Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art Works (via Mowser)

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Forked mouth.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

The economy is pretty good up here in the Dakotas. It's actually, in some regions and types of work, difficult to find workers. The discussion that drives me crazy, then, generally goes something like this:

"Those Mexicans come in and take all the jobs. And, I tell you what, they better learn to speak our language!"

Something like that. Then there's more yammering along those lines before the conversation goes like this:

"I can't get anyone to work on (the farm/the business/the shop). I can't afford to pay them what they ask now. For the work I need done, I can't afford to hire anyone! There's no one to work."

My suggestion, which I do not tend to voice aloud and hide behind a grimace, is to consider hiring some of "those Mexicans" that are supposedly taking all the jobs. I also suggest that many English-speaking Americans can't even speak the language. Seriously.

What jobs are they taking? The jobs we don't want to do but must be done?

The truth is, few Americans are willing to take certain kinds of jobs. We expect more for ourselves: more benefits, better pay, breaks, and certainly as little manual labor as possible. Maybe some are lazy -- I don't know, though I don't think that's fully accurate. Still, you won't find many of us out in the strawberry or broccoli fields of California, hoeing and working. Unless they invent a machine that we can drive to do the work, we don't do it. We still expect to have that produce in the supermarket, though, even in winter. We like the lettuce and tomatoes on our fast food burgers that we eat while complaining about the immigrants whose hands helped bring that food to us.

There's still a pretty good work ethic up here; I see it in the groups when we go to Nicaragua where we work like dogs all day in the hot sun. That, however, is a week or two experience and not our daily grind. I don't know that we'd be throwing ourselves into such a job every day for our livelihood. I know I'd probably look for something a little less extreme.

It's an odd mash-up and I'm not about to make gigantic, locked-in assumptions about different ethnic groups. There are plenty of hard-working Americans in dangerous and back-breaking jobs (mining comes to mind). I simply find it more and more tiring to hear the litany of complaints, ranging from language threats to job-stealing and not be aware of how much we have grown to depend upon the people we are verbally cutting up.

You know, when I walk into WalMart and see Spanish on a sign, I don't get freaked or upset. My blood pressure doesn't go up, and I don't reach for an American flag or stick a bumper sticker on my car that says something about learning the language. I think about Nicaragua and how much I want to learn Spanish and the people I love down there, and I move on. Frankly, the Hispanic culture is a rich, family-based culture that we could learn a bit from in our day and age.

It sure is nice to be able to bitterly complain about the people keeping us from getting scurvy or rickets during the winter in the guise of alleged culture and job destruction while, out of the same mouth, complaining that we can't find workers to fill low-paying jobs.

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Note: This post was pre-written and published as scheduled. Read more about this here.

Labels: culture, current events, rant

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Different norms.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

The quote of the day comes from Warren Buffett, who said that factories in China have different norms for working conditions than those in the U.S., and he won't "tell the world how to run" their businesses.

That's one way to put it.

If you're the world's richest man, you gotta find some way to live with yourself.

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Labels: celebrities, culture, current events

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Earth day.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 4 comments link this post

For Earth Day, I burned a bunch of garbage in a smoking mass, and dad walked out of the house and drove down the road and left the TV on.

No one tells the Neidlingers what to do.

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Labels: current events, family, humor

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Daily summation.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

I found a dead deer today. See it "live."

(Ha ha.)

And in other news, lying is art!* Anyone who has sat through an art critique, however, could have already told you that.

Except we didn't call it "lying."

We called it...um..."critique." Or "artspeak." Or, as in this case, "performance art", i.e. the license to be an idiot and get a grade for it.

I could probably use more quotation marks in this post. What do "you think?"

Regardless, the video of the dead deer is art, even if the deer can no longer perform.

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*I almost blogged on that story but I decided not to. Made me want to vomit. Whew! Face-saving! It did, however, make me jot down some ideas on art and beauty. You'll get to suffer through that bit of genius soon, no doubt.

Labels: art, current events, my life

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Oh, mighty sword.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

We all know about the pen and the sword, but the place of the keyboard in that battle is, in some cases, made superior. Stuff happens when it gets online.

Religious bloggers have their own track record. The Sic'em Bloggers got after a college for the speaker they had invited, causing the college to withdraw the invitation and the dean to discuss.

There are many other stories which can be tossed into the pile on bloggers that broke news and brought down a public official, such as RatherGate. The latest example of a blogger breaking a news story could be Obama's recorded gaffe on small towns (made while at a fund raiser in San Francisco) in which he disparages the people he supposedly supports, ironically made just a few weeks after his trip to Grand Forks in which a sizable portion of the crowd of 16,000 people who came to see him drove hours from...small towns. It was a blogger that got that little scoop.

Then there are the bloggers who get arrested for the things they say.

What is a blogger, really, but a citizen journalist? And what does that mean, really, but that in every moment there is a the possibility of a kind of disguised reporter waiting to reveal what's happening to the world? And what is that, but a kind of threat to public officials to keep in line, and a kind of threat to private people who have no idea that the silliest, most human things they do might annoy someone and end up (hilariously) on a blog? Or that a cell phone photo of you going about your usual, private day in a public space may end up for the world to see?

Some citizen journalists take it seriously, and it becomes what it could. Some abuse it and decide to slam their ex-boyfriend.

Citizen journalism via blogging is kind of a populist's Big Brother. There's not just one entity watching you. Everyone ends up watching you.

Just ask my family and friends, who end up on this blog.

We are all voyeurs, aren't we?

Links:

Poynter: 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism Grassroots journalism: Actual content vs. shining ideal CyberJournalist: List of citizen journalist sites

Labels: blogging, current events

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Jury duty.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 3 comments link this post

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A print that was given to me by a friend who is a retired judge.

On St. Patrick's Day, I was questioned by lawyers during jury selection, in preparation for a murder trial. The trial involved Tamara Sorenson and Aron Nichols, in connection with the death of Donald and Alice Willey.

A month prior, I'd received letters, forms and instructions telling me I'd been selected as a potential juror.

This was a first. I'd never been asked to be on jury duty before.

I filled out the forms, and came in and spent four and a half hours in a room full of other people, old People magazines, a carton of donuts, and was eventually questioned. But, despite making it into the last pool of about 40 potential jurors before final jury selection later that day, I didn't get chosen. The trial started the very next morning and I went to work at the store, like always.

As I had waited in that courthouse room with the rest of the people, waiting to have my turn and walk into the courtroom in front of the judge and court recorder and prosecution and defense attorneys and Sorenson and Nichols and all of the family and friends of the Willeys who were present...I became very nervous.

I don't like going up in front of people, and having people staring at me. This is not part of the job description of a wall flower. I didn't want to talk in front of all those people, walk up there and be asked questions.

Most of the other people who were waiting in the side room with me were talking about ways to get out of jury duty. One man joked about how he should have worn a Clint Eastwood T-shirt that said "Hang 'em High", and others came up with creative ways to answer questions so as to be sure to be kicked out of the pool. Everyone was grumbling and discussing ways to not be on the jury.

I felt stupid.

I've always wanted to be on a jury.

As much as I didn't want to walk in front of all those people and speak into a microphone and be recorded and questioned and have to look at everyone staring back at me...I really wanted to be on the jury. I think it would be a dorky kind of civic honor, to do that, be on some kind of jury. Be part of the legal system in the way that our law allows for a jury of peers. Be a good citizen. All that stuff.

I'm serious. That's what I think.

It was soon my turn, and the bailiff came back to get me. I walked nervously into the courtroom. The prosecuting attorney held open the small swinging door as I walked to the front and sat. I didn't really look at anyone in the eye, though Sorenson and Nichols were just off to my right. The judge explained the procedure, I leaned forward in the chair so I'd speak more directly into the microphone, and Nichols' attorney, Robert Martin, asked me three questions.

Martin was wearing a very black suit with a bright yellow shirt and a fire-engine-red tie.

The first question was to clarify something I'd said on the very thick questionnaire I'd sent in weeks earlier. The second question stumped me.

"What do you think about mental illness?" he asked.

Red and yellow, the color of McDonald's.

What do I think about mental illness? That was one of those impossibly open-ended questions that I had no idea how to go about answering. What do I think about mental illness?

I don't think about it much, was my ready answer. I then wondered about my preponderance with the red and yellow and if that would fall into some kind of category of illness.

I think I asked Martin, in a bumbling way, to rephrase the question. He wanted to know, he said, if I thought it was a real or valid issue, or just made up psycho-babble. He wondered if I thought it could be treated and/or cured.

"Mental illness is real," I said, adding a few other things that I can't recall now.

The third question had to do with the recent murder of Paula Hartze in Devils Lake and if it would somehow affect me. I told him I was not from Devils Lake and did not know anyone connected with that case. As with the Willey murder, I hadn't followed it and actually knew very little about it; I don't read the local papers or watch the local news like I should.

But.

I was very distracted by the yellow shirt and red tie. I'd noticed it earlier, when the entire jury pool was in the courtroom being asked group questions. Out of the entire experience, that yellow and red stands out the most.

The prosecution asked me no questions; they just held the small, swinging door open as I walked back out of the courtroom.

I didn't get on the jury.

Perhaps it's best, seeing as how a shirt and tie combination could lodge in my brain and supersede all else. I'm either highly distracted or excessively fixated with details. I'm not sure which.

I spoke with others who had also been denied jury duty; they felt raked over the coals and almost on trial themselves by the questioning of the defense attorneys. Upon hearing that, I was glad I'd only had a few questions and that I hadn't had that experience. Everyone I spoke with was thrilled they didn't get on the jury.

"Can you imagine," one person said to me, "having to sit there for three weeks?! Miss work for three weeks?!"

For me, there is little hardship. I don't have a full-time job, and I certainly wouldn't lose money by sitting in a courtroom for three weeks -- on the contrary, I'd probably make more money than normal. Plus, I'm curious about new experiences and about the whole legal process and I know I would value the experience.

I was disappointed that I wasn't selected.

It's probably a good thing that I won't have the autopsy photos etched into my brain, photos of the bodies murdered and then burned. And I don't know that I'll miss the emotional experience of sitting as a kind of "judge" of the facts with the two people charged with the crime sitting just a few feet away. Or watching family and friends struggle to testify, knowing the pain they were going through.

But I was still disappointed.

The next day, as I sat at work and designed yet another T-shirt at the store, the courthouse just across the street and surrounded by lots of cars, I felt strange, a kind of "close but so far" feeling. I almost was part of something important, but for one phone call telling me I "didn't have to come in" as if I were to be relieved at the news instead of disappointed.

No jury duty. Instead, I was designing a T-shirt.

I know it's probably strange that I'd want to do something like that.

But I did.

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Labels: current events, my life

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Smokin' monologues.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

Eve Ensler has nothing on Tom Marinaro.

Marinaro, owner of Tank's Bar in Babbit, Minnesota, tried to get around the smoking ban by having theater nights at his bar. Minnesota's smoking ban allows for smoking in theater productions by actors and actresses. So, like other bars trying to utilize that loophole, Marinaro began holding "Gunsmoke Monologues" starting at 3 p.m. daily.

He got a citation for it.

Now we have some court time.

But think of it.

Gunsmoke Monologues.

Lots of pun fun there.

For some reason, the first thing that came to mind when I heard this story was the scene from "The Blues Brothers" (one of the top all-time funniest movies ever made, in my opinion) where they sing the theme from the TV show Rawhide. Not Gunsmoke, but still funny.

This page contained an embedded video. Click here to view it.

Labels: current events, movies, video

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Relax. I'm not credentialed.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 7 comments link this post

Here's the money quote from an article on a recent California ruling which will wreak havoc for homeschoolers in that state:

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

"We're happy," said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. "We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting."

I can see the importance of kids being taught by a person being credentialed versus a parent who is not.

We had a credentialed teacher who had us watch The Silence of the Lambs instead of reading Shakespeare for Advanced Placement English when I was a junior in high school. And of course, those teach-all credentials make it safe to leave your kids with teachers. Credentials ensure that teachers make wise choices in literature for students. I also had an astronomy teacher who repeatedly likened the solar system to atoms, insisting that electrons had a neutral charge no matter what I said in disagreement.

I'll never forgive the teacher who messed up on the atomic structure.

Both sides could sit all day and throw out extreme examples of bad teachers and parents teaching badly, but I'm mainly just curious about the "we always think" and the "no matter what the setting" part of the above quote.

I question the accuracy of those statements.

But I'm not a credentialed blog writer.

So take that for what it's worth.

UPDATE: For your convenience, I've made available some generic credentials. This should cover it.

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Labels: current events, education

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The Badlands are also in the west.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 6 comments link this post

::Read the earlier article that I wrote in response to the January 2008 National Geographic article on North Dakota here. It will help in understanding this continuation.:

The Badlands are also in the west. I just want to point that out, in keeping with the idea that the western portion of the state of North Dakota is often used as a stand-in for the entire state. This, again, after reading the recent Grand Forks Herald article in which the editor of National Geographic responded to criticism on a recent North Dakota story.

"This article was not intended to be a profile of the state," Editor-in-Chief Chris Johns said. "Of course there's more to it than that."

The title of the National Geographic article in question was "North Dakota: The Emptied Prairie."

Hmmm.

Granted, the word "profile" doesn't appear in the title. However, the name of the state does. It seems to be a bit of a semantic dance on whether the article was a profile, was about the whole state, was a sad love story borne of memories of better days, or made for good page filler.

The Herald article goes on to show how all involved in the article love the state of North Dakota, would love to spend more time here, and love photographing the old buildings.

That is all lovely. Like I said: we all love a sad love story.

I've seen the discussion on the web about the article, and how futile it is to get into a "I agree with the article" "well, I don't" round-and-round argument. I do not ever say, in my earlier post, that the facts given by Bowdon were wrong, but I do say, again, that the interpretation of the facts are open to...interpretation. Not to mention the use of excessive adjective abuse in which, in all manner possible, the article was meant to show decline and death of "the emptied prairie" instead of showing that though a way of life may be falling into the past (small towns, lots of small farmers), the entire state was not falling away with it. What way of life anywhere is not falling into the past? It is one thing to be sentimental and sad about it, but to depict it as some kind of state-wide irreversible decline is quite a leap. Did anyone expect horses and buggies to still be in use when trucks and cars made their appearance? Why should we expect other holdovers from the past to treck on into the future unchanged?

No doubt it is natural to be sad about the change while you realize you're in transition, but to turn it into a memorial in a glossy magazine and attribute the entire death of a state to the process is not really what I'd call excellence in journalism, or non-fiction.

However, the clincher to the entire Herald mea culpa is the ending:

Johns has read the many letters and e-mailed comments -- both good and bad -- from North Dakotans and former North Dakotans who've reacted to the story.

"We've received many positive letters," he said, and the message in a lot of them is that the magazine "got it right."

Johns said the magazine has featured North Dakota in favorable stories in the past. "In April 2004, we did a beautiful story on the Badlands," he said.

Actually, the feature was on the South Dakota Badlands.

North Dakota, South Dakota. Same thing. All Badlands.

It is as I said in my earlier post: the focus on the western half of North Dakota is likely out of seemingly more interesting history, more photogenic landscape, and more crumbling buildings, but it really isn't all of "the prairie" and if you're going to talk about the "emptied prairie", get the hell out on the prairie further to the east and have a go at it.

There are abandoned buildings and sad stories galore, there, too. Plenty of heartbreak ripe for the taking.

UPDATE: North Dakota made ABC News' "Person of the Week." Check it out. See both ND-related videos from this story at ABC News here.

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Labels: current events, north dakota

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Eric Volz update.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 1 comments link this post

I've been receiving Eric Volz updates via email for some months now.

Interesting things have been happening. Please read more here, and keep the entire situation in your prayers today. It's difficult to read about his story, with the feeling of injustice, not really knowing what's going on, and the Nicaragua connection.

Some things to pray about, I guess, these few days before Christmas.

UPDATE: Eric is free, though there are still some challenges and worries. Stay tuned to Eric's updates page for the latest news on Eric.

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Labels: current events

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The mall is already horrific enough.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 14 comments link this post

As is the strange normality in the United States, any time a tragedy takes place, we simply must institute some kind of procedure or policy so that it doesn't happen again. Or, at the very least, write articles and talk about ways of trying to prevent the unpreventable.

Shopping mall shooter? Horrible. Fluke? Probably. Happen again? Possibly. Anything to do about it? No, not really. This article talks about the incident.

The sentence that got my attention the most was this one:

While Shoppers who were surveyed in focus groups indicated they would rather not have to go through metal detectors, they appeared willing to accept them if the government raised the terror alert level.

No.

No, actually, I am not willing to be searched, scanned, and have my bag dug through in every possible area of life that intersects with a public place because I'm not. I don't care if the terror alert level is through the roof. I don't want to be searched. I don't want to be that "safe." I want to retain my privacy and my mobility, and for plastic-gloved hands to quit pawing through my stuff.

When my German friends Bine and Christian came for a visit here, they told of an experience at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Before going into the the museum, they had to leave their bags in a room after they were searched. Bine had her coat wadded up in her bag on the bottom, a black coat, and the searcher barely unzipped the bag, cracked it open, peeked inside, and said it was fine.

Bine, who is very blunt, said "My coat is on the bottom. Don't you want to move it aside and look underneath it?"

The helpful security searcher reassured her it was fine.

"But I could have something there. If you're going to make us all be searched, you should actually search."

The security person became irate with her, and at that point, pulled everything out to look. There was nothing, of course, but the point being that what is the point of all this hassle when the people doing the searches aren't even doing a good enough job to make it worth while?

I don't feel safer for having to go into places and have my bags surface-pawed through by the unobservant oberservers. Cameras are only as good as the people watching the feed. Searches are only as good as the searchers. People show up to punch the time card and deal with crowds of people as quickly as possible; human nature makes a routine of things very quickly and it is humanly impossible to be perfectly vigilant and on the money every moment. Such vigilance, however, is required if such policies are to have any effect. Essentially, we insist the impossible is possible and put our trust in an inherently flawed mechanism.

The collection of things like nail files and clippers and jack knives and lighters in no way makes me feel like things are working correctly. And there is nothing that compares to the personal indignity -- yes, indignity, which matters to me as much as "safety" -- of having your suitcase thrown wide-open on a counter in front of a bunch of other strangers and having some guy paw through all my personal items, clothing, underwear, and toiletries so everyone and their grandma can have a look. The Grand Forks airport is exceptionally terrible for this, considering that they do it right out in the open next to the busy check-in counters along the main walking area. It is visible from every vantage point of the building.

Or, worse yet, being randomly pulled out of the line at Chicago O'Hare while everyone else is boarding, and having the hand-held metal detector swept over my body only to have it beep because certain undergarments contain metal hooks, which meant that, in front of a packed concourse, I had to have a woman feel me up.

"Better than being blown-up!" is the response to people like me who value privacy and personal dignity over such searches. Sure, being felt-up in public by a stranger probably is better than being blown up. Probability, however, makes me think that's little more than a red herring response. A kind of worse-case-scenario presented as likely-case-scenario used to get people to agree to things that are invasive and ought not be done.

Pointless. Annoying. Intrusive. It's a policy that takes the 99.999 percent of law-abiding people and turns them into a circus side-show where they have no privacy left. The last thing I want is for a mini version of this to happen everywhere, from malls to museums and onward.

But industry officials conceded that random acts of violence, like the Omaha attack in which 19-year-old Robert Hawkins killed eight people before turning the gun on himself, were difficult to prevent.

So why do we even bother considering it, polling about it, and letting "average" shoppers show their sheep-like stupidity -- in love with a fictional safety -- by even asking them if they'd mind "extra security"? I don't want to be fake-safe. I want to be uninhibited and left alone and take my chances in wild, crazy world of the shopping mall, museum, or any other public place. Random, by its very nature, is not planned and so planned defenses are only ever going to partially successful only in as much as the planned response randomly meets up in perfect time with the random violence.

You can't completely or regularly prevent what is random.

What was the issue in the shopping mall shooting in Omaha? Was it lack of security? The weapon of choice? Or was it the shooter himself? Which type of element should we focus on for some kind of successful resolution and problem-solving? Is it a problem that can be solved? If we're not really sure why the guy did it, do we really know how to prevent it? Building thicker security "walls" and removing weapons -- do these address the reason such things happen now, or is it merely dike-building against evil?

Dru Sjodin was taken from the parking lot of the Grand Forks Columbia Mall. After this occurred, there were increased security officers for a while, but there aren't now. It was mainly a knee-jerk please-the-public response more than anything. Such a thing won't happen again, in all probability. It was random. However, what feasible security measures would have prevented what happened to Sjodin? More officers? Constant patrols? Possibly, if they were driving through the parking lot at that moment, and if the perpetrator was stupid enough to do it when a patrol was present, i.e. if the planned happened to meet up with the random.

Should we focus on constant, high-grade (which is impossible) vigilance in preventing the act from being successful, or something else, when we think in terms of security? Is a defensive posture by some outside security force for safe-keeping of all citizens who dare venture out of their homes for normal life possible for the forseeable future? Is safety and security a matter of stopping things from happening so people aren't hurt? Or is it finding ways to keep going with uninhibited, free life in spite of the danger?

What is security? Is it really something I can attain by having my backpack searched by a stranger? Is my personal security something I can hand over at the entrance to a public place and not think about it again, or is it my responsibility?

I don't feel more secure thinking that I won't get hurt while I'm scanned, searched, checked over, and videotaped. I feel more secure thinking that I'm taking the chance that is life rather than handing it over to some person in a quasi-police uniform who may or may not be on the level himself. I don't feel safe putting my trust in the searches done by people on a time clock. I feel safer on my own, doing my thing.

The terrorist attacks did more than introduce front-page terror to the United States. It helped usher in, in a strange way, the false concept that we could "be secure" and that the government or an agency would do that for us. We've never been secure; we can't ever be secure. Life isn't secure. It isn't safe. But now we are stripped and searched and taped and brainwashed into thinking that's acceptable.

It isn't.

If I'm stupid enough to go to a mall and get the life sucked out of me by the bad music and annoying teenagers and too-small clothes, I certainly need all the energy I can get. I don't need to face a security facade at the door that's hoping to catch the next random wave of violence, should it land there today.

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Labels: current events, rant

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Bricks, the building blocks.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 13 comments link this post

::This is a follow-up to my earlier post from today.::

I received an email from a reader who has many years of experience in the education field. The reader responded to both the original article by Mark Morford as well as the post by Dan Edelen that I linked to.

I've been a teacher for far too many years and have seen quite a number of changes in public education. I've also had the benefit of some private education. My feeling is that both the Morford article and the Edelen piece are somewhat simplistic in their views and conclusions. That's not to say that I don't agree with some of their observations, it's just that there are circumstances they don't address.

There is no question that parental involvement is a significant factor in a child's success in school. But it also is true that many children with less than ideal home circumstances are able to achieve much. I don't agree with Dan Edelen that a "6 out of 10 parent can't hope to produce an 8 out of 10 child." I have seen that very outcome many times over the years. What is crucial is how the parents address education, not just in words but in deeds.

What I have observed over the past 20 or so years is not that children are any less capable but rather that they are moving through the system less and less prepared. The skills that were taken for granted that a high school freshman should have are just not present in ever increasing numbers of students. Fewer kids appreciate good literature in part because fewer kids spend much time reading. I cannot expect the level of discourse in an essay today as I did even 10 years ago. Again, it's not that the students are less intelligent, it is simply that they don't approach education in the same manner as I and my peers did.

There are far too many distractions in the average child's life. One of the most frequent complaints we receive from parents is that their children are given far too much homework. I can tell you that I and my colleagues give far less homework than we did 5 or 10 years ago. The truth is that many of our kids are over committed to a wide variety of after school activities, and parents are increasingly reluctant to deny their children any experience.

I am not blind to the fact that public education is not fulfilling its responsibility to the children. In this I fault the propensity of our profession to swing from one fad to another without giving due consideration to the impact it may have on the education of our children. There is no question in my mind that the worst offenders are the education schools that perpetuate this mindless pabulum. My biggest lament is that we find ourselves increasingly teaching to the lowest common denominator, rather than challenging everyone to their highest potential.

Finally, I am not pessimistic about the future. There are far too many young minds who excel in spite of the deficiencies of public education. I still have the thrill of seeing young minds, with little life experience, struggle with weighty issues and form their own opinions after much due consideration. Mostly, I am happy to say that if challenged, most rise to meet the challenge.

After receiving this email, I received a few comments on the original post. Edelen left a comment in my original post that struck me as... well...it struck me.

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the case that rural kids are just as smart as their "sophisticated" West Coast and suburban counterparts, but in my rural area that's definitely not the case. (And yes, I lived in the Bay Area a few years, so I can honestly compare.)

Just yesterday we went to the polls to vote on funding the libraries in our county (since the state of Ohio has cut their funding so drastically most can barely even buy books). The modest levy, which would've cost most families about $30 a year, was defeated 56% to 44%. What stunned me as an enormous supporter of our libraries is that in the course of the run-up to the vote, I'd not talked with a single person who opposed that levy.

Only after the levy failed did I realize my perspective was off. I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries. I didn't talk with Cletus Sixpack who would much rather the government ensure free satellite access to every NFL game than toss a month's worth of cigarette money to a library. And guess what? Our county is full of Cletus Sixpacks.

While I don't run in Cletus's social circle, I do bump into Cletus a lot. The Sixpack household tends to be fertile, so I run into all his kids, too. Once you meet the kids, you realize Morford may be more aware than we know.

The line that caught my attention first was "I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries."

There's a lot in those two sentences that I could comment on, but I'd much rather just pick it out and say "look at this."

My response to his comment was that I hadn't attempted to make any case for "ruralism" and, in fact, tried to avoid the trite country mouse vs. city mouse debate that seems to arise in far too many discussions, education or otherwise.

I'd hesitate to say that I was trying to make any case regarding regional intelligence, but instead was saying that Morford's simplistic cause/effect limitation on what makes a non-dumb kid with all exceptions just being "lucky" was a very poor theory.

[...]

I think throwing in a reference to Cletus Sixpack is a kind of lazy way to discount that Cletus has his counterpart in urban areas, though the counterpart is often better dressed and has more electronic gadgets.

I am certainly not familiar with Ohio or any of its funding policies, nor do I want to make this a long and in-depth debate on funding policy. However, I can attest to one reason why reasonable people Not Named Cletus But Still Rural in a Rural State Like North Dakota tend to not support "minor" mil levies to fund schools and such: unbalanced reliance upon property taxes to do the funding of all things educational. Farmers and other landowners get tired of being called on to constantly fund the school expansion or new computer lab, particularly if they are part of a district that has an odd mix of students mostly from the cities while landowners fund schools that don't directly benefit them or their families. This example doesn't necessarily address Edelen's point, but the reason I noted this example was that there are sometimes reasons that people don't vote to fund things that seem "reasonable" beyond wanting NFL or NASCAR pumped into their home by the government, i.e. there are more complex explanations than simple Redneck-ism.

Obviously, that is a specific example which can be negated by someone else's specific example. My point, here, is that our personal examples and personal experience is limited. This makes Morford's column simplistic and out of touch, just as Edelen's comment revealed something very disheartening and just as out of touch. My own experience with the definition of "rural" is as equally out of touch as perhaps the reality of "rural" that Edelen has evidently experienced where he is from. I can't say that Morford has ever experienced "rural" since it didn't even come up as a consideration in his article.

All this talk about being dumb assumes we know what makes a person qualified as dumb. Inevitably, someone brings up people who can't make change. I will hereby admit that I loved geometry and calculus but that, when pressured to make change with a person standing in front of me, I absolutely cannot add and subtract. Oh yes, I understand how it should be done, but I can't do it. I take great comfort in Madeleine L'Engle's quote about math:

"Six months after I started to write Wrinkle, I discovered higher math. And for me, higher math is much easier than lower math. Lower math lost me in 4th grade when I was taught that 0 x 3 equals 0. Now, I understand that if I have nothing and I multiply it by 0, 3 something's are not going to appear. But, if I have 3 apples and I multiply them by 0, why are they going to vanish? So I wiped out lower math as philosophically untenable."
- Madeleine L'Engle

There is much to be said for different kinds of intelligences. In the comments section of Edelen's post, by Edelen himself, is the agreement that there are different kinds of intelligences:

Now I expect a person to be able to read and do math to at least a junior high school level, but some seemingly less educated people know things you and I donâ€™t. Quite a few of the farmers in my area canâ€™t keep up with some of the things I know about tech, but when it comes to knowledge of agriculture and animal husbandry, they make me look like an idiot.

I am having some difficulty reconciling this statement with the Cletus Sixpack juggernaut. I don't doubt the existence of some forms of Cletus Sixpack -- stereotypes exist for a reason -- but I doubt the simplistic take on the who, why, and what of Cletus' actions.

I would assert that many urban people have come off as very dumb to me because they have priorities that seem disconnected from the reality of the earth and nature and the basics of things like the origin of food and what farm equipment is. Though they seem erudite and able to discuss literary theory or list their favorite Handel pieces, or are able to list the obvious poor qualities of those not like them, the lack of understanding in what I consider fundamentals astounds me. But, rather than throw a name like Gregory Metrosexual at them and make jokes about men who are unable to change the oil in their own car, I chalk it up to different intelligences.

In the end, out of concern for showing disrespect for Morford or Edelen, I want to say that the email that I received from the reader and shared at the beginning of this post is the most heartening. And that's why, after getting permission, I needed to post it in its entirety.*

*(UPDATE: Last sentence reworded. See comments below.)

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Labels: current events, education

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As bricks.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 6 comments link this post

Are American kids dumb?

American kids, dumber than dirt.

Dan Edelen points out, with a little less ferocity, that there's a parent issue involved. I agree. I also note that the writer of the original article, Mark Morford, has forgotten a couple of things, namely that not all kids are from the same area of the country and that his take on private-schooled, privileged kids doesn't necessarily apply as the main reason kids that succeed actually do succeed.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America â€” and many more who aren't â€” now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

The description of kids that do well, and what it takes for success (wealth, privilege, private schooling) according to Morford, are rare in rural parts of the country and so for the kids that do well here to have being "lucky" as the only reason they have succeeded is a bit of a stretch.

Morford has some good points, although he writes with his usual "style" that almost hides it. I think he's missed the boat in trying to clarify why some kids in this country do well and others don't by forgetting that not all kids are:

from San Francisco from the West coast from cities

There are no doubt examples of dumb, rural kids who went to public schools. But there are more that do extremely well in college and don't have the problems described in Morford's article. Very few kids in rural areas have access to the factors for success that Morford outlines, so there must be other reasons for the educational decline in some regions and success in others. I'm not going to be so simplistic to assert that everything about a small, rural school is automatically better because it isn't always so. I'm just going to say: Morford wrote this from a very narrow viewpoint.

UPDATE: Read a follow-up to this post here.

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Labels: current events, education, links

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Ed Schafer could possibly be able to celebrate secretaries day next year!

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

So former North Dakota governor Ed Schafer might be the new Secretary of Agriculture.

I've met Ed a couple of times. I'm sure he doesn't recall. Typical.

The last time I saw him was in Webster, North Dakota at a fundraiser for my district's Republican Representatives and Senator. I sat in the audience and took notes on his little speech, since that is my habit. I also drew a little cartoon of him and Nancy. And then became sidetracked and stopped taking notes on the speech, but on just watching the two of them. This is not uncommon behavior. During a technology conference, when I found myself sitting next to Dorgan, Pomeroy and Conrad, I drew unflattering cartoons of them and their hair.

This has nothing to do with anything.

Schafer looks a little like Ted Turner.

That also has nothing to do with anything.

The previous paragraphs, in their entirety, are why I am not a political blogger.

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Labels: current events, north dakota, politics

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Crack grass does not bring me hope.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 8 comments link this post

I'm almost at the point where I've decided to become a proponent of global cooling, just because I'm so tired of hearing about global warming.

To be a global warming prophet -- for surely it is a religion -- you have to have the following qualifications:

Harpy. Annoying. Mobius strip argumentation skills.¹ Books with colorful illustrations and satellite maps showing Florida partly underwater and Lake Chad completely dry. The director's cut version of Waterworld. Delusions of pretentious patronizing grandeur.

For the love of all that is good an holy, just shut up. You know what? I don't care. I don't. And, in a local newspaper column written by (what else) a local person, I have the reason why I don't care: an article that starts off listing all the books no one reads but keeps on their shelf to impress guests, a device used as a segue into talking about Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which then segues into the meat of the column, which is envisioning the world without us and how global warming will bring this about.

Let's have a look.

"We humans forget that according to the Bible we were created on the sixth day. According to paleontologists, Homo sapiens have only been around for about 200,000 years and the earth has been circling the sun for more than 4.5 billion years. In other words, biblically and scientifically, we are a relatively new species."

What, exactly, is the expert opinion here? The Bible? Paleontologists?

The following paragraphs detail how fragile we humans are, how we are part of the environment and not master of it, and how nature is quick to rebound after our polluting folly which, apparently, is all we have done to the world. It's tricky, this column. Concepts I don't agree with are supported by true statements which, by some sort of straw man befuddlement, makes the reader decide that since the true statements are associated with the concept, the concept must also be true.

"We are affected by other creatures and dependent on them. Did you know that without the bacteria in our intestines we would starve to death? [...] If we see environment abuse as abuse of ourselves or our children, we might be motivated to be more careful."

The irritating thing is that I support a lot of "environmental" issues, yet this column completely turned me off . At what point can we stop seeing humans as fungus covering the planet? As just another hair bristling out of a pimple on Gaia's back? As the environmentally important equivalent of a piece of grass sticking out of an evil concrete sidewalk?

Which, by the way, brings me to the closer and the point where I really got angry:

"The idea that the earth will continue on whitout us is, in another way, a hopeful one. It is amazing how plants will grow in any little crack in the sidewalk or trees will sprout up through the center of an unused building in just a matter of a few years. The earth has powerful regenerative powers. Nature can undo man's centuries of work in a much shorter span of time. Realizing that we are not essential to the rest of the world is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for hope."

If the earth has powerful regenerative powers, yet the earth is in danger, and we humans are so fragile and at the mercy of nature, why in the heck doesn't the earth do its thing and start restoring? Unless, of course, humans are more than just another cog in the wheel with Joe Dolphin and Jane Bacteria. Could it be that humans might just be a little higher on some ladder after all? That we can squirt RoundUp on that grass in the sidewalk and fry it?

I'm not terribly interested in any cause that tells me the earth is powerful and humans are fragile only to turn around and say we're destroying everything. Pick one.

And this non-essential crap. How can we be part of the environment and now be non-essential? Are there other parts of the environment that are non-essential? If so, we ought to set up a logging camp or gas refinery there. I don't find the revelation that I'm non-essential and prime for mass extinction much reason for hope. If you find that a hopeful place of being, you are far more depressed and out of touch with humanity that you might realize.

"The earth will continue to live with or without us. It is up to us to learn to find new ways to live respectfully in our changing world."

I have a few Bible verses that might dispute the idea that humans are mere after-thoughts and unnecessary. Normally I wouldn't throw the Bible into this discussion, but, since it and paleontologists were already mentioned by the author earlier in the column as some sort of foundational point, I find it acceptable. The suggestion is, of course, that the rest of creation was as important -- or more, since it doesn't need us -- than humans. I should think that Jesus, the cross, and the lack of of apes, mushrooms and mountain lions having their souls saved on the way to Glory Land would say otherwise. I grant you that the rocks may cry out. You have me on that one.

If I want to tickle my mind with possible futures where humans are the rarity, I'll pick up a copy of any number of books by Phillip K. Dick, Asimov, Bradbury, and any other science fiction writers who do a heck of a lot more for science than the actual science writers, who merely come off as bad fiction.

Obviously, I was annoyed by this column. You should see me on Thursdays.

-----------------------------
¹Thank you, Keith. You refreshed my memory and allowed for a fine metaphor.

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As bricks.

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Ed Schafer could possibly be able to celebrate secretaries day next year!

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Crack grass does not bring me hope.