GODSPEED* with Learning Stories

  The days of miracle and wonder never cease. First the moon landing, then " We have lift off " in the labor of transforming our family Learning Story, and now Zoom Family Court Hearings. This is good practice for the trial. Practice listening for what is being asked for. Let’s say you are getting the shaft. The system produces the shaft according to the rule that either everyone has to agree or somebody has to be a loser. Turn the shaft into a staff. The Shaft of the System becomes the Staff of Teaching and Learning when you accept responsibility for transforming your family story. You are being asked to take responsibility.  Show up and keep showing up. That changes the algorithm of what future generations will think is possible. Let’s say that there was a father who for one reason or another did not show up when they were blamed for the family trauma in a previous generation. From that time, the story was that fathers don’t show up. The expectation was that mothers and chi...

“Americans, terrorized, flee to Denmark to be married in a time of war - keeping hope alive.” That was the original angle for the human interest story where I was married to the woman who would become the mother of my children on Danish national television. Looking in the rear view mirror on our way back to the train station the day after the story aired, the taxi driver recognized something different about us. Denmark is known by Americans as the “Las Vegas of Europe” for its wedding industry . We chose the “Top of the Line” wedding in Vejle from a brochure. Arriving by train on a Wednesday, we registered with the authorities and were married on a Friday. The law was, we had to be in-country at least 48 hours before we could be legally wed. There were other American couples, and also couples from other parts of the world. We all thought the modern package was the way to go, as compared to a castle wedding,  or a country wedding, or any of the other options available. All but one c...

  Being gay has been a mystery to me as long as I can remember. When I was a boy, people constantly warned me to be careful about the way that I spoke, or people might think I was, you know… what? I wondered. What does that even mean? I didn’t get it.    I learned from other children that the way that I talked and moved my body made it seem like I might be faggot. The girls did not seem to mind, but other boys would either tease me in good fun or earnestly counsel me about how to sit or stand or talk without raising the wrong kind of questions. From what I understood, the appearance of swishiness and flamboyance was to be avoided.     My parents were of a generation that the news media at the time seems to have credited with starting what was referred to as “The Sexual Revolution.” Before the 1960s, the story I heard was that sex was something people didn’t talk about. The young people at the time, my parent’s generation, thought that sex was natural and th...

The new frontier is in the realm of relationships. The challenges of the 21st century will be overcome by people who will no longer contend with each other to maintain old grievances, but focus instead on self-transformation. Refusing to claim their rights as victims in the blame and shame game, the new pioneers will take responsibility for healing our world by focusing on interactions that reveal the strengths in each other, and settle their family feuds.   The spiritual dimension in relationships has been denied by aggressive masculine positivists, and subsequently ignored by passive feminine paradigms of social science research. Our institutions of education are like factories producing research that focuses on people’s lived experience without an ethical framework for ensuring that the research is not contributing to the problem it seeks to understand.  The toxic waste resulting from research that problematizes what previous generations would have no patience for is b...

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...