GODSPEED* with Learning Stories

America is young enough to learn from its past, but not old enough to know any better. For years we told ourselves and the rest of the world a story, mesmerizing in the simplicity of it’s allure. We were one of a kind. We invented the lightbulb, skyscrapers, airplanes, motion pictures, and on and on and on.  Now we are not so special. Talk with a young person in Southeast Asia these days and they will shrug their shoulders if you ask them what’s so special about America. Everyone has skyscrapers now.   Our political system, called revolutionary in 1776, was in fact a mash-up of systems borrowed from Europe, and which Europe had borrowed from China together with ideas from the Iroquois Indians and their confederation. We are the inheritors of the world’s political destiny, gathered from the disinherited pioneers of other revolutions in other parts of the world.  We are also the forgotten slaves of political regime change, who paid the price to control the old world ...

    Whatever your parenting style may be, there is no guarantee that what works to successfully navigate one season of your child’s life is going to work in every season. Whatever the thought police may say, you have to use your intuition.  Toughen up. Children need to deal with some tough situations, and they are not going to be prepared if you don’t show them how to get a job done without complaint, and expect for them to handle a thing or two themselves.  Also, be more sensitive. Listening to children teaches them that their feelings and perceptions are important. You don’t have to tell them how to solve their problems, but they do need to know that you understand their world on some level, that you feel for them, and they are not alone.  You have trouble on your hands either way. Teach your children to think for themselves and they are going to get into good trouble , and probably trouble you would have rather they avoided. Fail to give them the tools to thi...

The best medicine is the medicine you have. Children know this to be true. They know what band-aids are good for, and they know how to use them. If there are no band-aids, kisses will do just fine. The simpler the better, really. The more options there are, the more we need experts to help us decide which option might be the best one. But nobody has to tell a healthy person what to do.  Nobody has to tell a disabled person what to do either, or an old person, or a child. They know exactly what they want to do. The question is whether they can convince the powers that be to let them go for it. The idea that adults know what is best for children is generally accepted. With people who are disabled and old people, it’s a little different.  Once a person has come of age, they are expected to be able to make up their own mind. Their autonomy is respected. We can admire the cantankerousness of people who are old or disabled. Imagine what it must be like to be in their position, and y...

  Talk is cheap, and it passes for knowledge. It can also stand in the way of both thought and action, which are the twin forces that transform the world. In terms of time wasted, talking about our problems is a primary focus for both mainstream and social media.  This is the perfect environment for the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of maintaining the status quo, activism and verbalism. There can be no transformation without praxis, which is what Freire described as the synthesis of thought and action in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In an age where anyone can teach themselves almost anything by watching YouTube videos, most people are not looking for a teacher. Most people are content to consume the words of people who they think will protect their interests, and reject the words of anyone associated with questions about the implications of their logic. If they do not know something, it is not worth knowing.  This is the age of the sound bite that sounds true, but o...

Red Blood Cells "Open hearted citizen of our world" kellyjane bradley reported for jury duty at the Gender Switch Trials yesterday. She wrote, “Trans identities are valid, and individuals must find their own way to authenticity.”  I would be interested in knowing more about what she meant because while I agree, it’s her idea.  I am going to use somebody else’s words to tell you my idea, because they express my own idea to a T. To be honest, I can only speak for myself. If I use a trans person’s words, I am the one who is responsible for what I say with them. I can give credit where credit is due, but each of us has our own personal relationship with the truth, even if we mean the exact same thing.   When I say “it’s the authenticity, not the form it may take, that matters most”  in  “supporting all people to express themselves”  I want to talk about what’s in our bones. Like, IN our bones, the marrow. That’s where our blood comes from. The beating of ...

The worst has already happened. The healing has already begun. As soon as you got hurt, that’s the moment you started getting better again. That is how my momma taught me to make sense of things when I was overwhelmed with strong feelings of loss, and even horror at the sight of blood or disfigurement resulting from the hazards of being an energetic young boy. There are worse things that can happen than skinning a knee.  When anyone in your family is hurt, they can turn to despair. Hurt people hurt people. If somebody gets hurt, and the hurt turns into despair, there is a danger that the despair will become contagious. Despair can be passed from person to person until your whole family is in despair, like a family of zombies with the same affliction.  We all know that in the zombie world the best thing to do is avoid getting hurt in the first place. That’s not the real world though. In the real world, we are born into families that have already turned to despair without knowin...

  Focus up. It’s Father Time in America.  The last word of our family story is not going to be about who the victim is. It is not about the drama of the trauma, and what you think needs to change to restore fairness in our family court system. It’s not about the politics of eternity, or being woke or making America great again. Love is the last word of our family story.  This is about the drama of the hero who stands for the heart of humanity. This is about affirming the best in each member of our family, our whole family, unbroken and unseparated as it was in the original moment. This is about restoring hope for the hero’s journey of every child to share the best of the people they come from with future generations. It’s time to take this drama out of the courtroom, out of the streets, and shut out the media. It’s time for the Patriarch and the Matriarch to stop fighting for control, against each other. It’s time to fight for each other, and our shared humanity.  It...

  It was the last year of the millennium when I met a holy man who was not like any Santa I had ever seen before. I wouldn’t call what he was wearing a suit, though he did wear red woolen pants, a coat, and a hat of the same color. This was not someone you would see in any department store. This encounter happened in a residential area in Stuttgart, Germany as I walked with a friend on Christmas Eve.    It was cold, but the snow from earlier that week had already worn away from foot traffic. My friend and I were in a jolly mood. I was laughing when I noticed that my friend had stopped a few steps back. What happened? I wondered. Her mouth was open wide enough to whisper “Are you seeing this?”    My eyes moved to follow the direction of her gesture, and I saw what had stopped her in the middle of our merry banter. Dressed as I told you, a sober and holy man with a full white beard had appeared by the light of a street lamp. He was not pleased.   He proceeded...

  The way things are going is the way things are going to keep on going for some time. The question is, will you be able to let go of the way things were before? Letting go is different than just giving up. Letting go is allowing for what is happening to happen. What else are you going to do? I know, fight. There is a war going on for the soul of our human family. We call it a culture war.  This just in. Every war is a culture war. Every conflict between human beings has its genesis in the heart of the individual who is not willing to be defined by someone else’s idea of who they are. Our humanity gives us a sense of responsibility for contributing to the liberty and justice of all. We fight the good fight when our humanity is threatened.   We fight when we are unwilling to live by rules and judgments that threaten our autonomy and interfere with fundamental human rights and responsibilities. Our way of life. Our culture. Our language. Our identity. You can say we fi...

DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in Star Trek: The Original Series - Episode 1: "The Man Trap"  Emerson called a foolish consistency “the hobgoblin of little minds.” Nana said as much in her own way. “Smart people always change their minds.” If you ever need to focus up, shake off the sleepy comfort of other people’s ideas, and get your mind on your own purpose in life - there is no better place to start than Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance . You have an opportunity to become familiar with your own way of thinking that nobody else does. Be consistent in that. Trust yourself. Imagine your life was one of those advertisements with the actor who says “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on tv.” The idea is that people who are thinking of you in the role of a doctor will be receptive to your prescription for what might be good for them. It’s because they imagine you to be someone else.   The only consistency that is foolish is the attempt to “play yourself on ...

We all have experience with disability. Maybe something invisible, and nobody knows what causes it. Never is the need to be understanding greater than when we just. don’t. get it.  Blaming and shaming people for acting in ways we don’t understand is not going to make anyone feel better. But it serves a purpose. It makes us feel like we are nobody’s fool. We may not understand what is happening, but that doesn’t mean we give up our need to control the story. We get mad, or get bossy. We tell you exactly why it is not our problem, and why it’s your problem if you think any different. When someone in our family has a visible disability, or a disability with a name that helps us accept how they are as being part of who they are, we come up with different ways to control the story.  Let’s say we learn that our sister has autism, or our dad has MS. They do not move and act the way they do to make life difficult for anyone else. They move and act the way they do because they have a n...

  The 3-Step Gamechanger is a quantum leap strategy for transforming your ability to speak truth to power without hesitation. The three steps are also good for writing Learning Stories, and for documenting everything a judge needs to know to help your family. It will be obvious if you aren’t learning anything, or if your story has been abducted by an alien intelligence with a UFO.  You are responsible.  If you mess up and lose track of time, the cause is lost. That is why you document everything. Notice, recognize, respond. If it happens, write it down. After you write down what happens, write what you might be learning about, and what you might be ready to learn about next. Taking these steps is going to help you process what happens, and make sense of it. Taking the steps will help you present all the pertinent facts to a judge. If you messed up before, can you bury the details of your situation within the tallest mountain of paperwork you can muster? Can you fly under ...

Fundamentalism by Jens Galschiøt The entrance to Galschiøt's exploration of Fundamentalism is inviting to all, and the exit equally forbidding. There is something for everyone, but the only way out is to break the rules. Walk the perimeter of the circle on the outside, and you will see words quoted from the texts of the Abrahamic faiths that represent a liberal approach to the human condition. This approach is liberal in the classic sense, and not liberal in the sense that progressives and conservatives use the word today. Viewed from the inner circle, passages quoted from the same scriptures represented on the outside are essentially a negation of the liberal doctrines found in each of the religious traditions. The  words in the inner circle emphasize what separates the righteous believer with superior views from others.  Anyone who does not accept the regulation of their thoughts into categories of good and bad as defined in the passages of the inner circle are the others. ...

When you are a man among men in the military culture, you have the same right as a woman to take time off surrounding the birth of your child. This has been true ever since the Family Medical Leave Act was passed into law in 1993. To exercise the right, you have to be as strong as a woman.  Any man in the United States has the right to take leave from work to care for his family without fear of adverse action from his employer. If protection from fear is a right, it is not something an appeal to the rule of law would ensure. The only way to exercise the right is with discipline and mental toughness. I was employed as a director of child development programs for the US Department of Defense when my first two children were born, and  was born. I remember the raised eyebrows of my boss’s boss when my boss mentioned that I would be taking time off to be with my family when my first child was born. Without addressing me or the issue directly, the message of the more senior manage...

It’s half time. The home team is down by three and the usual suspects have gathered. Perhaps I should say the unusual suspects, since I must include myself in the mix. My father and my boy’s mama have been here before. From what I understand, they go to all of his games, barring life and death situations beyond their control. They sit together, and they don’t talk about any of the drama surrounding the reasons I am not there. Duh. That would be against the rules. My dad was a high school and college basketball referee for 39 years, until the very year our family basketball hero was born. Exposed to the chemicals of war in Vietnam, the neuropathy that made every step like walking on pins and needles made him call it quits one year short of 40. He is still going though. Still working the court, now that I think about it. Like other things that become part of who a person is, it may be that once you’re a referee, you’re always a referee. I sat with my son and talked numbers after the game...

The Sphinx in the Emeryville Mudflats When I was growing up, we would pass by this amazing sculpture garden in the Emeryville mudflats on our way to and from Nana’s house in Sacramento for the holidays. It was in the mile just before you get on the Bay Bridge headed for San Francisco. These were fantastical creations, something to marvel at, like the riddle of the Sphinx . It was the free spirit of the Bay Area, art for art’s sake, and an abundance of creativity that was going to make the world a better place. Anonymous people made these sculptures and placed them there in the mudflats so that everyone passing through Berkeley on the I-80 Freeway could see. A kid would see that sort of thing and think, “I could do that.” That is what we want to see more of.  It used to be like San Francisco was always under construction in my mind. I had a feeling like the music that was playing there just finished but was still echoing. It was the 80s, but you could tell the 60s had just been a m...

Conception of a human child usually happens inside of a woman. Before a baby girl is born, when she is still gestating inside the womb of her mother, she already has all the eggs she will ever have for her entire life present inside her.  The egg that was penetrated by the electric impulse of your father’s sperm at the beginning of your life was already present inside of your grandmother. Your grandfather caused this to happen when he gave your grandmother a girl sperm with an x chromosome, the father stuff needed to make the person who would eventually become your mother. The genesis of your sperm happened inside of your father within months of the moment you were conceived.   For fathers, the conception of a child is something that happens outside of their body. They bring the gift of their electric pulse, a sacred flame to the holy well that is the body of their children’s mother. With the rhythm of their heart they come, and experience the first moments of fatherhood ...

Genius Bastille Paris I’m going to make this quick. You may not be a genius, but you have genius in you. The same goes for your child. If you see the genius in them, don’t say a word about it.  Let’s say your child is fascinated with numbers. They have an ability to do calculations that amazes you. They play with dice, marveling at the sums of the pips they calculate in successive rolls, one right after the next. They can count as quickly as you do, even quicker. Whether they are looking at the pips that turn up with every roll, or even if you ask them to think about different combinations. They don’t have to think about it. They just know.  This is something different than counting. It’s in their body.    I have a child like this. They have an uncanny ability to anticipate patterns that makes it near impossible for me to ever win at a simple game of rock-paper-scissors . Fast or slow, they win better than 4 out of 5 throws. It’s in their body. This is the same child...

  Our baby had just been born. He was our first-born child, less than a day old. The nurse who came on duty was surprised that we had not given him formula.    When we made it known that we wanted him to take nourishment from his mother before anything, the nurse rolled her eyes and left the room with a comment about how we would give him formula if we knew what was good for him. We were shocked at the way we felt when she said that. It was awful.    We had our own ideas about how we wanted things to go that did not jive with what the nurse expected. I think she expected to help us with everything, and for us to be happy with all of her help and do things her way. We didn’t want the help she offered, and there was no other choice.   We had not planned a hospital birth, but our family physician had surgical privileges at the local public hospital, so when the birth did not progress as we had hoped at home we arranged to have our boy there. With private insur...

Who is going to take out the trash? It doesn’t matter what day it is. If the trash is full, somebody has to take it out. Otherwise trash is going to start piling where it isn’t supposed to be, in the living space we share with our family.  It has been said that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. This may be why we have arguments about taking out the trash. Everyone has a different value system to determine what to keep, and what to let go of. Once a week, a big truck moves through the neighborhood house by house, emptying the trash families have collected from garbage cans they have placed on the curb to go to the dump. In my mind, the moment the can is emptied into the truck is the moment the trash becomes garbage. After that, whatever you thought of as trash is gone, hopefully for good.    Some things get put in the trash by accident, and they can't be replaced. That is one reason people hold on to their trash longer than they need to sometimes. Even if we think...