Cutting Through the White Noise

Opinions are like assholes everyone has one or knows one that wants to broadcast their white noise in streaming Digital Dolby Technicolor. The white noise has become so loud lately that it drowns out all the other white noise so you hear nothing.

In this digital age, we all know how to filter through the white noise to find those stories and events that are important to us, and in less than a blink of an eye send them off into the nether regions of the internets so that all our friends on Facebook or our followers on twitter or instagram or Pinterest or where ever we think that the most people will see that important story reside so that they will agree with us as to its importance.

For this to happen, we have to be introduced to said story, and that is where our internet providers or cable companies come in as they decide what to filter and what to send to us, the masses, via the independent messaging systems formally called: the news.  It might be yahoo news or msn news or NBC news or Fox news or any of the thousands of other sources for digital information. It matters not because once you hit on that link, you can go anywhere that they want you to go.

They cut through the white noise using their filter. And, once you are in their filter, they decide all content. All you have to do is sit down and click. You get to watch or read or listen to whatever information is provided and prioritized for you. This includes the advertisements that are picked for your viewing pleasure.

There is no thinking. It has all been done for you. No wonder our country is at such odds with each other. At no time in history have no few controlled the content for so many. And, it has never been easier to find likeminded individuals to rally around.

As good sheep, we go along for the ride. There is pleasure and pain in being directed to think and feel a certain way. It takes away the pressure of having to do real research and look for facts on our own. We can find the filters that we like and use them to find the answers that we are looking for to prove the theories that we hold so dear.

In this way, we are always right. We do not have to spend any time worrying about counter-arguments or different points of view because they are no longer in our field of vision. They are the white noise that is so irritating and obnoxious. They have no value as they hold contrary ideas to ours, thus, are not relevant to our world view.

Ask the Republican Party how this myopic vision worked in the 2012 Presidential Election. Let’s just say that they fell flat on their face. This fact in no way has stopped the Republicans from relying on this constrained, dogmatic perception as they seek their future political fortunes. In fact, it has only doubled their efforts to insulate themselves from outside criticisms.

Beyond politics, what I see from individuals to large groups are people looking for well-suited ideas to reassure them that they are on the righteous path to Elysium. Many want to to justify their belief systems in a vain attempt to live out their virtuous anger or say, “I told you so”. As childish as that may sound.

Many of you may think that I have some nerve to attack the digital world and all the members of it. It seems to be rather presumptuous for anyone to speak for the huddled masses. Too bad. It is all too obvious even to the casual observer. Start looking through the blogosphere, and see if I am telling the truth on some level.

This may all be true, but it is much too simplistic and primitive. I agree and only wish that I was smart enough to parlay these ideas into a research position in some think-tank and spout them out to a larger more cantankerous audience and see the sparks fly.

So, keep checking out all the people that agree with you, thus, justifying your position on any issue that matters. You will always be able to validate what you think and why you are always correct. This corroboration is extremely important in this age of cooperation and consensus building. Remember, you must cut through the white noise at all cost. It is your opinion that matters.

Time Shifts

There is a tenuous relationship between the here and now. We like to think that we live in the here and now, but that is an illusion just as the idea that there is a clear chronological time continuum that leads our lives in a straight line from beginning to end. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Logic would dictate that time is linear and maybe your watch supports that perception, but time has a mind of its own and leads us humans in any but a straight line. How often have you fallen asleep in a car and when you awake you are completely disoriented because of the distance traveled and the hours that you passed in your unconscious state? It is consciousness that dictates our connection with time. Ask anyone that has come out of a coma. Their link with time completed dissolved during that state of altered consciousness.

We all experience a lost sense of the time construct when we fall asleep. Time becomes meaningless during those hours of nocturnal rest.  These time shifts can be easily induced without falling asleep as in surgery or cannabis ingestion. What about when you are trapped on a plane or a classroom, maybe it is that meeting where time slows and you begin dreaming of the soft sands and warm waters of the Bahamas. You have just experience a time shift.

These are only momentary interruptions in what many see as a straight line of time. Too often we in the western world are ruled by chronology. We fight against time and try to put it in a little box and tie it up in a pretty little bow. But, when we open that box, time has played a number on us. It has left us in the dust, and we wonder where the time has gone. That is one little joke that time plays on us humans who do everything in their power to measure time and try to make it conform to our belief systems.

All you have to do is ask the Mayan’s about their measurements of time or the Afghans when 2014 is coming; maybe, the ancient Chinese would give us a better understanding of time and its influence on culture, or not. Everything we do in this country is predicated on the idea that time moves in a straight line. We are slaves to time as we define it. It all starts with that alarm clock that regulates daily habits. It drives how we educate children and dictates when we can and cannot work.

We try to control time with technology. We come up with time saving devices. There is no way to save time at least not yet. It is not like our artificial creation that we call money. You cannot put time away and use it at a later date though many of us would like to do that. Time marches on to its own drummer and we are along for the ride.

We have other odd dealings with time. Many people do not want to experience what we call the ravages of time. Many want to pretend that they not only can stop time, but they can reverse time. I don’t know how it all started, but we have created doctors who sculpt the human flesh to look as it did in days gone past.

It in no way looks as if you have lost 20 years. It looks more like your skin has been stretched too tight over a drum. That is neither here or there, it creates an illusion that time has stopped, and in the best case scenarios has been reversed. We only see what we want to see.

This technology does nothing to stop the degradation of cells. It is meant to create the illusion of youth. Aging is seen by some as giving into time. These procedures may make one a wrinkleless corpse, but it will no way change the landscape of cellular structure. Whatever time you have on this earth, enjoy it anyway you choose even if it means some sort of pulling and tucking.

Remember time goes beyond the spinning earth and slithers into black holes whose gravitational pull may be greater or lesser than we can hypothesis as well as their impact on the universe as a whole. If the universe came from nothing, then we have nothing to lose.

On the other hand, time is a man-made construct designed to make sense of limited days that this reality affords us. Put your time to good use or don’t. It is all up to you. You are the captain of your ship and get to sail it as you wish. But, when your time comes to an end, I hope that you have filled the minutes and hours and days and nights with memories that bring you a smile at the end of your time.

Teaching in America

When you look ahead at what is to be, what do you see for yourself? Is it a world where you live on the edge? Do you live in a place where money is in short supply, and are you being told that you are the problem because the system is fine? I live and work in a place like that. I am a public school teacher.

With all changes facing educators today, we have been told by outsiders that the public school system is fine, but you the teacher need to change and not the organization. Here are a few of the issues that we face: raise graduation rates or else; you have no idea what is important to learn so follow these new guidelines; prove with paperwork that your students are progressing. If you refuse to follow these directions, then, you are subject to termination.

I have received email that a certain student or students are only failing my class. The implication is that I am the problem and not the student. If I was a better teacher, then, these students would be passing my class. The days of students being responsible for their learning has long since passed.

More than this is the fact that schools no matter their clientele are being graded using the same rubric. There is a school in the Seattle School District that houses students classified as medically fragile. Many of these school age children are unable to read, write and take care of their basic bodily functions, yet they are required to take the state mandated tests, and if they don’t, their lack of scores are counted as a ZERO against the overall average of the entire school. What an affront to these students and their parents.

Another insult when it comes to public schools are two separate but important issues: vouchers and charter schools. These two entities take millions of taxpayers’ dollars and puts the money in the hands of private businesses and individuals. All the while stripping those monies from the public schools that most need them.

In both of these cases, the aforementioned businesses do not have to follow the same rules as the public schools that they are to replace. There is no teacher training required by the state to work and teach under these conditions. How do I know? I was a private school teacher in the great states of Washington and Colorado without ever having to go through a teacher training or preparation program. 

More to the point, the students being taught under the above situations are not required to take any of the state mandated tests required of public schools. Moreover, teachers in these institutions are not subject to the same ongoing teacher training requirements to be recertified every five years as public school teachers are required to do. This is not sour grapes. These are the facts.

It is Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation that are behind many of these changes, and they want to tell public schools how and where to spend their money, how they need to evaluate public school teachers and they are the hidden money behind common core, which was developed by academicians and researchers that have never set foot in a public school classroom and practiced what they are selling.

In the 19^th Century, these men and women would be call snake oil salesmen and women. They are trying to pull a fast on over on the public while using Gates money and their personal degrees to leverage their position.

Not only have teachers, administrators and politicians knuckled under to these tactics, but now the textbook manufacturers have given way as well.  By doing so, these publishers have created 10 lb. tomes for our students to lug around full of revised curriculum that has yet to be scrutinized.

As a public school teacher for the past 20 years, I am flabbergasted by these events; not merely for myself, but for all the teachers that will follow me. These phony prescriptive measures are the latest means to disembowel our public schools and federalize a system that demonstrated strength through local control.

Public schools are on a fool’s errand with this new wave of corporatism in the classroom. This is not the way to educate our citizenry. One of the cornerstones of American Democracy is under attack by the elitists 1%. Be extremely wary of that man or woman who is telling you how much better schools will be if only you incorporate their cure.

Picture: A Momentary Flash of Your Life:

There is something so fresh and new each time you pull out a picture from a shoe box or look at one pasted in an album. One day you may look a little closer, and you may see behind the canvas that has been painted for you. You may remember the feeling or smell the air. You may be able at that moment to put away the anger or the angst of daily living and feel a tranquility or excitement. It is your picture and you get to hold it any way that you like.

I am not talking about the millions or billions of electronic pictures that hide in the background of your phone or live endlessly on the internets. I am talking about the honest to goodness pictures that are printed, and you can hold in your hand and touch. They may be slick on one side and dull on the other. They tell a story of your past and can be passed from person to person for hundreds of years.

These memories were created and live in a new day and a new time. They clutch bits of humanity. A brief moment is captured and released. No matter what, these pictures always tells a story. There is always someone behind the lens and those posing or being frozen in time and space in front of it. It is a miracle of technology. Moreover, whoever picks up that picture gets to make up any story as they see fit.

Sometimes there is nothing so sad as a picture. There may be smiles or hugs staring back at you, but you never get to go back except in your mind. There is no time traveling machine that will whisk you away so that you may jump back into that picture to relive that moment. This fact is what makes me sad sometimes. I look at moments stopped in time and wish to have them back. I would like a do-over or I just want to relive that time once again with those people.

This may or may not happen to you, if it does, you may, at some point in your life, want to print up some pictures. It is only natural. You will want something more substantial than a bunch or 0 and 1’s floating carelessly in some server or in the nether reaches of some electronic device. You have only two true choices: pick carefully and judiciously or print them all and see what is really there. This is only the beginning of the project. After you begin printing, you have to decide what to do with all those pictures and where to put them for safe keeping.

In my life, shoe boxes have been great repositories for pictures. You might want to go buy a pair of shoes so that you have a safe place to store your memories. I am in no way saying that you must have a shoe box. Any box will do.  Go look for where and how your parents and grandparents have hidden their memories and take them out. Open the box or boxes or albums and see what you can find from the past and make up your own stories. But, once you have printed your pictures and found a place to store them, you will want to display some of them. This is where the hard work begins.

You will want to be careful about the picture frame that you choose and the picture that needs to be placed in that frame. It is the matching of the two that will tell much about you. They tell a story beyond the picture and give insight into the workings of your mind. The story has more to do with you than it has to do with the picture.  What do you see in the picture? Why did you use that particular frame? Why does that picture need to be protected and displayed when all the others are gathering dust in your shoe boxes or turning brown and curling in old picture albums?

It goes beyond those ideas. How are you going to tell your story to those that want to know you? How are you going to bring to light the important or not so important moments that have made you who you are? You are in no way the sum total of those pictures nor are those pictures you. They are a momentary flash of your life. They are a time where someone stopped life for eternity or until the picture fades away or is lost.

It is a picture.