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Sunday, 13 September 2009

  • Divided We Fall

    I wrote this on another site in regards to "remembering" 9/11, and feel it's worthy of re-posting here:

    How could any American ever forget?

    I hadn't had the TV on. As is still typical for me I got on my computer before anything else that morning. A friend had e-mailed me, saying she hoped I didn't have any family or friends in NYC or DC. Confused, I went to Yahoo News, and read it all. I didn't see anything happen live, and frankly I'm glad I didn't.

    Two events, two years apart most profoundly have influenced my life. The first occurred on April 20, 1999 less than five miles from where I live now. At the time, I lived in Georgia and it didn't impact me that much, but I never knew what a role it would come to play in my life. That was Columbine. And then 9/11/01. I was in my third semester of grad school, already feeling a bit disillusioned about the whole process. The events of that day created a whole new perspective for me. With each passing day I felt more and more that time should not be wasted doing something you're not sure you want to do. Life suddenly felt far more fragile than it ever had in the 26 years I'd lived to that point.

    Now I'm working to make a difference. I don't know what my influence will be, but as a teacher, one thing I'm striving for, every day, is to instill a little bit more compassion, a little bit more understanding of others. I can only hope our next generation will learn tolerance and respect for differing views, but I'm doing whatever little I can to make that hope a reality. Because it was the lack of that which led to 9/11, that is the fuel of all terrorism. Young men and women blinded by pure hate, actually led to believe that their God wants them to sacrifice themselves to cause the deaths of others.

    I look around at our nation today and feel disheartened. We are so divided and polarized. One need only examine the venom in the healthcare forums, or the abject silliness of debating whether the President can speak to students, or the utter lack of decorum that could actually cause a member of the United States Congress to call the president a liar in the Senate chamber and on live television. What have we lost in those eight years? "United We Stand" and so we did in those strange days of mid-September. Heartaching as the tragedy was, I never felt prouder to be an American than in those days when people put aside differences and realized the treasure of our common bonds. While part of me feels that the former President squandered the opportunity he had, the tremendous support he had from citizens and goodwill from other nations, ultimately we are all to blame for allowing ourselves to lapse back into exactly the same kind of "I don't like you because you don't think like me" mentality that, taken to its very extreme, led to those awful attacks.

Sunday, 06 September 2009

  • The Decline and Fall of American Civilization, Part I

    This week's post comes courtesy of the ill-founded furor over President Obama's planned address to the schoolchildren of America on Tuesday...

    We struggle to teach kids the importance of history, and deny them the chance to participate in it as it happens.

    It's not political. It's the President addressing the children of the United States. When I was their age, it would have been Reagan... and there's no way there would have been such furor. I doubt there would have been significant opposition.

    What have we come to in this country when EVERYTHING is perceived as having a political agenda? When we are completely polarized, left and right, even though in fact, the majority of Americans are more or less in the middle.

    The President wants to tell kids to stay in school and work hard, that they are responsible for their own education and ultimately their own success. If anything it's a CONSERVATIVE message!

    Yes, I voted for Obama and yes, I almost always lean Democrat. But had this been one year ago and President George W. Bush was giving this address, I would have been 100% for showing it then as well. Party doesn't matter, it's the PRESIDENT. Is there no respect for the office left?

    I understand if parents want to opt-out. I think they're playing ostrich-- I think it's shameful that, wow, we might actually allow our children to be exposed to an opinion that differs from ours. We might actually have to let them know that not everyone in the world thinks the same way their parents do. There's a real world out there they're going to have to grow up and join one day, but let's not prepare them for that...

    But all that being said, I understand the need for the opt-out. But as a teacher, my hands are more tied than that. After my principal went through three days of hell fielding nonstop e-mails and phone calls, he decided on a policy that left it up to individual teachers, with two conditions: 1) we would have to send home a permission slip, offering both opt-in and opt-out-- not such a big deal; and 2) we had to tie the address directly to the current unit we're teaching-- which is all but impossible.

    I just don't have the energy to play parlor tricks to create a justification for allowing The President of our nation, The Leader of the Free World to speak to my students. Apparently, it's no big deal that during their two years of middle school, they will listen to speeches by both MLK Jr. and Hitler; they will see man's inhumanity to man from the Holocaust to the atrocities of slavery and Indian "removal" here in our own country; but they can't listen to their current President telling them the value of education.

    I mean, god forbid some mention of government-run health care might slip in, because, you know, that's would be so much more horrible and "indoctrinating" that learning about the Nazis' rationale for the Final Solution.

    So, Mr. Teach, you will smile and nod and play the game, and then go home and shed a tear for the next generation.

Sunday, 30 August 2009

Sunday, 23 August 2009

Sunday, 16 August 2009

  • I'm Special

    Featured Grownups offered the writing prompt: What makes you so special? The impetus behind it was a query about what is the greatest problem plaguing Americans' psyches. The consensus among psychologists is that this most prominent malady is malignant self-love, or in a singular term, narcissism.

    I would not say I'm a narcissist. To whatever extent I love myself, it's not malignant. It's not harming myself or others. At the same time, I don't think I have a lack of self-love. (I mean the emotional and not physical variety, if you're thinking like that). I do think I'm special, and I'm happy to tell you why.

    For one thing, I'm intelligent. I mean, I'm really smart. Mensa material, even. I have a photographic memory and a mind like a steel trap. I retain facts both useful and useless. I wield a prodigious vocabulary. I seek to boldly split infinitives as they've never been split before, knowing exactly what that means. I can tell why "swimming" is a gerund, and why the correct spelling is y'all, not ya'll.

    But in the pursuit of true specialness, I decided to use this vast cerebral power for the good of humanity, and become a teacher. Even more special, I teach middle school. Anyone who has a 12-14-year-old child, or who knows a 12-14-year-old child, or has been a 12-14-year-old child, knows how especially special middle school teachers are.

    But most special of all is the fact I'm a father. Now listen. There are millions of fathers-- it doesn't take anything special to become one, as anyone familiar with the process knows-- but I did not become a father in the usual manner. I married into four children, one with special needs, and then adopted the oldest, instantly becoming legal father of a teenage daughter. That's special.

    I'm also a special writer, a special blogger, a special sports fan. You name it, I'm special at it. I wrote this post especially to tell you how special I am. I could go on, but then I would be narcissistic-- a quality which, apparently, is not so special.

jasonwrites

  • Visit jasonwrites's Xanga Site
    • Name: Jason
    • State: Colorado
    • Metro: Denver
    • Birthday: 4/8/1975
    • Member Since: 5/5/2005
    • Lifetime

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About Me

  • I have been on Xanga since essentially its beginning (December 2000), originally as Litboiler; I've also appeared under enigma42, education_is_life, and Jason_the_poet. I've blogged elsewhere during that time as well (see box below) but I'll always consider Xanga to be my original blogging home. I met my wife on Xanga, after all. I'm happily married with one adopted teenage daughter and three younger stepchildren. I teach middle school (7th grade Language Arts & Geography). I am a graduate student. I am a writer.