It’s a scary thing…..

A leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court.

This is what started my mind spiraling into understanding the “why.” I try to figure out how we got here again.

Roe v. Wade was decided in January 13, 1973. I was halfway to my 16th birthday. I didn’t even know about it at the time. No one had ever told me I couldn’t do things BECAUSE I was female…..YET!

Justice Alito starts by stating the obvious — that “Abortion is a profound moral issue with conflicting viewpoints.”

Isn’t this true of very court decision, law enacted and enforced, and any Executive Order made? We are a country of diverse opinions, much more so since our inception in the 18th century. Even then, we were different. Our founders had the audacity to believe that “men” could govern themselves, without monarchies, priests, rabbis, emirs or other higher powers. That “men” could be civil, debate, disagree but come to a consensus over every issue. We know that there was compromise when our Constitution was written and ratified, on many things. Many issues that would have destroyed our fledging country were pushed off for future generations to grapple with. Could still destroy it now.

We are all upset with the SCOTUS leaked draft opinion. And we want change… BUT….

You are talking about things that take time to do. Justices serve for life. Very few retire. especially these days. There are very slim margins in Congress…. Biden is not a dictator… we have a process… albeit bulky and close to broken. Trump issued executive orders… which are not laws… they get dumped with a new President is elected. Is that what you want???

Yes, Dems need to be more serious and deliberative… but being deliberative is a slow, prodding process… Our Constitution is a very conservative document for a reason. It was created while France was having their revolution as well… with mobs, beheadings and turmoil.. that scared our founders…. so they made it cumbersome so that corrections could be made but slowly. To allow for cooler heads to prevail. And there is an ebb and flow to politics… But both sides experience it. Maybe not equally but it does happen.

Should we speed it up, yes!! but that does take compromise and consensus and cooperation from the opposition. and if you’ve noticed they don’t want to play in the Dems sandbox… they want to regain power and slingshot us back to the 1850s! (and this is NOT a typo)

I always thought we needed to codify many decisions into law.. Some we did… Civil Rights comes to mind…

But many we did not. So our only recourse now is to get out and VOTE…. VOTE in overwhelming numbers. VOTE like your life depends on it. (Trust me I have to give myself this speech!). Encourage debate (not yelling) among our friends and our foes. Be direct…. ask questions….. listen for answers…… always learn… Be open to compromise without losing your core beliefs.

🧐😁😎Just my rant for the week!

I’ve been thinking about….

Guns.

I remember being in a college history class and we were discussing wars.  We talked about why people went to war, what was gained and what was lost.  Wars are fought for a variety of reasons, politics, land, revenge, lust, survival.

Then we talked about modern wars.  Modern wars were fought for the same reasons as above. But we have always created better ways to kill people in wars.  Every generation and every society has always attempted to gain leverage to win by improving weapons.  But some of those who created better weapons say they did so to STOP wars.  By creating more deadly weapons, strong bombs, they believed that humankind would be LESS likely to go to war to kill each other.  Bows and arrows, machine guns, chemical weapons, nuclear bombs, submarines – these was all created to make war more deadly.  Some felt that when we saw the heinous results of these weapons, our societies would turn away from war and look to resolve our disputes differently.

We haven’t had a WORLD WAR since 1945 but have we learned how NOT to kill each other?  We have continued to kill each other in a myriad of ways.  In fact, we’ve become more efficient at it.  We have learned to kill others with less loss of lives to our side.  We kill by robot now.  It’s very sanitary isn’t it?  We don’t have to deal with the messiness of being up close and personal.  We sit in front of screens and basically direct traffic.  Nice. Neat.  Sanitary.  We don’t see the results, the horror on faces, the blood, the destruction.  No consequences for the killer.  Eventually, those who control the weapons may become desensitized to the act of killing, the enemy ceases to human.

I’ve been listening to the debates we have here in the U.S. about gun control.  Those who support it, believe it will end, or at least, slow down deaths in this country.  I don’t know about that.  There are already more guns in this country than people.  If we institute stricter gun laws, we will not take away guns from those who already own them.  That’s not usually how our laws work, we draw a line and say from now forward.

We are a country where more is always better.  We have school shootings, let’s have more guns on campuses.  Let’s allow people to open carry their weapons.  Because those who shoot and kill people will worry about being killed themselves.  IS THAT TRUE?  Most of those who have committed mass shootings, have then taken their own lives afterward.  Maybe it’s like ancient cultures, they don’t want to die and be alone in the afterlife, so they take others with them.  Our country is also one where we kill people for killing other people.  “I’m going to teach you not to kill, I’m going to kill you.”  I do not understand the logic.

I believe that more guns are not the answer.  The answer is to look into ourselves, our government, our politicians and each other.  WHY DO PEOPLE KILL OTHER PEOPLE, outside of wars?

For those who believe this is a supporting essay about allowing more guns in our society, it is not.  For those who want our society to have more guns so they can have a bigger profit (gun manufacturers), be careful what you wish for.

 

Racism, Part One

It’s funny.  I am white, very white, a pale woman of Swedish descent.  I am proud of my heritage.  Almost three years ago, I moved from Tampa, Florida to Bowie, Maryland.  I now teach at Prince George’s Community College.  Prince George’s county is a majority minority county, the most affluent one in the United States.  Quite a change from Tampa.  I had lived in Florida all my adult life prior to my move to Maryland. I took the job because I wanted a change.  The racial makeup of the county and the college did not even factor into my decision.  It sounded like the ideal position for me.  I could teach full-time at a community college.  I admit to being a little naive about the whole thing.  I had worked with African-Americans in Florida, in fact, my previous supervisor had been African-American.  I have friends who are African-American, Latino/a and Asian.

I did notice the difference on my first day teaching and it has continued.  There are many times that I am the only white person in my classrooms.  I did not think about it at all.  I figured I had a lot in common with these students.  I am a first generation in college student, the daughter of an immigrant to the United States.  But my students did not see that in me.  They saw a white woman.  Being white means having privilege.  I understood the concept of privilege but I believed that being from a working class background would negate the privilege.

I was incorrect.  Even being working class, the white part gave me privilege over people of color.  My childhood was different and not only because I grew up in the 1960s.  My parents moved out of the south side of Chicago in 1963 because “those people” moved onto our block.  I did not understand who those people were until I was in high school.  I was a kid.  Race was not on my radar at that point.  Later, it would.  I made friends with different kinds of kids.  They just had to be willing to play with the rest of us.  Usually with the boys.  I was a tomboy.  I still am, in some ways.  That was the second thing that I thought would negate the privilege thing.  I identify as lesbian.  But again, the privilege was still there.

I did not walk into an obvious battlefield.  At least it did not appear as one.  The faculty was a mix of people.  The students were also a mix.  Most of them are first-generation in college students.  Many of them are non-traditional age students.  Most of them are at the community college to learn a group of skills for entering the workforce.  Some of them are planning to transfer to four-year institutions for a baccalaureate degree.  Some of them are like me, not sure of what they want to do yet.

Most of the students were accepting of my differences.  They questioned my decision to move FROM Florida to Maryland.  To them, the norm was the opposite.

TO BE CONTINUED……

Data is just Data……or is it?

Blind Faith in Big Data

Data is just numbers….. it’s how we ask the questions of it and how we design what we are looking for and at. So since humans are fallible and have biases, data is usually skewed to maintain the status quo long after the quo has lost its status. Change continues to occur.

Looking at data is a good thing.  However, we need to remember who collected the data, where in society was the data gathered, how did they create the algorithms to aggregate the data and what questions are being asked of the data.

Think about it, this process takes time but our society does not stand still.  Quantitative information has its place but it is NOT unbiased or neutral.  Howard Zinn stated that you cannot be neutral on a moving train.  Data cannot be neutral either.  The train is our world…  it keeps moving forward even as we look back.

Everything is “data driven” today.  Schooling, shopping, politics, living and even dying.  We look at trends, averages, means, medians.  What do they mean?  What can they tell us?  Well, they can tell us where we have been, and show where we MIGHT be going.  And most of us would like that because we do not like not knowing.  We are afraid of the unknown.  It’s not a bad thing but nothing remains static.  And usually change happens even if we dig in our heels and stomp our feet.

But all of this is what most people do.  NOT EVERYONE.  Relying on data, trends, averages, means and medians negates the outliers.  And the outliers are where most of our change occurs.  Inventions happen because someone didn’t stay in their lanes, color inside the lines or sat in their boxes.  Innovation occurs when someone looks at a process and decides there’s a different way of doing the same thing.

This is why we continue to look back at history.  We discover new ways of looking at our world.  We find out new information about the people who came before us.  And we figure out that NONE OF THEM WERE PERFECT.  All of them had flaws.  They made mistakes.  This does not diminish our history or our heritage.  It creates a deeper understanding of both.  Our culture changes because it has to.  Time only goes one way.  As Mary Chapin Carpenter sang, it can go fast, slow and stall sometimes but there is no reverse.

Moving forward is our only choice.  Or you can stop, but that would be to stop living.  And I do not believe any of us want to do that until we absolutely have to.  I’m not ready to stop yet.  I have more life to live and so much more to learn!!!