Category Archives: thinking out loud

Love Your Neighbor and Your Enemy

thinking out loud,

The Guardian covered the recent horrific, hate-filled meeting of conservatives that focused a lot of its attention on transgender people, with one speaker calling for the eradication of transgenderism. He claims it is the “ideology” he wants to get rid of, not the people themselves but me thinks he doth protest too much. It is very clear that pushing transgender people out of the public space is the main goal, and these conservatives plan to do so with all the panache of a schoolyard bully using jokes and name calling. Picturing the hall of grownups giggling over silly memes while their rhetoric is getting people killed makes me sick to my stomach.

I agree with Geoff Wetrosky, part of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group who is quoted in the article, that these people are on the wrong side of history. Unfortunately, at the moment, they have large majorities in state legislatures where the culture wars end up playing out via new and more draconian laws. And, because the Supreme Court is now a bastion of conservatives with politics in their pockets, the laws banning health care even for transgender adults will probably be upheld.

I am afraid for us all in a way I haven’t been before, but mostly for those who have only begun to be able to explore their identities and express themselves publicly in the way most of us take for granted. My own state is only being saved from savagery by a few votes in the Senate. And, while I know he disagrees with me, I have made my beliefs clear to my own legislator. Do not discriminate in my name. Focus your work on solving real problems such as the poverty that keeps many in *your* community from accessing health care, good food and quality education. And, since you like to parade your religion as some badge of honor, try loving your neighbors and your enemies as yourself for a little while to see what it really feels like.

Is Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow?

thinking out loud, ,

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander was first published in 2010 and called attention to the impact the War of Drugs had on communities of color. In her preface to the 10th anniversary edition, Alexander discusses what a new version of the book would cover: the hopefulness of prison reform, the complicated legacy of Barack Obama related to incarceration, and the horrific consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency in general.

She resisted the urge to write an updated book and I agree with the decision. Things have changed since 2010 but as long as police have almost unlimited power to stop and search and prosecutors can keep people of color off juries for silly and superstitious reasons, our system is seemingly irretrievably broken. However, Alexander expresses some hope for change in her preface to this new edition.

The book is a meticulously researched historical timeline that shows how we moved from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration as institutional answers to segregation and racism. The latter is seemingly so entrenched legally, politically, culturally and economically that Alexander doesn’t offer much hope for reversing it in her first edition. She is particularly hard on Civil Rights lawyers and activists, including herself, who seem to ignore the issue because it often deals with people who did break the law and that makes it harder to defend them.

That focus, however, is changing and the Prison Policy Initiative is a good starting point for learning more about mass incarceration and the efforts to change the system. For my fellow Virginians, check out the profile page for our state. Here is one graphic to get you started: where the prison inmates come from in the state:

“Using 2020 census data, we looked at where people in Virginia prisons and jails come from. We found many of the state’s biggest and smallest communities are disproportionately harmed by mass incarceration.”
From Prison Policy Initiative

Erasing Equity

Education, history, thinking out loud,

The first thing Virginia’s governor did (day one literally) was to order the Department of Education to rescind all the policies and programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Somehow helping people see how past and present inequities and discrimination have created huge cultural, political and economic gaps in our state and country might make those who benefitted from those policies and practices and live on the “right” side of the gap feel badly about themselves.

This concern for the tender white people is playing out in the history standards revisions, the third draft of which came out earlier this year. That draft is only marginally better than the second one, hurriedly put together late last year to replace the comprehensive draft developed by state educators and historians. The National Council for History Education recommends that the Board of Education adopt the alternative, collaborative standards developed by VASCD, VSSLC, and AHA as they offer a more complex approach to teaching history and social studies, one that encourages critical thinking rather than rote memorization.

Do not forget that Virginia’s response to Brown vs. Board of Education was to essentially close the schools. Once they were forced to desegregate, localities closed Black schools, fired Black teachers and forced Black students into hostile, white-centered environments. Friends who lived through the process tell the story of finding their school memorabilia–from football trophies to administrator photographs–in a dumpster. Their lives, their stories, were being erased.

Youngkin and his minions are simply continuing that tradition. Fortunately, the Virginia Education Association stepped in to post the EdEquity VA website. You can also find the original site by using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.

If A Tree Falls in the Forest

technology, thinking out loud

Today’s existential question: If you do yoga without recording it via your fitness device, did you even *do* yoga?

I have taken to wearing my watch to bed in order to track sleep patterns. But, that means it doesn’t get charged overnight the way it always had so at some point during the day, I am surprised to discover it is down to 10%. That happened this morning just as I got started with my morning yoga. I was tracking the workout and found myself thinking I would have to charge the watch before continuing to make sure I got credit.

Hmm…got credit from whom? The inanimate object on my wrist? Apple headquarters? Steve Jobs? AARP to whom I granted access to my health data? God?

I faced down my somewhat obsessive need to track everything, put the watch on its charger and continued with yoga. But, don’t give me too much credit for fortitude: I knew I would have several opportunities to complete other workouts during the day that would get tracked. At some point, I may need to dive further into this obsession, but as I credit the watch with supporting my weight loss and generally good health I don’t worry too much.

Back to the Beginning

thinking out loud,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I am using a very serious poetical quote for a frivolous post. But, Eliot’s words came into my mind as I sat down to write. We explore, we expand, but we often end up back where we started and discover that what we were looking for was always there . It may be that we can only see it because of our journeys. This can happen in large and small ways. This blog post is about a small return.

I have always been interested in planning and productivity and taught project management for many years. My own practices are definitely old school with analog planners and handwritten to do lists. They are also very simple and minimalist: I list appointments and activities and check them off when they were done. If they don’t get done, they get moved to the next day. They have none of the fancy headings, doodles, stickers and so forth that seem to have become part of the world of planning, largely growing out of the bullet journal movement.

There are a variety of approaches and browsing the journal/planner section at bookstores is fascinating, if a bit overwhelming. I considered trying to implement one of the systems but never felt like I could take the time to learn it, plus I worried that I would spend more time on planning than doing. In the end, my system seemed to work for me.

So, I was intrigued when a headline on my news feed offered a much simpler approach to the bullet journal. The writer shared a screen shot of her planner where she showed how she wrote down the items she wanted to do in the correct day’s block in her planner. When she finished an item, she crossed it off. If she didn’t complete it, she added some symbol to mark it unfinished and copied it to the next day. I laughed out loud. This was how I and, I suspect, most other people have done it all along. We are, indeed, back to the beginning.

Before Eliot came to mind, I was considering calling this an example of our rubber band world. We stretch the band, often by building on a simple idea, adding complexity, variety, customization. At some point, it gets too tight and snaps back; we rediscover the simplicity at the heart of the idea.