#i think this is the post that enlightens people as to whether or not vance is an oc LMAO

[mail-me-a-snail]

✨ finally drew a proper ref for vance !! ✨

ive been drawing him from memory for so long that i just now have the muscle memory to conjure him from my mind. i need to chew on him .

[drsorrell]

Mon. 10.24.22 (SVC)

Announcements & Reminders

Review Friday’s online activity

Activity/Discussion

Close Reading Activity, Part Two (on Schoology, in groups) With the other members of your group, read through these quotes carefully, paying attention to how the sentences are constructed and the specific use of language. Talk about the quote in question before you write a response together. When you're done talking, please write up your response (one per group), post it, and we will talk about all of them.\

How does the author use language to get his or her point across? What is that point? Do you think that the author does a good job of it? Group 1: Madeline, Abby, Josiah, Justin (8:30) Tanner, Kayleigh, Jose, Brad, Colt, Steve (9:30) Damon Linker, “Liberals’ Astonishingly Radical Shift on Gender” (666) "That's because all societies — as collectivities of individuals sharing a common culture as well as common laws, rules, and norms (including linguistic rules and norms) — invariably constrain individuals more than they would be if they lived in absolute isolation from others. Any one of those limits on the individual will can feel as if it's an intolerable constraint, and the principle of individual freedom can always be invoked in order to combat it" (670). Group 2: Anton, Emma, Chrys, Dylan (8:30) Ben G, Ben H, Grace, Hailie, Jude, Carolina (9:30) Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (673) "I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks" (682). Group 3: Robbie, Francis, Tonio, Steven (8:30) Jacob, Camdon, Jaden, Shannon, Brady, Jessica (9:30) Richard Dorment, “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All” (694) "My wife makes more money than I do. We majored in the same thing at the same college at the same time, and when I chose to go into journalism, she chose to go to law school. She works longer hours, shoulders weightier responsibilities, and faces greater (or at least more reliable) prospects for long-term success, all of which are direct results of choices that we made in our early twenties. She does more of the heavy lifting with our young son than I do, but I do as much as I can. (Someone else watches him while we are at work.) I do a lot of cooking and cleaning around our house. So does she. I don't keep score (and she says she doesn't), and it's hard to imagine how our life would work if we weren't both giving every day our all" (699).

EXAMPLE "To them, payday lenders were predatory sharks, charging high interest rates on loans and exorbitant fees for cashed checks. The sooner they were snuffed out, the better...To me, payday lenders could solve important financial problems" (Vance 439) Vance uses "to them" and "to me" here to highlight a completely different way of viewing the world, which is super clever because he's not just saying, those morons are wrong but more, they don't have my life experience, so they just don't get where I'm coming from. This goes with his whole point, that elites don't understand where people like him are coming from, and he has a truly unique and enlightening perspective for the rest of us (rest of us morons, maybe??).

Homework

Read the following Chapter 23 “What’s Gender Got to Do With It?” texts before class:

Helen Lewis, “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism” (715)

Sanjana Ramanathan, “An End to Sexism in Gaming Communities” (723)

Monica Wright, “Why We Need Title IX Now More Than Ever” (731)

Do InQuizitive (15): Pronouns That Don’t Agree with Their Antecedents before class.

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR The Deep Confusion of the Post-Weinstein Moment ON CAMPUS Competition Is Ruining Childhood. The Kids Should Fight Back. THE STONE Buddhism Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS The Lessons of Cyrus Vance’s Campaign Contributions OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Jeff Flake: In a Democracy, There Can Be No Bystanders OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR ‘Game of Thrones’ Comes to Saudi Arabia CHARLES M. BLOW The New Democratic Party DAVID LEONHARDT The Conspiracy of Inaction on Sexual Abuse and Harassment LETTERS Unwavering Loyalty to Trump, Come What May LETTER Larry David’s Unfunny ‘S.N.L.’ Joke LETTER Paying for College LETTER A Ban on Bus and Subway Alcohol Ads in New York LETTERS Another Massacre, This Time at a Church in Texas OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS The Climate Risks We Face OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR A Deal-Maker Goes to China RED CENTURY What If the Russian Revolution Had Never Happened? EDITORIAL New York Voters Can Make Crooked Politicians Pay EDITORIAL Willie Horton, Updated for the Trump Era OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR With Manafort, It Really Is About Russia, Not Ukraine OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Marco Rubio: Tax Reform Should Help American Families Loading... OPINION Advertisement Opinion Buddhism Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think Robert Wright THE STONE NOV. 6, 2017 Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Share Tweet Email More Save 98 Photo “Golden Buddha, 2005” by Nam June Paik. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Not long ago I was accused of something I hadn’t realized was a bad thing: clarity. Adam Gopnik, reviewing my book “Why Buddhism Is True,” in The New Yorker in August, wrote: “He makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear.” Underlying this allegation (which I vigorously deny!) is a common view: that Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation — and that in a sense the point of Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation. After all, aren’t those Zen koans — “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and so on — supposed to suggest that language, and the linear thought it embodies, can’t capture the truth about reality? Gopnik seems to think that this drift of Buddhist thought — its apparent emphasis on the inscrutability of things — largely insulates it from scrutiny. Buddhist discourse that acknowledges, even embraces, paradox may “hold profound existential truths,” Gopnik says, but by the same token it has, as a kind of built-in property, an “all-purpose evasion of analysis.” So apparently people like me, who would like to evaluate Buddhist ideas in the light of modern science and philosophy, should save our breath. The question Gopnik is raising isn’t just an academic one. Every day, millions of people practice mindfulness meditation — they sit down, focus on their breath, and calm their minds. But the point of mindfulness meditation isn’t just to calm you down. Rather, the idea — as explained in ancient Buddhist texts — is that a calm, contemplative mind can help you see the world as it really is. It would be nice to critically examine this powerful claim, but if we can’t say clearly what Buddhists mean by “the world as it really is,” then how can we examine it? How can we figure out — or even argue about — whether meditation is indeed drawing people closer to the truth about reality? The cultural critic Edward Said famously used the term “orientalism” to refer to a patronizing way Westerners sometimes think of Eastern cultures and ideas — as charmingly exotic, perhaps, but as deficient in various Western virtues, including rationality and rigor. Said was talking mainly about Middle Eastern cultures, but much the same could be said of Buddhism: Western thinkers may cherish its art and its cryptic aphorisms, and may see meditation as therapeutically useful, but many of them don’t imagine Buddhist thought playing in the same league as Western thought; they don’t imagine a Buddhist philosophy that involves coherent conceptual structures that can be exposed to evidence and logic and then stand or fall on their merits. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story This condescension is unfounded. Not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make — many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought. In fact, in some cases Buddhist thought anticipated Western thought, grasping things about the human mind, and its habitual misperception of reality, that modern psychology is only now coming to appreciate. Consider a quote that Gopnik employs in suggesting that appraising Buddhist philosophy may be a fool’s errand. It is from a Zen Buddhist who, in analyzing a famous text called the Heart Sutra, wrote this: “Things exist but they are not real.” I agree with Gopnik that this sentence seems a bit hard to unpack. But if you go look at the book it is taken from, you’ll find that the author himself, Mu Soeng, does a good job of unpacking it. It turns out Soeng is explaining an idea that is central to Buddhist philosophy: “not self” — the idea that your “self,” as you intuitively conceive it, is actually an illusion. Soeng writes that the doctrine of not-self doesn’t deny an “existential personality” — it doesn’t deny that there is a you that exists; what it denies is that somewhere within you is an “abiding core,” a kind of essence-of-you that remains constant amid the flux of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and other elements that constitute your experience. So if by “you” we mean a “self” that features an enduring essence, then you aren’t real. Now, you can argue with this line of thought — with its characterization of the self, its definition of “real” and “exist,” and so on. But the point is that this line of thought is clear enough to argue about — just like the lines of thought Western philosophers produce. In fact, David Hume, an emphatically Western philosopher, made an argument against the reality of the self that is so similar to longstanding Buddhist arguments as to make some scholars (including, as it happens, Alison Gopnik, Adam’s sister) suspect that Hume had encountered Buddhist thought. In recent decades, important aspects of the Buddhist concept of not-self have gotten support from psychology. In particular, psychology has bolstered Buddhism’s doubts about our intuition of what you might call the “C.E.O. self” — our sense that the conscious “self” is the initiator of thought and action. A particularly famous experiment seems to show that, before we are consciously aware of deciding to perform an act — push a button, say — the physical processes that initiate the act are already underway. Other experiments suggest that our minds are good at fabricating reasons that we do certain things and hold certain opinions — and that the fabrication happens unconsciously, so that the conscious mind is itself duped into believing these stories, along with their implication that the conscious mind is running the show. Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME If much of this sounds disappointingly free of the charming paradox commonly associated with Buddhism, I have good news: There is a paradox that can surface if you pursue the logic of not-self through meditation. Namely: recognizing that “you” are not in control, that you are not a C.E.O., can help give “you” more control. Or, at least, you can behave more like a C.E.O. is expected to behave: more rationally, more wisely, more reflectively; less emotionally, less rashly, less reactively. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Here’s how it can work. Suppose that, via mindfulness meditation, you observe a feeling like anxiety or anger and, rather than let it draw you into a whole train of anxious or angry thoughts, you let it pass away. Though you experience the feeling — and in a sense experience it more fully than usual — you experience it with “non-attachment” and so evade its grip. And you now see the thoughts that accompanied it in a new light — they no longer seem like trustworthy emanations from some “I” but rather as transient notions accompanying transient feelings. Note how, in addition to being therapeutic, this clarifies your view of the world. After all, the “anxious” or “angry” trains of thought you avoid probably aren’t objectively true. They probably involve either imagining things that haven’t happened or making subjective judgments about things that have. In other words, these thoughts are just stories the brain spews out; they are often manifestly misleading, and abandoning them will tend to leave us closer to clarity than embracing them would. Mindfulness meditation can be enlightening in another way, too. It can make us more aware of how our buttons get pushed — more aware, say, of how people or things we encounter trigger certain feelings and certain stories and thus certain behaviors. Somewhat like “Western” psychological science, mindfulness can illuminate the workings of the mind. There’s a broader and deeper sense in which Buddhist thought is more “Western” than stereotype suggests. What, after all, is more Western than science’s emphasis on causality, on figuring out what causes what, and hoping to thus explain why all things do the things they do? Well, in a sense, the Buddhist idea of “not-self” grows out of the belief undergirding this mission — that the world is pervasively governed by causal laws. The reason there is no “abiding core” within us is that the ever-changing forces that impinge on us — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes — are constantly setting off chain reactions inside of us. Indeed, this constant causal interaction with our environment raises doubts not only about how firm the core of the “self” is but, in a sense, how firm the bounds of the self are. Buddhism’s doubts about the distinctness and solidity of the “self” — and of other things, for that matter — rests on a recognition of the sense in which pervasive causality means pervasive fluidity. The kind of inquiry that produced Buddhist views on the human psyche isn’t scientific; it doesn’t involve experiments that generate publicly observable data. It rests more on a kind of meditative introspection — somewhat in the spirit of what Western philosophers call phenomenology. Yet Buddhism long ago generated insights that modern psychology is only now catching up to, and these go beyond doubts about the C.E.O. self. For example, psychology has lately started to let go of its once-sharp distinction between “cognitive” and “affective” parts of the mind; it has started to see that feelings are so finely intertwined with thoughts as to be part of their very coloration. This wouldn’t qualify as breaking news in Buddhist circles. A sutra attributed to the Buddha says that a “mind object” — a category that includes thoughts — is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.” Brain-scan studies have produced tentative evidence that this lusting and disliking — embracing thoughts that feel good and rejecting thoughts that feel bad — lies near the heart of certain “cognitive biases.” If such evidence continues to accumulate, the Buddhist assertion that a clear view of the world involves letting go of these lusts and dislikes will have drawn a measure of support from modern science. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Gopnik thinks that attempts to corroborate Buddhist ideas with modern science run into a contradiction. After all, Buddhism is in a sense suspicious of “stories” — such as those stories that mindfulness meditation can help liberate us from. And, Gopnik says, science is just “competitive storytelling” — which means, he says, that Buddhism is “antithetical” to scientific argument. He writes, “Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend.” Well, this irony doesn’t seem to have deterred the Buddhists who, a couple of millenniums ago, compiled the “Abhidhamma Pitaka,” which puts names on lots of mental phenomena and tells stories about how they relate to one another. And it doesn’t seem to bother the Dalai Lama, who has embraced science as a legitimate way to test Buddhist ideas. I agree with Gopnik on one thing: There are parts of Buddhist philosophy that, even when properly understood, seem paradoxical or opaque. But these tend to involve the same issues that drive Western philosophers toward paradox and opaqueness — for example, the relationship of consciousness to the physical body. Language is indeed (as notable Western philosophers have held) incapable of encompassing all of reality, and I’m pretty sure that the human mind is incapable of comprehending all of reality. 98 COMMENTS All we can do is clear away as many impediments to comprehension as possible. Science has a way of doing that — by insisting that entrants in its “competitive storytelling” demonstrate explanatory power in ways that are publicly observable, thus neutralizing, to the extent possible, subjective biases that might otherwise prevail. Buddhism has a different way of doing it: via meditative disciplines that are designed to attack subjective biases at the source, yielding a clearer view of both the mind itself and the world beyond it. The results of these two inquiries converge to a remarkable extent — an extent that can be appreciated only in light of the last few decades of progress in psychology and evolutionary science. At least, that’s my argument. It may be wrong. But it’s an argument that can be engaged by anyone willing to engage it — which is something it has in common with Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology.

[flauntpage]

ESPN Won’t Wait for You to Get Enlightened

It was the Sergio Dipp implosion that really brought things into focus.

ESPN is going to drag us all into the 20th century – not the 21st century, the 20th century.  It’s a decade or so late, whether we like it or not.

This was Dipp’s ESPN debut on Monday Night Football:

It was halting, it was awkward, and it was, without question, a labor for him.

But if you listen without prejudice, the message is pretty clear: Vance Joseph is the new head coach of the Denver Broncos, which, given that he’s an African-American, is no small accomplishment.

Joseph rose through the patriarchal and overwhelmingly white ranks of American football. After playing two years in the NFL, he coached at three different universities before landing a supporting role in the professional game. He then toiled for four different organizations (San Francisco, Houston, Cincinnati, and Miami) before finally being given the chance to be the number one guy in Denver.

That hill Joseph climbed bears no resemblance to Doug Pederson’s ascension to his current position as head coach of your Philadelphia Eagles.

Dipp delivered that message plainly, if incompletely. He didn’t do it with the ease and confidence that comes from being a native English speaker. That’s not surprising given his background.

“Dipp, a bilingual 29-year-old from Baja, California, has been with ESPN Deportes since 2013,” was noted in a Chicago Tribune reaction.

The blowback following Dipp’s Monday night appearance, chronicled harshly by the New York Post and so many other “traditional” media outlets, is merely an extension of the difficulty the average (i.e., Caucasian, middle-class, 18 to 49-year-old male) sports consumer, or sports talk radio host, has with the irresistible force of change. Even if Dipp’s sideline report was substandard — OK, poor — it’s hard to imagine a similarly lacking effort from a hot blonde woman or a young white guy temporarily breaking Twitter like Dipp did.

ESPN has taken a beating in media circles for the purge it ruthlessly executed on so many standard Caucasian voices in the past six months. “Ed Werder is great at his job!” “Jayson Stark knows more baseball than anyone!” “I liked Danny Kanell with Ryen Russillo!” Gone, gone, and gone, plus many more.

Concurrently, but perhaps not coincidentally, ESPN has made bold moves in the past year.

The 6 p.m. version of SportsCenter, the network’s flagship show, was handed over to youngish African-American talents Michael Smith and Jemele Hill and forcefully repackaged as “The Six.” Jessica Mendoza was installed as one of the voices of “Sunday Night Baseball.” And, just this week, Beth Mowins became the first woman to broadcast an NFL game in the United States in 30 years.

Thirty years.

A generation.

Predictably, for every voice that has praised the Worldwide Leader for its progressive efforts, there are hot takes suggesting that ESPN has undercut its brand in an effort to bring more people into the tent.

It simply isn’t true.

Nobody – NOBODY – gets a microphone and a camera angle at a place like ESPN without having put the requisite time in.

As noted earlier, Dipp worked for ESPN Deportes for four years before appearing on MNF this week. Mendoza, picture above, won two Olympic medals and three World Championships as a softball player before joining ESPN in 2007. Mowins began working with ESPN in 1994, calling “NCAA championships in basketball, softball, soccer, and volleyball – not to mention countless high profile college football games” before getting this week’s career-defining chance.

It takes a brittle, stinting heart to wish failure on these new voices. And whether you appreciate it or not, ESPN’s pivot to inclusion is really just good business.

That Caucasian, middle-class, 18 to 49-year-old male demographic, the one that has habitually and blindly bought cable packages (including ESPN) for decades, is either in transition at the low end or heading for extinction at the high end.

As noted previously by this very site, cord-cutting is real, and content producers like ESPN cannot just systematically program a wave of middle-aged Caucasian anchormen and color commentary guys ad infinitum while relying on the market to keep saying “that’s okay.”

That market is now being rightfully influenced by African-Americans, by Latin-Americans, and by Asian-Americans, and many of them are women. It’s only common sense to think that these paying customers would at least occasionally prefer to receive the content they are paying for from people and voices they can identify with.

If it makes you happy, you can continue to resist the influx of new and previously underexposed voices in your sports commentary and delivery.

You probably already know this. ESPN and other forward-thinking networks are not going to stop introducing new, diverse talent just because that’s what you say you want.

ESPN Won’t Wait for You to Get Enlightened published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[mergguest]

Pre-election 2016

A sermon by Meredith Guest

Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marin 10/9/16

Luke 6:27-36

 For many years I had the great pleasure of being a teacher of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in a little Montessori school. After the students were gone, while engaged in the Sisyphean task of checking papers, I would occasionally find a student’s answer to a math problem that was not just wrong, but made absolutely no sense. It’s as if I’d asked for the square of 6 and they’d given me the time of day. Now I will confess to you that sometimes my response to these students was not especially charitable. “Sweet Jesus,” I was known to exclaim, “I’d have an easier time teaching math to the class guinea pig!” But, save for with my colleagues, I kept these thoughts to myself. The next day, I’d call the student over to my desk and, in my most neutral voice, ask, “Uh, can you tell me how you got this answer?” And after studying the problem for a moment, the student would invariably explain how they got this completely wrong answer in a way so logical as to be downright brilliant – wrong, but brilliant.

 Most of my friends are like you; they’re well educated, progressive, liberal thinking people. And most of them are apoplectic at the possibility that Donald Trump might be elected president. “What is wrong with these people?” they wail. “Are they just stupid?!” “Don’t they realize they’re choosing against their own self interests?!” And, for the most part, they do not keep these thoughts to themselves. Personally, I find it ironic that these mostly atheists are having a downright Old Testament experience: weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. What we haven’t done, it seems to me, is stop, take the time and exert the energy to actually listen to Trump’s supporters, and if we did, I think we would find – as with my students – there is a kind of logic here.

 This logic based on several things, and key to it is:

 Insularity.

 One of my sources for this talk is the book Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant. I’ve also drawn from interviews with J.D. Vance about his book Hillbilly Elegy. I have not read Hillbilly Elegy but I highly recommend Deer Hunting with Jesus. Bageant grew up in a small town in Virginia. After high school he went off to college, became a successful journalist and lived from many years in New York City. When talking to his many liberal friends, he would often be asked why rural southerners so often voted in ways that were contrary to their self interests. Finally, toward the end of his career, he moved back to to his hometown to see if he could answer that question. Deer Hunting with Jesus is the result.

 When Bageant interviews his old classmates, one of the things he discovers is that none of them knows a liberal. Their own thoughts, their own views and opinions are constantly being reflected back to them and little or nothing to the contrary has a chance to get through. Their lives and the milieu in which they live are insular.

 But then, that’s not just true of conservatives.

 In the 9/19/16 issue of the New Yorker, the author observes: “Fewer than 1 in 4 Americans ever talk with someone with whom they disagree politically; fewer than 1 in 5 have ever met with people holding views different from their own to solve a common problem.” To which he asks, “What kind of democracy is that?”

 And social media, with a cheap, easy and convenient capability of bringing together diverse people and opinions, has only made the problem worse. I recently saw a FB post in which a person demanded, “Anyone voting for Trump, please unfriend me.” Pretty soon, we’ll all be living inside intellectual and ideological gated communities where the only people we talk to and hear from are those who think like us.

 When I came out some 16 years ago, I expected it to be harder for Caleb, my son, since high school boys are arguably more homophobic than girls, but Lia, his younger sister, had her own times of difficult misgivings. It was hard for her, too, and years later, Lia reported that the most annoying thing she had to deal with was, once she revealed that her dad was transsexual, not only did she have to explain what that meant, but that then, she had to assure them that I did not dress like a hooker.

 I tell that story to illustrate the power of the personal. In the abstract, to hear that Lia and Caleb’s dad dressed and lived her life as a woman was strange, to say the least. But once they got to know me, I wasn’t particularly strange. It’s by knowing one another we come to understand one another and while we may not agree, personal relationship is far better soil for the flowering of compassion than the concrete foundation of a gated community.

 One of the best things about being a financial failure as an author is that it forced me out into the world. Had I been successful, I would have sequestered myself in my cozy little study and spent my days happily writing lies. Even in retirement I have to work, and so, at least 3 days a week, I substitute teach in schools all over Petaluma from grades 3-12. As a result, hundreds of children get to see a real, live, breathing transsexual who, unlike the ones they see in the media, is not rich, famous or sexy. And I make it a point whenever I can, to interact with the kids in their Mossy Oak camo sweatshirts; not because I want to change their minds about anything. I just want to get to know them; I think they matter; I care about them. They don’t always like me or warm up to me. They can be cruel, though usually not overtly. But this is what I can do. In many ways, it’s all I can do. Perhaps it is enough.

 Insularity leads to:

 Uncritical thinking.

 Under the best of circumstances, even for well educated people, it is hard to be aware of and critical of our own presuppositions and the presuppositions of our group.

 I remember on day saying to a little boy in my class, When you meet the right girl… Later, I thought to myself, how do you know he’s not gay? It’s so hard to see those heteronormative presuppositions. Once I did, whenever I had cause to say something similar, I would say, When you meet that special person… It was easy to fix, once I recognized the presupposition.

 And what about the presupposition that all male babies grow up to be boys and men while females grow up to be girls and women. Clearly, that’s not true. I have a 7 month old grandchild, and what we know about my grandchild is that she’s female. It’s too early to tell whether she’s also a girl or not; but I hope so. Having a brain and a body at odds with one another is not something I would wish on anyone. I’m not suggesting we have to relinquish our presuppositions; I still speak of my granddaughter and refer to her with feminine pronouns. I just think it’s very important to be aware of them. Operating at the level of our unconscious, presuppositions can be damaging, even dangerous.

 Being an educator, I’m especially aware of the presuppositions that guide so much of our thinking about school.

 I once did a subbing gig in which I was the co-teacher in a high school English class.  The teacher, a lovely, very caring person, was exhorting her students to bring the rough drafts of their essays to her at the tutorial period to have her critique them. “Why do you think you might want me to critique your writing?” she asked. After a moment, a boy ventured, “So we can get a better grade.” “That’s right,” she agreed, and it was everything I could do not to cry out, “No, it’s so you’ll become a better writer.” School is about education; it’s not about grades; it’s not about college; it’s not about what job you’re going to have and how much money you’re going to make once you get out. It’s about becoming educated. It’s about learning how to think, to reason, to question, to grow, to become a lifelong learner.

 The poet, thinker and social prophet, Wendell Berry has said, “A powerful superstition of modern life is that people and conditions are improved inevitably by education.” (W. Berry, What Are People For, pg. 24) But that’s clearly not true. There are all sorts of successful people, some of whom have made tremendous contributions, who have not been well educated. Would they have inevitably been improved by education? I don’t think that’s a given.

 One unfortunate, even dangerous, consequence of this superstition about education has led to the denigration of physical labor.

I recently saw one of those inspirational posters hanging on the wall of a middle school classroom. It began: “I can be…” then went on to list a slew of possible occupations that were colorfully inscribed on a black background in the shape of a light bulb, symbolizing, I assume, that these were occupations of the enlightened or occupations that would bring enlightenment – or both. Here’s a quick rundown of the occupations listed: software developer, doctor, meteorologist, airplane pilot, anthropologist, microbiologist, epidemiologist, astronaut, cartographer, network analyst, medical scientist, computer programmer, veterinarian, zoologist, geographer, archeologist, architect, conservation scientist and so on down to chemist. I found it ironic that nowhere on this classroom inspirational poster did I find the occupation of – teacher.

 It makes me wonder if these educators ascribe to a philosophy I found in a Terry Pratchett novel. In the story, Death has decided he wants a new occupation; he’s just done with dealing with the dying and the dead, so he goes to a career counselor. After an extensive interview, the counselor says, “It would seem you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever. Have you ever thought of going into teaching?” Maybe they should hang that next to the “I can be…” poster.

 Our life on this planet depends on 6 inches of topsoil and the occupation most directly involved with the stewardship of this vital resource, farming, is not, and will likely never be, on the list of things our students might aspire to. But the truth is, we could lose every occupation on that poster, and we’d still survive, but without 6 inches of topsoil, we’re just so many skeletons littering the face of the planet.

 This kind of lazy liberalism that considers itself so enlightened as to have no unexamined presuppositions and certainly no superstitions is one of the things I like least about living in the Bay Area. And just like the unexamined presuppositions and superstitions held sacred by conservatives, ours are enabled, in part, by insularity and uncritical thinking.

 Anger and a desire for revenge.

 In Hillbilly Elegy Vance describes the Appalachian town in which he grew up. In the 70s and the 80s the industrial jobs began to disappear, jobs that made a middle class lifestyle possible to people with a high school education. Now the town is full of shuttered storefronts. More people die of suicide from drug overdoses than from natural causes, families are disintegrating, and single mothers raise the majority of children. Church attendance is at historic lows, high school graduation rates are dropping, and few students go on to college. There’s something “almost spiritual,” Vance says, “about the cynicism” in his hometown.

 Who speaks for these people; who represents them; who cares about them? I’ve heard liberals say things about Trump supporters, they would never dream of saying about Muslims, or immigrants, or African Americans, even though many within those groups also hold views liberals find abhorrent. Since when did it become okay to demean poor, uneducated white people? Since when did they become fair game for our ridicule? And make no mistake, I am not innocent here.

 You will likely recall when the North Carolina legislature passed the bill banning transgender people from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. When President Obama came out very publically against this bill and in support of transgender rights, he was applauded by rights’ groups, but I was suspicious. For one thing, it seemed out of character for this president who has been slow, almost timid, in taking sides on controversial issues. Also, North Carolina was already under tremendous economic pressure to repeal the legislation. It seemed to me the President’s public support merely hardened the resolve of the Right. Furthermore, what I was reading and seeing in the news about that time was that rural, white voters were beginning to sit up and take notice of the things Bernie Sanders was saying. Here was a Democrat and a liberal who was addressing the issues that mattered to small town people who had not that long ago been stalwart democrats. But when Obama, who they despise, threatened to cram transgender rights down their throats just like gay marriage had been crammed down their throats, this very effectively drove them back into the folds of the Republican party. This, I believe, was the intentional strategy of the Democratic establishment who, fearing a Sanders victory, decided Hillary wouldn’t need these voters to win, and so, rather than try to bring them back into the fold of the party, they wrote them off – again.

 The poet Adrienne Rich has said, “When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” This quote used to apply to me and to others in the LGBT community. But not anymore. Now our faces are everywhere you look, while the faces of working class Americans are disappearing, rendering them anonymous and their lives invisible.

 Nobody cares about them, about the rural communities they call home, about their traditions or their way of life. And nobody represents them, and they are angry and looking for revenge. That’s why whatever Trump says or does, however absurd, outlandish and mean, that sticks a finger in the eye of the elites who run the country, be they Democrat or Republican, the more they love him. In fact, you might say, through Trump the people who we don’t know, don’t like, and don’t agree with have slapped us in the face; and we have done everything but turn the other cheek. What do you suppose would happen if, rather than insult, malign, and demean, we did; we turned the other cheek?

 I once had a child in my class with severe cerebral palsy. She was my student in 4th, 5th and 6th grades. Her name was Johanna and she was a wonderful student. One summer just before the beginning of school, Johanna’s mother recommended I meet with an occupational therapist who they had been seeing. I agreed, and in our meeting he asked me to describe the classroom and Johanna’s place in it. After I did, he looked at me and said, “This child’s not a member of your classroom. She’s little more than a fixture. No meaningful interaction happens between her and the other members of the class…” This was a “take no prisoners” kind of guy, but I listened to him and came up with a plan. I cleared it with the mother and soon after school began, the class did a group challenge. Privately I gave Johanna information that the class had to get from her without the assistance of her aid or any other adult. Only when they got this information would they be allowed to go to recess. It wasn’t easy, but they got the information, went to recess and after we did a few similar things, pretty soon I saw students interacting with her in ways they never had before.

 It seems to me we, as a nation, have a similar group challenge. While the well educated, well connected and well endowed have enjoyed the fruits of the modern economy, Donald Trump has sounded a take-no-prisoners wake-up call for those with ears to hear and eyes to see that a whole group of others have been left behind. While technically part of the country, they are like the handicapped kid in the wheelchair who nobody ever talks to and everybody tries to ignore. But in this case, a lot more than recess is at stake.

 So I want you to imagine, instead of a sweet, bright child with cerebral palsy in that wheelchair, picture a laid-off West Virginia coal miner who dropped out of high school, lives in a dilapidated trailer with his girlfriend, her 2 snotty nosed kids and a pit bull. He owns an AR15 assault rifle, drinks Bud light, and hates Obama.

 And then, I want you to remember your first 2 principles: 1) The Inherent worth and dignity of every person; 2) Justice, equity and compassion in human relations – all human relations, both private and corporate.

 And I want you to hold that picture next to those principles when we sing our closing hymn, “We’ll Build A Land.”

           We’ll Build a Land

We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken.

We’ll build a land where the captives go free

Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning

Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.

 Chorus: Come build a land where sisters and brothers

Anointed by God may then create peace

Where justice shall roll down like waters

And peace like an ever flowing stream.

 We’ll build a land where we bring the good tidings to

All the afflicted and all those who mourn.

And we’ll give them garlands instead of ashes,

Oh we’ll build a land where peace is born.

Chorus

 We’ll be a land building up ancient cities

Raising up devastations from old;

Restoring ruins of generations,

Oh, we’ll build a land of people so bold.

Chorus

 Come build a land where the mantles of praises

Resound from spirits once faint and once weak;

Where the oaks of righteousness stand her people,

Oh, come build the land, my people, we seek.

Chorus