Attack

These past few posts have been responding to recent things. I worry about being reactive rather than proactive; will I really make any progress?

But how do I ignore a man with LDS roots shooting up a gay bar on the eve of the Transgender Day of Remembrance?

I can't even promise that this will be a coherent post, but there are some things that I want to say, and then I guess I hope that a week can go by without some new terrible thing happening.

First of all, though I am almost positive that the shooter's claim to be non-binary is a cynical ploy suggested by the lawyers, I am glad to read articles respecting that and using "they/them" for the shooter. Respecting pronouns is so easy that it is the least we can do. Let's make sure that we also do that for people who are not mass murderers.

It is possible that someone who was not cisgender or heterosexual would target people in what should be their community? Absolutely. It still seems suspect in this case.

I also understand that there were some people wanting to prepare some kind of petition or something directed at Elder Holland for his "muskets" speech, perhaps assigning some responsibility.

I can see that, but it is ignoring other issues that are important.

First of all, it is questionable how involved in the church the shooter was anyway. Without having looked into it that much, that is a troubled family (they seem to be pretty consistently politically conservative) and who had the most influence on the shooter is questionable.

In addition, while Elder Holland's talk was over a year ago, there has been increasing commentary from all over the right targeting transgender and homosexual people, equating them with groomers and sexual predators targeting children. These are blatant lies, but that doesn't stop the repetition. 

The church is not good enough on this issue, but we are not the ones driving it.

It does drive home the point that being accused of bigotry is such a minor complaint when you see the things that happen to marginalized people. That is a reason to be ashamed of that talk. It's embarrassing.

The other thing is that we really need to look at patriarchy.

It wasn't the only shooting recently. It never is anymore.

We should think about how a culture where being weak or having lower status is shameful, and yet if you don't have a way of earning more money or gaining more prestige, the go to solution seems to be violence. That violence is more likely to be targeted against those who are deemed of lower value by patriarchy: women, people of color, queer people... society lends a certain permission there.

It is worth noting that right-wing politicians are not even murmuring their "thoughts and prayers" platitudes so much this time, but leaning in to the abuse lies that justify it. The right's reaction to the Pulse shooting was bad, but this is worse.

Yes, groomers are real, but they are mostly white men. They are the teachers who run off with students, or the fathers and grandfathers who molest their children and grandchildren. We all know of these cases, but that doesn't fit the image of how things are supposed to be. 

Yes, the world is not what it should be. Targeting the people that you feel like you have permission to target is not the answer. 

Let's be honest about that.

Where your treasure is...

There have been some rather spectacular value reductions lately.

First, FTX -- an exchange for various cryptocurrencies -- has gone into bankruptcy proceedings, leaving many people unable to access their funds. Part of the problem may have been a secret backdoor that allowed money to be transferred without updates to the financial records.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/12/1-billion-to-2-billion-of-ftx-customer-funds-missing-report.html

It is unclear whether this has changed the mind of anyone who thought the lack of regulation on crypto was a feature and not  a bug.

In addition, Tesla stock has been trending downward. 

One interesting aspect of that is that with Twitter stock having been delisted, I can't help but wonder if there would have been the same effect on Tesla if Twitter were still publicly traded. There would still be reason for the Tesla drop, as the company shares are now tied to the Twitter purchase, and the purchaser is displaying horrible management skills, acting exactly as if his wealth and ego made him believe he was the genius his fans claim he is, despite a disturbing lack of evidence.

Plus Teslas keep bursting into flames and getting involved in fatal collisions. 

That's the kind of thing that hurts investors' confidence, and the stock market is based largely on confidence. If people believe the stock will increase in value, the demand to purchase it goes up, and that in itself increases the value.

If you can hold on, meaning if you have enough real assets that you don't need to sell your depreciated stocks, the stocks will often recover. Sometimes they don't, but more to the point, poorer people may not be able to wait. I believe that the 2008 crash was a big factor in the spread of income inequality, but probably also where the church's hedge fund really started getting big.

This post is not about that, but I want to make three points about "investment" based on things that we know and believe.

My family has been enjoying reruns of Barney Miller. There was one recurring character, Mr. Brauer, who was always getting into some new craze. His frustrated wife Harriet (played by Doris Roberts) would seek help from the police. 

The first time it was because he was converting all their assets into gold, including emptying their savings and selling their furniture. He was doing this in anticipation of an economic collapse, where their current cash would be worthless.

"Do you want to have to roll a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread?"

Other episodes featured other people trying to prepare for economic collapse, becoming survivalists or finding other ways to buck the system. 

It's not that there haven't been economic problems, but there was never really that collapse where you needed gold, though you will still periodically see commercials urging you to do it. However, it assumes that someone who has something of value will want gold. 

If you want bread, maybe you should purchase flour and yeast.

The idea of food storage and other forms of provident living are old concepts to us. How well we follow them is another question, but they do make sense.

Food storage may not as easily fit into the scripture referenced in the title, "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matthew 6:21) 

It does fit in with knowing what matters. As useful as various items can be as a means of economic exchange, in the absence of the need for exchange those items revert back to their intrinsic worth.  Gold is pretty and malleable, so has some usefulness in that way. Green paper -- or digital or paper records of things that were bought and can be sold as long as someone else is willing to buy -- is less obviously valuable. 

In the absence of that kind of value, the desire to accumulate more can function as a kind of addiction, where it can never be enough, no matter how many zeros you add to the total.* 

Therefore, it seems worthwhile to consider how much of environmental destruction, attacks on personal worth via advertising, and exploitation of labor happens because of capitalism's need for "more".

Consumer confidence is often boosted, leading to a rise in stock prices, because of harmful practices like layoffs at companies that are making a profit, but just not getting that stock boost. 

When you look at the companies that really do collapse (oh hey, there was just a sentence for the Theranos fraud), there is often some kind of malfeasance or at least wild arrogance involved, that integrity could have prevented.

There is a negative relationship between how we value people and how we value money. 

People need to be our treasure.

That leads to the third point: how you invest your treasure.

A stock portfolio can shrink away before you have a chance to spend it. Many women have saved up for retirement travel with their first husbands, then been widowed and gone with their second husbands, or perhaps not gone at all as health issues came with aging. That saving and putting off sounds prudent, but simply may not work out.

Temporal life is built on being temporary. If you feed someone, they will get hungry again. If you fund someone's medical care, they will still eventually die.

Regardless of that, when we give from love and do things to make people's lives better, there is a very real way in which is cannot be taken away. Not only will our hearts stay there, but that giving will stay with our hearts.

As we start a season of giving in perilous times, let us consider what things have eternal worth. 

This doesn't rule out fleeting joys and pleasures, those moments of rest and shared enjoyment can have great worth, increasing our bonds and refreshing our souls.

I can't tell you how or if to plan for retirement, but you can make those decisions with eternal perspective.

*Wealth acquisition as an addiction comes partly from Charles Eisenstein and his book Sacred Economics, but I can't refer to it enthusiastically as there were so many bad ideas around that pretty good one.

Examining education

The member I mentioned last week was not the only local member running for office. 

Just as he lost his race for the Oregon senate, there was another member running for the Oregon house, as a sort of a sequel to his failed run for the Hillsboro school board. 

I am thinking about that more because of seeing the complaints of yet another church member regarding the schools, and how bad they are and how we needed his leadership.

There were some missing points that I feel need to be addressed.

The member had a long litany of grievances when pressed. They included the lack of deadlines on assignments or penalties for turning work in late, the ability to retake tests, the use of sentence frames, and a lack of constructive feedback. In addition, she was upset about the lack of gifted programs in middle school, complained that answers were given during the lessons, and while it was not brought up in her original complaint, when someone else mentioned the lack of family values, she heartily agreed.

Let me just start by saying that some of the complaints don't make a lot of sense. For example, on the one about the teacher giving the answers during class, meaning instruction? The complaints relating to tests and homework would indicate that something has to be done with the instruction later. Is the concern that there should be more mystery? More things that need to be solved via lengthy homework? Because they are finding that is not beneficial for students.

https://news.stanford.edu/2014/03/10/too-much-homework-031014/

Clearly there is a concern that the work is too easy, with the sentence frames being a part of that, but sentence frames are prompts, often used to guide longer writing. If there are truly students that are weak on grammar and sentence structure, those prompts might help them without damaging the students who are stronger. I am not sure that is a real problem. 

There was definitely a concern that the work is too easy, and this will result in students who don't know how to work, but I can guarantee this is not true for at least two of the complaints. If you get all of the assignments turned in by the end of the year, having procrastinated or been distracted by personal issues or only recently becoming engaged by the teacher, I assure you that getting that all caught up will not be easy. It will take a lot of effort and it shows motivation. 

In addition, if after having done badly on a test you understand where you went wrong and want to try again, that is not a bad thing. It is more work, not less work.

It is not even unprofessional. I had just read a post from a college instructor on making all deadlines flexible. It worked great, and commenters likened it to their office experiences:

https://twitter.com/margosteines/status/1590074378443948033?

All in all, these things seem downright humane, giving students who struggle a change to overcome those struggles.

Of course, this parent has a child who is brilliant, and being held back by not getting specific feedback on her good work and not being able to participate in gifted programs.

As a participant in gifted programs, I don't remember them doing much. I do know that they are really effective at hoarding resources to the students who are already better off. 

https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-what-research-tells-us-about-gifted-education/ 

https://nypost.com/2021/10/28/schools-debate-gifted-and-talented-programs-racist/ 

The racism correlations are interesting, in that they are more popular in the South, and that is not where the highest overall test scores are.

So, let's talk about those family values. 

I posted a LOT about those school board elections (11 posts, first one at https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/05/2021-school-board-elections-quick.html). I remember their values clearly:

Schools must be opened to in person learning right away (this was before any vaccines)
No teaching of critical race theory (which really means any acknowledgment of the presence of racism or judgment against it)
No affirmation of differences in gender and sexuality (which would also tend to support that historic prompt to academic greatness: bullying!)

Sure, they might have said that those other values were taking away from real teaching time, but the only strategy for greater academic rigor was leaving poor kids behind. To be fair, that could have easily incorporated gifted programs.

I think about ways to facilitate learning all the time, just as a matter of personal passion; I really care about this.

But if you mainly want school to be about affirming that your child is special, you should be supporting a tax level that allows for a lower student-to-teacher ratio. If you think your child is that much more special than all of the others, that may be appropriate in a parent but cannot be for the teachers.

One other things... I have not given any names here. I assume the failed (thankfully) political candidates are easy to identify and am fine with that, and have some concerns that the complaining private citizen might be identifiable. And yet, they end up being so much on script, I can't help but suspect there are other church members and parents saying the exact same things. 

It's like the 40% of Beaverton school district students identifying as non-binary when the national average is only 10%. Neither of those numbers are right, and I don't think the person repeating them is deliberately lying, but someone was, and their communication methods appear to be effective.

Are sentence frames the new pronouns? Not yet, but that is even better! Because some of those twisted liberals who won't give in to the outright bigotry might still fall for academic concerns that just happen to be misguided.

It shouldn't even be surprising, then, that the misguided complaints happen to correspond with racism and capitalism. That was practically inevitable.

Why third parties don't work

This is not going to be about the numbers.

I am writing this because a local church member (and locally fairly prominent) is running as an unaffiliated, non-partisan candidate, despite being a lifelong Republican.

In the past, it has not been unusual for a certain percentage of Mormons to not want to be Republican like everyone else. Usually the answer to that was to say they considered themselves more Libertarian.

I had seen the signs around town, and then I saw that he was one of the sponsors for the non-partisan gubernatorial candidate; none of that was surprising. 

I was a little surprised to see a postcard addressed to a household member from someone we know, encouraging her to vote for him, as he is what the community needs.

That is why I have been thinking about it more.

Usually when I write about the problems with third parties, it is pointing out that people on the left cannot downplay their interest in racial equality as a way to appeal to conservatives because we will never sound as reliably racist as the Republicans. If that is the voters' issue (disappointingly, it plays a prominent role), our efforts there won't work.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some Republicans now find themselves in a similar boat. If they are not wholly in the cult -- where the open racism, projected fraud claims, and insurrections seem a bit far -- they are still surrounded by cult members in their party.

The apparent solution then is to try and lure people who aren't steeped in QAnon over to their side.

In much the same way, it is not going to work. We know that your hearts are still conservative; we can tell by how much of your focus is on crime, which is not nearly as rampant as you keep saying it is. We know because when you refer to the Republican candidate being too extreme, you don't specify what level of extreme would be okay for you. 

We know.

This is not to put Democrats or liberals or especially Progressives on a pedestal; we have the same problems with racism. That is a feature, not a bug.

Today isn't about Democrats, though; it is about people who have been very comfortable being Republicans until the dog whistles turned to fog horns. This is about people who were okay with rumors of police brutality because that is just criminals, and then you keep seeing different videos and you can't deny that it looks wrong.

As people of faith, believing in the priceless value of truth and the worth of souls, going back to the dog whistles should not be sufficient. If it was comfortable then because of what you did not know, this is time to move past ignorance. There's a saying that when you know better, you do better. Well, not everyone, but we should.

For this election, I hope that Oregon is still liberal enough that the Democrats will win. Not because they are perfect, but because they will still be better. 

I honestly don't know. Last time around things worked out for the Hillsboro and Beaverton school districts, but they sure didn't for Newberg. Those repercussions are still happening.

The past few years have given ample evidence that the two parties are not the same. If you find that you are unable to stand up to your party and exert an influence when they veer badly off the rails, spend some time pondering that.

Dear conservatives, please consider what it is that you are trying to conserve.

I try and hope for the future, but I would sure love to stop seeing people I know from church being in the vanguard of the problem.