It’s amazing how often I feel I should write something, and I open this page, and nothing ever comes out. Not like writers block, but like the things I want to talk about get lost against the background noise of the day.
And then my Goldberry says I made her laugh, and a long lost friend writes a catch-back-up letter… and I wonder.
But most of what I’ve been wanting to write about lately would sound political, since it is. Some of it isn’t.
The first thing that’s been dying to escape into this empty freedom of the North… the first thing is with politics, particularly the politics of fear. A blunder by a major political party a few weeks ago showed their true intentions of scaring people away from personalities and ideas. Both major political parties (and likely all since the beginning of said parties) partake in this practice, but to see it so blatantly honed made me particularly mad. It’d be like me trying to scare people away from money or televangelists or raw ignorance… certain radio and TV personalities. I don’t need to paint these things or people in a dark or cartoonish light. I don’t need to paint their faces or brand a historically heated adjective across their foreheads. I just get mad when the only ideas that are presented are denunciations of someone else or their ideas. It works the same in a religious sphere, when the end of the world is given precedence over the part of the world we’re in right now. It’s the same power that is given to fear, to demonize the other side, to be wrapped in justification and self-righteousness that holds others at bay, and keeps any possibility of a good future from being known, or even imagined.
I was just being too vague, wasn’t I? But onto other things, like textbooks. Talk about fear. Just seeing the philandering rhetoric coming out of the Texas schoolboard meetings made me more certain that it isn’t what you look out, but how you look at it that makes all the difference. The arguments being made were about what should be included (conservative names and viewpoints) and what shouldn’t (minority history, non-white culture, and non-Christian religion). I’m the first to admit, you can’t have it all fit in the textbook - there’s no such textbook. Yes, some important people and events will fall between the lines and will be left for later times. But try, try, please try with all your conscious moral aptitude to allow history not to be a battleground between a conservative and liberal outlook. Teach students to want to know beyond the standard textbook. Teach them to look beyond their culture, their language, their era - teach them to see rather than what to look at! Teach them to read the words of the Founding Fathers rather than view them as Christians or deists or angels or demons. Teach them to find opposing viewpoints rather than to hear only the voice they want to hear. History is like all other human endeavors - it is merely a tool to look at something. The scientific endeavors tend to be like a sifting box to separate out the plain dirt of existence. History is millions of singing voices, and you have to learn how to listen to the song. It’s not written in rock formations (words could come back to bite me) or bird migrations or weather patterns - it is written by humans, and humans only. Cutting out some stories for the sake of balancing what is a perceived “liberal bent” is… maybe the exact best example of the two different thoughts. If education is so liberal, then the conservative reaction could only be to ignore, to constrain, to save what remains, rather than to include, and enable, and seek something more. Maybe education can only be liberal, because it asks for a broader viewpoint by nature of asking questions rather than simply seeking answers.
The last thing I wanted to complain, if complaining is what I’m doing, about is - once again Texas, and the question of how energy companies are treated. Complaints were made against the special treatment wind-power companies get compared to natural gas. The argument was that the playing field should be equal, otherwise the wind power companies have an unfair advantage. The underlying issue is profits. The system in place makes it more profitable and less risky to invest and generate wind power than it does anything else. My problem is with the desire for any natural gas, oil, or coal power plant fighting to stay alive. Instead of investing there, those companies should be (and should have been for decades) investing in wind and solar power. Instead of the playing field being made more even, I think it should be more slanted, so there is no incentive to continue with power plants than need oil, coal, or natural gas in contrast to the energy of the future.
Obviously, I am not joining a Tea Party movement anytime soon. My sweetheart is almost here, so I’m going to leave you now. Not my best blog, but maybe it got you thinking. And then again, depending on who you listen to, maybe it didn’t.