Educators are Coming for Our Children … But Do We Care?

  Educators are Coming for Our Children … But Do We Care?

        Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal July 30, 2017

                        

            Nat King Cole’s “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer” are upon us, a time during which Americans like to escape their routine if and when they can.  And school has already started?

            For those who can manage to get away for a break, here’s a message that awaits them when they return: your kids’ school started while you were gone.

             Families had better enjoy the open road while they can because the American summer is being chipped away.   School boards seem set on the idea of starting school while the weather is still sweltering.  The trend is to start school early and give students a couple or more breaks between starting time and Christmas.  (The Winter Solstice, that is.  I keep forgetting that Christmas is a bad word at school, though the Celtic pagan religion expression, “winter holidays,” is not.)

            Formal schooling is important, but it’s only a part of our total lives and our learning.  Formal schooling isn’t the only kind there is.  Children and youth can learn outside the classroom.  They learn from trips, from Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Joe, neighbors, summer jobs, recreation, and chores.  They learn to live life with their families and away from their peers. 

There are two reasons why these early start dates are not good.  One is educational, the other, cultural.

            MDJ letter writer and teacher, Melissa Anderson, recently hit the nail on the head, arguing that when the break times come, at least two instructional days are lost, the day before the break when students are too excited, and the day of return when they are comatose. I know from experience, also, that such breaks don’t serve students well.  Teachers lose ground.  Students lose tempo and interest.  Surely we adults remember what it was like returning to school after Chris … , I mean winter holidays.

             Shortened summers are bad culturally. Extended summers, while good for the economy, also curb the impact of teen culture.  Teens need to be around adults more.  They are spending too much time with each other. Too many parents don’t realize that school is now a subculture, one that can suck teenagers in and woo them away from the habits and values they have been taught at home.

            This reality is no fault of principals or teachers.  It’s the nature of the beast.  Although I realize big schools are what we’re stuck with, a thousand or more or even several hundred teens in one place is a bad idea.  Teens quickly become each other’s confidants, teachers, comforters, counselors, and chief influencers.  Only the strongest of homes, as havens of love and dispensers of discipline, can keep their offspring from being enveloped by the negative aspects of teen culture.  Yes, including its music, its dress, trends, moral values, language, and most seriously, its obsession with conformity.  Teen culture’s beachhead is the school, but it exists apart from and in spite of the school.  Sheer numbers feed it and give it life.

            Schools deserve some of the blame for youth culture’s direction - in music and dress, particularly.   If rock is their music at home and out and about – with its primitive rhythms and coarsening lyrics - why not a different kind of music at ball games and in the cafeteria?  Classical music would appeal to far more teens than anyone realizes. Why give teens what they already have?

 Schools to teens: “At home do what your parents allow.  That’s really none of our business.  But at school, we will not give you what you already have.” 

And dress?  God help us.  School boards should fight parents on this one:  “At home, dress like a vagabond, listen to loud music, use terrible English, but school is a place where standards are aspired to, expectations are held up, excellence is taught, one’s best is demanded.” 

Oh, how we have fallen. Not just schools.  All of us.  The culture has gone from “Shall the pot command the potter?”  to “We must identify with youth.”  It’s quite unfair to blame educators totally.  Yes, doctrinaire educators want our children, but many parents are apparently willing to let schools have their children.

Another thing.  To me there are few things more heartbreaking or more foreboding for a nation than the expression “Pre-K.”  PRE-kindergarten?  Where are parents?  Is the delivery room the next destination for the nanny state educationists?

Yes, educators are coming for our children.  Busy, hardworking parents need to take notice.

Roger Hines

7/26/17

Trump in Context … Including His Sins

                Trump in Context … Including His Sins

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal 7/23/17

            If Donald Trump has committed more sins of the flesh than I have, I’ve probably committed more sins of the spirit than he has.  If we’re counting, I seriously doubt that the president’s sin list is any longer than mine or anybody else’s.

            I’ve been judgmental and covetous in my day.  I’ve gossiped, in spite of a biblical prohibition and one of my dear mother’s favorite sayings, “Now don’t talk about people.”  I’ve also withheld forgiveness.  Just how hurtful do you suppose my sins have been?  Certainly hurtful enough.

            I know.  Sin is an unpopular, laughable word these days, but since our nation was birthed in and has been shaped and informed primarily by Judeo-Christian morality, surely we can use the word a while longer without being scoffed at.

            A liberal friend tells me that because I support President Trump I am trafficking in “secular evil,” (a new expression to me).  “How can a professing Christian support this man?” he recently asked.  That friend went on to call Mr. Trump a groper, a charlatan, and a fake conservative.  Groper, I really don’t know about.  A charlatan Trump definitely is not.   A charlatan is a put-on, a pretender, an actor.  Seems to me Mr. Trump is pretty good at being himself everywhere he goes and is loved for it.  If he’s acting, he has acted consistently ever since he came on the scene: direct, confident, and clear.

            Along with these traits the president also exudes authenticity.  He shines light on the typical in-authenticity of politicians who are fence straddlers.  Trump, refreshingly, is not a typical political figure.  He claims not to be and his claim is verifiable.

            If he were a typical politician he would schmooze those around him with glaring insincerity, guard his words to the point of inanity, and side-step all the difficult issues for the sake of his own re-electability.  Trump does none of these.  His non-political countenance is one reason the billionaire was able to draw to himself so many middle class supporters and “working people.”  His stump speeches effectively set voters against the unreal, glamour-soaked media and the unreal, self-possessed career politicians.

            Politicians generally are not known for directness.  The re-electability factor, their moral compass, whispers to them constantly, urging caution.  Perhaps the reason so many congressional Republicans don’t care for Mr. Trump is that he reveals their caution.  Hesitancy and wind-testing are just not Trump’s forte.

            Though not chummy, Trump is not distant.  If not “intellectual,” he is certainly darn smart.  Though not a manual laborer, he connects with those who are.  Such skills make his political enemies envious.  Envy is a sin too, incidentally.

            As for fake conservative, can we not see that that the old liberal-conservative spectrum is fading?  Words and phrases come and go.  Liberals now prefer the word “progressive” (to which I want to respond, “Progressive toward what?”).  I’ve always preferred the words “traditionalist” or “constitutionalist” over conservative because they are slightly more focused and far more descriptive.  The question should not be what we call ourselves, but what we believe.

            If one of Mr. Trump’s sins is that he was not always a conservative, then I’ve sinned there also.  As a youth and young adult I could have been called and was called a liberal on race.

 Right, wrong, and truth don’t change though we try to change them with weasel words and slippery phrases (“alternative life styles”?).  No one can say the candid president weaseled or twisted himself into a pretzel to get elected.

            My friend’s charge of “trafficking in secular evil” shows he does not appreciate the quandary in which many social conservatives found themselves in last year’s general election.  In the face of bad options, one makes the best decision he can.

            Everything has a context, and the great divide brought on by Trump’s election bids us look back at other times in presidential history.  Given the bitter differences between Jefferson and Adams, Hamilton and Burr, and between the political left and right during the Vietnam era, today’s divisions seem a bit tame.

            Donald Trump is hardly the chiefest of sinners.  The love his children have for him speaks to this point.  Is it possible he could teach us something about being a dad?  CNN could  turn even his good fathering into a sin (he taught them to make money … taught them to be materialistic, … ).   

Long ago someone uttered these forever contemporary words: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Good words for me, Trump’s critics, Bill and Hillary, and everyone reading these lines.”     

Roger Hines

7/19/17

Romanticizing the Interstate

                            Romanticizing the Interstate

            Published in Marietta Daily Journal July 16, 2017

            In the early sixties there was a radio and television ad jingle that haunted me daily: “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet.”  It was a positive haunt that fed my love for the open road.  No doubt General Motors knew the Interstate Highway System was imminent, so they timed their jingle accordingly.

            My wife doesn’t enjoy the hum or the clap-clap of the interstate highway, but I do.  To me it’s music, history, and the sound of progress.  It’s true that you can’t experience America from the interstates, but you can certainly ponder America and the American spirit as you belt your way toward your destination. 

            Road trips on the interstate always drive my thoughts to four people: a president, a teacher, a general, and a surveyor.  The president was the face of an era of good feeling in the late fifties.  The teacher was a historian extraordinaire who made sure students connected the textbook to current events.  The general was just a name until I got to know his grandson, and the surveyor was a quiet, 30-something survey crew chief, Andy, who led a small pack of college kids across a fifty-mile wooded path that would become a section of Interstate 20 in Mississippi.

            President Eisenhower promoted the idea of a national “superhighway” network partially as a national defense system.  Impressed by the German autobahn while serving as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII, Eisenhower foresaw the possible need of a good road system for times of war in America, should that time ever come to our shores.  In 1956 Eisenhower signed the law that authorized the Interstate Highway System.

            During my 1960-61 school year at Forest (MS) High School, Margaret Richardson held forth on all things historical.  Always connecting the past to the present and arguing that the past is not over yet, she – the second of my four interstate heroes – told us about the third, General Lucius Clay.   Clay was not yet in our American history textbook, so Richardson explained his orchestration of the Berlin Airlift.  She also informed us that Clay had been charged by Eisenhower to head the panel that would study and advise him on implementation of the interstate system.

            Richardson proudly added, “You need to know about General Clay.  He’s a Southerner.”  Thirty years later I would be privileged to meet the general’s grandson, Marietta attorney and then state senator Chuck Clay.  On two or three occasions I have told the senator how the interstates make me think of his grandfather, all because of an astute high school teacher.

            I never knew Andy’s last name, but that didn’t diminish his influence on me and the other college kids on his survey crew.  As summer employees of the Mississippi Highway Department, we were primarily stake drivers.

            An exemplary supervisor, Andy had a poetic side.  One day during lunch in the tick and chigger-infested woods, Andy remarked, “Well, the government conceived this superhighway, and the engineers will birth it, but us surveyors are preparing the delivery room.”

            Prepare we did.  With stakes and markers in hand, we would wait for Andy to peer through his tri-pod and then yell, “Cut” or “Fill.”  Marking one or the other on the stake and driving it into the ground, we thereby provided directions for the earthmoving equipment operators to do their part in birthing an idea whose time had come.

            Nobody today, except those who remember pre-interstate America, can appreciate Andy’s colorful analogy.  For many, the interstate is the bane of their existence.  For metro Atlantans, the word conjures images of the three interstates that converge on and clog our state’s capital city.

            But hopefully, come vacation time, we view the interstates differently.  Admittedly, they are a mixed blessing.  They connect us and disconnect us, speed us up and slow us down, bring us together and scatter us abroad.  Still, they remind me that the American pioneer spirit has always been to “head out” and reach for better things.        

The four people who flit across my brain whenever I travel on interstates all understood the American spirit.  It is a spirit born not of restlessness per se, but of a desire to explore and risk.  Traveling on is the American Way.  The highest value of hitting the road was summed up by poet T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

            So happy summer travels!  Back home you’ll love home more.  And be grateful for a president, a general, and a boo-coodle of “us surveyors” and engineers who helped make a dream a reality.    

Roger Hines

7/12/17              

The Trophyfication of America Reaches Its Peak

                   The Trophyfication of America Reaches Its Peak

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal July 9, 2017

            We’ve all heard the phrase “trickle down economics,” but “trickle up mediocrity”? 

            I’ve never heard this second expression either, so I’ll take credit for its creation.  I’m hoping, however, that both the expression and its practice will soon die. 

            For some time, many schools and community sports programs have given out trophies that reward participants not for achievement but for participation.  Try to envision it: a shiny, impressive-looking trophy on the base of which, in capital letters, is the word PARTICIPANT!

            I have often said to high school and college students that those who run the world are those who show up.  But that’s not the whole truth.  The other part of that truth – which is becoming more and more operative throughout the world – is that those who run the world are those who have the most babies.

            For the past several decades, Americans have been telling their babies that they are special.  Why special?  Not because they have achieved or learned something but because they exist.  Not because of a noble act or a good deed, but because you’re you, you sweet precious thing.  Now go forth, and be a participant!

            Schools and local park sports programs have been glorifying participation, but who would have thunk that the United States Army would get in on the act as well?

            With sadness I must point out that the Army continued its “trickle up mediocrity” recently in the great Southland.  The South has always been pro-military for several reasons.  One is patriotism; the other, politics.  Patriotism because the South loves the nation and has historically sent so many of its youths to fight and die.  Politics because in the old Congressional seniority system, many Southern U.S. Representatives and Senators chaired committees that afforded them the power to get military bases placed in their states.

            How unmanly, then, how just plain un-rugged and un-Southern that this spring at Fort Jackson, South Carolina the U.S. Army would begin awarding graduation certificates to recruits who completed … ready?  Basic Training!

            Pause, dear reader, and think about this.  With our little ones at school and at the parks, we’re giving participation trophies because we don’t want any of them to feel left out.  We want to shield them from feeling a certain way by providing them with a different feeling they haven’t earned.  Wrongheaded for sure, but at least we’re dealing with children.

            But for the world’s premier military machine – the United States Military – do we need to coddle and adopt this mania for tenderness?  What would Patton say?  Or MacArthur?  Even the gentle Eisenhower?  We know what the mischievous Churchill would do.  He would lay the practice to rest with his typical satire, poking fun at Army Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, for journeying to South Carolina for such an unseemly act as handing certificates to basic training graduates.

            According to the Army Times, General Milley’s underling, Sergeant Major of the Army Dan Daily, explained that giving recognition to all recruits was a way to “welcome them into their community of soldiers.”

            Maybe it’s just me, but if the Sergeant Major had said “Band of Brothers,” I might have mellowed out a bit, but “their community of soldiers” is just a little too lovey-dovey for a guy whose two older brothers fought under George Patton and Mark Clark.

            Basic training is the first and most foundational accomplishment a soldier can reach.  But does it call for bravery or sacrifice? No, because it’s largely about push-ups.  Perhaps push-ups, marching, and finding the mess hall can be strenuous, but like the kindergartener who doesn’t merit a visit from the school superintendent just because he colored inside the lines, neither does a basic training class merit a visit from the Army Chief of Staff.

            The seedbed for all of this recognition fervor is the culture at large.  From Participation Elementary to Snowflake University to Millennial Pajamafication and now on to Army Push-up Recognition ceremonies, the path of mediocrity has reached its peak.  Like a blanket it spreads over us.  One wonders if there is anything for which we should not get trophies, after finishing diversity training, of course.  Showing up isn’t necessarily shining, and participation alone is hardly cause for trophies.  Our relentless rewards are part and parcel of the feel good, therapy-prone craze that now envelops us.

Neither children, teens, nor adults need inflated notions of themselves.  A better path is that of Longfellow: “Let us then be up and doing …”

There’s the solution.  For certificates or trophies of any kind, have children and recruits  memorize something from America’s premier poet.  That’s accomplishment deserving of reward.

Roger Hines

7/5/17  

Storming the Palace: Can it Happen Here?

                  Storming the Palace: Can it Happen Here?

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal July 2, 2017

            The thoughts pursued here are not pleasant.  They are dark and ominous.  Even so, Americans must entertain them.  There is a mood and a movement in the land that at one time or another has befallen almost every nation except America.

            I’m referring to such occurrences as street violence and massive protests which in so many countries have brought normal life to a halt.   Americans have watched on television as citizens have hit the streets in Central America, South America, Asia, and eastern Europe to bring about change.  Particularly have there been massive protests and violence during transfer of power from one individual or one party to another.

            Not so in America, until now.  Historically Americans have honored the axiom, “Debate is how civilized people fight.”  We have done our political “fighting” at town hall meetings, in legislative halls, and eventually at the ballot box.  Losers at the ballot box have typically accepted election results and then set out to win voters to their side for the next election by powers of persuasion.

            This, the American way, is not the path the losers of our last presidential election have taken.  Instead, they continue to reject and undermine the people’s choice in the 2016 election.  Everyone knows who the leaders of this rejection are.  Basically that leadership is three-fold: the media, the political class, and the college campus.

             The anti-Trump media is not every television cable station or network in the country.  Nor is it every newspaper.  It is, however, the Washington Post and the New York Times, the three old line television networks, plus CNN and MSNBC.  These entities daily dish out accusations and charges against the president and show disdain for those who voted for him. 

            The anti-Trump political class includes politicians of both parties who are out to bring Trump down.  Democrats, of course, are quite out in the open with their vitriol.  Republicans, having to walk a thinner line, aren’t vitriolic.  They either damn Trump with faint praise or decline to speak of him at all.  They certainly don’t defend him, even though he was their party’s choice and still draws thousands to rallies everywhere he goes.

            The Republican wing of the political class has a strategy that is cowardly and abhorrent.  Unlike the media and Democrats who are bold and forthright, these Republicans stalk through underbrush, peering out into the clear, waiting to pounce after the media, the Democrats, and clueless college kids have completed their dirty work for them.  We could call the Republican wing of the political class McCain Republicans.

            For McCain Republicans, the expression “coup de grace” comes to mind.  The expression may reference grace, but it’s grace of a far different stripe from what we normally think.  In short it is a finishing stroke.  The Republican wing would never stab Trump (I speak figuratively), but it would gladly dispose of his corpse, all the while saying nice things about it.

            Even though charges of Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin are waning for lack of hard evidence, there are still endless other bogus charges the media and the political class can make and are making (regarding his tweets, and no doubt soon … his neck ties).

            Let’s say that special investigator Mueller indicts the president for this, that, or the other.  Trumpsters everywhere are thinking, “Just let him.” If Mueller and company invoke the 25^th amendment, the president’s enemies would emit their cheers, but middle America would show its claws.  I believe the delayed frustration and the stored up anger of the working class that put Trump in power would explode.  Backlash is too weak a word.  Class warfare will have come to America.

            If such occurs, no one should wonder what or who propelled it. It will have been propelled by college kids ignorant of Americanism, dressed up people who stare at cameras for a living, spouting (and usually reading) their commentary, and politicians who no longer honor our political system.

            Jefferson wrote, “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

            At some point America’s deplorables are going to invoke Jefferson’s words if their president’s malignment continues.  This may or may not mean physical violence, but it is a prospect that the chattering class and everyone else should ponder.

            Trump’s enemies should be looking ahead toward the next election, not backward toward the one they so embarrassingly lost.  Otherwise, America will face what other nations have faced which is unrelenting turmoil and chaos.

Roger Hines

June 28, 2017