I am neither a scholar nor a sage. In truth, no one gives a rat’s ass what I have to say, but say it I will even if no one reads this blog post.
In the spirit of being transparent, I will admit without embarrassment that I am a fact-checker despite the fact that I am continually told that I should not let facts get in the way of a good story. Should it matter if the family event happened on Thanksgiving in 1982 or if it happened at Easter in 1983? It shouldn’t matter as long as the purpose of the story is told as folklore, but not to “prove” something of some importance. That’s when facts matter. But, what is just as important (in my opinion) is if the facts are unvarnished and not tainted with prejudice. I would also add that a fact not told is as bad as a lie.
I am an ardent believer and supporter of “facts” when those “facts,” after being scrutinized without prejudice, are deemed to be “unvarnished.” Then and only then can a just “argument” be made.
Arguments are actually meant to clear the air and bring about change that is true and just. Unfortunately, arguments today fail to take “all” the facts into account. Despite the “fact” that I might want something to be “true,” I have to be willing to fully evaluate the unvarnished facts before what I believe is actually true,
I love to harvest facts. I harvest them by listening to different voices. I do not limit my reading and research to one set of “beliefs.” Of late, I am of the opinion that we have lost the ability to find out what is true. We are more interested in “proving” our point, instead of finding or learning the truth.*
The airwaves, internet, and print are filled with stories coming out on the June Sixth hearings and the Hunter Biden Laptop. In both cases, I don’t believe either the arbiters of the hearings or the investigators of the laptop are out to find out what is true. I fear that in both cases the decision of what is “true” was decided long before any hearings or investigations began.
We have become so divided that to use a trite expression we can’t see the forest for the trees. I listen to the ladies of the View and to the WABC radio hosts. etc. While I admit to being “View-sided,” I don’t take sides before I can harvest the facts. The problem with many facts is that they are not sagebrush. Facts have long roots that run deep. There is no denying, again in my opinion, that what happened at our Nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a travesty. The how and why it happened needed to be investigated. But, instead of an unprejudiced hearing, a mob mentality often tainted the proceedings.
There have been a plethora of “facts” divulged by the “witnesses” at the hearings. Is what they said the truth and nothing but the truth? Or were some of the “right” questions not asked because the answers might have challenged some of the other facts?
The same logic applies to the Hunter Biden laptop investigation. If the investigators are only out to prove they are “right,” more than likely they won’t be asking questions that don’t fit their scenario. There is, I “believe,” a greater truth in all that is happening today. And that truth is we are so divided and so angry that we have become blind to the truth. Hatred is killing all of us. If we can no longer be objective when it comes to finding the truth, we will be a nation built on a mountain of opinions.
And that I believe is our current state of affairs. Statements are made by politicians, broadcasters, and people in the media in a “factual” tone. Many of us take these statements to be solid, unvarnished facts when in truth they are not.
Call me an “unbeliever,” but when facts are thrown at me, I need to do some homework. And even then I often need to do more “fact-checking.”
OZ NOTE: To tie this into the YBR. Emerald City was not green. When the young man who landed in Oz after a balloon mishap was declared the Wizard of Oz, he set out to build “his” city. Since he loved the green of the Land of Oz, he called it the Emerald City…but since it was not green, he made all the people wear glasses with green lenses. The people never took them off. The fact that Emerald City was not green didn’t matter to them. Hmmm. Does that sound like us?
*I use the word truth here with some hesitancy because “truth” is a philosophical/religious construct. It is about “self-evident” matters. Truth and true are not the same things.
“Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked very hard from early morning till late night and did not know what joy was. He was gray too, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.” ―The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
While it’s traditional to begin a commencement address with a joke or a humorous anecdote, I will not break character. Although it is hard to believe, I never laughed. I was stern and silent. I was gray in a gray world. Rather than regale you with bromides and empty promises, I want to talk to you from the heart in an intelligent way with the courage of my convictions.
I shed a bucketful of tears the other day when I learned of the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. That such a tragic event should cast a dark cloud over your special day is powerfully sad. However, sadness is like a cancer that spreads like wildfire.
As sad as the most recent mass shooting in a school is, what is sadder is if we forget before we do something about it.
You might be asking yourself what you possibly do about it. You have enough on your plate: college loans, Covid, inflation, and supply chain issues to name just a few of the potholes on your yellow brick road.
Did college prepare you for the “real world?” Are you ready to take your place as an active participant in the life that awaits you? I am here to tell you that if you spent the last four years of your life only focused on getting an entry-level job at the expense of becoming the person you could be, then you wasted four years of your life.
As a young child you learned how to read. But unless you read to learn, you have many miles to go because learning is the carrot on the end of the stick. Learning is the spur that urges us on. Learning did not only happen in your classes. In fact, I believe that not much real learning goes on in the classroom. Learning was hiding all over the campus. Learning masqueraded as an opportunity. And as an old man, I can tell you that opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.
That’s the message I want to give you today. Be aware of the opportunities that tap you on the shoulder and then choose wisely because you have a lot to consider when an opportunity comes your way.
If you did learn anything in college, I hope you learned how to think….critically; how to love…unconditionally; and how to have the courage to stand up to the forces of evil that will come your way.
Don’t allow yourself to become gray. Don’t believe there is nothing you can do, because every act of kindness you do will make a difference in the world. Don’t wait for tomorrow to live. Live now. Open yourself to new and meaningful friendships. Open your mind to new ideas. Have fun doing whatever you do. Find something to be enthusiastic about and find something to be indignant about. Then do something about both.
And lastly, appreciate the gift of life because it is a precious gift, a gift that was denied to the precious children and teachers at Robb Elementary. Since their names will never be called at a college commencement, I would like to end my talk to you today by calling out the names of those innocent children and the two wonderful teachers whose lives were cut short:
Makenna Lee Elrod
Layla Salazar
Maranda Mathis
Nevaeh Bravo
Jose Manuel Flores Jr.
Xavier Lopez
Tess Marie Mata
Rojelio Torres
Eliahna “Ellie” Amyah Garcia
Eliahna A. Torres
Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez
Jackie Cazares
Uziyah Garcia
Jayce Carmelo Luevanos
Maite Yuleana Rodriguez
Jailah Nicole Silguero
Amerie Jo Garza
Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio
Alithia Ramirez
Eva Mireles (teacher)
Irma Garcia (teacher)
Go forth today believing that you are a unique crayon whose job it is to add your color to the world. And don’t forget to color outside the lines!
I have not posted a new blog since June of last year primarily because no one neither wants to nor cares to hear what I have to say. But, sometimes there comes a time when I have to open my big mouth. I chose to do it on my blog for a number of reasons. The main reason is that since relatively no one reads my blog I am shielded from an onslaught of attacks. (Rational responses are always welcome.) I have accounts on FB, Twitter and Instagram. I hesitate to use any of those forms of communication because by sharing thoughts on those venues you place yourself in the wild, Wild West where everyone shoots their mouth off even though their brains might be loaded with blanks.
I feel safe here on the Yellow Brick Road in a world that is so divided on everything. I was raised and educated on the idea that there is much more to an argument than arguing. Where I come from my intellectual training an argument is defined as “a reason or the reasoning given for or against a matter under discussion — compare evidence, proof. 2 : the act or process of arguing, reasoning, or discussing especially : oral argument.”
Today most arguments are reduced to arm wrestling where a winner has to be declared. Today with a plethora of venues (television, radio, podcasts, etc.) for voicing opinions we are at a point where one side hears what another side says (rarely do they listen because that would involve objective thinking) and gleefully jumps all over it for the sole purpose of exploiting not just the message, but the messenger. It’s what I call “got ya” warfare.
Unfortunately, many people who have a platform where opinions are the soup du jour, fail to understand that their opinions sound like facts. That’s where we run into a problem. Dressing up an opinion to make it sound like a fact is dangerous, especially when the supposed fact is actually not factual, especially when many listeners only want to hear what they want to hear.
I have no political bias or ax to grind. I would never align myself politically to anything. I, as I already mentioned, believe in a rational and reasoned approach to any argument. If after applying such I find the argument to be faulty, I will make a statement based on the evidence in the argument.
Now to the meat of this blog. It’s about Whoopi Goldberg’s stumble on the Yellow Brick Road. Far too many people are running through the streets of banal public opinion cheering that the wicked witch is dead. Most of those people have no “reason” to hold the opinions they hold. They are ecstatic because the “right” nabbed someone on the “left.” They want blood. They are not satisfied that Ms. Goldberg was placed on a two-week leave of absence. They want her out.
I am not a cheerleader for Ms. Goldberg. While I might not always be on the same line of the same page she’s on, I find many of her arguments to be reasoned and rational. There are times when I think she has dressed up an opinion to make it look like a fact, but even then I don’t believe she’s gone over the edge.
She has been castigated for remarks she said in regard to a segment about the banning of the graphic novel “Maus.” The hair on the backs of Ms. Goldberg’s enemies only stood up when she declared that the Holocaust was not about race. It was about man’s inhumanity against man. It was white against white, as she stated. (Kudos to Joy Behar who did interject that it was about race since the Jews had been identified by the Nazis as a race.)
Ms. Goldberg’s “opinion” on that matter moved over to the area of fact because if you follow her comments you will see that she was making statements of facts…based on what she believed to be true.
That’s what the maelstrom is all about. Her vocal critics are making claims that she minimized the Holocaust by “dismissing” it as a white-only issue. Since the show was live and the segments on the View are limited to just so much time, there was no opportunity to introduce the elements of real argumentation.
But you know what? We all missed something. The segment was not really about or positioned to be about the Holocaust. The segment was supposed to be about two school districts that had removed some books from eithera required reading list or from the list of books available for teachers to use.
I would bet that if you asked Ms. Goldberg’s critics what books were used for the segment, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. Well, I will. The two books used in the segment were “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Maus.”
Here’s some background on the reading controversy regarding those two books:
A Seattle-area school board voted to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” from student reading lists this week, just days before news surfaced that a Tennessee district had, earlier this month, banned the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the holocaust, “Maus,” from its curriculum.
According to the Seattle Times, the Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously Monday night to remove Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” from the required reading list for ninth graders while still allowing for teachers to choose to teach the classic novel to students.
The board acted after months of discussion among teachers, parents and students, and in reaction to concerns over racism in the classic novel, first published in 1960.
In the Times report, John Gahagan, a board member since 2011, stressed that members were not banning the book, just removing it from the list of required reading. He said a 20-member instructional committee of teachers, parents and community members had voted by a nearly two-thirds margin to no longer have the book be required reading.
Gahagan told the Times he reread the novel, about a white lawyer’s efforts to defend a Black man wrongly accused of rape, last week for the first time in 50 years.
“It’s a very difficult book anda lot of thorny subjects are raised, and we felt that some teachers may not feel comfortable guiding their students through it,” Gahagan said. “It deals not only with racism, but it reflects a time when racism was tolerated.
“Atticus Finch, of course, is in everyone’s memory the great hero of the book, but in fact he was kind of tolerant of the racism around him. He described one of the members of the lynch mob as a good man.”
Unless you have been living under that proverbial rock, you should know that more and more parents are chiming in on what should and what should not be taught in schools. I believe parents do have a right to know what the curriculum includes or doesn’t include. I get scared when either side (the school’s curriculum committee or the parents) has an agenda that does not include open-minded thinking. (Here’s the rub. Open-mindedness has unfortunately become synonymous with liberal or far-left thinking. That’s not what it means. A mind that is open is prepared to let in new or different ideas. It does not reject an idea just because it does not fit a rigid measurement. I am also of the “school of thinking” that just because something is hip and current, does not mean it has to be embarrassed without some evaluation. Again, reason and rationality need to be part of the discussion.)
“It’s a very difficult book anda lot of thorny subjects are raised.” That’s a mouthful. Education should be if not difficult, at least challenging. I tell my college students they need to read things that make your hair hurt.
Is “To Kill a Mockingbird” appropriate reading for a third-grade, a fifth grader, a seventh-grader? Forget content for a minute and focus on what reading level the student is at the moment. That should be considered. And then consider the content. Is the student capable of understanding the content as written. Is the content out of context, simply meaning does the student have any idea what the story is all about? Does the reader have to know the “back story” to the story to understand it?
I read Mockingbird in 1964 when I was a sophomore in high school. I loved the book on many levels. As literature it was wonderful. As a lesson it gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me think. (That same year we read A Catcher in the Rye. One parent objected to reading a book her son told her was called Catch her in the Raw.)
Mockingbird was the first book Ms. Goldberg and the members of the View discussed. The racial nature of the book opened up Ms. Goldberg’s emotional spigot. She has had to deal with racism her entire life. Just the way she talked about removing such a classic book dealing with a topic that should be discussed in schools…and elsewhere, was very disturbing for Ms. Goldberg (as it should have been because once you “remove” such a book from a reading list, required or otherwise, it is so easy to remove “similar” books).
In the Goldberg story all over the news, not one person has even mentioned Mockingbird or that the real segment was about removing and banning books.
I could tell Ms. Goldberg’s heart was racing. When the discussion moved to discussing Maus, I could see Ms. Goldberg was still digesting the Mockingbird controversy.
Here’s the background on Maus:
On Jan. 10, the McMinn County (Tennessee) School Board decided to remove Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” from its curriculum, citing “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman as the reason for banning the book, according to the board’s meeting minutes. The nude woman is drawn as a mouse in the graphic novel in which Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis are drawn as cats.
Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
In an interview, Spiegelman told CNBC he was “baffled” by the school board’s decision and called the action “Orwellian.”
“It’s leaving me with my jaw open. Like, ‘What?’” he said.
Instructional supervisor Julie Goodin, a former history teacher, told The Associated Press she thought the graphic novel was a good way to depict a horrific event.
“It’s hard for this generation, these kids don’t even know 9/11, they were not even born,” Goodin said. “Are the words objectionable? Yes, there is no one that thinks they aren’t. But by taking away the first part, it’s not changing the meaning of what he is trying to portray.”
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which does not play a role in McMinn County, noted the timing of the news on Twitter. Weingarten, who is Jewish, pointed out that Thursday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Yes it is uncomfortable to talk about genocide, but it is our history and educating about it helps us not repeat this horror,” Weingarten said.
The U.S. Holocaust Museum tweeted that “Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors.
“Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”
Back to Ms. Goldberg. The View team immediately shot down the idea that the book was being “removed” because of questionable graphics. I believe using that as a reason was just a smokescreen for the real reason, i.e. teaching about the Holocaust in schools.
With two books being used in the same context, Ms. Goldberg’s initial comment about Maus not being about race came about, I think, because as a Black woman who knows about race in America, wasn’t able to apply the same term (race) when talking about Maus. Instead of supporting her understanding of race, I only wish Ms. Goldberg had asked the question: “As a Black American, is Maus really about race?” Her response in the form of a question would have moved the conversation into a broader understanding of what race is and what it was. (Coming from Irish stock, I am well aware that the British considered the Irish to be an inferior race with no hope of ever joining the “pure” white race of civilized people. For well over 300 years the Irish were demonized and this subject of genocide.)
The Nazis considered themselves a superior race and that Jews belonged to a “race” of inferior subjects. So, the Holocaust was about “race” in a sense that might have escaped Ms. Goldberg.
BUT…to nail Ms. Goldberg to the wall without taking a wider “view” of the segment is, in my opinion, wrong.
At 73-years of age, I have no reason to believe aliens will ever come to earth looking for intelligent life. Social media has the power to unite us. But instead of using it to our advantage, we have used it as a wedge to divide us even further than we are. The egg we call home has been cracked. I only hope that we don’t suffer the same fate as did Humpty Dumpty who could not be put together.
While this blog post might not be read by anybody, I needed to vent.
It happens to me each year around this time when we set our clocks ahead an hour. It is a painful reminder to me of how futile is our attempt to control time. Only a blink of an eye ago on the verge of spring I was a 10 year-old boy throwing a baseball around in a vacant lot, flying a kite, and riding my bike (hands-free) around the neighborhood. When I was 10 and spring was in the air I looked forward to Easter and couldn’t wait for the school-year to end. When I was 10, there were 38 wonderful hours in a day, or so it seemed. Today, I hate the idea of losing an hour’s sleep.
It’s all about time. Or so it seems. Time is a commodity more precious than anything money can buy. We try to manage it, but it seems to manage us. I wonder if we have lost sight of the real meaning of time. Is the world really a better place because we have DVR’s. snapchat, tic toc, and a score of devices that hood us prisoner in a cyber world?
We all seem to be in such a hurry. But where are we going? My second year Latin teacher, Sr. Clare taught me something about hurrying. She had two Latin words written on the blackboard: Festina Lente (Hurry Slowly). And while it sounds like an oxymoron, those words seem to have more meaning today than they did two thousand years ago.
We do everything quickly. Instead of savoring each moment, we’re like the kid on Christmas morning that tears the wrapping paper off present-after-present without ever taking the time to revel at the gift inside.
Over a century ago the American poet Henry Van Dyke wrote, “time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is not.”
It’s all about time. We never seem to have enough of it, but, as H. Jackson Brown pointed out, “we have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.”
I believe we need to take the time to make the time. We need to consider how we spend the precious time we are given because “time is the most valuable thing a man can spend (Diogenes).” I look back not on the money I might have foolishly wasted in my life, but the fool I was to waste so much of my time worrying about inconsequential matters. I look around me as the world is coming back to life and I see what matters most in life is not money, power or fame, but enjoying the moment and depositing it, not in a FDIC bank, but in our memory bank where we can visit it anytime we wish without fear of it being diminished over time.
At this time of year I’m young again. When I close my eyes, I can see the tree house my friends and I built in the vacant lot across from my house, the cowboy wallpaper on my bedroom walls, the red bike I called ‘the Crusader,’ the dented basketball hoop nailed to the telephone pole outside, and the old house down the end of the block that I swore was haunted.
When I take a deep breath I can smell my father’s Old Spice aftershave and my mother’s Toll House cookies. I can smell the dreams upon my pillow, the fragrance of which makes my heart race and my soul yearn for the way it used to be. I inhale the aroma of days gone by and hold my breath until my face turns blue.
When I sit very still the world of memory comes alive with the sounds of my childhood. I can hear the dreams rustling in my head. I hear the refrains of Davey Crocket and Howdy Doody. I hear the shrill voice of a teacher who used to scare the bejebies out of me. And if I listen real close, I can still hear my grandmother’s voice as she bounces me on her knee and sings, “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross to see an old lady upon a white horse. She’ll have rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and she will have music wherever she goes.” I wonder where my memories will go when I’m no longer of this earth. Will they die with me and get buried in the ground?
I don’t have the answer. All I know is that I count my blessings and continue to marvel at the amazing gift of life and I am warmed by the fire of the cherished memories I have stored away in the recesses of my mind. Festina lente.
At the end of third grade I literally begged my father to let me take up the clarinet. (What was I smoking?) My father being true to himself said “no.” There was no arguing with him on anything. He did, however, leave a little wiggle-room. He said that if I still wanted to play the clarinet in a year, he would let me start playing the clarinet in the fifth grade. Since I still wanted to play, he relented and I started my music career as a ten-year old who was eager but not a musical prodigy.
I actually worked hard. I did practice to the annoyance of my sister who kept telling me I sounded like I was killing cats. I was not to be deterred. While a student in the Seaford Public school district I didn’t, to my father’s surprise, quit. No. I kept killing cats.
By my senior year as a student at St. Agnes Cathedral High School I managed to work my way up to first chair clarinet. (Not a position that garnered me any status, but an accomplishment nonetheless. I even had a solo in our spring concert.)
There was something about looking at a piece of sheet music that intrigued me. There was something else. I had this understanding that an orchestra is only as great as the weakest player. I also learned how amazing it was that when third row clarinets or trumpets played their individual parts it didn’t sound like the piece of music we were playing. The piece of music only came alive when all the parts of all the instruments were played together that music was made.
Although I only played in a band/orchestra for seven years, the experience ruined me for ever becoming a rock or heavy metal fan. That’s because my ears were trained to hear all the different sounds being made by the different players.
To this day whenever I hear an orchestra play, my ears revert back to a time when they were attuned to hearing the difference sounds an instrument made as a part of a whole.
We live in a world filled with hundreds of different instruments all of them playing at once. Only the sound being made is cacophonous. It’s hard on the ears. There is no harmony. There is no melody. It is just noise.
I remember a quote on one of my music folders when I was in the sixth grade. It read: all noise is sound, but only good sound is music.
Is there someone we can blame for the horrible sound we are making? I don’t want to point a finger, but there’s one factor I’ve left out of this analogy. That’s the director/conductor. Without a good conductor the assembled instruments will just make noise. A good director literally knows “the score,” and they know how to make sure all the parts are heard. They know how to make music.
America is in need of a good conductor.
Note: The link here is a four minute example of the “sound of music.” Listen and you’ll hear music for more than a dozen Broadway musicals.
Along The Yellow Brick Road 