Necessary Threats

Authority is created by those who surrender their power to the will of others. It’s assumed that, in the tradition of political philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, that a social contract is created between the state and the individual by this action. The state is socially responsible to protect its members; however we know through studying American history, that this has too often not been the case. Political institutions solidify their authority through the enforcement of law, but laws in American history that restrict liberty, protect wealth and promote racism undermine this social contract. Inevitably as a result, society suffers from the diseases of political apathy, economic disempowerment and social division. Our history, however, also provides panaceas. Activists have proven that democracy is sustained by challenges to authority. Whether we speak of the power of abolitionists, labor unions, suffragists, peace activists, civil rights protesters, immigrant advocates, or human rights bloggers, their role in American history cannot be underestimated. John Brown, Alice Paul, and Malcolm X (to name only a few) are examples of necessary threats to the authority of the state. Authority fears change, and with good cause. Revolt undermines the status quo, demanding a swift and punishing reaction against activism. Our history is littered with examples of reactionary backlash. Today, as media consolidation, public distrust and wealth concentration limit the perception of individual empowerment, these heroes are needed more than ever. Mohandas Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." Question yourself; question authority - or it will question you.

The Voice of Power

Power. Malcolm X fought against it in his youth. He blamed it for weakening him in his teens. He was punished by it in his early adulthood. In prison, he submitted to it wholeheartedly. He used and attracted it as a religious leader. As an activist, he scorned its abuses and demanded its validation. The changes in his own life refined his understanding of political, economic and social power. Lately, I’ve wondered why Malcolm’s life and message has become so important to me. When I first read his autobiography and speeches in my late teens, something appealed to me in his internal and external search for justice. Malcolm’s myth became his message. He transformed his own consciousness as well as those followers of racial justice. Tragically, his life in submission to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam misled millions because it reacted and did not respond to the needs of those suffering from American institutional and personal racism. Today, I feel the need to use the message that Malcolm’s energy raises in me for my own activism. War is evil. Poverty is injustice. Racism is violence. My voice wants to hear Malcolm to be heard aloud. Inspiration is power.

Columbus's Mirror

Columbus is a national hero. Columbus is a genocidal killer. Which is correct historically? Which applies to our common ‘moral compass’ today? From examining the records of the time, it is true and accurate (if we are to believe Columbus’s own words) that he systematically brought about the destruction of a large number of people in order to gather wealth for himself and his benefactors. Howard Zinn uses the example of Columbus’s morally questionable actions to demonstrate our own subjective interpretation of the past. We see it from our own time, with our own prejudgments. But how do we see the present? Although some are quick to condemn the explorer, others justify his methods by examining the end result. Five hundred years ago, Columbus was an imperial vanguard of a rising medieval super-power. Today, Wal-Mart comprises over 20% of all retail purchases in the United States. In 1492, The Spanish conquistadors killed without consequence in order to establish an empire, while today American generals are quick to point out that they do not count enemy dead. Gold and God were centers of an ideological intoxication with power in 1492. Today, capitalism and technology drive the engines of ‘progress’ forward. Both are stories of victims. Both are stories of power. The events of history may work in cycles, but our collective conscience seems to be reset with each generation, waiting to learn how to view the past. Does Columbus see our image in his mirror?

Globalization, Inequality & Education

What is the relationship between globalization, income inequality and public education in the US? It would seem that students at NBHS (or at least a portion of them) believe that public education is a punitive measure of government, imposed on some by courts and on others by their parents. Still others believe that education is not either a public good or a global good. Keeping the issue of teenage angst aside, has our society failed to stress the importance of an education? Do students in a high unemployment, high dropout, high drug use, gang connected city like New Bedford feel that public school is their punishment? Providing a global scope to NBHS students can improve the situation, but only at the point of saturation. One teacher's message or one parent's plea does not seem to have the pervasive effect of promoting a paradigm shift in the way students view school. The Singapore Study demonstrates that if NBHS felt that it had to compete in a global environment to survive economically, improvement in education would be fairly easy to measure. From my experience, NBHS students do not feel this way. They also do not feel that education provides them with the tools that they need to be successful by their measurement of success. Economic power sustains social status. Perhaps that is why some students in my classes work 20-30 hours a week and begin their homework at 10PM. Of course, not all of these beliefs are supported by all students. The attitudes that I am describing here are those of my college-level students, not the AP students. If globalization increases income inequality (something not discussed at great length in Tom Freidman's book) then the disparity in achievement scores would tend to reflect that fact rather than refute it. Can we compare Newton and New Bedford fairly? Are we disengenuous when we tell students at NBHS that education is a form of economic empowerment in a globalized world? Put this way, the results of improved standard for academic achievement define our government's ability to punish the effects of globalization, not the failures of public education in particular. Or is that scenario wrong? Jonoathan Kozol does not believe so. His books, Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation, demonstrate the differences of education between schools of different tax base (and income level) and those redivided by racially segregated districts in urban areas. Income inequality affects public education on many different levels. It affects the amount offered for teacher salaries, the percentage of dependence on state aid for cities and towns for education, the ability of a school district to fund long term (technological) resource development plans, the number of special services offered, the quality of food eaten in school lunch rooms, etc.What we want is for students to believe what we believe: globalization is a reality, whether we love it or not. Because of this, it seems a series of events has occurred. Corporate America is threatened in its geopolitical position because of lower expectations of public school students. No Child Left Behind is a government reaction to this problem, demanding higher forms of accountability on all levels. Income inequality creates complex challenges for public education, and the causes of income inequality, often obscured by parochial vision, lead us back to the effects of globalization. So is it (globalization) an opportunity or a challenge or both?

Perspective and Reality

Why are so many people afraid of teenagers? For some, they represent anarchy, rebellion, freedom from authority, wild creativity and a dangerous abandonment of ‘common sense’. I don’t see it. Of course, my point of view is one from the classroom. Contrary to what a lot of friends think, teaching isn’t a burden in the slightest, if it comes with a new perspective. Today I shared lunch with a student who has been helping a parent overcome a really bad heart attack by working numerous jobs to pay the family’s bills. I saw students using art to express the ideas of slavery and freedom. I talked to a student who dreams of studying and teaching music for a living. It was a good day. It was empowering to see, listen and share. Maybe there’s more for the world to understand about how the teenage brain works. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with wanting to change the world.

The Forgotten Fire

Today, newspapers reported that an authorized Air Force flight transported six active nuclear missiles in a B52 bomber across the Midwestern states from the north to the south. The journey covered hundreds of miles and reminded Americans, it seems, that we have a really large number of nuclear warheads still active and ready to launch in the United States. How many Americans remember the Cold War fears of being attacked by the Soviet Union? The threat of mutually assured destruction hung over everyone then. Is it still the same today? There haven’t been many movies, books or songs that brought to light the danger and death that a nuclear blast would bring. When I was 13, I saw The Day After and was completely frightened. That movie, as hokey as it was, was all too real. Instead of focusing on the drama of actually launching nuclear missiles, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, this movie solely focused on a Russian retaliatory strike on our silos outside Lawrence, Kansas. It terrorized people so much that ABC set up nation-wide psychological help for people suffering from nuclear psychosis after watching the film. After the many accidents that could have started a nuclear war, I would think that the US military would maintain their low profile on our nuclear arsenal, but apparently too many people found out about the recent B52 flight to cover it up. Our worst case scenario would be the terrorist acquisition of a nuclear weapon. With so many loose nukes in the world, it is definitely a possibility. We know that Al Qaeda has plans to either build or obtain nuclear weapons. That scenario can’t be allowed to happen. But the US also maintains the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Look at countries like North Korea or Iran who have built and are trying to begin their own nuclear program. Having a nuke is a guarantee against being attacked. It’s also a big bargaining chip to getting other things, as North Korea has known, and as the Soviets and Cubans learned in the Cuban Missile Crisis – the closest the world has ever come to all out nuclear war. Who should have them and who shouldn’t? In one of my comic books, one of the main characters takes all of the world’s nuclear weapons and buries them two miles down in the Arctic Ocean. To prevent countries from building more, he leaves just one nuke in every single country, even the ones who didn’t have them before. If that country uses it, they lose their only weapon and face retaliation from the rest. It’s an impossible dream, but someday the world will have to come face-to-face with this monster. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, figured this out almost instantly after the bomb was used and then mass produced. He feared the total danger that would come with total power that nuclear weapons possessed. That fear still exists, whether the media chooses to report it, whether the military chooses to flaunt it and whether average people choose to acknowledge it.

Dreams of Rain

Water is an incredible thing. For at least 3 billion years, water has existed on the planet. It has become one of the most powerful forms of nature. For some reason, all life is dependent completely on water. It is far more precious than food. Water carves rock and shapes mountains. Its rains create forests deep in the center of continents in which 2/3 of all plants and animals live. Today, so many issues are centered on water. In the Middle East, control of water is power, as the dispute between Palestinians and the Israelis centers around who controls access to drinking water and irrigation. Glaciers store about 75% of the world’s fresh water supply. Recently, Canada and Russia have claimed control of the Arctic Ocean as it becomes more and more navigable through global warming. Water also has the power to destroy, as America unfortunately learned with the destruction of New Orleans in August 2005. Today is the two year anniversary of the devastation. It is also almost three years since one of the world’s most deadly tsunamis in Indonesia in December 2004. Some people suggest, though, that water is a receptive vessel for our emotions. Dr. Emoto, a Japanese researcher and physician, determined through exhaustive experiments that water responds to our emotions. By photographing water crystals and then directing thoughts, words or actions at the water, he has shown that the crystals change shape and form, because of us. Water is also an environmental concern in our industrial world. As industry expands, the pollution of our groundwater supply and the need for wastewater cleanup becomes more and more of a necessity. Even the drinking of purified bottled water is a pollution problem, since the demand for such water has created millions more tons of plastic, overloading recycling projects and filling landfills. Water is life, and no one knows this better than people living in the third world. Political activists have even called for water to be a free commodity around the world, since all people need it to live. The United Nation’s 2006 Human Development Report focuses entirely on water related problems and policy, and what the world can do specifically to improve life through access to water. Water has even shaped my own life in profound ways. Both my mother’s and father’s families were connected in some way to the ocean, as shipbuilders and fishermen. I grew up on the coast, almost always in or on the water. As a teen, one of my favorite books (and series) was Dune, by Frank Herbert, which centers on the dreams of and struggle for water on a desert planet. Perhaps it will become that important on our own planet in the future. For now, the glass is half full.

Tech & Tiananmen Square

Yahoo today had a lawsuit filed against it for aiding the Chinese government in supplying information on dissidents. Why is this important? There are a lot of reasons China is at the center of many events and issues in the world today. China is soon to surpass the US as the world’s largest polluter. China is also due to host the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing, an honor they have been preparing for years. China’s military has been in a process of modernization for over a decade. Hundreds of millions of its people have risen from extreme poverty since the 1980’s. Since then China has adopted what it calls ‘market socialism’, allowing it to participate in global trade. It has had nuclear weapons since 1964. China’s leaders are still Communists, leftovers from a not-so-distant age when the world’s most populous nation was ruled ruthlessly by one man: Chairman Mao Tse Tung. A recent biographer claimed that Mao was responsible for the deaths of over 70 million Chinese, in peacetime. It is not an exaggeration. Still many millions suffer in absolute and dire poverty in China’s eastern provinces. China has become the golden jewel of international capitalism as the world’s largest corporations fight for the right to sell their goods in China. Cigarette manufacturers sell millions of packs while Disney seeks to become a cornerstone of Chinese media and Yahoo and Google provide the Chinese government with computers and heavily regulated internet access. China also has one prized possession the world desperately wants: cheap human labor. How many goods sold in the US have been made in China? How many of those products now are considered unsafe? China’s also has had, for the last ten years, the world’s fastest growing economy, at almost 8% steady growth in GDP each year. The US is happy when it reaches 2%. What does this really mean for the future? Well, the world is changing. As Yahoo is brought to court, new precedents are set. Will technology aid oppression or fight it? Will Yahoo only follow the money, as international diamond companies did (and sometimes still do) in Africa, supplying women around the world with ‘blood diamonds’? Is access to the internet in China worth the government’s heavy-handed control? Consider the sacrifices of student demonstrators in June 1989, as thousands of protestors were brutally oppressed by China’s military as other Communist governments in Eastern Europe fell. One image always comes to mind to those who saw these events unfold on CNN: the Chinese man who refused to move when tanks stormed the square. Blocking them with his body, he became the symbol for resistance to cruelty around the world. Inside China, however, the crackdown had its desired impact. Even now, almost twenty years later, Yahoo and others are helping the government keep the voice of the people down. So what’s the future look like for China? Some believe democracy is inevitable. Others believe that globalization in China (and India) will tip the balance of power in the world. Still others believe China may become, eventually, a military threat. It does have one of the world’s oldest cultures. It’s influence is growing in Africa, South America and the Middle East. What we know now is that this court decision involving Yahoo will set an important example.

American Rocks

Jess was reminiscing today, remembering times when she explored different places on a whim. I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but she brought up the Boulder Field of Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania. I had never heard of it, but it triggered cool memories of my own: running really fast on breakwater rocks by the sea, jumping instinctively from ledge to ledge. Then I began thinking of the geological and oddities of the United States, because that’s kind of the person I am apparently right now. In New Mexico, the Lechuguilla cave system contains one of the world’s largest systems of natural crystal. It’s only recently been discovered and is still being explored, with over 100 miles of caves and tunnels. Jess and I actually came across it in the Planet Earth series by the BBC and the Discovery Channel (a must-see). Bryce Canyon is also just a bit freaky. Although not actually a canyon, it has lots of hoodoos, which are giant pillars formed from millions of years of erosion. The area forms its own natural amphitheatre. America even has its own Stonehenge, claiming to be the oldest man-made structure in the United States (over 4000 years old). It’s located at a place called Mystery Hill in New Hampshire. We’ve even sculpted mountains to make monuments. Almost everyone knows about Mount Rushmore, with the four heads, but few people know about the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is a project dedicated to carving an entire mountain into the figure of the famous Native American who fought the US Army to protect his lands. Some Native Americans believe it is sacrilegious to scar the earth in such a way, especially the Black Hills that Crazy Horse sought to protect. Others do not, as Judith Dupre points out in her upcoming book, Monuments: America's History in Art and Memory.

Bush Goes to Vietnam

President Bush connected the Iraq War to the Vietnam War last week in a way that has forced many people from that generation to scratch their heads and many historians to throw objects at their laptops. Really at stake here is how we use history to justify the actions of the present. Politicians do this all of the time. It’s not just Bush, and it’s not just now, but his comments were really interesting in any case. So what did he say? Bush stated that there was still debate about the reasons we entered Vietnam and the reasons we left. This is not actually the case. The documented reasons are very clear. All someone has to do is remember the 1954 Geneva Conference, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and resolution and the Pentagon Papers, what they meant, and how the government tried to prevent the public from knowing about them. Bush’s argument is that withdrawal is and was equal to failure. Because we withdrew from Vietnam, we lost. If we withdraw from Iraq, we lose. Before considering the merit of that claim, consider how many Vietnamese died then and how many Iraqis have died now. Consider the cost of the Iraq War. First, the argument against withdrawal concedes the argument against entering. No one is trying to defend that decision now, even Bush. Weapons of mass destruction are selectively forgotten. Second, withdrawal raises all kinds of worse scenarios: Iran controlling Iraq, more terrorist attacks against the US, weakness and dishonor in the face of the Muslim world, strategic loss of military bases in the Middle East, and more. All of these arguments, however, use the ‘trap’ argument. We can’t leave because the alternative is worse. That sounds like we’re trapped by our choices. Now, let’s get back to Vietnam for a bit. That war affected a whole generation. I was born right near the end, but my father served in the middle of it. So did many people I met later in life. Very few people speak of that war with pride in their country now. But let’s not confuse the issue. The soldiers did what they were ordered to do, even those in My Lai. Decisions during the Cold War and during the ‘War on Terror’ are made at the top.

So what does Bush mean now? The reality is that, as a ‘lame duck’ president, Bush is stuck with hard choices. On one hand, he doesn’t want to weaken his foreign policy at the end of his term. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to weaken the Republican position in the 2008 election for whoever their pick is. He knows Iran is watching, waiting for any opportunity. He knows the potential for another terrorist attack in the US is unfortunately a possibility. He does not want to leave Iraq, for all of the reasons stated above, but like Vietnam, an occupation coupled with a war does not succeed (some suggest it can never succeed) without internal change and support. Can the Sunni, Shiite and Kurd people work together to create a democratic society with stable political, economic and legal institutions protected and reinforced by law? No ‘surge’ of military force can guarantee that. Ultimately, victory or defeat is up to them, not us. It was the same in Vietnam. It was a hard lesson to learn, but by 1968, it was fairly clear that the US had lost support for the war both inside South Vietnam (the people we were supposed to be helping) and inside the US with more and more protests. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the war. Thousands of intellectuals and hundreds of thousands of youth also protested. It became the decisive issue of the 1968 election campaign. What will happen now? Will the US retreat to its bases in the south and west of the Iraqi desert, leaving the chaos to the Iraqis (and Iranians) themselves? Will we try to maintain police order, rebuild their infrastructure, run their government through proxies, and fund our military occupation indefinitely? The answers lay in how we understand our own past and in this case, the Vietnam War.

Google and Galileo

How's this for a coincidence? Apparently, Galileo developed an advanced telescope on this day in history over five hundred years ago. Yesterday, news reports around the world announced that Google Earth was adding another feature to its program. Now, you can enter an address and click the Google Sky button to see the night sky above you. What is mind-boggling is that you can zoom in, pivot your camera and move the mouse around to your heart's delight. Galileo was thrown in jail for refusing to refute (initially) his writings. For looking at the rings of Saturn he was tortured. Just the mere act of peering through a telescope challenged the institutional power of the Catholic Church at the time. Pope John Paul II formally forgave Galileo only recently too. Now comes Google. Is it possible that Google destroyed the telescope for amatuer nightwatchers? The night sky is as available as an interstate highway. But is it closer or farther away? In the coming year, the Japanese are going to expand the International Space Station with an addition, called Kibo. Moon bases are being planned, as is a US mission to Mars. The Pentagon is even eyeing the weaponization of space. Maybe as technology, like Google, makes space more accessible and corporations and nations see investment in space as profitable and strategically adventageous, we will move ultimately up and out. But at what cost? More or less than what Galileo paid?

Why this?

Well, first I have to say that I have been inspired by my former students (without their knowledge) to create a blog. Credit has to go where it is due. This blog should round off most of my efforts to innovate my teaching techniques in the coming year. For years, I have been creating web sites for students to complete assignments and explore historic research on the web. Last year, I established a discussion forum for my students to share ideas and assignments online. Over the summer I created a wiki for my students to submit their work in the coming school year. Now, as the last summer weeks tick slowly away, I thought that the creation of a blog would allow me to create a space for thoughts, historic connections, teaching moments, and other daily ideas that came in between the moments. We'll see. On to the teacher-babble...