https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itO8AsqLYqg

Rather than join in the fun everyone else seems to be having by piling on to the teacher that disciplined a student, I’d like to instead take a look at what might have been going on in there, and how I would have reacted.

It’s a big video. But it’s also highly informative and without commercial interruption. I did a big tour of Civil War battlefields and such-like some years ago and wrote a lot about it after taking a lot of pictures. High time I got them loaded up on the Internets somehow.

What most people call the Confederate Flag is actually an elongated version of the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which itself would have been an interesting footnote in Confederate history were it not for the use of that flag as a symbol promoting the Lost Cause movement and, later, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. I explore the facts and mythology surrounding the flag in this video. If you enjoyed it, be sure to like it, share it, and subscribe to my channel.

Perhaps this might offend someone… but it might also uplift someone else. I write this as a rant, so I’m already convinced of the certainty of these arguments. It’s not a soul-searching piece. It’s just another page of my open-source diary.

Birth is not a beginning and death is not an end. There is no end to existence, though it may pass through phases, times, and seasons. I watched as this world came into being, and I shall exist long after its passing. My life here has a purpose, but it is for an end beyond this life. And of this beyond, what proof do I have? I have enough for my own purposes, and I had to fight and struggle for that proof born of faith. I confess a tired impatience when others speak of that faith as a secondary concern, or of it being no concern at all. It is the same tired impatience I experienced when an ignorant young wag would try to debunk my geographic knowledge by virtue of the fact that I had not yet been to every place in the world. I had been to enough of it to know that it was there and to trust in the tales of honest travelers who had been to other places in the great, wide world.

By that same token, I have been to spiritual places in number enough to trust in what is told to me by honest men that have seen more of that realm. That knowledge informs a view I hold that looks beyond the limits of mortality. I see my ultimate end as being one with God, as part of His family, engaged in the work and glory of bringing to pass the eternal life of mankind.

Why are people born the way they are? Jesus said it wasn’t because of anyone’s sins: it just happens. Pick any condition in the “born this way” category, and it just happens. Each of us faces a string of burdens in life, unique to our own existence. We can choose to be guided by pride and demand that we are right, damn anyone that dares to disagree. In the process, we can destroy goodness around us and blind ourselves to truth. Or, we can choose instead to be guided by humility and accept that we have much to learn and, in the process, open our eyes to truth as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, care and precision.

So how can I, a person who claims to be a just, enlightened, unbigoted intellect, be against the idea of same-sex marriage? How can I be against the idea of full gender equality in my own faith? Well, I shall explain.

First, the same-sex marriage thing: We are here to prepare to be part of an Eternal Family. That is no euphemism. I was a spirit child before I was a mortal child, and as a spirit child, I was the product of a loving union in the realm from which I came and to which I hope to return. Gender was important to the creation of my spirit. Important? No, it was vital. Gender is vital to the continuance of that work, for there is more of it to come. I cannot live alongside my Heavenly Father and do the things which He would have me do without an Eternal Companion of the necessary opposite gender. Biology for the continuation of the species is not limited to the time between birth and death in this mortal existence. It is Eternal. Marriage between a man and a woman can continue for eternity, should it be sealed upon earth by the proper authority and in the proper place. Any other sort of union cannot.

Now, if persons wish to make same-sex marriages legal, that is their business, and they have to accept that I will oppose such measures on my own moral grounds. Even so, if someone wishes to live a life in a same-sex union, so be it. We all are free to choose for ourselves how we live our lives. But don’t expect Eternal truths to change because of societal druthers. No matter what may be permissible in society, I am quite certain that my religion will never recognize same-sex marriages as being acceptable to God as things that can be as Eternally binding as those marriages I mentioned as being sealed by the proper authority and in the proper place. And I’m fine with that.

Now, given that gender has Eternal meaning and implication, part of our existence here is to experience what it means to be who we ultimately will become. Our roles and experiences here guide and form our souls, and our souls have a gender. All the stuff the Greeks came up with about the body being a prison for the spirit is only so much philosophical noodling. The body and spirit are the soul, and gender has no small part of defining our souls’ eternal experiences.

For some reason, men need to learn important lessons about leadership, organization, and service that go with serving in the priesthood in my religion. I don’t believe that women don’t need to learn those lessons: I just believe that they don’t need the priesthood in order to learn those lessons. For some reason, men need to be ordained to the priesthood in order to perform solemn observances in the Lord’s temples in my faith. Women can perform those observances without being ordained to the priesthood – they have that right from birth. There are things of Eternity in this difference and distinction. Asking why is fine, but demanding an answer that fits a notion at variance with Eternal truth is not.

And I admit that my answer on the women not having the priesthood thing is not as solidly formed in my mind as is my response to same-sex marriage. But I do know that the answer is there, and that it explains things fully and to the satisfaction of anyone not motivated by pride, self-importance, or with a mind to justify sin. Yes, it takes faith to muster up the patience to await that answer, but faith and patience have been good to me in the past, so I trust in them for my future.

Women should have the vote, equal pay for equal work, the same standing as men in a court of law, the right to own property, the right to have credit cards in their own name, the right to initiate divorce, the right to have custody of their children, the right to learn any subject taught in the university and a host of other equalities that they have struggled to attain – some only in the last 40 years in the USA – but there is an end to equality where gender makes a difference, and that applies to me as much as it does to my Eternal partner, my wife. The inequalities of gender do not make one greater or lesser – just necessarily different in order to experience the fullness of Eternal Life.

Here endeth the rant. I don’t care if anyone reads this or is persuaded by it. I just care to commit it to a document for my own sense of posterity.

How do people survive when times are hard? How do people survive in conditions of grinding poverty? They form communities or, rather, they live on in already-existing communities. Bereft of electronics, reliable supplies of food, without ready access to clean water, people survive through communal structures – families, neighbors, co-religionists – pooling their resources, skills, and luck to support each other.

But surround a man with technology, and he becomes more and more isolated physically from his world. Not only does the technology place distance between him and his fellow men, but the technology also reduces his need to reach out to his fellow men for day-to-day survival. The lack of regular personal contact with family, neighbors, and co-religionists results in a certain kind of loneliness that manifests itself as a homesickness for human interaction.

Enter the zombie apocalypse sort of fiction. The plot is straightforward: it’s the end of the world as we know it, and all that stuff of technology is gone, possibly for good. In this fantasy, humans must band together to defeat whatever forces caused the apocalypse. Right now, zombies are all en vogue, but nuclear warfare and Martian invasions served as fitting backdrops for stories of human family reunions brought about via horrific disasters.

If one notices, however, people living in conditions of grinding poverty don’t really have an interest in zombie apocalypses. Those kinds of events, like hurricanes and earthquakes and dictators propped up by multinational corporations, can be survived, but life would be less harsh without them. People involved in helping others survive also don’t really spend a lot of thought being entertained by wondering about big “what ifs”. They’re getting that human interaction through volunteering to help out friends, neighbors, and co-religionists.

Human poverty can manifest in so many ways. There is physical poverty, sure, but there is also poverty of the spirit and of the soul. Leaving our comfort behind in order to become part of a community to deal with poverty allows us to deal with the very real calamities that exist on a person by person basis, and to experience that human togetherness that technology has removed from our experience.

I realized today that ungrateful people suffer. Grateful people endure. Whatever the pain, whatever the hardship, they endure and look forward to a better day that surely exists.

I got off the plane and stepped into an odd place that combines Europe, America, and Asia. I like the quirks, don’t get me wrong. But, taking public transit from the airport to within .2 miles of my hotel? That’s not American, most places in the USA. My hotel, Hotel Bijou, is a quirky place across the street from two Indian restaurants and a 6 minute walk from Dottie’s, where I’ve been told that I simply MUST eat a breakfast at. There’s no AC in the room, but this is San Francisco, where I had to put a coat on as I made my way through the town. It’s an odd sort of penetrating chill in this city, but it’s quite refreshing.

My trip here was great fun. The shared ride in Dallas was lively, what with the Ethiopian Gospel music and the discussions with the other passenger about her upcoming trip to Germany to study abroad there. On the flight, I sat next to a materials engineering student who was making her way to New Zealand to study there. The battery on my phone held out well, which was good, considering that our flight arrived a little late. No worries, though, as I had plenty of time to finish reading my CCDA book.

For, yes, I am here to attend Cisco Live and I will take my CCDA exam on Monday. I plan to have Indian food tonight, but both places across the street are equally highly rated. Which one do I go to? What a lovely problem to have.

Something else that needs fixing in the school system… dropout rates. They need to be higher to reflect reality. Trouble is, if they were figures that reflected reality, most schools would be in deep trouble with the No Child Left Behind requirements. That explains why the numbers for dropouts get cooked.

If a student transfers from a standard high school and enrolls in a charter school that has a dropout waiver, then that student does not count as a dropout, even if the student quits the charter after enrolling there. This explains why schools everywhere have larger freshman classes than senior classes by a significant margin, yet their dropout rates remain within NCLB bounds. These fudges are legal, but highly deceptive.

I heard a political ad yesterday. When the ad proudly proclaimed that this politician was responsible for getting a moment of silence into school, I cried out, “HE’S THE GUY!” Now, I don’t bear him any malice. I forgive him because he knows not what he done did do.

I knew when the moment of silence hit the agenda that it was an attempt to shoehorn state-sponsored prayer in schools. What it became was a joke. Kids would always try to text, talk, goof off, fidget, and do anything but pray. I don’t recall a single student of mine ever actually conscientiously using the moment of silence to offer supplications to the almighty – except for a few times when I asked that the students observe the moment of silence in recognition of a significant disaster. Otherwise, it created a disruption at worst and an annoyance at best.

It’s not like students can’t pray in schools. They can and they do. Thing is, we happen to have a horde of godless heathurns running wild in our schools that don’t give two cares about gettin’ religion once a day after ignoring the Pledge of Allegiance. A moment of silence isn’t going to get them to come to Jesus. In fact, there’s quite a few interpretations on that theme, as I understand them, and there are a number of faiths that don’t even subscribe to the notion of there being anything particularly special about Jesus.

As a teacher, I’ve accommodated the pious of all faiths. I’ve made exceptions in daily routines to allow for Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims (Sunni, Shi’a, and otherwise), Buddhists (Theravada and Mahayana), and even a Zoroastrian to practice their faiths according to the dictates of their beliefs. It’s not hard: it’s just a matter of exercising the same common courtesy normally extended only to Christians and Jews by our legislatures. (By the way… a note to certain high-minded Christians: Jews are *not* just waiting around to hear about Jesus, and then they’ll suddenly flip and become Baptists.)

The people that are most ardent about prayer in schools seem to me to be most ardent about *their* prayer in schools, and not someone else’s. I remember a time back in 1990 when I had an incident in an in-school suspension class.

For the unfamiliar, in-school suspension is a mild form of house arrest at school, typically assigned to students that have made some affront to decency like fighting, cursing at teachers, or getting too many tardies. This day, there was one student in ISS, and I had to cover the class at lunch time. When his lunch arrived from the cafeteria, he refused to eat it. The cafeteria lady took it back and I asked him why he refused it. He said, “I’m Muslim, and Ramadan started yesterday.”

Immediately, I knew it was his month of fasting from dawn until dusk, and knew that this habitually tardy lad had at least some sense of timing, even if it operated across months instead of hours. Be that as it was, I thought nothing of it and carried on supervising his working quietly on homework.

A few minutes later, a principal entered the room and confronted the boy about his refusal to eat lunch. She wanted to know if it was some kind of act of rebellion. He said, “It’s Ramadan, Miss. It’s a month of fasting.”

“What’s that? A ram-a-what? Are you making this up?”

I about had my jaw hit the floor after bouncing off the desk. This kind of stuff got taught in 10th-grade Social Studies in Texas. How could this person have a doctorate in anything from a for-reals university and not know that Muslims observe Ramadan, a month of fasting. But this lady had no clue and was really giving this kid grief. He insisted he was telling the truth and she kept asking him to come clean and admit he was fibbing. I interrupted and said, “Muslims do observe a month of fasting called Ramadan. He’s not trying to cause a disruption. It’s his faith.”

“Well, can he prove he’s Muslim or whatever?”

The kid looked at me, confused as to how to go about proving he was a Muslim. It’s not like they brand their yearlings or the EPA tags them to follow their migratory patterns. I suggested, “Why not recite from the Quran?”

He said, “Bismillah al-Rahman, al-”

She said, “OK, I believe he’s a Muslim. We just don’t want his mom trying to sue us for not letting him eat lunch or anything.”

Now, this was a woman that also professed a desire to have prayer in school. Yet, she had no respect or understanding of faiths other than her own. If I hadn’t been there to speak on behalf of the young man, he would have gotten in deeper trouble, to be compounded by a possible parent protest to the administration. That kind of spectacle was absolutely unnecessary, and completely avoidable to anyone truly interested in understanding and respecting religious pluralism, which is more to the heart of our Founding Fathers’ principles than mandatory state-sponsored prayer.

Which brings me back to this politician… his ad speaks glowingly of his support of the second amendment and uses equally glowing language to support his desecration of the first. What, does he want the right to hold a gun to my head and force me to pray? OK, so I exaggerate there (I hope), but there’s something in there that needs addressing. That is, we don’t fix our schools with prayer in them. We simply do not. Put another way, that moment of silence, along with the mandatory pledge, breaks the schools. They rob the school day of instructional time. They teach that conformity to minimum standards are more important than striving to make choices at one’s own pace.

As a teacher, that moment of silence and daily pledge really grated on my nerves. Schools were better before so-called conservatives took a page out of the totalitarian playbook and decided to force religion and patriotism on us all. I got along much better in my classroom without that moment of silence. So, if you’re a politician in Texas that cares about education, one thing you need to do is junk that moment of silence. If you need someone to give the guys behind it a lesson they’ll not like to forget, I’m your man.