education

The Girl in the Third Row

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

“We teach everything in the world to people, except the most essential thing.  And that is life.  Nobody teaches you about life.  You’re supposed to know about it.  Nobody teaches you how to be a human being and what it means to be a human being, and the dignity that it means when you say, “I am a human being.”

–Leo Buscaglia, “The Art of Being Fully Human

About a month ago my students seemed unengaged during a lecture about literary terms. I sat down and was quiet for several minutes. Few things can grab the attention of a disinterested student like a professor’s sudden silence.

I told this story:

When I was a freshman, we had orientation where we broke into small groups and were led by a couple of seniors and a guidance counselor or other such school official, and we did various activities together from the obvious, like a school tour of where everything is that you could possibly need, to the ludicrous, like a swimming competition where we all had to wear pantyhose and do laps in the college pool.

At some point each group gathered in the library and watched a video called, “The Art of Being Fully Human,” by  the late Leo Buscaglia, a philosophy professor at USC, and a bestselling author/lecturer. In the video he tells of how when teaching he finds “friendly eyes,” someone in class who is mentally present, and he talks to them. He found them in the eyes of an alert young woman in the third row. She didn’t always agree with him, he says, but she was there. So he was looking forward to her showing up to his request of everyone to stop by his office and introduce themselves. She didn’t show, and several classes went by without her being present. So he went to the dean to inquire about her, and it turns out she had driven up to Pacific Palisades, got out of her car, and in front of many witnesses, jumped off the cliff.

I sat silently for a moment more.

Buscaglia says it changed his life, because that was the moment he became fully aware that we teach everything in the world to people, from calculus to literature to engineering to chemistry, but we don’t spend one moment teaching the art, the absolute art and beauty, of being alive. We leave that lecture off the syllabus. We’re supposed to just “know” how to deal with troubles and bullying and failure and insecurity and disappointment. No one teaches us the value of being ourselves, of being alive and human.

I then asked my students a familiar question to anyone who has ever taken one of my classes: What are you doing here? Why did you decide in your life that right now out of all the options available to you, you chose to sit here, now, with me, and learn about Melville? Because we need to remind ourselves of two things: one, we chose to be here instead of anywhere else; and two, while this class, or this semester even, may not be what you enjoy, we need to keep the big picture in mind; that this might be the slow part of an exciting life ahead.

End of story. That was in October.

Last night one of my students who had not been in class in a few weeks waited until everyone else had left and she stopped me. We’ve had discussions before as she is transitioning and it has been more than a little difficult with family, friends, and her own confidence. She had told me her depression can spin out of control.

She apologized for not being in class and asked if it was okay to still turn in the writing that had been due. I assured her it was absolutely fine, and I’d read it first to make suggestions before she turns it in for a grade. Then she reminded me of the Buscaglia lecture.

“I’m the girl in the third row,” she said. “If she were here she’d look around the room and recognize me as herself.”

I was quiet.

“I had written letters to everyone I know apologizing for what I planned to do. Again. I was completely at peace with the decision to die.” She was visibly shaking as she talked. “But then I searched online everywhere for who you were talking about, and I didn’t even know how to spell his name, but my mother knew who I meant, and I read a few of his books. I’m still alive now because of that.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Different. I feel different. I’m back in counseling.”

We talked a bit more and then walked outside. “You’re an engineering major, right?”

“I was. I am switching it for next semester.”

“To?”

“Philosophy.”

I laughed. “Leo Buscaglia would be very happy!”

She was crying a bit, and then said she feels like being in college, finally.

I nodded. “But you know, as a philosophy major, you’re never going to get a job, right?”

She laughed. “I’ll teach.”

I started my very long drive home up the bay and realized, quite clearly and positively, had she been in my class thirty years ago, my entire career would have been different. I’m so glad she showed up now.

***

 A school principal gave this to Haim Ginott.  She said:

“I am a survivor of a concentration camp.  My eyes saw what no person should witness.  Gas chambers built by learned engineers.  Children poisoned by educated physicians.  Infants killed by trained nurses.  Women and children shot and killed by high school and college graduates.  So I’m suspicious of education.  My request is:  help your students to be human.  Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns.  Reading and writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students human.”

The Full Lecture:

https://www.pbs.org/video/kvie-public-television-leo-buscaglia-art-being-fully-human/

The Dead

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I guess the first was Karen. Karen was from Pennsylvania–this was quite early in my career and I had just moved back to the Beach from Pennsylvania myself, so I could relate to her writing. She spoke in class about adjusting to being away from home for the first time. Her husband was military and they were stationed here. Her paper was about the changes. I sat on my couch and read about her excitement to start life anew and all the places they would finally see together like they planned. She took a job–not because she needed the money, she wrote–but because she wanted to do something. So she took classes and got a new job as a server at the North Witchduck Inn in Virginia Beach. She got lucky, I read; another worker had been fired and she filled the opening in the place not far from their home.

I had just put her paper down and moved on to the next when the phone rang and it was the provost of the college. He wanted to tell each of her professors before we heard it on the news. The fired server and her boyfriend returned to the North Witchduck Inn and shot four people in the back of the head, execution style, including Karen. For a few years I held on to that paper. It reminded me how in a class filled with “I’d rather be anywhere else but here” students, someone was glad to be present, to be truly present.

Then there was Mark. Mark stopped me in the library and asked if we could talk. He had just received orders he was headed to Kuwait for the first Gulf War, and he was told to get his “affairs” in order. “Talk about telling you you’re going to die,” he said. I assured him everyone going overseas in the military is told to make sure their affairs are in order. We laughed a while about nothing; really nothing at all. The smallest of things that day were funny, the simplest of moments were beautiful. We walked to his car and he showed me a picture of his son. We talked about how when he got home our boys could play together. I don’t remember Mark’s last name, but I will always remember his face.

Tricia and I used to talk at the copier every day. We talked about music and travel. We talked about food and how the smell of cinnamon buns is better than the aroma of coffee. She had braces and said her students haven’t said anything about them yet, but she was certain they noticed. I remember her asking if I noticed her braces and I laughed out loud, right there, like the laughter was my answer, then I said, “Well, T…yeah! They’re right there! But they’re beautiful. I can’t imagine you without them. They’re just so you!” We laughed a long time. T got depressed easily and I could usually tell from the faculty workshops about recognizing various issues with students when she was in a down cycle. The dean came to me and said Tricia’s medicine was messed up and her husband found her hanging in the kitchen.

Stay with me. Please.

Then there was Rachel. Dear, beautiful, full-of-life Rachel. On a study abroad in St. Petersburg, we walked freely down Nevsky Prospect, the Fifth Avenue of the city. I was right behind Rachel on the crowded street so we were all pretty close to each other. As usual, she was engaged in taking pictures and writing in her notebook, jotting down “Kazan Cathedral” which was just to our right. Of all the people I’ve traveled with—numbering well over four hundred—Rachel was by far the most diligent about drinking it all in, making notes, taking countless photographs. She always smiled anyway and could make everyone around her laugh, and there on the other side of the world she was in her element. She absorbed every single moment. In the evenings she’d come into my room and show me what pictures she had taken that day and double-checked their locations. Then we’d sit and talk about her impending motherhood, what it’s like being a parent—my son had just turned ten. We walked past Kazan Cathedral; she was absorbed in her notes and stepped right off the curb and into the cross street where a bus was ripping past us at forty miles an hour. I was close enough to Rachel to grab her hair which she had pulled back in a pony tail, and I yanked her back into my chest, and the bus was close enough to knock her bag out of her hand on into the street. Those around us screamed and Rachel turned back somewhat unaware of what had just happened. “He saw me,” she said, to which I replied, “Yeah, he did. He just didn’t care. Pedestrians don’t have the right of way here.” We picked up her belongings and in no time she was back into enjoying her tour of Russia; my heart didn’t settle down for hours. The last time I saw her she brought her daughter, Shaylyn, to my office. This beautiful woman with her beautiful little girl was so excited to move on with her life; she’d be a single mother, she told me, and hoped she could set a good example. Then we remembered the bus in Petersburg, laughing at the nearly tragic outcome, and she assured me I had saved two lives that day. I laughed and told her I was just glad she hadn’t cut her long, curly hair. “Yeah that hurt, by the way,” she joked, grabbing the back of her head.

Her daughter has her eyes.

Not much later, in May of 2005, the little girl’s father went to find Rachel who was hanging out with some friends at their apartment. When she refused to let him in, he cut a hole in the screen and climbed through. Rachel ran out the back door and called 911. Her ex walked through the house and shot four people killing two of them before he found Rachel hiding outside. She had called 911 and the operator had to ask several times what was going on, but Rachel was quiet, until finally she replied, “He saw me,” and her ex put his gun to her skull and shot her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. This one breaks my heart.

I sat in class last week and watched my students do group work. A few engaged students carried the rest, but more than half the class kept reading their phones, staring out the window, messing with their hair. “What are you doing here?” I asked in a general fashion. They were quiet. “What are you doing here?” I asked again. They just stared at me. I remembered the rule of threes: First time they hear it; second time they think about it; third time they start to understand it, so I hit it once more: “Seriously,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

They remained quiet.

Bobbie slipped slowly inside herself. First alcohol, then drugs, then homelessness, until this beautiful woman who became a neonatal nurse was found dead next to a dumpster. Carrie OD’d and ended up in a brain center where she kept telling me the same joke when I’d go visit to talk to the patients: “Knock Knock. Who’s there? Cargo. Cargo who? Cargo beep beep.” We’d always laugh and she’d keep laughing long after I moved over to Dave who was learning to walk again. Carrie was a biomed major, graduated high school early and had applied for Drexel University to transfer and had just been accepted. The stress got the better of her and she “used a little something to keep her nerves in tact.” Dave was found in the garage. He brought the dog.

“For the next project,” I told my students before leaving on a reading trip to Ohio two weeks ago, “I want you to tell me what you are doing here. Include your short range and long term plans. Include your hidden ambitions, your unspoken dreams, that secret that can ignite your internal motivation. Tell me what you hope this moment looks like when you look back five years from now.”

They stared at me. No one, not one, not a single student: NOT. ONE. TOOK. NOTES.

I asked Geoff, who bares a stringing resemblance to Johnny Depp, and is someone I can usually count on to keep up, what they need to do. “Write about what we’re doing here.”

“And?”

“And…be ambitious with it.”

I repeated what I had said, asking them to write it down, which they all did–on their phones. Fine. I looked at a woman on the right side of the room. Sometimes I hope to see Karen. Or Rachel. I asked her the name of the woman immediately next to her who she had been talking to during group work for a half hour for the fourth time this semester, and it was already late October. “What is her name?” I asked. She looked out the side of her eyes as if the woman wore a badge.

I stared at them. “What are you people doing here?”

I am haunted, some days. Not by the dead or their memories; not by the tragic loss of life and the repulsively early departure of far too many souls–a dozen more of whom I’ve left out of this. I am haunted by how easy it is to not live at all. I stopped at the door. “If it makes you feel better, most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing here either.”

They laughed, and I thought of Bobbie. They laughed and the woman introduced herself to her classmate of ten weeks, and I thought of Karen. I thought of Rachel and Trish–adorable Trish. They laughed and I realized not every moment should be one of ecstatic joy. But we certainly should be closer to life than death, shouldn’t we?

Oh, and there’s Kevin, who simply disappeared, and Charlotte, who just three weeks ago tried to kill herself. Charlotte is transitioning and has just about as little support as a person can get. I leaned against the door jam and asked if they understood the assignment. So I asked again, knowing, waiting, certain someone would give me the answer I absolutely knew they all knew, and someone finally did.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s required.”

I smiled. “No. It’s not,” I said. “You’ve been deceived. Certainly to attend this college, to graduate, this is a required course. But nothing is required of you anymore. You’re not children. You can tend bar in Key West. You can hike across Europe. You can be anywhere, do anything, and you, for some apparently unknown reason, chose to be in my class on this day at this hour and sit and stare at your phones even though you could be anywhere else.” I laughed at the last part. “Anywhere!”

“With that in mind,” I added, “What are you doing here?”

Oh, and Bo, who got killed when the car he was riding in hit a tree on the way to Florida. And Eddie. Dearest, kindest Eddie. And Marcus. Jamal. Chris. Joe.

Karen wanted to have kids. Rachel wanted to be a teacher. Mark wanted to come home and bring his son out for ice cream. Bobbie wanted to dance.

All she ever wanted to do was dance.

Listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg-Qdrr3XSk

Pre/Post

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

I was three, just a few months older than John-John, when his father President John F. Kennedy was shot. I don’t remember the incident at all, nor am I aware of a difference in temperament before and after that fateful day in November of ’63. But I’m told it was distinct, black and white, an absolute clarity in “before and after” references. I’m told Kennedy came with hope, with promise, with lofty goals like landing a man on the moon and cleaning the earth, the Peace Corps, the hope of peace in general. He was young and so was most of the population as the first wave of baby-boomers came of age. Things were good.

Camelot.

I saw footage of the event only in great retrospect years later. People talked about conspiracy theories, they talked about Vietnam and Civil Rights; and they talked about the subtle differences of expectation and hope before and after November 22nd, 1963. But I only ever understood a post-Dallas world; there will always be something lacking in the narrative for those of us who didn’t experience life back then, in the times before Dallas. There will always be some subtle element we will never be able to grasp.

***

I used to ask my writing students this week every year, what do you remember? How were your parents that day?  Their work covered the spectrum from indifference to passionate recollections of military members who had returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. And, predictably, as the years went by the details became less clear, less “involved,” and more repetitive to what they heard from others, from history class even.

I don’t ask those questions anymore. None of my current college students were yet born September 11th, 2001.

They couldn’t know that before 911 our thought process was different, more hopeful, absent of impending doom. We still had that absolute conviction that whatever happened to us as individuals and as a nation was still pretty much in our hands. They have no idea that before that day we looked forward to what was next, not fearful of what might happen. Our daily vocabulary was absent of phrases involving extremism, terrorism, anthrax, and Fallujah. These concepts were real and among us, but they affected others, were problems for others, were handled by others. Our attitudes of issues concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and terrorism back then are similar to my students at this campus in Virginia worrying about what is happening to students at some college eight thousand miles away. We were peripherally aware of a situation, that’s all.

***

Higher education has once again become more of a world of industrial education, where students expect that the sole purpose of their classes should be to prepare them for employment, where enrollment is plummeting not just because of cost but because of the greater population of teenagers not seeing a point to it, so there is a desperate need for the study of philosophy and art. Am I being too optimistic? Am I tilting at windmills? I suppose.

But In a world which has adjusted to constant violence and invasion, where disease is rampant and the climate is killing us, I can’t think of a better time for educators to emphasize the potential of humanity. But technology is our new curriculum, and students today are convinced it is the sole foundation of whatever they do. But “it has become appallingly obvious,” Einstein said, “that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

“Intelligence plus character is the goal of a true education,” Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted. Yes, let’s go there. Let’s get back to that pre-911 thought process. It seems we are in dire need of starting over. Now. The earth is dying and the human race is watching it all happen on Instagram and TikTok. In this culture, we cannot teach anyone what “hope” was like in the before times; all we can do is hope. Educators first must be examples. In these times, those of us older than forty are by virtue of memory social historians who can remember a world of possibility and promise. We were there.

According to Plato: “The direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future in life.” Shouldn’t we start with hope? With possibility. We didn’t used to have to teach those ideals, but my students weren’t born when those once innate concepts were foundations instead of today’s cyber security and terrorist activities.

I cannot teach these people what life was like before terrorism terrified our cities. I can perhaps describe what it was like to sit at a table for lunch at Windows on the World completely absent of fear and enjoy the view. I can talk about crossing borders without interrogation, walking family members all the way to the plane for their departure, carrying pretty much anything I wanted on board a flight. I can talk about what wasn’t talked about, places we never heard of.  I can ask them why it isn’t like that anymore and what do we need to do to find our way there again.

Now I ask them to write what they think is humanity’s greatest strength, most encouraging potential. The papers are sparse. Their minds draw a blank; and it isn’t their fault. If the terrorists succeeded in one aspect in affecting American culture, it is this: We used to think about what can go right; now we think about what might go wrong.

That’s as tragic as the difference between pre and post can get.

AI AIN’T

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 4 Comments

A student actually asked me if it was okay to allow artificial intelligence (I see no reason to capitalize that) to write his paper. He didn’t try and plagiarize and pass it off as his; he didn’t unintentionally use someone or something else’s material and mistakenly claimed it to be original. No. He sat at his computer, opened his browser, addressed an email to me, and wrote, “Is it okay if we allow ai to write our papers? Will I lose points for this?”

Once again, we have slid right past the founding problem and into the next level, where we have already accepted the premise but now we must fight small issues. It happened with cell phones when we moved from not allowing them in class at all to penalizing students if they use them at the wrong times or for the wrong reasons. What happened to “No cell phones. Pay attention to me”?

We have so much technology in our lives and in our classes that time must be spent powering up and down, downloading, transferring, waiting, and on and on that the actual time a student is truly “present” and looking at who is talking, making notes, discussing, has diminished by nearly eighty percent according to Pew Research and a study at the University of Pennsylvania. The productivity and scores at every level of education in this country suck and we cannot figure out why. Here’s why: No one is paying attention.

Problems:

*As soon as cell phones or laptops entered the classroom, teachers had competition for already questionable attention.

*Students who consumer energy drinks have an attention span nearly twenty minutes shorter than just one generation (pre-cell phone and energy drinks) ago.

*It was proven many decades ago that writing things down, even just once, increases the ability to remember information tenfold. It is called “writing to learn.” But today students do not write down a single note choosing instead to take a picture of the information.

Education is easy: Listen intently (that means with intent to learn) to the person who knows what they’re talking about, ask questions of those areas you are not sure you clearly understand, write it down somewhere to see if you will remember it all. This is how it was done by slaves like Frederick Douglass who battled opposition from overseers who would whip him for reading, plantation owners who would kill him for learning, national laws forbidding him to read and write. This is how it was done by the Irish who were forbidden to learn in their own land so they had to hide behind the hedges in small groups to learn reading and writing from their “hedge master.” This is how it was done by immigrants who needed English to get a job and wanted to make a better life for themselves. This is how it is done. All the technology available will not replace internal motivation necessary to achieve your purpose. Nor will it explain to you what that purpose is.

But students today read texts from friends, use a program to write their papers, believe they can only get through the next five minutes with another Five Hour Energy drink.

There is no more quiet, no more earbudless, phoneless people walking peacefully from one place to another, listening to nature, listening to each other, listening to themselves, thinking about the day or about the moment. There is no more sense of now. They don’t yet realize that you have to put down the past and the future if you want to learn to unwrap the present.

There is no more sense that people are paying attention. Not on the highway where distracted driving is the number once cause of accidents; not in the classroom where distracted students are missing nearly eighty percent of the material. Not in our souls, where we need to pay attention to our own compass, our own course.

Artificial intelligence can certainly write a pretty decent paper, but it will read like the blind date pretending to get along with you so that the night isn’t a complete waste of time. Yes, it will fulfill the requirements and might even be acceptable, but I won’t feel it in my soul. When I read someone’s writing, I need to believe they stood in that spot, felt the sand, tasted the old wine. Ai cannot make me believe your heart raced when you got closer to some destination. Ai cannot convince me you actually lived.

Ai is not alive. Cell phones are not alive. The energy gained by ingredients in even the most natural of power drinks is not the fire you need to be truly alive, present.

We are dying. Slowly for certain; but dying equally for certain. And the only way to make that worthwhile is to be absolutely present on the way. To do the work, to grow tired from trying so hard.

Our pace is all wrong. Somewhere we believed that advances were always a good idea. We convinced ourselves that convenience was the best approach. The number of people fighting depression is at unprecedented levels; the suicide rate is increasing nearly daily; the dropout rate is growing exponentially; and our success in English, Math, and Science is nearly out of competition with all other industrialized nations. Our priorities are wrong.

Artificial intelligence assumes some level of intelligence to begin with. But it is not intelligence that is the problem to begin with that we need to use artificial versions like we do with sweeteners and flavors and levels of energy. It is purpose.

On the first day of class I ask my students to put everything away—laptops, cellphones, notepads, energy drinks, earbuds, bluetooths, all of it. We sit and I ask them where they’re from. Then I ask them this: Why are you here? What are you doing here? You can be anywhere–tending bar in the Caribbean, backpacking around Europe, working and making money at some resort hotel, absolutely anywhere you want. But you’re here. Why? And we spend the rest of class exploring purpose.

Does it work? I have no idea. But on my long drive home I ask myself that same question trying hard to answer it before my mind melts and I put on the radio instead, relying upon some noise to fill that dangerous space of silence.

Life is paper thin, Toni Wynn wrote. How are we spending it?

What did I really do with my time?     

Ad Invicem

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

It’s hard to imagine the horrors taking place in Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, and, of course, Ukraine, when the water and the occasional call of a gull drifts down the river. I try to look out and think more about the peace in northern Spain than the hunger that haunts the people in South Sudan, but only because I’ve been lucky. I mean, sometimes when the Chesapeake and I are just hanging out peacefully like this, I can be painfully aware that I wasn’t raised in Mosul; I wasn’t born in Beirut.

Humanity is a crazy race, building irrigation systems to help grow food to feed millions while building methods to annihilate those poor souls in seconds. Maybe the greatest irony of education is the stretches of intelligence, research, and application it takes for the human mind to conceive, create, and execute weapons which can evaporate entire cities. The mechanics to build the means by which to destroy someone else wouldn’t cross the mind of an uneducated person. Only educated people can accomplish such a holocaust.

Doesn’t it feel like no one wants to save the world anymore? Yesterday at the White House State Dinner, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol sang Don McLean’s “American Pie.” He was good, too! This was big news today. This should be irrelevant for its commonness. It should be an expectation, not an exception.

There needs to be a new requisite in schools everywhere: Humanity 101. The subtitle could be “We are here for each other.” The course could cover the benefits of helping other people, the rewards of sharing not just gains but losses as well. There could be a lesson on compassion and one on being a good Samaritan. A sociologist might talk in one session about how what happens in one section of the globe really does have an impact on the rest, and a psychologist can show the class how to balance the beauty of nature with the evil things people say and do, which would decrease after everyone took the class.

A theologian could explain why there are, or at least needs to be, some absolute morals. That person might explain why the belief in postmortem can keep evil in check, keep the horrible potential of humanity at bay. Without preaching about salvation in heaven, they can certainly drop in a few lectures about earthly responsibility to each other, and if the fear of God is necessary to get it done, so be it; not unlike threatening toddlers who act up with the possibility of Santa skipping their house. The potential of a little supernatural backlash is just what this world could use right now.

Honestly, it seems like everyone is resigned to some sort of slow decline. Did our parents feel this way? Well, if so, they didn’t smear it all over social media. I fear for the absence in education of something other than the notion of “career.” More connections with other people can be made by sharing a meal than college administrators give credit for.

In my last class this semester I told everyone they could bring food. They brought food. Lumpia, pizza, chips, wings, donuts (and not the cheap-ass kind either—Duck Donuts, a delicacy in southeastern Virginia). We laughed and shared stories, but we also talked about what worked in our writing and what didn’t. We connected. Is food the trick? Perhaps; I really don’t know. But I know we saw each other as humans. That works.

I told my students that seeing the between times from their age to mine, them starting careers and me finishing, I learned one lesson. One. No kidding, Uno. In the end we are here for each other. That’s it. With everything else which tugs and tears at our lives, pushes us to extremes and dehydrates our ambition, in the end we simply are here for each other.

Maybe we can solve more problems by knowing what our neighbors like on their pizza than understanding the treaties that keep us apart.

Here’s the thing:

Five years ago this week I left a job I held for thirty years. I’ve thought a lot about my career then and since then, and I know for certain one absolute:

Our education system sucks. The entire thing, all of it, from K through PhD, it sucks dogs. Complete bile.

What good amid the world are these people with their expertise in engineering, computer design, programming, business management, and more, if they are not first taught to be human? The most essential aspect of all of life, of all we get educated for to begin with, is absent from the curriculum.

It should have been the foundation of all teachings since before Plato. Such a simple, simple lesson plan: “We are here for each other first.”

Then State dinners might be closer to celebrations where leaders celebrate each other rather than merely tolerate each other.

I mean, honestly, the man nailed American Pie.

_____

This:

From Haim Ginott:

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.

So, I am suspicious of education.

My request is this:  Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

In Humanity

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Which one of these children was Beethoven? Einstein? Seneca? Obama? Which one did not yet know what a profound effect they would have on friends, family, the country? Civilization?

Those mad shooters of the children at the schools on the list below took more than lives; they took hope, they took possibility. If the world stopped today and straightened out this mess of ours of violence, of anger and greed, of waste, of war, of course things would start to improve. But what damage has been done that cannot be reversed? How many tipping points have we moved past on our way to another tragedy?

Which one of these young people would have, someday, soldiered up and saved your child’s life on the battlefield? Which one might have attended to your care as a hospice nurse someday? Which one would have read you last rites?

Which one of these now dead people wanted to be just like you?

Humanity has become a disturbingly inhumane race. The shootings, of course, the wars, the invasions, starvation, the rape of the land, the lack of response to massacres, the massacres themselves—machetes purchased for ten cents a piece to slaughter three quarters of a million people.

How is it possible that in spite of all our wisdom, we still can’t find a solution for homelessness, for hunger, for mental illnesses like depression and anxiety? Do you have any idea how hard it is for someone with depression to find even a sliver of hope to keep going these days? Is it really that easy to ignore them? Of course, it is what humanity does. We are an inhumane race that needs to stop referring to ourselves as one step below the angels. It is a bad reference, particularly when members of this race of ours is shooting all of the angels.

What a world. What a pathetic and misguided use of potential.

Parable time: There was a man before a judge. He built bridges and solved equations that resulted in the advancement of culture. But he killed someone. And he said to the judge, “Surely my achievements should make it easier for you to show me some leniency?” and the judge said, “You are only as good as your weakest actions. Potential is irrelevant. You should have known better.”

We should have known better. How could we not see this coming?

Humanity needs a do over. It needs to give back the apple and wipe out the sin. Humanity simply isn’t, and we’ve proven that over and over and over and over (multiply by the names of the dead from the schools listed below).

Let’s stop pretending we wouldn’t be better off if climate change won out. We’ve really not proven we’re worth saving, after all; not if the collective masses witness horrors, are horrified by them, but do nothing. Again and again and again (multiply by the parents of the children shot in the head in those schools listed below).

In the wars we’ve created, hundreds of millions have died. The collateral damage of those wars includes mass starvation, enslavement, disenfranchisement, rape, genocide after genocide after genocide.

Please. Stop pointing to all of our achievements and saying, “Yes, but look what we’ve done!” Let’s point to the horrors we’ve created and say, “now do something about this.”

But they won’t. Truly. This is not going to change. Humanity has been a flawed race from the very start, and it is getting worse. And there is absolutely only one solution. One. No kidding, just one way out of this.

But that’s for next time.

I’m going to go for a walk along the bay and wonder which one of these lost souls was the next Cousteau, the next DaVinci, the next Frederick Douglass. Which one was the next Sanger, the next Mother Teresa, the next next door neighbor playing by herself on the patio, her cat nearby, and she’s laughing every time the kitten reaches for a toy, and she is completely alive and in the moment, the sun on her face, her life in front of her?

Which one but for time and place could have been my son? Me? My father. My God.

***

School Shootings From 1998-2022

Thurston High School.

Columbine High School.

Heritage High School.

Deming Middle School.

Fort Gibson Middle School.

Buell Elementary School.

Lake Worth Middle School.

University of Arkansas.

Junipero Serra High School.

Santana High School.

Bishop Neumann High School.

Pacific Lutheran University.

Granite Hills High School.

Lew Wallace High School.

Martin Luther King, Jr. High School.

Appalachian School of Law.

Washington High School.

Conception Abbey.

Benjamin Tasker Middle School.

University of Arizona.

Lincoln High School.

John McDonogh High School.

Red Lion Area Junior High School.

Case Western Reserve University.

Rocori High School.

Ballou High School.

Randallstown High School.

Bowen High School.

Red Lake Senior High School.

Harlan Community Academy High School.

Campbell County High School.

Milwee Middle School.

Roseburg High School.

Pine Middle School.

Essex Elementary School.

Duquesne University.

Platte Canyon High School.

Weston High School.

West Nickel Mines School.

Joplin Memorial Middle School.

Henry Foss High School.

Compton Centennial High School.

Virginia Tech.

Success Tech Academy.

Miami Carol City Senior High School.

Hamilton High School.

Louisiana Technical College.

Mitchell High School.

E.O. Green Junior High School.

Northern Illinois University.

Lakota Middle School.

Knoxville Central High School.

Willoughby South High School.

Henry Ford High School.

University of Central Arkansas.

Dillard High School.

Dunbar High School.

Hampton University.

Harvard College.

Larose-Cut Off Middle School.

International Studies Academy.

Skyline College.

Discovery Middle School.

University of Alabama.

DeKalb School.

Deer Creek Middle School.

Ohio State University.

Mumford High School.

University of Texas.

Kelly Elementary School.

Marinette High School.

Aurora Central High School.

Millard South High School.

Martinsville West Middle School.

Worthing High School.

Millard South High School.

Highlands Intermediate School.

Cape Fear High School.

Chardon High School.

Episcopal School of Jacksonville.

Oikos University.

Hamilton High School.

Perry Hall School.

Normal Community High School.

University of South Alabama.

Banner Academy South.

University of Southern California.

Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Apostolic Revival Center Christian School.

Taft Union High School.

Osborn High School.

Stevens Institute of Business and Arts.

Hazard Community and Technical College.

Chicago State University.

Lone Star College-North.

Cesar Chavez High School.

Price Middle School.

University of Central Florida.

New River Community College.

Grambling State University.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ossie Ware Mitchell Middle School.

Ronald E. McNair Discovery Academy.

North Panola High School.

Carver High School.

Agape Christian Academy.

Sparks Middle School.

North Carolina A&T State University.

Stephenson High School.

Brashear High School.

West Orange High School.

Arapahoe High School.

Edison High School.

Liberty Technology Magnet High School.

Hillhouse High School.

Berrendo Middle School.

Purdue University.

South Carolina State University.

Los Angeles Valley College.

Charles F. Brush High School.

University of Southern California.

Georgia Regents University.

Academy of Knowledge Preschool.

Benjamin Banneker High School.

D. H. Conley High School.

East English Village Preparatory Academy.

Paine College.

Georgia Gwinnett College.

John F. Kennedy High School.

Seattle Pacific University.

Reynolds High School.

Indiana State University.

Albemarle High School.

Fern Creek Traditional High School.

Langston Hughes High School.

Marysville Pilchuck High School.

Florida State University.

Miami Carol City High School.

Rogers State University.

Rosemary Anderson High School.

Wisconsin Lutheran High School.

Frederick High School.

Tenaya Middle School.

Bethune-Cookman University.

Pershing Elementary School.

Wayne Community College.

J.B. Martin Middle School.

Southwestern Classical Academy.

Savannah State University.

Harrisburg High School.

Umpqua Community College.

Northern Arizona University.

Texas Southern University.

Tennessee State University.

Winston-Salem State University.

Mojave High School.

Lawrence Central High School.

Franklin High School.

Muskegon Heights High School.

Independence High School.

Madison High School.

Antigo High School.

University of California-Los Angeles.

Jeremiah Burke High School.

Alpine High School.

Townville Elementary School.

Vigor High School.

Linden McKinley STEM Academy.

June Jordan High School for Equity.

Union Middle School.

Mueller Park Junior High School.

West Liberty-Salem High School.

University of Washington.

King City High School.

North Park Elementary School.

North Lake College.

Freeman High School.

Mattoon High School.

Rancho Tehama Elementary School.

Aztec High School.

Wake Forest University.

Italy High School.

NET Charter High School.

Marshall County High School.

Sal Castro Middle School.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Great Mills High School

Central Michigan University

Huffman High School

Frederick Douglass High School

Forest High School

Highland High School

Dixon High School

Santa Fe High School

Noblesville West Middle School

University of North Carolina Charlotte

STEM School Highlands Ranch

Edgewood High School

Palm Beach Central High School

Providence Career & Technical Academy

Fairley High School (school bus)

Canyon Springs High School

Dennis Intermediate School

Florida International University

Central Elementary School

Cascade Middle School

Davidson High School

Prairie View A & M University

Altascocita High School

Central Academy of Excellence

Cleveland High School

Robert E. Lee High School

Cheyenne South High School

Grambling State University

Blountsville Elementary School

Holmes County, Mississippi (school bus)

Prescott High School

College of the Mainland

Wynbrooke Elementary School

UNC Charlotte

Riverview Florida (school bus)

Second Chance High School

Carman-Ainsworth High School

Williwaw Elementary School

Monroe Clark Middle School

Central Catholic High School

Jeanette High School

Eastern Hills High School

DeAnza High School

Ridgway High School

Reginald F. Lewis High School

Saugus High School

Pleasantville High School

Waukesha South High School

Oshkosh High School

Catholic Academy of New Haven

Bellaire High School

North Crowley High School

McAuliffe Elementary School

South Oak Cliff High School

Texas A&M University-Commerce

Sonora High School

Western Illinois University

Oxford High School

Robb Elementary School

(This is an incomplete list of photos from
Robb Elementary School)