Michelle Robinson Obama, Happy Birthday

Our First Lady Michelle Obama is a strong, tall, beautiful black woman. Her causes are childhood obesity, proper diet, and the welfare of military families. She has become a fashion icon, and a quiet, dignified role model.

Michelle Robinson was so bright that she, like her older brother, skipped second grade. When she graduated at the top of her class, she went off to Princeton. She didn't need affirmative action to get in because she was truly an outstanding young woman. After Princeton, she attended Harvard Law School and received her law degree. Michelle Robinson Obama is one of the creme de la creme of American citizens.

I posted Michelle's picture on my Facebook page today and wished her a happy birthday. She is 48 years old today. Lots of my friends liked the photo of this gorgeous woman, but one person had something unkind to say. It's my page and my tribute to the First Lady, so I removed this remark. It didn't fit in. If you want to throw off on Michelle Obama, do it on your page. Leave mine unmarred.

My initial post had said to Mrs. Obama, "You are much beloved." The offensive comeback said, "Much beloved - NOT." It started me thinking. It's okay to not like Mrs. Obama, but what would make a person put the emotion behind stating it that way on someone else's page? What's there not to like? What is there to create animus?

And then a second, an ignorant right wing nut from my old backward hometown, saying that Mrs. Obama is "as nutty as a fruit cake." What's nutty about supporting military families or wanting to educate the public to avoid childhood obesity? This on my page's tribute to the First Lady.

I can think of only one thing that Michelle has ever done that would engender anger or hatred. She was born black in America. That is why I deleted the comment. I think the comment was motivated by race. There is something about this beautiful, regal black woman that some white people hate. Every fiber of my being rejects this kind of thinking. It's unChristian and unAmerican.

I am proud of my First Lady, Michelle Robinson Obama. She is the most beautiful and regal first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy. What class she has! Oh to be half that beautiful and half that smart! And she is beloved to me.

All I wanted to do was to post a tribute to this woman on her birthday. What would make someone who disagreed not just keep their mouth shut and stay out of it? Why rain on my parade? I think you know.

The Literate from the Illiterate

On New Year's Day, 2012, Kenneth L. Samuel, a contributor to "Stillspeaking," the daily email devotional from the progressive United Church of Christ, wrote of his time in Divinity School. After his first year, he said, he was in such turmoil that he truly believed he had chosen the wrong field. A wise friend helped him to see that he had in fact spent that first year UNLEARNING, clearing out his "embedded" knowledge to make way for his "deliberate" knowledge. Samuel states, "In a real sense, all education requires the uprooting and the break down of previous assumptions before any informed ideas and information can be put in place."  


The building of new knowledge is easy compared to the difficulty of breaking down the old. We can claim no credit for our embedded knowledge. We get it by osmosis in the environments of our homes, our elementary schools, families, churches - our home towns. We don't choose it; it is gifted to us. In order to become truly educated, one must possess "deliberate" knowledge, knowledge one has chosen to believe, that one has deliberately embraced. Even if that knowledge should be identical to the embedded knowledge we started with, we are can become educated only by deliberately adopting it. 


Going off to college for the first time can be a very trying time for many students. Some arrive as virtual tabula rasas, with all their embedded knowledge up for grabs, ready to soak up learning like a sponge. I was not one of these. I had to re-examine everything I thought I knew. I chose to keep a lot of it, but much was discarded as I made room for the new knowledge that I sought. I became a seeker, and I realized that in order to know what to accept and what to reject, I had to study the nature of knowledge, critical reading, and critical thinking. I found my lessons in these subjects by becoming an English major, and I still believe that if you can read and think critically and communicate effectively, you can be anything.


I learned from the ridiculous to the sublime. I learned that poetry does not have to rhyme, that colors don't have to match. And I learned that biological evolution is not goal-driven, not Lamarckian, that it never claimed that man was descended from the ape, that human nature evolves over multiple millenia, no faster. I learned that human language is innate in all of us at birth, waiting for an environmental trigger to start our acquisition of the language of our speech community. I learned that the brain does not know Standard English from nonStandard and that learning all languages and dialects are equal accomplishments. I learned that beer is not hard liquor, that Reefer Madness was propaganda, that the religion department taught more than theology, that the US does not have a purely capitalistic economy, that the South still lags behind, that truly all people are created equal in the eyes of God and must therefore be equal before the law. I had to make room for most of this knowledge by unlearning all the folklore that filled my head when I arrived on campus. And I am still learning and plan to continue all of my life.


The tearing down of the old and the rebuilding of true knowledge is especially difficult in politics, religion, and morality. For example, as children my mother and I were both taught that the purpose for Jesus Christ's birth was so that he could be crucified to save us all from our sins and give us eternal life in Heaven, sparing us from an eternity in Hell. One of my mother's favorite books is Leslie Weatherhead's The Will of God, which maintains that it was not God's ultimate will that Jesus Christ be crucified. Weatherhead's theology contains what he calls the "circumstantial will of God," which means that under the circumstances, it did become the will of God that Jesus die on the cross. My mother was terribly upset when in Bible study, she was taught that God had not intended Jesus' death all along. She became nervous, depressed, confused, upset, but she was willing to look at it. She came away rejecting Weatherhead's assertion, still believing that it had been God's will in all senses that Christ die on the cross for mankind, while I came away happy to claim as my own Weatherhead's analysis. But I respect my mother's belief because it is deliberate, not embedded. She had the courage to read a book that challenged her most deeply held convictions, and she came away stronger that when she started. My mother has the habits of mind of the truly literate, even though she does not have a college degree.


As a college professor, I have taught all kinds of students. I have noticed that each college or university has its own character, its own epistemological stance. My first university teaching was in Introductory Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the "Public Ivies." Students came into the class biased toward positivistic philosophies, toward environment over heredity in shaping our mature selves. They did not realize that environment, though it is extremely important, tops off the tank; it doesn't fill it up. The very shape and size of your tank is hereditary, and you share it with most other humans as part of your genetic endowment as a human being. 


Students in the early eighties were still steeped in behavioral psychology and operant conditioning, and they assumed that babies are born blank slates, that all knowledge is empirical in that it is gathered through experiences and the senses. Current neuroscience and human development show that we are instead born with amazing cognitive abilities that make all future learning possible.


At UNC-Chapel Hill, most of my students readily confronted the prejudices they had embedded in their consciousness. Most hungered to gain control over what is known about the human being, the brain, the mind, language, and culture. They were open to new interpretations of the literature they encountered, new approaches to literature. They learned that math is not finished, that new discoveries are always being made. They learned the value of basic as well as applied science. They learned that if they lived to be 100 years old, they would only have time to learn a small portion of the knowledge that is available to us. Even though our brains are one of nature's miracles, a lifetime is just too short. 


At Howard University in Washington, DC, I had a similar, even more fulfilling experience. Students asked constantly, "Why didn't they tell me this in high school?" Many learned the craft of written language by throwing out all they had been taught and starting over. I never had a student who fought against learning. As a white professor at an historically black university, I met students who were willing to unlearn what they had learned about racist white people, students who accepted me as a human being first, a Caucasian last. Students at Rutgers, in New Jersey, were also true learners, ready to deliberately choose knowledge even when that meant re-adopting pieces of their embedded knowlege. This re-adoption is most easily seen in religion, and it is a beautiful sight for a teacher to see when a student bravely allows her beliefs to be challenged, hears counter-evidence and counter-examples and then chooses to live in the church of their youth, this time with deliberate knowledge and beliefs instead of hand-me-downs. It is equally beautiful to watch the student soar in a whole new direction. What education is doing is opening minds.


UNC-Chapel Hill, Howard University, and Rutgers University are all true universities. They have large research libraries, law schools, medical schools, Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts. The campuses were alive with learning and unlearning and relearning. The linguistic purists came into my linguistics class with strong biases against all dialects but the Standard, but all, even the students who left with those biases intact re-examined their hearts and minds and listened and read what linguists had to say on the matter. They learned that all languages change, that English bears the imprint of languages from all over the world; it is not pure. This knowledge did not mean that the students became sloppy and permissive and began to slight good speech and writing. It just meant that their embedded knowledge became deliberate knowledge. A true understanding of linguistics never makes one permissive, a habit of mind that comes from misunderstanding the lessons of the study of language, that window on the mind.


Late in my career, I moved to the mountains of Northwestern North Carolina to teach at another university that was part of North Carolina's sixteen campus state university system. But Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, was no UNC-CH or UNC-Greensboro. For the first time, I encountered students who dared me to teach them something, dared me to ask them to examine their minds and make their knowledge deliberate. ASU began as a "normal" school, a teachers' academy. It was called Appalachian State Teachers College before UNC President William Friday created the state's university system. It's a horse of a different color from Chapel Hill and Greensboro, UNC-Greensboro having been "Woman's College" of UNC back before women could enroll at Chapel Hill straight from high school. Chapel Hill, the flagship campus, is a national treasure. I have never been a fan of Friday's plan to create the 16-campus system. It has compromised the excellence and integrity of the top schools in the state, taken money from their faculties and libraries, and treated less rigorous schools as equals.


Of course there were many wonderful students at ASU, but to my dismay, many more students seemed to want credentials and training, not education. They wanted to learn only what would assist them getting and keeping THE JOB. The campus did not crackle with excitement for learning for learning's sake. And many students held on tightly to their embedded knowledge. When my freshman English Composition students learned that is in fact okay to begin a sentence with a conjunction or to use the passive voice in their writing, they did not ask why their high school educations had not shown them this. They did not ask why those high school teachers took the easy way out - not all high school teachers by any means - choosing to give out flat rules rather than to face the challenge of teaching students when and how to use conjunctions and passive voice. 


Too many of my ASU students said, "Well, in high school they told me that..." whatever. Too many flatly refused to cast a critical eye toward their embedded knowledge and to embrace it deliberately or cast it out, making room for new, consciously gathered knowledge. They seemed afraid that their beliefs couldn't bear scrutiny, although they never admitted this fear. But I could see it. It was an intellectual and emotional strain to deal with students like this, students unlike those I had encountered all of my career. I did not thrive in this environment.


I think that Pastor Samuel is correct when he says that all education requires the breaking down of existing beliefs and knowledge, embedded knowledge, before the building up of a true education. We must protect those colleges and universities that serve the truly literate. When we inspire our students to learn for learning's sake, when we teach them not to fear examining old beliefs, when we open their minds to more than one way of looking at a question, when we do these things prior to college, our public schools will be revitalized. When we realize that true literacy entails critical reading, critical thinking, and effective expression, both oral and written, and not just decoding and reciting, maybe we can stop the decline in our educational standards. 


The greatest threat to self-government is an uninformed electorate. 

Jedus Bon - The Christmas Story in Gullah

Jedus Bon

Een dat time, Caesar Augustus been de rula ob de Roman people. E mek a law een all de town een de wol weh e hab tority, say, “Ebrybody haffa go ta town fa count by de head an write down e name.” 

2Dis been de fus time dey count by de head, jurin de time Quirinius de gobna ob Syria country. 

3So den, ebrybody gone fa count by de head, ta e own town weh e ole people been bon.

4Now Joseph same fashion gone fom Nazareth town een Galilee. E trabel ta de town name Betlem een Judea, weh de ole people leada, King David, been bon. Joseph gone dey cause e blongst ta David fambly. 

5E gone fa count by de head, an Mary gone long wid um. E gage fa marry um. An Mary been speckin. 

6Same time wen dey been dey, time come fa Mary gone een. 

7E hab boy chile, e fusbon. E wrop um op een closs wa been teah eenta scrip an lay um een a trough weh dey feed de cow an oda animal dem. Cause Mary an Joseph beena stay weh de animal sleep. Dey ain been no room fa dem eenside de bodin house.

De Shephud Dem Go fa See de Chile Jedus

8Now some shephud been dey een de fiel dat night. Dey beena stay dey, da mind dey sheep. 

9Den one angel ob de Lawd appeah ta um. De night time done lightnin op jes like day clean broad. Cause ob dat, de shephud mos scaid ta det. 

10Bot de angel tell um say, “Mus dohn feah! A hab good nyews wa gwine mek ebrybody rejaice. 

11Cause A come fa tell oona, ‘Right now, dis day, a Sabior done bon fa oona. E Christ de Lawd. An e bon een David town!’ 

12A gwine tell oona wa oona gwine see dey. Cause ob dat, oona gwine know A done tell oona de trute. Oona gwine find de chile wrop op een closs wa been teah eenta scrip, an e been leddown een a trough.”

13All ob a sudden, a heapa oda angel fom heaben been longside dat angel. Dey all da praise God, say,

14“Leh we gii glory ta God een de mos high heaben.

Leh dey be peace ta dem een de wol wa hab God fabor!”

15Den de angel lef um an gone back ta heaben. An de shephud dem say ta one noda, “Leh we go ta Betlem fa see dis ting wa happen oba dey. De Lawd esef done sen e angel fa tell we.”

Gullah is a beautiful creole language spoken on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

November 22, 1963

A few weeks ago, on November 22, we marked the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade in an open car through Dealy Plaza in the city of Dallas, Texas, in 1963.

Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news that one of our most beloved presidents had been cut down by a bullet. I was at school in a ninth grade classroom surrounded by my classmates in my hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina. The principal's voice interrupted our activities as it came over the school's public address system. In faltering words, he informed us that our president had been shot and killed. He told us the president was dead.

My classroom erupted in applause.

I will never forget it. Most of the students in the room applauded. There was a joyful atmosphere, a celebratory mood. The few of us who were not clapping were in shock, crying. I cried for President Kennedy and the loss of his life, for his wife and children who would have to go on without him. I cried both for my country and the blow she had just taken, and I cried for myself for having to be in that room at that time and that place.

You have to be taught to hate like that. It doesn't come naturally. These young kids had learned this at home and had brought it to school with them. There I had to be exposed to it in all its sickening reality. It left a scar that remains to this day. There's another post I could write on the assassination, on the events of the days that followed, but when I look back, the first thing I remember is that they applauded.

They applauded.

The Madison Revolution- Tom Degan's The Rant

smart in the south

GOOD OLE BOYS LIKE ME

Don Williams

1980

When I was a kid Uncle Remus would put me to bed
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head
Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand
He talked about honor and things I should know
Then he'd stagger a little as he walked out the door.

I can still hear the soft southern winds in the live oak tree
And those Williams boys still mean a lot to me - Hank and Tennessee
I guess we're all gonna be what what we're gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

Now nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does
But you ain't afraid if you're washed in the blood like I was
Smell of jasmine through the window screen
John R and the Wolfman kept me company
By the light of the radio by my bed
With Thomas Wolfe whispering inside my head.

When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street
And I watch him burn himself up on bourbon and speed
But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the 6 o'clock news
When I was eighteen Lord I hit the road
But it really doesn't matter how far I go

I can still hear the soft southern winds in the live oak tree
And those Williams boys still mean a lot to me - Hank and Tennessee
I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

The Land of the Free No More

Behind closed doors, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levin (D-MI) drafted a bill without a single hearing, and the dreadful S. 1867 National Defense Authorization Act should come before the Senate for a vote early this week. In the words of Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), the bill will "basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield." Even your hometown. Understand the effect of making everywhere in the U.S., the mall, the beach, the grocery store, your back yard, part of the battlefield. This greatly expands the powers of the Commander-in-Chief.

This bill will, by declaring America the battlefield, give the President and every future president the power to order the military to grab and whisk away into detention any American citizen anywhere in the world - even here at home. Citizens can be detained without charge, without a warrant, solely on the word of the President. There is no right to an attorney and detention may be indefinite, even for life. No trial, no judge, no jury, no lawyer, no charges, no rights whatsoever, just because one man or woman says so.

Surely our Democratic President Barack Obama opposes this bill. He has been said to, but he has not been active or vocal in fighting against this militarization of civilian life. Nor does he oppose the expansion of the military into the ranks of the local police. The militarization of the police has been showcased in the last few weeks as peaceful, unarmed, nonviolent demonstrators have been beaten, clubbed, arrested, and sprayed with military grade pepper spray, in some cases being held down and being sprayed down their throats as at the University of California at Davis. This situation goes against centuries of law and custom, keeping the military and the police separate, but once the whole country is the battlefield this issue will be moot.

At the first assault on the Occupy movement in Oakland, Scott Olsen, a veteran of two tours in Iraq, was wounded and awarded a cracked skull for his service when a military style police raid destroyed the Occupy encampment. His speech and language centers on the left side of his brain are still damaged. In Seattle, an 84-year-old Dorli Rainey was pepper sprayed when paramilitary police in riot gear stormed the Occupy site. Ms. Rainey is up and still fighting. A young pregnant woman was not so fortunate. After being pepper sprayed and kicked in the stomach by Seattle's Storm Troopers, she miscarried. And Right Wingers blamed her, saying that because she was pregnant she should have stayed away from the protest. But that's the point, isn't it? You should be safe at a peaceful, nonviolent protest. You have the right to assemble, to petition your government for redress of grievances. It's in the Bill of Rights, part of our Constitution.

And I must mention the idiots on Fox News calling military grade pepper spray a "food product," playing the tape with the screams muted and the sound down so that Bill-O could say that the spray didn't seem to bother the protesters so much. On other networks, you could hear screaming, wailing, sobbing.

Tonight at one minute after midnight there will be showdown between evicted Occupiers in Los Angeles and the police. We do not know yet how this will transpire. Petitions are circulating imploring the mayor to call off the eviction.

We are living among thousands of fraudulent foreclosures by banks that received bailout money from the tax payers to pay their top managers 12-figure bonuses. The Republicans who would rather shoot their grandmothers than raise taxes on the rich by letting the Bush tax cuts expire do no mind letting the middle and working classes get hit by not renewing the cut in the payroll tax. That's because our politicians are corporate property. And the Supreme Court has paved the way to complete the corporate takeover of the government with its absurd Citizens United Decision that says that corporations are persons before the law with all the rights that accrue thereto. I agree with the sign seen at an Occupy protest: I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one. Which reminds me of the spontaneous applause the debate audience gave Governor Rick Perry when it was pointed out that he has presided over more executions, almost 250, than any other governor. Where is Orwell when we need him?

Oakland's mayor has admitted discussing the raid on the Occupy movement there with the mayors of up to 18 other cities, joined by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. What are they doing in local matters involving nonviolent protests? Well, you know, there are no divisions anymore between police and military, local and federal, civil and criminal, corporation and government. We have reached fascism, our newly minted police state still polishing its boots before kicking another pregnant woman in the stomach. But we are there. The line has been crossed. Our emails, phone calls, communications are monitored and mined without warrants. FISA is a joke now. GPS tracking can be secretly placed on a citizen's vehicle without a warrant. For God's sake, 4000 of the 5500 Zuccotti Park Library books, BOOKS, at Occupy Wall Street were destroyed.

At the same time the Christian Dominionists pursue their agenda, which is to establish the kingdom of God here on earth before the Second Coming. They want dominion over all levels and branches of government and to place the Bible above the Constitution. Not only abortion but also contraception will be illegal. Michele Bachmann has been endorsed by their own Dr. George Grant who can be seen in this video  stating that what they want is "World Conquest."

There's so much more that I may be adding and revising this blog entry for days and days.

This great and beautiful country is seriously ill. The Enlightened wisdom of the Founders is being twisted from secular into religious and Jesus is being turned into Rambo. The Bill of Rights is in shreds. The government has merged with corporatism, Mussolini's definition of fascism. Police state tactics rule over idealistic young protestors who have hit the money button too close for comfort. Down is up and wrong is right. If you just consume and mind your own business, you might never even know it. But trying to be part of the solution has become very dangerous.