What would you rather have in America’s schools; high test scores or students who are empathetic and have strong critical thinking skills? What good is it for an individual, or for American society, if students test well but also think that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election? What good is it if they have no interest in providing a strong safety net so that no Americans need to live in poverty?

Today, a full three-quarters of Trump voters falsely believe the election was “rigged and stolen, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll – more than ever before. Just 9 percent, meanwhile, think Biden “won fair and square” – down from 13 percent a year ago. This is clearly stinkin’ thinkin.’ High school graduates have spent more than ten thousand hours in class, and they still cannot recognize the obvious. They are so jaded that they fall for the most unlikely of conspiracy theories.

It’s been a dozen years since we first heard of the Tea Party. They were the predecessor to MAGA. One of their strategies was to expand right-wing influence over what is taught in schools by fielding more candidates to run for school boards. Pandering to voters through fear, Tea Partiers and their allies won a number of elections and began the process of censoring more of what was being taught in schools. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the right has greatly increased its efforts to win school board seats and further suppress free and open thinking in our schools. New books are being added to the “banned list” such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hate U Give.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote:

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members,” the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

Recently the right has created a straw horse in demanding that “Critical Race Theory” not be taught in our schools. First, there are hardly any schools teaching it. That does not stop people on the right from winning school board and other legislative seats because they convince many voters that white people are being denigrated. Second, what precipitated the modern opposition to teaching CRT was the 1619 Project published by the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center. The project is not about theory; it is about history. Specifically, it addresses the origins of slavery in the United States and the impact that slavery has had for over 400 years on the lives of African-Americans, and other Americans. Our history has always been heavily weighted towards teaching about white people. If we are going to become better equipped to live in the multi-cultural society that we have, it is essential for all students to learn the history of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans and other minorities are included. Let us not forget that by 2045, we will be a minority-majority nation.

So, what can non-MAGA people do to support more open learning in our schools? The first thing is to recognize that our schools are in crisis, and have been for some time. The evidence is clear; more than seventy million adults voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Plainly their education was short on important values like critical thinking and empathy.

Part of the problem with our schools is that they suffer from a major problem in our body politic. I’m talking about “fake news,” which almost entirely comes from the right. Our schools unwittingly teach fake news. They do a poor job of helping students recognize fake news when they hear or see it.

Similar to our political system and our society in general, our schools are very competitive with one another. The conflicts are basically fought on two levels, substance and image. This is a central reason why so many students, and adults, have skewed views of the world.

Examples of substance being taught in schools would include teaching children how to read, providing students with opportunities to take science labs, encouraging students in social studies class to play a role in a model UN or a mock legislature, or providing students with real opportunities to be involved in school decision-making.

Unfortunately, much of school is about image and bragging rights. A big part of that is the obsession with standardized tests. Like sport contests, standardized tests are measured with numbers. Those numbers can be compared, and that means they provide platforms on which schools can compete, just like football or basketball. Students are under enormous pressure to do well on standardized tests in order to make their teachers look good, their school look good, their district look good, and their state look good.

This means that many teachers are teaching to the test. Much of that involves memorization. So, students are presumably learning how to do well on tests, both those that are standardized and those that are part of their regular classroom studies.

Teachers are also under enormous pressure to teach the state-mandated curriculum. It gets to the point where many teachers become robotic in what they present to students. Spontaneity, which is another way of saying “being tuned into the moment,” becomes more and more rare. If teachers are not questioning what they are “supposed” to do, how can students learn to peacefully question teachers, and others who are in positions of authority?

This fits right in with the right-wing agenda. Follow-orders; rarely question; and always remember that you are competing against others, particularly those from “elsewhere.”

So, how can we change schools so that students develop much more in the way of critical thinking skills and empathy? Ultimately, we need teachers who are more human, or who already are human and are not afraid to show their humanity. We need teachers who are willing to be like quarterbacks, or coaches. They need to call the right plays, and often that means calling an audible (making a last-second change). What makes teaching much more difficult than running an offense or a defense in football is that what might be a good play for one student may not be a good one for another student. Teachers need to do the best that they can at making sure that they are providing the best information and techniques for each student in their classes.

So how do we do this? Here are several suggestions:

1. Reallocate resources so that technology can do more, freeing teachers to have more time. Anyone who has taught knows that teaching is far more than a full-time job. Most teachers have several hours of work to do each evening. We need to cut back on the “make-work” that consumes many teachers, and also give teachers shorter working hours. The stress that teachers experience “trickles down” to students, sometimes like a shower. We need to reduce the amount of stress and tension in our schools.
2. If we want students to become better critical thinkers and to develop more empathy, these are two of the most important qualities that we need in our teachers. But this begs several important questions:
   1. What percentage of today’s teachers are good critical thinkers?
   2. What percentage of today’s teachers feel and express empathy to their students?
   3. If these percentages are lower than what we would want, then does it have anything to do with the ways in which we teach teachers?

So much of what teachers learn in education school is so prescribed and top-down. Over time, this squeezes some of the humanity out of students who will become teachers.

Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to decide to major in education and take classes with rigid curricula. This person is often someone who is comfortable with top-down decisions and may not value autonomy and creativity as much as others.

When they finally become teachers, combine the rigidity of their training with the pressure that parents, administrators, teachers and students all feel to achieve to the max, and you have a very oppressive environment.

We need to find ways for the nation’s best and brightest, and also most empathetic to become teachers. This means looking for individuals who will bring a maximum amount of empathy and critical thinking to the classroom, regardless of what training they have had.

This is not easy. But now is an excellent time to ramp up this movement. We have a tremendous shortage of teachers and districts are now loosening their certification requirements. If you are a person who thinks that you can humanize learning for students, and make them less likely to wind up as Tea Party or MAGA members, then it is a good time to step forward. We need teachers who are civil and civic-minded to help avoid civil war.

The post Changing Our Schools is Vital to Our National Healing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s understandable that there would be some excitement today in the world of Democrats. They won an inning, the one they play in the odd year following the quadrennial presidential election. But before we get too euphoric, let’s remember that generally the party that lost the presidential race comes back 365 days later and does well, particularly in the two states that have gubernatorial elections, Virginia and New Jersey.

Such has been the case in 2017. The Democratic Party has been starved for victory; for almost any kind of good news. Republicans hold more seats in state legislatures and Congress than any time since the 1920s. The control the U.S. Senate and they only must defend nine of thirty-three of those seats that are up for re-election next year.

If Donald Trump was not enough of a gift to Democrats to win the 2016 presidential election, then his shtick is wearing on enough Americans now that he has become a political liability. Democrats may well be learning two key lessons for the 2016 election: (a) do not ignore the Trump base, and (b) progressive politics appeal to many Americans.

But before we get too excited, it may be helpful to look at recent history which illustrates how Tuesday’s Democratic victories may well be only temporary.

Politics has an ebb and flow to it. If the norm in the United States is for the pendulum to swing between Republicans and Democrats, then the only factor that really matters is what is the medium point between the two major parties. Regrettably, the base line for American politics has been moving more and more to the right. We have to go back fifty years to Lyndon Johnson to have a Democratic president who not only espoused a liberal agenda, but who was also successful in working with Congress to implement it.

The “silent majority” of George Wallace and Richard Nixon in 1968 has grown and now travels under the name of the Tea Party or simply Trump voters.

Democrats have had their share of victories since the era of LBJ, but they have not been able to sustain a true political movement. Many thought that the election of Barack Obama reflected the triumph of identity politics, and because Obama was so likable and free of corruption, the move to the left could be sustained.

But when Mitch McConnell said shortly after Obama’s election that his goal was to keep Obama as a one-term president, the power of what Hillary Clinton aptly called the “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been able to thwart movement to the left that results in the implementation of progressive policies.

Temporary victories are better than temporary losses. But for Democrats (or people of other parties or non-parties) to be successful in moving the body politic in more of a progressive direction, several key things need to happen. None of these have anything to do with temporary victories, but they are key to long-term success:

1. Democrats need to focus on young voters and voters-to-be to help them develop better critical thinking skills. In other words, one of the best places for progressives to be is in our schools and working with students on utilizing empathy through critical thinking.
2. Democrats need to keep in mind that if they are the party of those most in need, then they must diminish their identity with the donor class and instead do the odious task of fund-raising at the grass-roots level. Wealthy people can certainly be part of the base of the Democratic Party, but they should have no more representation than any other group.

Congrats to everyone who won, or who helped Democrats win on Tuesday. But let’s focus now more on the structural issues.

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I had been planning on writing yet another article decrying the afflictive double standard and dog whistle politics of the term “terrorism.” Saturday, thousands of Muslims in Cologne, Germany marched to protest Islamic extremism, and I wanted to express how ineffably tired I am of having to march with a “Love & Unity” sign to prove my humanity/innocence/possession of a heart, but when Muslims are the victims instead of the perpetrators no one has “Love & Unity” with us. But it’s been written again and again and again and again and again.

Then on Sunday, 47 year old Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd of Muslims leaving Ramadan night prayers at a London mosque, killing at least one person and injuring near a dozen others. Witnesses say Osborne shouted he wanted to “kill all Muslims” and that he did it as retribution “for London Bridge.” The CNN headline read, “London van hits pedestrians in Finsbury Park,” all mentions of the deliberate targeting of Muslims curiously omitted. News outlets lined up pundits to say they “weren’t sure” if it was terrorism or not (no mention of hate crimes either), but they all took a few moments to spout a few glib words on “diversity.” No word yet if Trump will respond by tweeting some blather about his Muslim Ban.

Of the entire incident, what struck me most is that I—  I didn’t react. Other than a frisson of anger at the hypocrisy and a few twangs of grief at lives lost… I feel almost… unperturbed. Logically, I feel where the overwhelming sadness and despondency ought to be— where it has unfailingly been in the past— but none of its symptoms have manifested. Instead, I just feel dispassion. And that worries me. I don’t ever want to be the type of person who shrugs or turns a blind eye to someone’s pain.

But I’m coming to realize this isn’t really the onset of callousness and cold-hearted antipathy. If I feel rather impassive at the moment, it’s not because I’m losing my capacity for empathy, it’s because over the last 6 months or so, I’ve developed a (questionably healthy) defense mechanism to The Era of Trump and realized that sometimes the best thing I can do for my mental health is accept occasional apathy. And I’m also realizing that maybe, just maybe, it’s not peculiar to me— that this defensive quasi-cynicism exists as a sort of distinctive facet of the collective consciousness of people of color (if such a thing exists) post-Trump.

The night of November 8, I remember the insidious feeling of dread creeping over me, slowly giving away to a consumptive panic when I realized it wasn’t just a fluke or a grand karmic joke, it was really happening. The man who began his campaign by saying “Mexicans are rapists,” earned bonus points for calling for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and couldn’t even be stopped by hot mic recordings when he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”— that man was going to become the most powerful person in the world. I remember my eyes being glued to the electoral college tallies in the same morbid sort of way you can’t look away from a tragic accident. I remember my brain being a jumble of panic as once-worst-case-scenarios suddenly seemed inevitable, images striking me of my grandparents being unable to return to the country even with Green Cards, of my parents’ citizenship being revoked, of my siblings being rounded up for internment camps. I remember questioning the next morning if I should leave my apartment, afraid what his 60 million voters would now feel emboldened to do. I remember feeling like each and every one of those voters had looked directly at me and told me I didn’t belong in their country, and that knowledge squeezed like rubber bands around my chest so I couldn’t catch a full breath of air or form a coherent sentence. I remember looking at the faces around me that were in various states of terror or denial as each of our private nightmares seemed to come to life, and no amount of hugs stemmed the tears. During lunch I usually worked on law school applications, but I remember that day just staring immobilized at the screen because I couldn’t look that far into the future without drowning in waves of crushing panic again. I remember constantly feeling nauseated and bone weary, unable to eat or sleep for almost a week. I remember waking up every morning in the weeks after, terrified this would be the day a severed pig head, or racist graffiti at the very least, showed up in front of the apartment I shared with another hijabi woman. I remember the only time the panic truly drowned me and I gave into the terror was a little over a week later when there was a suspected hate crime on campus, and the night I found out I remember how I struggled to bring my voice to lower than a shout and how the only words I could formulate were a torrent of curses as I practically yanked my hair out in frustration. I remember vowing never to return to that bone-crushing panic again, and I remember the dispassion taking over ever since.

So if I say that I felt impassive in the face of Sunday’s London attack beyond my angry huffs and frustrated sighs, understand it’s just because at this point I can’t afford to allow something which is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small to pierce my armor of dispassion. You have to understand that over the last six months I saw hate crimes against Muslims spike after the election to such a level that I was convinced I was next, but I couldn’t summon more than an unaffected shrug at the possibility, adopting an “if it happens, it happens” sort of mentality. I saw a slew of Cabinet positions filled by alt-Right Neo-Nazis, racist conspiracy theorists, and Islamophobes, including one who said Islam is a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that had to be “excised,” and all I felt was mild relief the man who called to “exterminate” Muslims wasn’t chosen. I saw a man motivated by extremist far-right views kill 6 people in a Quebec mosque in a shooting rampage, but I couldn’t summon an ounce of surprise it had happened, only that Trudeau condemned it so roundly. I saw a British politician, after the London Bridge Terror Attacks, suggest the internment of Muslims as a solution to extremism, and I couldn’t summon more than a bitter, humorless laugh that that was really the solution he was proposing. For goodness sake, last month a man tried to harass me on the street and yell racial slurs at me as he drove by and, I swear to you— rather than sink into despair as I did a year ago— I just cackled at him, wanting to tell him he’d have to do better than that if he wanted to scare me.

After the grand upset that was Trump’s election, nothing seems to faze me. Since then, I’ve been able to summon copious amounts of anger and disgust— and grief in small doses— at the state of politics, but everything else has succumbed to a void of apathy. Each terrible piece of news has been met with a derisive woosh of air in an indignant exhale, but it all just felt inevitable. It’s the same frustrated, resigned air with which BlackLivesMatter activists greet every failure to indict police officers who shoot unarmed Black men unprovoked. We all expected it. It’s the same fatalistic way Muslims square their shoulders when, despite all their prayers, the gunman turned out to be ISIS-affiliated after all. We all expected it. It’s the same repulsed tone in which anti-deportation attorneys snarl “of course, they did” after they learn ICE tore up yet another family with their raids and forced deportations. We all expected it. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that if we broke apart after each time the world showed its hostility, there’d be nothing left in us but desolate despair, abject terror, and bottomless grief. And then we wouldn’t be able to make it through the day, let alone work to make anything better.

And I’m not sure how I feel about my realizations about my own dispassion, even if I’m not the only one to retreat behind defensive cynicism lest we bow to panicked despair again. Because at at some level, that despair we’re avoiding is a sign we’re still human, and embracing that grief is a reminder to never turn away from someone’s plight in disconcern. I worry that this dispassion will stunt my capacity for empathy because that’s one thing I never want to lose. But if the dispassion is the only thing keeping depression from crushing shoulders that cannot bear the horrors of the world, I’m loathe to disavow its protection. How else are we to survive the unholy mess that is The Era of Trump?

The post The battle within between dispassion and empathy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Paul Ryan never seems happier than when talking about the money that can be saved by repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. It seems as if he has zeros bouncing around in his head and his goal is to get all his ducks in a row so that everything in life zeroes out.

He is in a position of making public policy, and it seems that his goal of reforming government is to ensure that there is no deficit, and government spends no more than it takes in. Since he likes his taxes to be low, this means that expenses also must be low for the budget to zero-out.

Numbers can lend themselves to order. Being fixated by numbers is a frequent characteristic of people who experience obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The person is intently emotionally invested in the numbers turning out the way he wants.

This can be fine if you’re a banker, if you’re a baseball player, if you’re a meteorologist. But this is not what Ryan is. He is a public official whose job it is to provide those public services to the population that the private sector cannot effectively do.

Clearly, left to its own devices, the private sector cannot provide adequate and affordable health care to all Americans. Even with the Affordable Care Act, nearly 12% of Americans do not have health care coverage. With the Trump-Ryan plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, another fourteen million Americans will lose coverage next year, and a total of twenty-four million by 2024.

But for Paul Ryan, it may be that the suffering of those people who cannot get needed health care, or not have access to preventative health care, is simply outweighed by the joy of having the federal budget zero out. If the lens through which he looks at public policy is obscured by his fascination with having all the numbers in the right place, then he can get great satisfaction and consider himself doing a good job, even if it means that millions of people must suffer for your personal world to be in order.

This is why people can say about Paul Ryan, as they said about Ronald Reagan, that he is such a nice guy. Because being friendly with someone else, particularly if they are like you, does not have to create an imbalance in the way in which he sees the world.

Ryan, like many other Republicans, not only wants a balanced budget every year, but he wants the entire $19 trillion federal debt paid off. By certain Republicans’ standards, this could be done in short order. Since the federal government collects about $3.5 trillion in revenue each year, it would take less than six years to simply collect money, de-fund all programs, and pay off the debt.

Putting it in such stark terms is necessary to understand the impact of certain Republican policies, particularly if someone like Ryan is obsessed with them. Just seven years with no Social Security, no Medicare, no airport controllers, no national parks, no office of the attorney-general. Maybe some Republicans would like to keep the military budget, but that would mean extending the pay-down another three or four years.

Yes, paying off the national debt and running balanced budgets every year could put a certain kind of economic house in order. That kind of house would be the one in which some of us are lucky enough to live.

But this is not the reality of macro-economics, the kind that governs the role of our federal government in our national economy.

Why do Republicans dislike deficits and debts so much? Because borrowing means that there is more money in circulation and by some textbooks, that results in inflation. But here’s the problem. As the federal debt has doubled since the year 2000, inflation has barely risen. The likely reason is a macro-economic tenet that has new-found credibility. The theory says that what’s bad is for the federal debt to rise at a rate faster than the overall economy. In those terms, debt has gone down.

There’s nothing engraved in stone by this theory, but for the last generation, the data has substantiated it. So, the U.S. government has spent a great deal more than it has taken in. A lot of that was spent to fund dubious wars, another large percentage went to give tax breaks to the very wealthy, some of it has gone to meet the rising demand of entitlements, and some of it has been increased discretionary spending for items like developing clean energy, medical research, infrastructure and federal aid to education.

Could the U.S. make significant cuts in spending? Yes. Ending and not getting into new ill-advised wars would be a good start. So would fairly taxing the wealthy.

But the bottom line is that we are surviving the current ratio of income and expenses. That is not an orderly world to Paul Ryan and other Republicans. But what’s more important? Should we aim to zero-out every budget because it makes certain people happy, or should we strive to provide the necessary social services that the economically disenfranchised and middle class need?

Ryan needs to get out of his video game, ZERO-OUT, and see the world around him. Let the “zero hero” be the pitcher or goalie who throws or completes a shut-out.

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