Tirade I

Warning – Sometimes I get mad.  If a post is labeled as this one is either suck it up and read bravely what I have to say, or duck and cover.  I’ll get over it and write something more cheerful next week.     Unless I get mad again. 

Where is Truth?

During the civil trials of Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate asked him –while he stood there battered and bloody, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).   Jesus didn’t answer Pilate – perhaps his tone made it clear that he didn’t really want an answer.  Regardless, the question is The Question, but day after day I am reminded that whatever Truth is, our modern society values no more than it values virginity.

Case in point – the Atlanta public schools.  Earlier this month the Atlanta Constitution reported that for the last decade 178 educators, working in 44 schools and in the central administration, falsified the results for the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.  They actually donned rubber gloves, erased the little penciled  “bubbles,” and replaced erroneous answers.  They got startlingly improved scores using this method.  (Vogell)

At the other end of the school continuum, students, the vast majority of them, are turning cheating into a fine, electronic art.  According to a study done by the Center for Youth Ethics at the Josephson Institute in Los Angeles 64% admitted to cheating on tests within the last year.  In the same study 82% said they copied homework.  (USNews – Education) 

In a small study done in a Midwestern town the stats were even worse – between 74 and 87% percent admitted to some form of cheating on tests (Ramirez).  These industrious young people have at their disposal dozens of new techniques – phone-photos  of the test sent to your buddy in the next class,  a quick, surreptitious blackberry Google search,  a little thumb-dancing under the desk.  The truly innovative will even hack into the computerized grade book and just assign himself a grade, adjust his attendance records – the possibilities are endless.

I did my own checking with a Google search for “essays for sale.” (As an English teacher I was always on the lookout for plagiarized papers.) The search garnered over 28,000.000 results.  Twenty-eight million!  That means that millions of people are making money by helping students cheat, and that they evidently have plenty of customers. 

I have been aware that over the expanse of my career Truth as an absolute value has been going out of style.  The student who most didactically pounded on her desk and declared, “There’s no such thing as absolute truth!” wasn’t my first clue, but it’s one that’s stuck with me.  She may have been a very bright girl, but she didn’t come up with that one on her own. 

In an effort to find that non-existent middle ground, where no one is offended and no thinking has to take place, school curricula have grabbed the relativist philosophy with a white-knuckled grip.  My darling student had learned her lessons well. 

And you can’t help realizing how close the relativist mantra is to plagiarizing a paper.  Why look up facts if none of them is true?  Why bother writing a paper if you can just buy one? Who cares whether or not you implicitly lie by sneaking a peek at the test questions beforehand?  Why memorize stuff if nothing’s true? 

Of course the next question is -- Why bother cheating on a test if your teacher will do that for you? 

We spend upwards of $10,000 per student per year on public education, and for that we get a whole generation of con artists?  Oops – 2 generations, counting the Atlanta teachers,  and I doubt they’re the only ones pressured to use deception to “prove” they’ve left no student behind. 

I’m beginning to see this tirade as more of a book than a post, so I’ll close, but let me say this:

I have spent most of my life in a classroom, either sitting in a desk or standing before rows of them.  I have heartily believed in what I was doing there, whether learning or teaching, and I had the naïve idea that it was all connected to this concept of Truth.  Just stop and think; if we’re not teaching Truth, we have to be teaching lies.   The middle ground just doesn’t exist.

What is truth?  I doubt if many of our nation’s students have a clue.

Works Cited

“Most High School Students Cheat.”  Live Science.  May 2010.      http://www.livescience.com/8254-high-school-students-cheat.html

Ramirez, Eddy. “Cheating on the Rise Among High School Students.” USNews – Education.  December 2. 2008. http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/on-education/2008/12/02/cheating-on-the-rise-among-high-school-students

Vogell,, Heather. “Investigation into APS cheating finds unethical behavior across every level.” The Atlanda Constitution. July 6, 2011. http://sweetness-light.com/archive/atlanta-teachers-cheated-for-better-scores.

The Elegance of Needles in Haystacks

Tom and I have evidently lost some essential piece of common sense; we no longer hear those sniveling little voices that warn of pending doom, which makes it quite a jolt when it shows up – suddenly, as it always does.

We occasionally care for the small dogs for vacationing dog-lovers.  This has been thoroughly amusing and Dink, our dachshund, seems to enjoy the intermittent chaos.  Last Wednesday morning, however, doom arrived in the form of a tiny white Chihuahua with greyhound instincts.

Her name is Mia.  Her pack-mates, a Bichon  and a Maltese, settled in like they’d arrived at a posh resort.  Mia, however, thought the place had “prison” written all over it, so when a gusty breeze swung the garage man-door open, she didn’t waste the opportunity.  Zoom --  and she was gone.

OK – ask – how far can a four-pound dog travel in two minutes?  Answer: a lot farther than we can.  We ran out the back gate, but she was nowhere in sight. Not in the churchyard next door, not across our busy street, not at the neighbors’ house.  We walked in different directions calling her name – uselessly; our voices couldn’t have sounded familiar yet. 

As I rushed through the gate at the back of the church property, I glanced behind me, and there she stood, about fifty yards away in the scrub oaks by our driveway.  I ran off across the field toward her, but in the minute it took me to return, she’d done another vanishing act.  Poof. 

So, there we were, with somebody else’s tiny dog (the needle) lost at the edge of a town ( the haystack).  The owner was on her way to Hawaii, which she wasn’t going to enjoy much.  Sipping Mai Tais on the beach is hard to take pleasure in if you’re picturing your dog being torn asunder by coyotes.

Tom rode his bike all over.  I drove my car.  We both handed out fliers.  We talked to at least a hundred people.  Our neighbors made signs, drove around in their cars. We called Animal Control, the Humane Society, we talked to the police, the mailman. It seemed that all of Central Point was on the lookout for Mia, though I couldn’t see how that would help – she was so skittish, she was going to be hard to get a hold of.

It didn’t help to imagine where she might go – duh – home, but home was thirty miles away and one could get there by road heading either north or south.  And wouldn’t a Chihuahua just head overland? And there be beasties.  

The day wore on and we no longer heard reports of her.  We caught no more glimpses.  She had vaporized.  We went to bed that night knowing only that God knew where she was and the time hadn’t yet arrived to give us that info.  We prayed that she’d be cared for and that we’d find her.  How people lose children and go on living is beyond me; here I was, just sick about a pocket dog that wasn’t even mine.

We left the gate open and her bed on the back porch in case she came back, but Thursday morning dawned and no Mia. I mimicked our neighbor’s idea and made a big sign for the front curb.  Then we went out driving around – the other three dogs on my lap.  We passed out more fliers, accosted folks in the stores and banks and the park.  Nothing, and it was nearly noon.  She’d been out there in the world alone for 24 hours.

We headed home.  We had just pulled into the driveway when a young man riding a motorized skate board (!) zoomed in behind us.   He grinned and said,  “I just wanted to tell you your dog will be home soon.”   He said he’d found her and handed her off to a lady in a truck who would be bringing her home. He said that he had Chihuahuas and couldn’t imagine losing one. He left before we thought to ask his name.

So we waited.  I cleaned up the kitchen, fixed lunch,  took the other dogs out, puttered around.  Almost an hour later the dogs jumped off the couch, running around the room in one of their ballistic barking fits.  Someone knocked on the door.  There stood a lovely blonde woman with Mia cradled in her arms. 

But here’s the rest of the story – She had seen our sign while out running errands.  She said she couldn’t explain why, but she thought she’d go look out on Upton Road, north and east of us about a mile.  She drove to the ball park out there and on the field she spied two young men with a small white dog. She drove in, approached them and asked if the dog was theirs.  They hesitated and she asked if her name was Mia; they had to check her tags to answer that one.  She explained about the sign and her search – you see, she had Chihuahuas too, and couldn’t imagine losing one.  They handed Mia over and one of them set off the give us the good news.

What are the odds that a random woman would see a lost dog sign and know right where in the haystack to look?  What are the odds that the boys who found her, and the woman who brought her home, would know how to handle such an anxious, fearful little dog?

When we asked Mia’s chauffeur if we could offer her a reward, she said, “No.  Just pay it forward.”  So I’m writing this.  You see, the whole escapade was a burning bush moment for me.  I’ve had many of them, but I’m no less astounded.  It’s so easy to slip into that awful it-all-depends-on-me mode and forget that God has everything under control, even when it doesn’t look like it.  He knew where she was,  He got her through the cold dark night and brought her home, and He did that in a way that would let us know He was in it.

Here’s the kicker.  We immediately called Mia’s “mom.”  Her plane had just landed in Hawaii.  She lost no vacation time and is right now sitting on a beach, sipping her Mai Tai without a care in the world.  And Mia has changed her mind about the Chadwell Resort.  She’s asleep on my lap as I write this. 

Art and the Automobile

 We just returned from a pilgrimage.  We’re a little sunburned.  We’re road-weary – we drove over 600 miles.  We’re a few hundred dollars poorer and we’ve spent three days eating bad food.  But we’re satisfied – we’ve done what we needed to do – we paid homage to the automobile. 

The first shrine we visited was the Portland Art Museum, an odd spot for car worship, but I’ve always enjoyed cars as sculpture, not as machines, so maybe not so odd.  The exhibit, “The Allure of the Automobile,” overworked both my camera and my brain.  We saw a Tucker, a ‘37 Hispano-Suiza, a ’57 Jaguar (once owned by Steve McQueen), a Bugatti, … but the names mean very little.

We saw voluptuous curves and long, strong lines, elegance and breathtaking beauty, rich color and polished chrome. Each car reflected light in a thousand gleaming shimmers.  Each perched on its own simple pedestal, each with its own engraved plaque.  I suspect we were admiring over twenty million dollars worth of cars, but there were only seventeen vehicles.  And they were silent.

Later we sat in the sun and watched Listers and Lotuses and Corvettes careen around the last turn at the Portland International Raceway.  These cars, like the ones at the museum, were historic cars, but these were not silent. 

Only the sound of the ocean moves me the way the sound of highly-tuned engines screaming, thundering, back-firing into the down-shift just before the turn and then roaring out of it, sometimes with a frightening little squeal of the tires.  There is such power in that sound – sound that envelops and reverberates down into your bones, sound that comes in layer upon layer, each car at its own pitch, but harmonizing with every other car and after the first lap, blending like a round, thinning into separate strands that keep repeating, lap after lap.

I sat there in the perfect sun, head back and eyes closed, and thought about that sound as it infiltrated my soul.  It is an important sound, one that embodies the all of the vibrations of our culture – our freedom, our ingenuity, our devotion to being the best.  What we think can always, for better or for worse, be traced back to God.  What we do, goes back to the wheel, to four wheels powered by pistons and fossil fuels, to the car.

It is the car, and Henry Ford’s method of making them cheaply enough that anyone could have one, that has made modern versatility possible. Neither we, nor the goods we produce are stuck in any one locale.  The car has empowered us all to be where we want to be, to be what we want to be.

Yes, in a perfect world the miles of available road would be in perfect proportion to the number of cars traveling on those roads. (We were stuck in Portland traffic for two hours Friday,)  In a perfect world the fuel to power these cars would be cheap and politically neutral, creating neither international tension nor ecological miasmas.  And I’ll admit that the testosterone-laden sound I’m so fond of loses some of it allure when its ripping past my house at two in the morning.  But no matter how stylishly disdainful of the internal combustion engine we try to be, we are we because of it.

It has allowed us to conquer, in part, both time and space.  It has allowed us to rejoin those we have left – and to have left in the first place.  It has allowed us to avail ourselves of a myriad of goods and services.  It has allowed us to be independent, to push ourselves.  It has given us speed. 

The automobile has helped us understand our world – to understand power -- acceleration, aerodynamics, centrifugal force.  Those aren’t theoretical ideas, those are things we’ve experienced – the surge when we push the gas pedal, the buffeting of a hand held out the window, the sickening feeling when we take a corner too fast.

And that learning has produced great beauty.  The search to control those forces has allowed scientific law to show itself as beauty.  Those cars at the racetrack didn’t just sound good, they were stunning, each one designed to make the most of the air it travels through.  The Mustangs were ruggedly good-looking, angular and masculine, the Corvettes beautifully blending curves and points, the Lolas delicate and exotic.

As exotic as a pilgrimage, and just as in the Middle Ages, going on a pilgrimage is a vacation, a fun, as well as a pious, undertaking.  I love vacations when we go to see what God has made, but I also love admiring what man, in God’s grace, has made.  The automobile, in its beauty and power, in its gift of possibilities is worthy of that admiration. 

Freedom Floats

This may be Independence Day, but I’m far from independent; I depend on the stability of this most nurturing of all nations. I’m dependent on God. I’m dependent on all of you.  That must be acknowledged.

But I am free --  I can choose what I want to do with my days --- I’m sitting here in an old chair that was my mothers; my laptop is toasting my leg while I finish this post.  Later Tom and I will walk down to the park for the 4^th of July celebration, then I might go out and climb into the blue and white striped hammock under the catalpa tree and read a while.  Sometime this afternoon I’ll bake that peach pie for the party tonight.  Tomorrow I’ll choose something else.  My life is like that. 

Even when I’m teaching I have lots of choice about what I’ll teach when, about when I’ll actually read those papers I assigned, about what I’ll do when I’m done.  I’m not rich by American standards, not at all, but I am rich if you look at the big picture.

Most lives lived by most people who have existed on this earth have not been even close to the abundance we enjoy.  Most have had to work non-stop from sun-up to sundown just to gather enough to eat for the day.  That statement is not overly dramatic – it’s the truth.

Imagine being the wife of an Anglo-Saxon warrior huddled around a smoky fire pounding grain into flour or roasting a rabbit over the open flame.  Or picture eking out a living in the rice paddies of the Ming dynasty never knowing when the next uprising would bring the savage vengeance of the warlords to your village.  Almost any scenario you dream up involves misery, danger, hunger, and servitude.

Being American is new and amazing.  Two things make the lives of Americans vastly different than the rest of the world, past and present, and both are derived from God.  We were created free to choose Him and we were created free (because of the inherent abilities God gave us) to become prosperous enough to enjoy our lives.  “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” John 10:10

In America I have been free to know God.  His Word has been readily available; I haven’t had to risk my life to study it. I live in a country founded on the idea of Truth (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) and though scoffing at that concept is trendy right now, much of our prosperity comes from the trust that a belief in Truth provides.

I live in a society that has been aimed at God’s perfect Justice; we haven’t achieved it, but as long as that is our value we will edge ever closer to it, and in that environment we are free to pursue the ideas, inventions, and creations God gives us.

I live in a country where righteousness has been the norm – that is fading and it scares me, but we are still capable of horror at some of the behaviors of the powerful, the famous, and the misguided, and perhaps we will one day return to holding ourselves, our friends, our families and our elected officials to His holy standard of goodness.

These concepts have given us freedoms  that have produced a prosperity greater than any the world has ever known.  I have more in the way of comfort, health, pleasure, and happiness than kings ever used to have. I am free to putter away this glorious day because I can afford it.  I’m confident about my next meal, about the temperature of my environs, the cleanliness of my clothes, the adequacy and safety of the water I’ll consume.  I have enough – of everything. 

In a sense I earned it; my husband and I have worked hard all our lives.  But so did the folks in the rice paddies and all it got them was an early grave.

I have had the blessing of working hard in a system that rewards me for doing so and encourages me to work inventively and efficiently.  Everyone else in this country has had that advantage, which has produced all the things  that currently make my life pleasant instead of the historical norm of steady suffering.

On this 4^th of July let us celebrate the dual freedoms of this amazing country – the freedom to truly know God and the freedom that freedom itself brings – the freedom from the drudgery of life lived just to stay alive. Let us make this holiday another Thanksgiving.

I could live in Egypt – but not safely or prosperously since I’m a Christian.  I could live in a crowded dormitory in China and work at what they tell me to do.  I could live in the malaria-infested jungles of Africa, the barren steppes of northern Russia, the tumultuous streets of a crumbling Greece.  But I don’t.  I live in America, the most blessed nation of the world.  If the forces of evil, both within and without, have their way, it won’t be for long. 

We are free today, so free that it feels like it floats, but wherever freedom has struggled to the surface, it has lasted a very short time.   Let us take a moment and be profoundly grateful for the choices we still have today.

Henry Jay and the Tail

I have no idea why I try to garden: I can’t say I enjoy the process, the results impress no one, and Tom doesn’t like vegetables.  Go figure. 

For over twenty years we’ve owned a house that sits stolidly on almost a half acre of land and I’ve often wondered what God wanted us to do with all this yard; it seems that something useful should be produced here.

The land is fenced into a front yard, a back yard, and what we call “the outback,” an area of neglected fruit trees and star thistle.  Several years ago, the guilt of unused land weighing on my prairie soul, we built two large raised garden beds, necessary since the dirt here would more easily produce bricks than beets (I’ve lived in Oregon for half my life and the idea of buying dirt still amazes me.). Each year we’ve planted and watered and weeded and not produced enough to have paid for the seed, let alone the soil. 

This year, having more hope in our souls than sense, we planted again and, in spite of the long soggy spring, things are growing; I haven’t bought canning jars yet, but I am encouraged. 

In the spirit of that hope Dink and I were out weeding in the south plot last week.  Dink is our longhaired miniature Dachshund and he’s more of a gardener than I’ll ever be.  He looks like something out of a Harry Potter novel – one blue eye, one brown one and long, black-streaked chestnut hair.  I suspect he has magical powers and could, if he wanted to, helicopter up to ceiling height and zigzag around the room, but I’ve never actually seen him do that. 

Instead he digs.  Whenever I pick up a garden tool, he watches me closely for a few minutes, then starts pawing into the ground right next to me. He diligently yanks up any roots I’m chasing and has even learned the difference between weeding and planting; I noticed him a couple of weeks ago using his long nose to carefully cover up the ground I had just disturbed.

But I didn’t intend to tell about Dink, or, really, even about Henry Jay.  Henry is the scrub jay who has lived in our yard for the last half dozen years. He’s fond of us because we feed him walnuts from our outback trees, a habit he finds endearing, so he follows us around the yard, ever optimistic.

On the day in question he had been sans walnuts for a while and had, evidently, decided to fend for himself.

As I said, Dink and I were working the south plot, pulling up woodbine starts and searching the soil for some sign of intended vegetation.  I paused for a second and, leaning on the hoe farmer-style, I stared out across the outback to the north plot. 

There something caught my eye; in the dirt next to an emerging squash plant writhed an eight-inch length of some unidentifiable substance, something that appeared to be alive and in agony. 

It was about as big around as my little finger, too big for a worm, and no worm in my lengthy experience ever behaved in such an unseemly fashion.  The thing was swinging into an arc and then with equal violence, reversing the arc, thrashing around enough to kick up dirt.  It was too tapered to be a snake and snakes aren’t given to fit-throwing either.  I just stood there too horrified to look away.

It was Henry who came to my rescue.  He had been perched on the edge of one of the wooden planks that make up the bed.  I had been vaguely aware of his presence, but it had seemed normal for him to be there close to me. 

He covered the space between him and the thing in a nanosecond and was flying off toward the old plum tree before I could catch my breath.  He seemed both resigned and triumphant about the thrashing string of flesh that hung from his beak. 

At that moment a flash of something light-colored caught my eye.  I focused and saw what was left of a yellow-beige lizard zipping off to my left.  It was about half a foot long, and it was missing its tail. 

I suspect Henry was up to more than just yard maintenance.  He’d been greedy enough to go for that whole lizard – how else would the tail have been dislodged in the first place?  It must have surprised him that Liz had just walked away from half of herself.  Walnuts don’t do that. 

But he had quickly regained his composure and adjusted to the new reality.  I have no idea what he would have done with the whole lizard anyway; it was as big as he was. 

Meanwhile, Liz had gone underground to grow a new tail, Dink was still digging, and I was just standing there horrified at the violence I’d just witnessed.  True, Henry had enough lunch for his whole family,  and Liz would grow a new appendage,  but it was a nice tail and she was, like Eyeore, “pretty attached to it. “

The Place That Wasn't

 Sing along -- “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam…”  Nah, actually I want a home where the restaurants are within walking distance and the streets are neatly numbered.  I’m glad buffalo still exist, but I’m more interested in getting where I’m going.   I need not  to get lost.  Now, being a little confused about which turn to take isn’t lost.  Thinking, mistakenly, for several hours that you’re heading off in the right direction in an area that offers nothing in the way of pedestrians to ask or landmarks to spot, and doesn’t even show up on your only map – that is lost.  Last summer in Montana we were as perplexed and far astray as I ever want to be. 

One should, generally speaking, avoid being adrift in Montana – the miles are much longer there, so lost becomes a much more impressive experience.   One missed fork in the road and before you find a sign that raises an eyebrow, you’re already fifty miles off course. 

Last summer’s expedition was, I’m afraid, another Adventure with the Chadwells.  These adventures started thirty-some years ago when we left the tidy cornfields of eastern Nebraska and came west.  Our friends have learned to avoid traveling with us.

Once we ditched our raft in bad rapids, which produced some Reader’s Digest moments during which the icy water kept sucking me under and whacking me against bone-breaking boulders. 

Once we lost our way skiing in a blizzard.  I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and was headed straight down the mountain.  I dug my poles in hard only to discover that I wasn’t moving at all – it was just the wind and the total whiteout.  I can remember one of our kids moaning, “ I thought we left Nebraska to get away from all this.”  Good point. 

We’ve done the roll-the-new-dirt-bike-off-the-cliff thing, the left-the-new-suit-in-the-hotel-room thing, and, of course, we’ve been lost in Seattle; that happens to everyone.

But we’d never been lost in Montana.  That day we were attempting to drive south from Bozeman to Idaho Falls down through the Jefferson Valley; there really aren’t many highways there, not much to choose from, so it takes talent to get it wrong.  Especially these days.

Which is why I should bring up Dory.  Dory is our GPS navigating system.  (We’ve never actually heard her say, “42 Wallaby Way,” but we keep expecting it.) She has saved us many a time and has actually tamed Seattle, but she’s also made some really miserable mistakes.  I’d like to blame her and her annoying little “recalculating” voice for the Montana fiasco.  But I can’t – we had embarked on a 3,000-mile trip and left her charger at home. 

So there I sat riding shotgun, soaking up the vastness that is Montana, with nothing but a small atlas on my lap.  I value efficiency, so I had turned the atlas to the Idaho page since we’d be driving in Idaho most of the time.  I thought. 

We headed west out of Bozeman and left the Interstate at Whitehall turning abruptly south into the Jefferson Valley and down to Highway 41.  That would take us to Dillon and from there onto another freeway and down into Idaho.  By the time, that day in late June, that we hit a hamlet called Twin Bridges it was close to noon and the sun gave us no inkling that the road we followed had slowly veered east and morphed into uncharted Highway 287.

We ate lunch in some nameless village and drove on, clueless.  By mid-afternoon we were curious and very alone. We’d seen no other cars.  By the time we crested a rise and coasted into Nevada City, which is neither in Nevada nor a city, we were downright disturbed. 

Nevada City is a ghost town.  It consists of nearly a hundred weather-beaten, 19^th century buildings, fully furnished, looking like the whole town had just gone out to the rodeo.  Chalk still lay on the abandoned slates in the old school house; the day’s assignment still scrawled across the blackboard.  The dressmaker’s shop was full of calico bolts and rolls of lace, a dress-form half-draped in brocade.  The banker’s house stood open – lace curtains at the windows, pans on the stove, but nobody was home.  Nobody had been home for a hundred and fifty years, but the furniture was dustless.  And this place wasn’t on the map either.  Not on my 21^st century map. 

It’s profoundly unnerving to suddenly find yourself in an uncharted place in the wrong era, with no idea how you got there.  Time warp?  The Twilight Zone?  We couldn’t both be having the same hallucination.  But the afternoon was dwindling and, as far as we could tell, we were no closer to Idaho Falls.

Reluctantly we continued down the same highway; it was the only highway.  A few Montana miles later we drove through Virginia City (I know, what’s with these names?  Were the town fathers as confused about their whereabouts as we were?).  Virginia City is an inhabited version of the ghost town, quaint and charming, but according to the map, just as non-existent. We snapped a few pictures, trying to make the most of whatever this adventure was.   

Then we drove on to the next town, which turned out to be fully and comfortingly 2010. We stopped at a gas station.  I took my little lap-map in, swallowed my pride, hid my mounting fear, and, handing the clerk my atlas, asked if she could show me where we were.  She pointed to Ennis – which is close to Big Sky, a good fifty of those long Montana miles east of where we were trying to be. 

Eventually, after cruising down hours and hours of empty roads, through breath-taking terrain, past lavish ranches tucked into the base of black-green mountains (The only car to pass us was a Lamborghini.), we worked our way down into Idaho, and civilization eased back into place.   

We discovered that had I been turned to the Montana page I would have known about Highway 287.  (Why would mapmakers leave off random highways?  Were they trying to save ink?)  Aside from feeling like the universe had slipped sideways for a few hours, it was a grand adventure.  

 I’d like to revisit Nevada City (which is owned by the state of Montana and functions as both movie set and outdoor museum) I’d like to arrive there on purpose.  I’d like to sleep in the hotel and drink a beer in the saloon.  I wouldn’t even mind seeing a buffalo.  I doubt, however, that I will.  That adventure was a gift and gifts seldom repeat themselves.  

From Gershwin to Gaga

 

We are a nation attempting to dissolve itself.  Our poets write of Turkey and Mexico, and drizzle the names of obscure European philosophers through narcissistic nonsense.   Our artists paint nothing.  Those who aren’t artists pretend to be – hang two chairs on the wall, place two cinderblocks on the floor and label the jumble esoterically, enlightening no one.  (That's not a virtual example; my sculpture instructor in college was very proud of just such a piece.  He called it "Marriage for Two.") Our musicians abuse their instruments, de-reeding their saxophones and shouting obscenities into the naked necks (I saw that happen too -- at a dance concert where the dancers cavorted through a pile of dirt and took their clothes off.)   Our drama must have plunder and propaganda and offensive language, often no language at all, just explosions and body parts and sex.  

We are a nation in love with the false dream of security – and we want it without having to bother with integrity.  We want prosperity without work, success without risk, fun without consequences.  We want to obey only the rules we find easy to follow. Which leaves us mindlessly voting liberal, believing everything -- or nothing.  It's too hard to take a reasoned, moral stand -- so hard that we find ourselves hating those who do.

All this unwound from a culture sure of its purpose, sure of its God.  All this from a people so grand they could imagine a civilization though there was nothing but forest and scattered tribes aimlessly scratching existence from the rocky coastline.  Cities beautiful and towering, farms productive and orderly, roads to everywhere, planes overhead, trains across the prairie vastness.

Jazz and baseball and Rockwell and Frost.  Fried chicken and tractors and Hiawatha and quarterbacks.   Barbecue and victory gardens and Microsoft and tap dancers.  Huck Finn and fly fishing and Levis and convertibles.  Speed and open spaces and wind and mountains,  Elvis and Gershwin and Hopper and Wright.  Wilder, ah Wilder, and Sandburg and Ford.   All rusting in a continuous drizzle of acidic sophistication, of fashionable hatred, envy, and monstrous wallowing guilt.  Jonathan Edwards to Jeremiah Wright.  Abe Lincoln to Barack Obama.  Will Rogers to Al Franken. 

The thread is still there, the heartbeat thin, but steady.  Can we werite another hymn, return to face our God, and walk on into the destiny we could have? With God all things are possible.  Let us pray.  Let us learn about Him again.

Betrayal, the Natural Way

 

Nothing is tastier than a blackberry pie still warm from the oven, and nothing is nastier than the blackberry bramble it came from.  We spent the morning doing battle with the spiky vines that have invaded our fotinia hedge and we’ve come away bloodied and exhausted.  The bramble won.  Here in the Northwest they always do.

The Pacific Northwest is filled with many natural amazements:  conical, snow-covered volcanos, tumbling white-water rapids,  forests that each spring bloom with rhodendendron and dogwood.  We can gape sky-ward toward the tops of ancient redwoods, stand in awe at the rolling power of the Pacific, or catch a glimpse of a grizzly snagging a salmon at the base of the roaring falls.  We are surrounded by Mother Nature.

Mother Nature.  What an interestingly vague and benevolent concept,  even more difficult to define than God.  He at least told us what would tick him off, but with Mother Nature, we have never really known. Our ancestors even went to the extremes of sacrificing their next of kin to keep her mollified.  And yet the term “mother” carries such an affectionate, cookie-baking, kiss-it-and-it-will-feel-better connotation that it hardly fits with the reality of nature. William Wordsworth, in a fit of romantic zeal and wishful thinking (while, no doubt, taking tea on a spring afternoon in his well-tended rose garden) once said , “Nature never will betray the heart that loves her,”  and I suppose many a tree-embracing environmental enthusiast would agree with him.  But if this is true, then he must have meant something different by the word “nature” than I do, and I’m sure I harbor a different definition in my head than the one floating nebulously through our national band-width.

I suppose that since mankind naturally (pardon the pun) squanders contentment and wastes his days yearning after what he can’t have, and since we have won so many of our battles with Mother Nature, that we now lust after what we think we “remember” about those pristine times when all was natural.  Never mind that in the good old days starvation and disease did most people in before they were forty.  But now, having trumped nature in a few areas,  we seem to long for the days before central heating and useful medicine.  We want to get back to nature, however  irrational that may be.

In the first place I have to contend that nature consists of more than just trees and hills and sucker fish,  that human beings are nature too.  Granted, we can  make machines, but we aren’t machines and just because we sit at the top of the food chain doesn’t oust us from it.  So much of our public discussion makes man sound like some ungrateful alien upstart, a Grendel-style monster with the audacity to try to stay alive and improve his existence at the expense of other preditors.  We don’t seem at all appalled at the ladybug who will selfishly wipe out entire colonies of aphids just for her own benefit; we even employ her to do the job for us and praise ourselves for using “natural” gardening techniques when we do.  No, we got here the same way everything else did and that makes us, too, a natural phenomenon.  Which brings me back to Wordsworth -- if we include mankind in nature, then his statement is patently ridiculous.  Volumes have been written on human betrayals.

But if mankind does not belong in the definition of nature,  what does?  Could we say that nature is everything in the world except man and what he has made? That would mean we would have to include our national nemesis, petroleum, since that substance developed naturally thousands of years before man found and learned to use it.  Under this definition we’d have to include nuclear radiation as a part of nature, and quit treating it like a Frankesteinian human invention.  Bacteria and viruses would qualify as well, with or without mankind, and we’ve all had to deal with stomach flu and head colds and we’ve all felt betrayed. Then, if we include the “nothing man-made” clause we would have to exclude all gardens and farms and Wordsworth didn’t seem to be shunning domesticated animals or his climbing roses. Did he just mean the outdoors?

That creates problems as well.  If nature is so benign, why have we humans spent the last six millinia trying to avoid her?  We build shelters and spend most of our time inside those shelters, cleaning up the messes that just naturally  accumulate, and creating our own climate, which in most parts of the world far outshines the natural climate outside the walls.  Even when we wax all maudlin and sentimetal and rush off into the woods to camp and “get back to nature,” we pack up half our worldly possesions so we can stay safe and comfortable in the forest.  Wordsworth could make his pollyanna remark because he  never tried to live through a Montana winter or a Texas tornado.   What was Hurricane Katrina but nature betraying all those jazz-loving Louisiannans? 

In fact, humans have found natural climate conditions rarely condusive to staying healthy.  Mankind was created with little to protect us from the elements.  We have no insulating coat of fur or feathers, no protective scales, and a body temperature that we need to keep stablized, so we have built roofs to keep out the rain, walls to stop the wind and and warning systems in case Mom Nature decides to turn unusally nasty;  nature doesn’t have to change her behavior much to make our existance impossible.  A little too much rain, and our houses are ripped from their foundations and go floating down the fickle river. Too much wind, and roofs fly off.  Too much cold, and the pipes freeze.  We have paved the world’s surfaces so we can move about unhindered by nature’s weather whims, but then she freezes the rain or dumps tons of snow and we are still in trouble. 

In fact Mother Nature is such a sweety that we long ago discovered we were better off huddled together in cities, not only to protect ourselves from marauding lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), but to lend each other a hand in our never-ending attempt to outsmart the old girl.  Many summers ago I spent a week in Manhattan. Upon my return to the Rogue Valley, my Nebraska brother and his family came to visit and one day we decided to drive over to Gold Beach. My husband, who loves to drive and scare our flat-lander relatives, decided that the lonely old logging trail called Bear Camp Road would be the ideal route. By the time we were heading home, the sun was setting and we crept slowly over the pass, scaring black bears off the road, spotting cougars slinking through the trees and generally feeling isolated.  For over two hours we spied no other humans and the forest grew darker.  Finally we rounded one last bend and the road dropped down past Ennis Riffle and we saw the lights in the charming brown cabin that guards the turn-off.  The minute I spied the lights, I relaxed and I realized that I had been less uneasy walking through the midnight streets of New York than I had been that night on Bear Camp Road.  Granted, people die daily in the Big Apple - I watch TV too - but I’d rather be shot on a crowded street corner than die the way a salesman did on this old road  several winters ago.  He got lost in a snow storm at the top of the pass and it took three months for the rescue team to find him. I doubt that he died quoting Wordsworth. 

Though, he might have at the start of his ill-fated journey.  It is beautiful up there; ridge after ridge of navy-blue mountains,  ancient Douglas firs, cascading rivulets, rugged rock outcroppings and the occasional patch of snow.   Mother Nature is an attractive old broad - attractive, but dangerous. She is also generous, providing, when she feels like it, beauty and susteanance, rest and water, health and healing.  When she feels like it.   And she is wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, capable of fulfilling our every need and desire, but she is also capricious, unstable, unforgiving and uncompromising. We must find better ways than the ancients did to accept her largess without incurring her wrath and we must always respect her dictums because she will betray us, whether we love her or not.     

Ernest and his Lucite Core

I’d like you picture this --- It’s 11:30 on a Saturday night and Jane has a tiff with her boyfriend and decides to leave the party early and hitchhike home; two weeks later police find her body dumped in a ditch.  Jonathon, who was also at the same party, leaves drunk, chooses to speed to the freeway via the off-ramp instead of the on-ramp and breaks his back in the ensuing head-on collision. Picture also George who, despite his mother’s drunken rampages, is determined to graduate from college and spends that Saturday evening pouring over his chemistry text.  He will pass the exam and get an A in the class.  Each of these people chose certain actions that had semi-predictable results..  Each exercised volition, free will.    

Granted, Jane might have made it home in one piece, so might have Jon.  George might have passed the chemistry exam without studying, but he greatly increased his odds by hitting the books.  It was really bad luck that Jane crossed paths that night with a homicidal maniac, but her free will put her on that path. (Her choice, of course, does not exonerate the nut case; it just put her on his radar.) It was a nasty coincidence that a tractor-trailer rig loaded with concrete blocks was headed down the on-ramp that night, true, but had Jon not chosen to get drunk, to drive, to drive down that road at that speed, it wouldn’t have mattered. Each person used free will, which we like to claim when convenient, but which has taken quite a beating in the last half-century.  The further we move away from personal responsibility, and we are traveling at warp speed in that direction, the further we are from truth, from choice, from God. 

            Several years ago I enjoyed occasional philosophical discussions with an unusually bright student of mine – I’ll call him Ernest.  Ernest, who was very adamantly an atheist, had an interesting fixation on the concept of free will.  I found it somewhat odd that an atheist could find that concept so captivating.  “Free from what?” I would ask him.  I failed miserably to convince him that if existence is only material and we’re all just so much protoplasm, then we are hopelessly controlled by our biology and free will is meaningless.  If, however, we are created by an omnipotent, sovereign God (who in spite of His sovereignty has allowed us volition -- even to choose against Him), then free will is an interesting construct.  Perhaps that’s what I’m doing here.  Having one last go at Ernest. 

First let’s look at the denotative definition of free will.  Contrary to popular, psychiatric thinking, free will is not hampered by anything but natural law.  (i. e. I can’t choose to inhabit two places at once.  I can’t decide to vanish into thin air.)  But it is, after all, free will.  “Free” as in untrammeled, unfettered, un-impeded.  “Will” as in I will, I won’t, I decide. Free will is not frozen because of a bad childhood (We are screwed up because our families are screwed up).  Free will is not fettered because someone has provoked us (He makes me so mad.  No – he’s a jerk, but we make ourselves mad. ) Free will isn’t even abrogated by our bad habits – the negative exercise of that free will is what gives us bad habits.    Free will chooses – it chooses whether to give in to peer pressure and drink.  It chooses whether to be mad or understanding, whether to be punctual or late, whether to believe or doubt, whether to work or play.  Free will chooses our emotions, our behaviors, our friends, our attitudes, our relationship with God.  Free will even chooses, to a certain extent, our mental and physical health.

The outgrowth of popular, Freudian thinking and its theories about the origins of psychoses, neuroses, and general bad judgment is just an end run around the personal responsibility that is the other side of the free will coin.  Pop-psychologists have us blaming our parents, our siblings, our weird Uncle Bob, our first grade teacher, the weather, our previous lives, and hormonal upheavals for every rotten choice we ever make.  This creates two problems: 1) It lets us wiggle out of things we’d be better off facing up to, and 2) It robs us of our free will.  If I’m a mess because my dad was an alcoholic, then I’m just stuck. I have to be a mess. There is no way out -- except expensive, neurotic therapists and exotic pharmaceuticals, and if either of those worked, they’d no longer be necessary. 

But if free will is just that – free, in every sense of the word, we can choose not to slog through meaningless lives completely at the mercy of all that had come before -- & before -- & before -- & before.  If I’m like I am because of my manic-depressive alcoholic father, then he was a bipolar drinker because of his overworked father’s early death and the poverty of the Depression, and his father ended up in that position because of his father’s restless need to come the new world, and, and, and, until the weight of it all is hopeless.  If we have free will, we make choices of our own – all our own and we are not doomed to follow the dictates of our ancestors’ experiences.

As I think back on those conversations with Ernest, I realize that it is no wonder that so many 21^st century Americans place little value on freedom – for anyone who sees people as nothing but agglutinative masses of molecules, the concept is empty.  Empty-ish, anyway – regardless of our philosophies we all seem to know what we ourselves want, what we’d will to happen.  However, if we are at the core, clear Lucite units of volition, if we are born with the capacity to choose, to be at least partners in the formation of our own ultimate destinies, then freedom matters,  really matters.  Is there God? Choose.  What think ye of Christ?  Choose.  Will you take this man/woman to be your lawfully wedded ….?  Choose.  I’m not willing to turn those choices over to either my DNA or another human being.  I don’t think Ernest is either.

As is usual with teachers, we rarely find out what becomes of our ex-students.  Ernest marched off to Stanford, an institution his free will chose.  He came back to visit once, but I was in the middle of teaching a class, so I have no idea if he ever satisfactorily resolved his Lucite issue.   All I can do is hope his chemistry has been making the right decisions. 

My Apologies

For thirty-two years I stood in front of classes of high school students.  I now teach at the college level, but I sometimes miss the energy and urgency of teenagers.  I often muse about those days…..

I have been in the presence of genius: brains so keenly alive and omnivorous they barely need teaching, souls so hungry I must scramble to find fodder, synapses snapping so fast the air crackles with the energy.  I have been in the presence of those who managed daily to step forward strongly in spite of bodies weakened by injury and disease. 

I have also been in the presence of souls so numb from the loveless battery of uncertainty that they can barely absorb air, let alone ideas.  I have seen young people utterly exhausted from -- what?  Sleeping in a car? Staying up all night playing video games?  Arguing with parents? Doing homework? Doubtful. Doing drugs? Quite possibly. Fixable? Who knows?

I was constantly surrounded by paradoxes incarnate: these new people – both childlike and adult, simultaneously worried and cavalier, scared full of bravado, both curious and blasé, both earnest and incurably lazy.  My own brain has acquired the habit of thinking in tiny electrical, virtual bursts. It is said that in Columbus’ time, folks thought the world was flat; my students thought the world is square, that it lights up when you flip the switch, that you can change it by merely pushing a button, relocating a mouse. They were very sure that if you miss something, the whole world would rewind, will TIVO reality into convenience.

 I have witnessed their amazement when they discover that a car accident actually hurts, that homework has to be actually produced, a book actually read.  In their world reality and imagination have no mutual boundaries, no sure signals, no Welcome to Fantasyland signs to let them know they’ve crossed an invisible frontier.

I have been in the presence of very worried people, fresh, young, vulnerable people who already know all about rape and incest, torture and terror, famine and wealth.  They have learned well the lessons of global warming, capitalistic evil, nuclear holocaust.  These kids were in grade school when the World Trade Center went down – over and over again, in front of God and everybody.  They know it is “only a matter of time,” and that time is their time. My students were very aware of time and  very sure that it goes by too quickly; few seemed actually bored.  Most were frantic, fractured, running on static.  I may be onto something there – most were usually plugged into something electric, wires draping from pockets and backpacks, cell phones hidden in folded hands, IPods humming on their desks. 

At my old school one of the most important hidden curriculum pieces was the assiduous teaching of procrastination, and our students took to it like mechanics to grease.  All due dates were officially whine-able, especially if a parent, preferably a rich parent, did the whining,  and by allowing this we succeeded in enlarging the student sense of impermanence and uncertainty. I could be angry with my kids for not finishing projects on time, but I helped set up the culture that allowed that.  It is a kind culture.  On the surface.  It is a culture straddling several vast caverns, so all is unstable at best.  We tried on the one hand to see to it that no student could slip by without doing all that he needed to do to learn.  We tried, on the other hand, to encourage timeliness. Since kids all march to some pretty off-beat drummers, they are not all going to learn on schedule, so do we bow to the time god and march on without the slower ones (And, how do we know if they’re slow-lazy, slow-drugged, slow-abused, slow-slow?)?  Or, do we struggle slowly on, vowing to “leave no one behind,” due dates be damned?  

I was daily in the presence of students who were very sure that nothing is true.  Except, of course, that statement.  They learned this from some very good teachers. They didn’t know what to say when I suggested then that we all just go home.  If nothing is true, why learn? 

We have taught them this very trendy idea in order to straddle another canyon – the supposed gap between thought and faith.  Is faith (read that Christianity) so fearful that we have to obliterate logic and thought in order to avoid it?  And yet, it breaks my heart that those beautiful, confused, and frightened young people couldn’t be told that guilt, fear and anger are optional, that the problems of the world are traceable and controllable, that God is not only in His heaven, but He is here too in the devil’s world.  What would be so bad about all those brilliant, nervous brains facing the future with hope instead of dread?  with a sense of duty instead of entitlement, with love and logic and thoughtfulness?   What have we done?