Out of some okay books

Seeking learning and wisdom out of the best books is a noble goal, if not a lot of pressure, but helpful ideas can come from all kinds of places.

I just finished reading all of Andrea Davis Pinkney's books --  to the extent that is possible -- after starting in February of 2022. There will be more about that in Friday's post on sporkful.blogspot.com.

The reading I did included two anthologies, so what I am going to write about was not written by her, but I found it because of her.

Anthologies are always kind of a mixed bag anyway, but really, it is about the thoughts.

From The Creativity Project: An Awesometastic Story Collection (2018), invited participants each submitted one writing prompt and responded to another. Someone had a prompt about advice for a newly dead person from someone who had been dead longer. I regret not having either author's name.

In this story, a newly dead man is not sure whether he is in Heaven or Hell. His advisor explains that he is -- at his most beautiful -- going to revisit the moment of his life when he was ugliest, and see how it could be different, and get a chance to do things better. Hell can become Heaven.

In this case, his most beautiful was during his final illness, telling his wife that he loved her and that he was sorry he had not been a better husband. His ugliest was when he harassed a women wearing hijab on a train. His guide just happened to be the woman who reached out to the target of his harassment, distracting and deflecting the situation.

(I was kind of dreading that outcome because Portland has a really bad example of Islamophobic harassment on a train turning deadly, but this was not like that. It may still have been inspired by that.)

In Be Careful What You Wish For: Ten Stories About Wishes, (2007) there is a school where all the sixth graders get to participate in "Wish Week", where whatever wish you commit to will come true. That story is by Gail Carson Levine.

One girl has a hard time committing to a wish, signing hers late, but finally settles on everyone having to walk in the shoes of someone they have hurt. While there is a literal aspect to the wish, with people actually finding the shoes of others on their feet, the metaphor is real also, with new understanding and sympathy coming with that.

I read the two relatively close together, and while I was thinking of how we don't look inward enough... that maybe we need to ask ourselves harder questions.

There are some potential questions here.

Whom have you hurt? How did that affect them?

When have you been ugliest?

When have you been at your most beautiful?

Can you apply some of that beauty to some of that ugliness, and make things better?

Is it I?

Politically, many people with whom I ostensibly share some very important values are terrible jerks.

I know, that sounds more like my religious problem, doesn't it?

There is the same issue at the root of both sides of the problem: it is easy to decide that others are wrong and bad. Just write them off and channel all of your anger there!

As I have said before, dividing people into "good" and "bad" is reductive. We all have our own flaws, and things we will be wrong about, or perhaps we will be right, but in the wrong way.

I have been thinking about this more because I have recently seen people that have left the church decrying the patriarchy of the church.

They are not wrong about that, but their complaints are focused on the church as if that is the only bastion of patriarchy around. That is clearly not true.

Patriarchy is a corrupting force in many other religious organizations, not even exclusively Christian or Judeo-Christian. It affects government, and if it is a stronger force on the Republican side, it is a problem for the Democrats, which the Progressives will complain about with far more scorn than they give Republicans, but shockingly without a trace of irony for how they uphold it.

That goes back thousands of years, though perhaps not as many as you'd think. It may be more reasonable to refer to it as dominator culture, because that gets to the heart of wanting to dominate and exert authority over those below you, thus setting up the hierarchy. 

"Patriarchy" specifically denotes that the hierarchy is male-led. That's the flavor we know, so it does matter, but the issue is the need to dominate, not who gets to dominate.

I am not saying that to criticize anyone who has left the church; those decisions often makes sense.

What I am saying is that if you then harden your own heart against everything associated with it, well, you have a hard heart. The existence of other hard hearts on the other side does not negate yours.

I have felt alienated at church, My continuing to wear a mask when it looks like I am the only one (but I am really only almost the only one) has been a big part of that. It is easy to see those unmasked faces as signs that they have rebuked science and embraced Trump. 

That is certainly true for some, but others have just gotten tired, or taken capitalist-led efforts to downplay the pandemic in good faith, or are submitting to peer pressure. All of those are things I can understand, but will stubbornly resist.

I realized I needed to focus on loving more. That means looking for the good and enjoying people and looking for ways to serve. I can do that, and it helps.

I have written before that there may be a time when my integrity requires leaving. If that happens, I will. For now my integrity requires me to stay, and to keep working on charity and humility.

That is not automatically the answer for anyone else.

My standard answer on issues of gender and sexuality is that for church doctrine, that is the province and responsibility of church leaders (who may be held back by their own bias and the readiness of the bulk of the church). However, anyone can get answers for their own life and what they need to do.

Those answers are still likely to require charity and humility.

They will require the Spirit, which will be shut out by a hard heart.

I know people who have been in much worse wards, with harsher, more dominating people. In that situation, maybe it would be right for me to leave. Or, maybe I would stubbornly stick it out, pushing back so much that I would be asked to leave.

Or maybe I would change someone's mind.

I can't tell you what to do, but I encourage you to return to that question, multiple times because it is actually multiple questions.

What am I doing now? Is this what I should be doing? Should I be doing it differently?

Do I feel the influence of the Holy Ghost? How is my relationship with God? 

How is my heart?

Getting to two things about grief

I have been much more aware of grief recently, especially in media.

Two things combined this weekend that have influenced my thoughts, but also I appreciate the way they have come together.

Often with the books that I read and movies I watch, there is an order that feels right, and then they end up working together. A lot of the thinking about grief was because of movies that I had watched because of a reaction to some comments on the Oscars, though when I watched them was largely related to when they became available to me.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2023/05/movies-woman-king-and-till.html

In the reaction to the murder (and I use "murder" deliberately) of Jordan Neely, some were bringing up the "bystander effect" for why no one intervened. This misunderstands both that situation and the murder of Kitty Genovese, which is the lens through which people tend to view the bystander effect.

One thread about that led to a documentary, The Witness, that I watched Friday night. 

https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/1654520961096351750

https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482313144/the-witness-exposes-the-myths-misconceptions-of-kitty-genoveses-murder 

I was already familiar with what the media got wrong about the case, but if there is more to learn, I would like to learn more.

In the documentary, Kitty's younger brother Bill talks to various witnesses, people who knew his sister, and even the son of his sister's murderer. 

That meeting was particularly interesting in terms of how trauma affects us. Bill Genovese saw "bystanders" trying to get out of the draft, signed up for Vietnam, and lost both of his legs. Steven Moseley was taunted as a murderer's son and really wanted to do good; he became a minister.

What struck me most was the interactions Bill had with his siblings, and their discomfort over his digging deeper. Their mother's grief led to an early pattern of protection, where you could never talk about the murder. Years after both of their parents are gone, that pattern is still there. You learn that Kitty's nieces and nephews know very little about her.

Bill - perhaps still incapable of standing by - keeps digging. You don't see every step, but at the end there is a family gathering, with the telling of stories and laughter, and it seems to be a relief.

The final piece was reading an article about the writer who worked with Prince Harry on Spare.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare?

It is really more about the process and the writer's history, but there was this part:

That imperious Windsor motto, “Never complain, never explain,” is really just a prettified omertà, which my wife suggests might have prolonged Harry’s grief. His family actively discourages talking, a stoicism for which they’re widely lauded, but if you don’t speak your emotions you serve them, and if you don’t tell your story you lose it—or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it. Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane. We say ourselves into being every day, or else...

I had a second thought about silence. Ghosts don’t speak—says who? Maybe they can. Maybe sometimes they should.

This is a lengthy process to get to understanding anything about grief, but I include it because there are things all around to help us. We should listen for them. Healing is possible.

So this is what came to me:

We have to be willing to bear the pain of loss to have the joy of loving.

With our knowledge of resurrection and eternal families, we should be able to do that. 

I don't even think those are particularly profound, but it's the feelings along the way.

That's why the process matters.

And in about three months there will be two more books read, and perhaps more there, or in a completely different direction.

Do they know (or care) that they are lying?

I had thought this post was going to be about spotting the fascists, but I think I will post that Tuesday on the main blog. Maybe this other post fits better here. 

This week I listened to a clip of one of the Hillsboro school board candidates, Bart Rask, speaking. 

I first noticed some similar talking points to someone else; that's no surprise. 

Then there was a section on the sex education curriculum. I was pretty sure that was a mix of lies and exaggeration, but again, that is old news. Every couple of years someone is up in arms over kids in elementary school being taught how to have sex (like positions), and it is never true.

Then, almost at the end of the clip (which was only seven minutes but felt longer), I realized he was talking about The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks and not describing it accurately. 

However, he kept saying you could check the web site; I did.

It's not that I didn't know he was wrong. It's just, are you taking a piece of information and misinterpreting it? How willfully? Are you repeating something you heard from someone else?

I decided to transcribe it. It was a really annoying experience, but I did it and the link to the video clip and the transcription are at the bottom of this post.

So, you can check for yourself, but I think as many times as he repeated it, there may have been a defensiveness there. Sure, you can check it, but you don't need to. You can trust me.

First of all, here are some of the inaccuracies that can be easily determined. Yes, you can view the Hillsboro School District's Comprehensive Sex Education curriculum breakdown by grade level at https://sites.google.com/hsd.k12.or.us/hsdcshe/lessons-by-grade-level#h.p_KgsAA-PINJnz.

You may also notice a link to Erin's Law. I know I went over this last time, but there are laws about what children need to know because of things that happened to other children. To remove some of these things from the curriculum you would need to change the law, and I would be very interested in your justifications.

However, there is still nothing about teaching fifth graders how to have sex. 

Because it does mention sexually transmitted disease, there may indeed be something about condoms.

I cannot find anywhere recommendations for high schoolers to read about Samantha Bee's sexual fantasies as a Catholic school girl (I am not sure that such a book exists). For the gay transvestite book, I think he means Love That Story: Observations from a Gorgeously Queer Life by Jonathan Van Ness (transvestite is a stretch, but okay). I still don't see anything close on the reading list. They may very well be available in the school library. 

Now, My Princess Boy. by Cheryl Kilodavis, is in fact on the 1st grade curriculum. They seem to be more specific when they say something true, logically enough. You can tell that the audience finds that objectionable enough, but what is the point of the book? From the Goodreads description:

as a community, we can accept and support youth for whoever they are and however they wish to look.

Well, they hate stuff like that.

The big thing for me was when we got to Henrietta Lacks. Again, that name was not said, because that would be too specific when lying. However, when he said died of cervical cancer in 1951, I was like, wait a minute! So I did a search and found a syllabus for Health Sciences 1:

https://www.hsd.k12.or.us/cms/lib/OR02216643/Centricity/Domain/517/Copy%20of%20Health%20Sciences%201%20Troy%20Hall.pdf

As represented by Bart Rask, the students spent seven weeks just reading a biography written by a woman who experienced racism when she was being treated for cancer in the time of segregation (with no anatomy or physiology like you should have for a health class) thus part of the race-baiting of students. 

First of all, this class is Health Sciences 1, part of college prep series for a career in health services. It combines with Health Sciences 2 and Anatomy and Physiology.

Health Sciences 1 focuses on treating people and animals, and what it takes to become an informed, professional caregiver. The book is the primary course text, but there are also movies, job shadowing, and many other aspects. It sounds like a great class.  

He lied not just about the role the book plays in the class, but about the book itself.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is not an autobiography, and not really about her experiences. Her cancer cells became an important part of medical research, but also causing some problems in medical research (for their ability to take over other cells). There is a lot of information not only about the whats and hows of medical research, but also research ethics and access to health care.

Furthermore, author Rebecca Skloot first got the idea when she was a student at Portland Community College, taking the class because high school was boring her and she wasn't applying herself. Therefore, there is the local connection, and a kinship for these high school students taking college prep courses.

This is also an award-winning book that got a fair amount of press -- perhaps more in Oregon -- and my first thought was how could a medical professional not know?

Except, he probably does know. 

Because they do lie. They may not always know that they are lying, but sometimes they do, and they do not care. They are sure enough that they are right that they can justify some lying or unethical practices, but... if you are willing to do those things, how will you know if you stop being right?

Anyway, I know I will post more on sporkful.blogspot.com on Tuesday, and after that I may be done with this round of the school board elections, but I will probably not be done with fascism.

To view Bart Rask's clip:

https://www.facebook.com/Janet.Bailey.Hyatt/posts/pfbid035MJzKTXE5mQaELX3D4gC71zSY3bEN9coiAaVoiDELQPSs4eSSgzkfqtftj7R4Viil

(transcription below)

<start of segment> ... my grandmother's cousin was Victor Atiyeh. I'm a third generation Syrian Lebanese, like Victor Atiyeh. I'm an orthopedic surgeon. My office twenty-five years in the same location in downtown Hillsboro. I have six kids, three out of school, three still in school and that is my source of information. That's why I know how wacky the school system is I know it from my own research and my kids' homework, looking at the web site. 

The Hillsboro school district is a golden source to find out what is going on and there is also an app called Google Chrome I believe where you can look up schools' assignments in different classes and as a parent I have access to most of what they're taught. So over the years I've actually taken notes, believe it or not, of what's been being taught and have a whole library of the silliness of really it boils down to a re-education camp, especially recently with what's going on. I'll give you some examples. For the sex ed starting in kindergarten, and this is on the Hillsboro web site, this is not secret, you can look it up yourself, starting in kindergarten children are taught that gender is an identity, it is not based on biology and that you are what you think you are. 

First grade there is a recommended book called My Princess Boy. On the cover of that book is a little boy dressed as a girl. Fifth grade, kids are taught how to use a condom and ten year olds are taught different ways of having sex. Higher grades it gets even more disgusting. Reading assignments in high school they one book that's recommended called, by this woman called Samantha Bee, I think she's a comedian, and it's about her sexual fantasies while she was a high school Catholic girl, and there's another book by a scholar called Jonathan Ness who is a gay transvestite and it is about the civilian life of a gay transvestite and has on the cover this fella dressed as a girl in high heels and a long beard and prancing around in a girl's type way. So those are the types of things they are being taught and it's all there out in the open. If you don't believe me you can look it up yourself. 

The other thing is poor student quality, poor education quality. Last poll I saw was Oregon was number six from the bottom. Hillsboro is below average in a below in our below average state. Seven years ago Hillsboro was average for the state of Oregon. In the last seven years, almost correlating with the increase in per capita spending there's been a corresponding decrease in the school quality based upon their test scores for math and English. So the last data on a year ago year 21-22, where Hillsboro used to be average for math and English. It was math and English scores are 9 and 17% below state average. The state average. While in the same, this is over 7 years, 2014 - 2022, the same 7 year period , per capita spending went up 33%. More spending, poorer quality.

Why is it poorer? What is so bad about schools now, comparative? When we were in school, I was in school back in the 60s and 70s, and one thing I noticed, I think the one theme, if I can summarize in one sentence is poor expectations. And they stretch three weeks of work into three months. 

For example, and I know this for money, ask my kid what they do, We're reading a couple of short stories. What are you doing now? We're reading the same short stories. We're writing a paper from these two or three short stories. When's the paper due? It's at the end of the quarter. So after two or three months. After three months we're reading three stories and writing a two page paper. Yes Dad, that's what we're doing. How did you do on the paper? I got an A. Did the teacher make any marks on it? No, there's no marks on it. There's just an A there.

So they go through three months reading two short stories and they don't they get very little feedback on the papers they write. And the other low expectation they make is that they have multiple chances to do tests take the test over. I don't mean a different test; I mean the exact same test with the exact same questions. So if they get D on the test, or a C on the test they have an option to take the test over again. Same with many classroom assignments. If you get a C on a classroom paper or on a math test or a science test, you have the option of taking the exact same test over. So there's no incentive to study hard to do right the right way the first time.

There's also very little enforcement of tardiness. You have to be... It's very subjective on when a teacher declares a kid as tardy. I know this because I do lectures in some of the health sciences classes my kids.  Oftentimes kids will show up five or ten minutes late, they're not counted as tardy. And the teacher, this is when I was giving a lecture at Liberty High School just about a month ago, kids were just strolling in.late, "Oh we didn't count 'em, we're just happy that they're there." How do I know? Because I was there and I seen it and I heard it. It's how I know.

Other poor expectations. The race-baiting the Balkanization and tribalization of kids. This is kind of indoctrinating. These are classroom assignments that are integrated and inserted in multiple different subjects. For example, my daughter's health science class, you would think that there's a part about anatomy and physiology and medicine and dentistry and that sort of thing. Well they spent seven weeks talking on the topic of racism in science. How do I know? I know because I saw it in the curriculum. Racism in science. And what is there example? There example of it is one book written by a woman who was treated for cancer in 1951 in Baltimore.And it's essentially a biography of her, it's not really a science book it's a biography of a woman of how she had some experiences with racism in the early 1950s in the time of segregation. (disbelief in audience) Yeah, the 1950s. She died in 1951 of cervical cancer. So that's their racism in science.

 In my son's - this is last year - my son's <end of segment>