Lessons from the 2014 election

Random and opposing thoughts regarding the mid-term election:

Our political system will continue to be corrupted by and in the grip of those obsessed with money and power.

We will rely on the leadings of the spirit and the spiritual.

Gross inequality will continue.

We will distill our lives, or our lives will be distilled for us.

The militarism will continue.

We will learn by the riveting experience of suffering…and forgiveness.

Secrecy in government will increase. Our privacy will continue to be invaded and diminished.

We will be clearly shown that we are one, that we depend on each other, not as "The other" but as "The one.” We ARE the enemy and the enemy is us. (Pogo was right, sort of....)

Purveyors of fear (still the great motivator) will continue to shape our culture and attitudes toward our neighbors, be they on our street or in the rest of the world.

The Great Unraveling will teach us compassion and humility.

Global warming will continue. “Natural disasters” (Nature shaking off our toxic species) will grow more and more severe.

The manifestations of environmental disintegration and the power of nature will force themselves upon us. They will require us to change.

Ignorance will spread…thanks to fundamentalism, corporate media, distorted values, amplified media demagoguery and impoverished schools and families.

We will discover truth through experience.

The homeless, many of them veterans, the mentally ill or both, will continue to find homes only in the streets. They will continue to be neglected, even scorned. Children will suffer in growing numbers. Homeless, hungry and abandoned.

We will learn that change begins with us acting as individuals and as communities (including ‘communities of interest’). Change begins in “small places” within the "oneness."

Technology will grow with little or no consideration given to unintended consequences. Escapist sports, games, consumerist values and other fantasies will define our culture. We live in a drop-out, fabricated, media-manipulated world of distorted and corrupted values.

We will withdraw from corporate media, consumerism and their contrived values. There will be a growing suspicion of technological change masquerading as “progress."

Crime will increase, including that committed by our “system of justice.”

We will be forced to examine and re-examine deeply, and then reshape, our values and our actions. Restorative justice, compassionate listening and non-violent communication are manifestations.

The good (love) in religions will be muted; the bad (prejudice, anti-intellectualism, self-righteousness and judging) amplified. Religions will grow as a problem, not a solution.

We will turn to spiritual “leadings” and reject religious dogma and dictates.

Government and politics will grow as a source of our fear and despair.

We will focus on and do what is possible. We will live and act more closely to our communities and homes. We can not afford to be distracted by events (news?) we can do nothing about. We will govern ourselves.

Our infrastructure will continue to crumble. Private profit will reshape and then destroy “The Commons.”

We will be called upon to act together and independently in new, sustainable, cooperative, humane and creative ways.

We may not have “fallen far enough.”

We will evolve to new awareness and, then, a new consciousness.

Gifts on a spring walk

Taking a walk in the hills above my house this afternoon, I seemed particularly attuned to signs of good deeds. Perhaps I was inspired by the spring-like day and nature’s own budding gifts.

Why should human beings be any exception as natural gift givers?

The first sign was a fairly decent looking T-shirt carefully draped over a bollard in Council Crest Park. It was on prominent display just in case the owner came back looking for it.

Then, leaving the park, I passed a water fountain (a gift from the parks bureau, I assume). On a chain at its base, a neighbor had attached a metal bowl intended for dogs to slurp from after romp in the park. A nice gesture.

Along Fairmount Boulevard, someone left a stylish pair of reading glasses on the spur of a telephone pole. Again, the finder had hoped the owner might recover the glasses on a return jaunt.

Not much farther down the windy road, I encountered an elderly man picking up litter. He grasped an abandoned plastic bottle and packet of peanuts. He even dumped the peanuts on the edge of the road. “For the squirrels,” he explained after I thanked him for helping keep the roadway clean.

Finally, I got my turn.

A young woman in a pick-up truck slowed to ask directions to West Linn. No small task because West Linn is about 15 miles to the south. She had been visiting a friend in the hills and was utterly lost.

“Believe me, it happens here,” I said.

“My GPS isn’t working,” she said pointing to her smart phone, suddenly made stupid by the hilly terrain.

So I gave her directions from the still functional global positioning device in my head and sent her on her way.

Afterwards I worried briefly whether technological assistance is replacing face-to-face help, keeping us in a cocoon of isolation.

But I decided not to let the thought bother me. Why let technology intrude on the streak of human gifts my walk had given me?

21st Century learning: Beyond brick and mortar

Question: Should the public invest in more brick-and-mortar school facilities in this internet age?

The question is particularly relevant as Portland Public School District officials lay the groundwork for another campaign to pass a bond measure for capital improvements, including new schools.

The last measure, for more than a half billion dollars, was narrowly defeated on election day one year ago.

Missing in this year’s run-up is the discussion of how technology is changing the very nature of education. And education is what we should be focused on, not schools.

Communication technology is doing to schools what it has done to “traditional media,” newspapers and television. But because the media are in the private sector, media organizations have to stay focused on the bottom line. As a result they have scrambled and changed to be financially sustainable.

Those that failed to make needed changes have died or are dying. And, not surprisingly, readers and viewers have adjusted too, or they have paid the price of being uninformed...or ill-informed.

On the other hand, schools, as public institutions, have little motivation to change in fundamental ways. They are tied to building-based learning and teachers standing at the front of the class. Even traditional textbooks are still in the budgets.

The only change we are seeing in the schools is reactive, resulting from declining revenues. The change is taking the form of traditional cuts in staff and programs.

Instead, the crisis should prompt a deep reappraisal of what education needs to be, and how it is delivered, in the 21st Century.

I didn’t vote for last year’s bond measure in part because of this institutional myopia. The other part, not surprisingly, was a big jump to my tax bill in a time of financial hardship. I doubt I was alone in the way I reacted.

The two parts of my reaction are related. As we know, we live in an information age, and information is at the heart of learning and of economic success. If we are to be a competitive society in a world economy, we — our educational leaders, our governmental institutions, our businesses —must use technology to advance learning and innovation.

From all appearances, our children are more than ready to embrace this technology (if not always in the best ways), but are we adults? And are we willing to create the norms that allow young generations to get the most out of powerful emerging and changing communication/education technology?

HERE is just one development in how technology could reshape education.

Money for an out-dated "schools" paradigm

Portland Public Schools is placing a $548 million bond measure on the May ballot. If approved by the voters, the money will be used largely for capital construction of new or expanded schools.

Question: Why would PPS want to spend a half billion dollars on bricks and mortar in this internet age? The money will simply be propping up an out-moded paradigm, one built on school-based education.

Certainly we can spend education money more wisely in today’s world.

Rows of desks, schedules of one-hour "modules," and long bus rides are at odds with the world students know and the nature of the times. Outside the school (and often in it), students are immersed in a private place defined by rapid-fire communication.

It’s haphazard “learning” through dizzying dexterity and hand-held computers.

Logically, education should tap into those communication devices and networks, which, like television before them, are the greatest teaching tools yet invented.

And yet, as it was for television, the question is what are those little “smart” devices teaching?

Right now, as far as needed education is concerned, not a lot.

What could they be teaching? It would take a lot less than $548 million to find out and get started restructuring education to fit the findings.

As for bricks-and-mortar schools, let’s make them into community learning centers. One of the “courses” would have the kids teach the rest of us how to use technology. We could teach them how to use it constructively.

Imagine the creativity that would be unleashed if we ended this now ever-growing technological generation gap.

Suddenly it's 1892 and typewriters are on the rise

A friend recently gave me a well-worn, yellowing copy of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Not THAT Cosmo. This one was published in the winter of 1892.

The Nineteenth Century Cosmopolitan must have been cutting edge for 1892. It offers an essay titled "Democracy and City Government" and a fantasy piece set in 1950 about the earth's being on a collision course with a comet. The futuristic tale is written by Camille Flammarion, an astronomer and well-know French writer. Flammarion seems to have been the Carl Sagan of his day.

But what interested me most were the typewriter ads. (I'm a bit of a typewriter nut. If you are interested in typewriters, you might visit my site, backspacetypewriters.blogspot.com)

As you will see, the new technology of 1892 (typewriters) was competing with the old (fountain pens). And the ad copy for the rising technology, manual calculating machines, were making snide remarks about "type-writers," which forced their users to do all kinds of stressful thinking.

I'll let the ads speak for themselves. . . .

Fear and my cell phone

Slowly, every so slowly, I’m developing a troubling, but under-examined relationship with my cell phone.

This little slab of circuitry is beginning to engender fears in me.

“What if?” fears.

What if I should find myself in a situation where I need it? Having it “on me” makes me feel marginally safer.

In the morning, when I consider whether I should hook my LG VX 5500 to my belt, I imagine dangerous situations I would never have thought of as recently as three years ago.

Sure, the cell phone can be a convenience, but my primal reason for having it is fear, a fear I never had before.

Increasingly I’m not even considering the option of leaving it at home. I am making my cell phone a “necessity” in a world that is suddenly more threatening — at least in my cell-phone state of mind.

My cell phone is changing me. I am less trusting. Without it I feel less safe. Some might even say “anxious.” Could Valium be in my future?

Did the cell phone’s inventors intend to make us fearful of our world? How about the manufacturers?

I’m sure fear is part of the marketing mix. (Also, being friendly, open, available and "successful"— which, in their own way, are causes for anxiety.)

We need cell phone-free days as reminders that the world is a kinder place than our cell phones would have us believe. (We also need a break to remind ourselves that we are friendly, open, available and “successful” even without cell phones — in the "old" face-to-face world.)

When strap on my cell phone, I occasionally wonder about those with concealed weapons. How do they feel as they holster their revolvers in the morning? Fully armed, how do they see the world?

Like cell phones, technology is not neutral. It changes us. We must continually study and be aware of how.