Thursday’s Theme Music

Mood: Flooferverscent

Thursday, November 9, 2023, has come to have its say in what happens and how it happens with little clear explanation about why it happens. Many people like muddying the clarifications about why things happen because they dislike those explanations. Angers them because they can’t grasp the explanation, so if they can’t understand, why should anyone else? Shut it down; hide it; don’t teach it. Make it a mystery, so they can smugly say, “Nobody knows.”

Down to 34 last night in Ashlandia, where the schools are first rate and the arts and athletics are above average, it’s forty and foggy now as frost covers the bare ground and glazes some grasses. Don’t you worry, though; partly sunny skies will see us through to 57 F by daylights end. The remains of the day will deliver us back into darkness and 37 F.

When I awoke this morning, I opened a window blind. Soft dawn was crawling white through the trees and across the yard. Among the denuded poplar branches, a hummingbird hovered for a few seconds and then zinged away.

The hummingbird’s appearance surprised me. Cold, mid-autumn, winter hustling toward us, I figured hummingbirds would have better places to be.

Meanwhile, Tucker the magnificent (which is the mixed long-haired/short-haired cat’s official title) rose, ate, used the litter box, and went back to bed. Papi, the ginger blade feline floof, went out, declared it too cold, came in, declared himself bored, went back out, declared it too cold, came in, declared himself bored, went out, declared it too cold…get it?

I was outside at midnight last night. Clouds and moon were absent, letting the stars and other celestial bodies take a turn at shiny. Beautiful and serene with clear fresh air, but the black night was hugely cold to my body, driving me into my shelter after just five minutes of standing outside and thinking.

Somewhere in the night, I thought about the GOP – Right Wing – MAGA approach to governing and education. Limitations are the key the their approach. They will not accept anything being taught except what they like and understand as history, which is very, very narrowly defined. Their version of history must not show our nation or white people in a dark light. Our nation is good, because, come on, it’s christian, you know, one god, and all that, as the Founding Fathers so ordered, amIright? In their view, slavery was a good thing: sure people were locked up, traded, and beaten, but they were taught trades and given food and shelter. Surely that’s enough, so don’t dare teach that slaveowners were cruel bastards who often raped slave women and treated slaves worse than animals, unworthy of human rights.

It seems like they take the same approach to anything other than two sexes, male and female, whether it’s in gender or sexual preference. That’s what the bible says, they say, so they must be right.

They only want – no, they only accept – one religion, their version of christianity, and their god, a white, benevolent man who knows everything and is the only deliverer of knowledge, justice, and love. Such a god can’t have ideas about other religions and philosophies, so they can’t be taught because they’re not in their religious book, and their tiny minds can’t brook anything other than what their little black book says, even if they only follow the parts of the little black book that THEY like. Screw the rest of that silly, ancient black book, they decide by action, even if they won’t say it. Like, what’s that whole thing about loving thy brother, turning the other cheek, and that whole thing about bankers and rich men being in the temples and entering ‘the kingdom of heaven?’

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” But, but, capitalism! We are a christian nation, and can’t have rules and regulations which limit our abilities to exploit others and grow wealthier. We’re Capitalists!

“Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”

I’m sure wealthy Americans plan to do that after they die, right? Until then, they will donate to charities which support their principles to grow wealthier, as long as it’s tax deductible.

Meanwhile, it’s not the government’s job to take care of anyone else, not in our christian nation. No! That encourages laziness. If they’re lazy, they won’t work for others for low pay so companies and the wealthy can make more money. No, no, no. And if companies pay them too much, then the companies will make less profit, and the shareholders will make less money, and the rich executives won’t be able to collect larger bonuses and buy more beautiful, pretty things for themselves, like mansions, vacation homes, jets, cars, and yachts. So pay for the lower classes must be kept low, for so it’s written in the bible…innit?

It all falls back on education then. Limit what is taught or don’t teach them at all beyond the basics of following instructions. That’s all that’s needed.

All that has me and The Neurons singing Pink Floyd’s mashup from The Wall in the morning mental music stream (Trademark unavoidable). See, the way it goes in The Neurons’ view, the Right Wing dictates and limits what will be taught in school, threatening the school systems and teachers with punishment if they don’t adhere and obey (exhibit A: Florida; B: Texas; C: Wisconsin. Etc.). They want perfect little white children (some blacks might be acceptable, as long as they adhere to the doctrine), all male or female – and nothing else because the bible! (And then they descend into lies about what those ‘other’ so-called sexes do, and how evil they are.) Because, see, they don’t understand. And if they don’t understand, they can’t accept. And if they can’t understand and accept, why should anyone else?

Under the GOP plan, aided by the misnamed “Moms for Liberty” who are all about censorship, which as Matthew Perry imight have said as Chandler Bing on Friends, “Can anything be more anti-liberty than stopping what other people read?”, schools become mills to turn out perfectly ignorant, intolerant, non-thinking little images of their white, bible-thumping masters. And the teachers will be the ones molding these little monsters of tomorrow, so long as the teachers adhere to the doctrine, don’t think, and obey the rules, which they will, or the GOP will beat, intimidate, and incriminate the teachers.

Because anything other than the GOP curriculum is ‘woke’, and that’s communist, socialist, thought control.

See how they turn it on its head? It’s no wonder that the GOP and its christians put its greatest faith in trying to build walls.

Stay positive and woke, be strong, and lean forward for others’ rights and freedoms as well as your own. Coffee is now at hand and warming my innards. Here’s the video.

Have a nice day. Cheers

November 9, 2023 3

Friday’s Wandering Thoughts

It seems like the United States’ GOP is working hard to divide the nation. Through actions like dictating what pronouns and genders must be used, and what can be read and taught in schools, they’re narrowing the boundaries of freedom and undermining intellectual thought and creativity.

Once the Republicans were happy to merely oppose the Democrats. Now they oppose personal freedom and choice, forging deeper and sharper divides based on the formulation of ‘us’ and ‘them’, far from the Founders’ vision of ‘we, the People’. Congress under the GOP, and as en extension, the Federal government, is obstructed from governing as Republicans do all they can to stop anything and everything the Democrats attempt to do, treating everyone outside of the GOP’s narrowing scope as enemies. They demand compromise while offering none. Even Republicans who do not heel hard to the line, “Our way or no way,” are ostracized as enemies.

It is one thing to disagree and debate, and another to throw tantrums and hold parts of the government hostage. Holding the government hostage is the modern Republican way, whether it’s:

the US military (Senator Tuberville’s ongoing blocking of senior officer promotions until they make changes Tuberville wants);
the Federal budget (the GOP Freedom Caucus threatening to shut down the government again and again, as the GOP has done before);
reading and education (the GOP embraced ‘Moms of Liberty’ and their advocacy against school curricula that mention LGBTQIA+ rights, race and ethnicity, and ‘critical race theory’, as well as Governors Abbott (Texas) and DeSantis (Florida) and their bids to ban books and forbid teaching certain aspects of history);
or the ability for the Federal government to execute and enforce laws (Speaker Johnson’s moves to cut funding for IRS agents and their investigations of tax fraud).

In the GOP’s latest vision of the United States, the vision of who the people are and who may vote, and what rights ‘they may have’ is diminishing in front of the GOP’s idea of God, their idea of religion, their idea of science, and their idea of culture and history.

In so doing, they drive the United States further and more deeply away from being a welcoming melting pot of freedom, independence, and equality for all. Their tools to accomplish their vision are fear, intimidation, discrimation, and bigotry, fortified and encouraged by lies and hypocrisy, often done under cover of ‘religious freedom’, citing the Bible as the source for things it never mentions, in a nation where separation of church and state are supposed to be a foundation of our nation’s existence.

Ironically, the GOP marches down a path that is directly against the words of their party’s founder. President Lincoln declared in his House Divided speech (June 15, 1858), “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”

It’s an insight which the GOP in its right-wing, short-sighted zeal, has chosen to ignore.

November 3, 2023 3

Changing Times

Everything is changing. I’m not stupid. I know that it’s not unusual for things to change. Weather changes, clothes, all that. I’m not stupid.

This is different, you know? This is real change.

I was born in 2032. May, a taurus. I can’t remember much of my early life. I guess it was okay. Then the crumble began. You know, bridges collapsing, blackouts, gas and electricity shortages, water shortages.

I remember that from when I was around ten and our school was shut down. Dad said that taxes had been cut, so you know, the government didn’t have the money for schools, and we couldn’t afford a pay school. Dad was working a full-time job and two part-time jobs. Mom was working three part-time gigs. Working their asses off, both of them. My auntie, who was disabled from diabetes, schooled me and my sisters and cousins in our family room. That’s where she lived.

I did what I could myself. Made some change from helping with cleanups. People would abandon their cars and places, and I’d pirate things and sell them door to door. Tapes and books, old computers, that kind of thing.

We were always hungry, picking berries, apples, plums, whatever we could find. Best time was when I was a teen. Used to be able to pay two dollars to bus tables for fifteen minutes in a restaurant. They let me eat anything that was left. I’d try to stuff things in my pockets for my family, if I could, but I was so damn hungry all the time.

That lasted ‘bout five years. Now I’m 31, and it’s all gone. I’m trying to find a new gig but all I got is my ‘lectric bike and clothes. Most days, it’s too hot to be outside, you know? Gets over 110 by noon, and then climbs twenty degrees more.

Like Mom used to say all the time, the times, they are a-changin’.

September 29, 2023 4

July 22, 2023 0

Saturday’s Wandering Thought

We were talking about classes we wished we’d had when we were young. Like, explanations about how much your body might change as you age. We knew that would happen, of course. Saw it in mother and father, aunts and uncles, etc. But how do you impress how much of it’s within and outside of your control, and how there is an accumulative impact? Despite exercise and health, some of these things take you by surprise and take you down, mentally, physically, emotionally.

Maybe such information is now being taught. Of course, with the net and technology, more of it is available.

July 22, 2023 0

A Little Thanks

I belong to a beer group. Tongue in cheek, we refer to ourselves as Brains on Beer because the original founders were smart individuals, usually retired engineers, physicians, scientists, and professors who met to drink beer and talk science, the arts, and technology. Most of the original group passed away. Now there’s me and some worthy replacements, but you know what’s said about any organization that will have me… Anyway, each week we collect donations after we pay our beer tab to fund local STEAM projects. (Yeah, it used to be STEM.) Throughout the year, we keep searching for causes to support. We received a nice little thank you letter from one of our 2022 projects this week.

Makes me smile into my beer.

December 2, 2022 0

February 22, 2022 0

The First Day

First day of school. She’d had to buy her son a new Backhand. He wore it proudly, turning to see it again and again. Fiddling with its controls. Mastering it.

A Backhand. On her son. Her five year old. She’d not gotten a Backhand until she was twenty-three years old. But they hadn’t been affordable to her until she was twenty-two. By then they’d been around for five years, replacing phones, watches, laptops, and everything else. Just a device on the back of your hand, doing all those things, feeding off your body’s energy. She still discovered it as amazing and creepy.

She wasn’t ready to surrender her little boy to the pearly halls of education. He seemed so small and fragile. This was the pain of being a mother. Her mom told her she would experience it. She knew she would, too. She’d been a virtual mother for two years, training for the vocation.

“Are you nervous, Jayed?”

Jayed turned his liquid brown orbs at her with a bright smile. “I’m not nervous. Why would I be?”

Not surprising. He’d gone to in-person daycare and online classes since he was three. They grow up so fast.

Jayed said “They’re going to start teaching us emoticons today. I already know most of them.”

Kary’s mother came in as Jayed said that. She, of course, couldn’t stop a head shake. Habit and personality compelled it. “Emoticons. I remember when we learned cursive writing. I was older than him. It was phased out two years after my class. Oh, how things change.”

She squatted down before Jayed. “Look at my little scholar.”

Jayed was dressed in his best red shirt with black shorts and purple rubber sandals. Corporate sponsors on his front and back. The usual suspects. Energy companies. Baseball and football teams. Restaurants and banks. They all had part of her baby already. But this was good. Without corporate sponsors, they wouldn’t be able to afford public school. The city’s NFL team, the Mexico City Aztecs, had stepped forward in a big way. Paid for all his vaccination, his share of the teacher, and his meals.

The teleporter chimed. “Time to go,” Jayed said, spinning and striding toward the teleporter like a miniature man. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be okay.”

She rushed to him, along with her mother. Both bent, forcing him to turn back to them, lavishing the youth with hugs and slobbering, noisy kisses as they said, “You be good. Treat others with respect.” He endured and accepted, then smiled. “You shouldn’t be so emotional. I’m just going off to school. I’ll be back tonight.”

Then he stepped back into the teleporter. Raised the Backhand to the keypad. Synced. And was gone.

October 19, 2021 0

Wednesday’s Theme Music

Sorry, today’s song is a downer. Reading about recent White House statements, trends in different states, and education in America, my mind began streaming Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” (1979).

We don’t need no education. We just need walls. Walls will save us all.