School Yard Fights

Sending Love to the Daughter I Always Wanted

Balance. Inside out, outside in. From science driven diving, environmental warrior in the 1970s — in AZ, in Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez —  to small-town daily newspaperman: Tucson, Bisbee, Wilcox, Sierra Vista, and all these small towns in several rural counties south, on the borderline. El Paso, New Mexico, Mexico, Central America. Teacher, […]
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It’s the Mask, Stupid: Beware The Covid-Pfizer Jumping Virus!

How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands […]
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Milquetoast for all Three Meals: All’s Dumb in the United States of A

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. — aphorism There is dumb-downing, cancel culture (I’ve been cancelled since beginning in 1972 in high school, way before the trendy terminology), forced consent, manufactured bifurcation,  false balance, triangulation, perception as reality, equivocation, a host of propaganda […]

Trading Chihuahua Desert Hardscrabble for Coast Range Wet

The word was the ember and the forest was my life.
― Jimmy Santiago Baca, “Coming into Language,” March 3, 2014

We’re at the Flip ‘n Chicken sharing food, swapping stories about El Paso, and philosophizing about what it means to be an educator in the Early Childhood program at Oregon Coast Community College.
His looks are a cross between Lee Trevino (golfer from El Paso) and my buddy the muralist from El Paso, Mario Colin.

An electronic umbilical cord

The lifeblood of alternative radio is sometimes the celebrity that they create among themselves. And on Monday, October 7, Lincoln County’s KYAQ radio station will welcome one of the biggest stars from the bottom of the dial as David Barsamian visits Newport, Oregon on his Rise Up and Resist tour.
Barsamian grew up in New York, the son of Armenian refugees who fled the genocide unleashed in Turkey by the Ottoman government from 1915 to 1917. More than 1.5 million people were murdered.

Household Income, or Higher Planes of Consciousness?*

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909

A Friend as Guidepost and Connector

It was impressive, the number of people this 66 year old fellow touched: a father figure, a friend, a guide, a mentor, a guidepost, a brother, and a giver.
The service was held in Portland Sat. 4/27 and hundreds showed up at the Quaker church. I was asked to say some things about the man, my friend, and I had already written a poem of dedication to him, but I had to let a more simple-and-unfolding-of-our-collective-emotions sort of poem lead me.

Psychopathology of Not Teaching, Not Feeding, Not Embracing Our Youth

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
We only think when confronted with a problem.