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IT'S OVER

IT’S OVER

Is this Saturday?  There are a whole conflagration of things jumping off in the world right now its hard to keep up.  So let me start with this:

According to Tony Robbins, Most people lose momentum or get distracted when they don’t have a vision. “We all need a compelling future, something that will get us up and excite us. If you don’t have that, life feels very dead for high performers,” he said.  The Bible says it another way: Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keeps the law, happy is he. there. 1 Samuel 3:1  I was telling an acquaintance yesterday that had you taken me 10 years ago and put me in a box and then just taken me out yesterday.  My life wouldn't even have noticed.  In other words I have done nothing in the past 10 years beyond subsisting. 

Well, there were the 7 1/2 years with Charlie and Zoe on the weekends. 5 1/2 with Zoe.  And after 7 1/2 years with Charlie, IT'S OVER.  I have not seen nor heard from their family in the past two weeks.  That's hard but I have survived hard things before.

The eastern world it tis explodin',

Violence flarin', bullets loadin',

You're old enough to kill but not for votin',

You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin', 

It has been 50 years, say that again 50 years and nothing has changed.  Make any statement regarding the Middle East that suggests how this new current conflict in Yemen is going to turn out and I will have to quickly doubt you know anything at all.  50 years and nothing has changed.  I was reading an article this morning that pointed out that America was at the forefront of starting all the current mess and is actually supporting Iran on one front and fighting Iran on another.  Can this get any more unreasonable. 

The weather this morning was described as unseasonably cool.  34° is two degrees above freezing.  Even in weather fore casting the weather media tries to influence us with their vocabulary.  It’s not enough to give us the facts they want to determine how you are going to feel about the facts.

For The Love of The Game (for fans of the game)

Popularized first by a movie and then by a clause in Michael Jordan's contract came the term "For Love of the Game." Which then went on to become "For the love of the game." Mostly it applies to athletes who PLAY the game. But as I contemplate the outcome once again of another NCAA Basketball Tournament, another Silver Cup for our Chicago Black Hawks or NBA Championship for our Chicago Bulls or even a Major League World Series for my beloved Chicago Cubs, I got to thinking why not a For The Love Of The Game clause for the fan.

We have adopted a Championship only mindset. Our season is ruined if we don't win it all. Sports writers and Managers and Coaches regale us with its all or nothing and when we don't win we consider our teams failures to WIN THE BIG ONE. Only one team out of 64 (68 counting play-in teams) is going to win The Big One. Does that make the rest of the teams failures. Do the thrills of game ending heroics all go for naught if we are not there at the end to cut down the nets.

I loved to play a number of sports baseball, basketball, and football. I could play all of them to a degree. But I was never great, I was never fast and I was blind in one eye. (That didn't stop me from umpiring.) The only championship any of the teams I played for was a jail house league at the MCC. I don't consider my experience in sports a failure. I enjoyed several moments of success enough to have enjoyed the experience.

It is not a necessity for the teams I am a fan of to WIN IT ALL. I can enjoy the game for the game. Winning is not everything. Playing the game for the love of the game is all that's necessary at the end of the day. Because we are going to get up and play again. The End

The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools

by

Bill Bigelow

 48 Comments

To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine: Interior of a Peasants Hut)

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

© 2015 Zinn Education Project

Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project. This project offers free materials to teach people’s history and an “If We Knew Our History” article series. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A People’s History for the Classroom and The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, and most recently, A People's Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis.