found the combination and the way to deal with his fears and the only call we got was the one letting us know that he wouldn't be home that night. This was the beginning of a trend that would eventually leave us with any number of possible locations for him to land on any number of evenings. Many of these were just late nights in the backstage shop at his high school theater. He was building. He was creating. He was making a path for himself to college.
When the phone rang last week, he was calling from college. This was a treat for me, but I still had that gut reaction: Trouble?
"Hello?"
"Hey dad." No terror there.
"What's up?"
"Could you help me out?" Here it comes: Money? Lonely? Worried?
"What do you need?" I was ready.
"I'm at Trader Joe's. Do you know where they keep the Cold Brew Coffee?"
The flood of relief. "Well, I -"
"Oh, here it is. Never mind."
"Good talking to you, son."
"Good talking to you. I gotta go."
Gotta go.

Love Means...

Love means never having to say you're sorry. That was the tag line from "Love Story," a little book and film from the 1970's. It's the kind of thing that used to go on posters and T-shirts back then. It was a simpler time. It was a time for silliness like Andy Warhol and bell-bottom blue jeans. Bad things happened. Wars were being fought across the globe. Disco was still dance music, and Coke was still a smile and not for grinding your teeth.
Some decades later, bad things are still happening, but the legs of our jeans have become thinner to the point of absurdity. Disco has died and come back to life as many times as Jason Voorhees. Andy Warhol is a venerated master. And love still means never having to say you're sorry.
If the opposite of love is war, as we learned back in those days after the endless slog of Vietnam, what do we say about the accidental air strike in Afghanistan that killed nineteen? Not nineteen bad guys, by the way. These were nineteen non-combatants. Twelve staff members for Doctors Without Borders, and seven of their patients, three of whom were children. Thirty-seven others were injured in the melee, brought to you by the United States Air Force. Just doing our job. Keeping the peace. What do we do now? Now that the doctors who had been attending to the wounded in the region have been killed as part of "collateral damage?" Would now be a good time to say "sorry?"
I will tell you how it works on our playground: We say, "I'm sorry," followed immediately by, "Are you okay?" This is used at each point of contact, intentional or unintentional. Accidents happen on playgrounds. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone," is not an excuse. We want the person who got hit on the nose with an errant four-square ball to know that even if we didn't mean to hit them on the nose, we are still concerned for their welfare. In Afghanistan? "The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility. This incident is under investigation."
One thing is clear: Afghanistan is no playground. Nor is it a Love Story. My suggestion is that we don't sit around waiting for an apology from the ones who dropped the bombs. By then we could all be doing the Hustle in our elephant bells once again.