6th in a series.
5) Testing shapes the curriculum. As schools are evaluated only on their performance on standardized tests, there is a nearly irresistible pressure to abandon any parts of the curriculum that will not be evaluated by those tests. If the material on the tests was representative of the most important areas of knowledge and proficiency, this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, it isn't.
Let's pretend that a math test has 100 questions, and you can rank them in order of difficulty. Assume that everyone is able to get the 40 easiest questions right, but for the next 60 questions, more and more students get them wrong as they get more difficult. Those first 40 questions didn't tell us anything about which students knew more than the others since everyone got them right. Therefore, those questions could be removed from the test, and the results would be the same.
It's cheaper to make and evaluate tests if we just eliminate those questions that aren't helpful in ranking students and schools. It also cuts down on the time necessary to take the tests, which seems like it would be a good thing for students and schools. There is a drawback to eliminating those questions, however. The questions that most students get right and are not particularly helpful in ranking students tend to be those that focus on the most basic, fundamental, useful, and necessary parts of a discipline, be it algebra, biology, literature or history. What happens, therefore, is that the tests are skewed toward the "fringes" of knowledge; they test the more esoteric, less helpful and necessary parts of a knowledge set more heavily than the basic and more useful parts. Remember when you asked you algebra teacher "when will I ever use this stuff in real life?" Guess what: there's a lot of algebra we use every day... and that's exactly the part that's been eliminated from the test.
What follows is that schools and teachers feel pressured to focus their instruction on areas that they know will be tested, which swings the focus away from the most important parts of the class to the edges. Students find themselves studying advanced topics without a solid grounding in the basics on which they rely, making it necessary for them to rely on algorithms, mnemonics and rote memorization without actual understanding of what the information they're memorizing actually means, why or how it works, and how it can be useful.
So that's reason #5: Students are being taught less basic and useful skills and information, instead being focused on obscure and specialized skill sets removed from the fundamentals of the discipline that give them meaning.
- "This is it. That moment they told us about in high school where one day, algebra would save our lives."
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Thursday, December 13, 2007
I'm back... kinda... VOTE FOR ME!
I've been getting nagged from all sides (mostly in the form of merciless ridicule at the infrequency of my posts) to get back to the blog. So, here's a treat for all of you superfans... you know who you are. Take small sips, you don't want to burn your brain.
Lots of issues are back on "the public's" (i.e. the media's) lips these days, what with an election coming up and all. Pretend that I'm running for elected office and read my sound bites (okay, they’re too long to be sound bites. “ Sound snacks”, I guess) on the hot topics of the day (they're not all original ideas, but I'm going to go full-on politician mode and pretend that they're all mine!). Here they are, from A to Z:
A is for ABORTION: "From my perspective, it seems that this issue hinges on one question: Is an unborn fetus in fact a person, and therefore entitled to the same rights extended to every other person on earth, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or creed? If this is the question we are attempting to answer, let us tread very carefully, and be mindful of our nation's shameful history of answering this question "no" when it has been applied to Native Americans, Blacks, women, and others. History shows that this is not a question to be answered easily nor without a willingness to accept the harsh implications of either outcome."
B is for BARRY BONDS: "Did Barry Bonds use steroids? Probably. Should he have an asterisk next to his name in the record books? I don't think so... unless everybody else gets one. To pretend that every season, every player begins and ends the season under conditions identical to every other player since the beginning of baseball is ridiculous. Every era, every team, every ballpark has its quirks that make the experience of every player different. This isn't science; it's not a controlled experiment - it's entertainment! It's actually to the benefit of the public that baseball isn't exactly the same every single time... the fun wouldn't last very long. Barry Bonds played in an era of steroids, as the recent congressional report confirmed what everyone had long suspected. Barry was competing against teams with "enhanced" hitters, facing "enhanced" pitchers, and his experience was in this regard totally unlike anything Ruth, Aaron, Maris or Mays ever faced. Even without considering the issue of steroids, there are myriad reasons why every hitters case is different: The extensive use of middle relief and closers, the ever changing strike zone, new stadiums a mile above sea level, the wide variation of distances to the wall (and heights of the wall) from ballpark to ballpark, and more. If records can only be broken under the exact conditions under which they were set, no records could ever be broken. Was Barry wrong? Of course he was, and what's worse, he took part in a growing culture of steroid use that is spreading to college and high school athletes at an alarming rate. Barry had no excuse to abuse the position that his fame puts him in as a role model and add fuel to this growing public health crisis. Should he be in the record book, though? I think so. If Hitler and Stalin can be Time's Men of the Year, I see no reason that Bonds (or Rose, for that matter) should be kept out of the record books or the Hall of Fame. They were phenomenal ball players, who made phenomenal mistakes."
C is for CHINA: "It's unrealistic to expect China or any other fast-growing economy to take the environment or fair trade policies into account when the biggest example of a rich, successful nation is utterly unwilling to make any concessions on any front or even to acknowledge that the concerns of 90% of the world's population should in any way influence our energy policies. If we bite the bullet and adopt and enforce stricter environmental regulations, we can set the model that the rest of the world will follow."
D is for DARFUR: "If we're not afraid to go against the world and invade Iraq, and we're not afraid to take on up-and-coming nuclear states like Iran and North Korea, what are we afraid of in Darfur? Whose permission are we waiting for to go in and save innocent lives? The lack of a military response may be justifiable to many like me who are hesitant to believe that violence is ever a solution, and who never look to it to bring about progress, but only as a last-ditch resort to slow down wholesale slaughter with no end in sight. The lack of an aggressive diplomatic push with the full weight of our economic and political influence across the world, however, is totally inexcusable. How many people do we think we're saving with our "Save Darfur" T-shirts? Is the Janjaweed susceptible to political pressure expressed only through "Genocide Sucks" bumper stickers? What in the world are we waiting for?"
E is for EDUCATION: "Half a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education, schools in the deep south are largely integrated while the enlightened coasts are more segregated than ever. In the guise of innocuous sounding programs like 'neighborhood schools,' 'vouchers,' and the closure of 'under-enrolled' schools due to a dearth of school-age children (at least, of certain ethnicities) in urban school districts, schools in the big cities of our nation are becoming monochromatic. In San Francisco, the alleged capital of progressive political ideology, a complex school-choice system ensures parents with political clout that their children will not be stuck in "under-performing" schools, and the implications of this practice can be seen when taking a tour of the cities elementary schools and being able to categorize them at a glance as "black," "Asian," "Latino," or "white" schools, with the only concession to integration being a white minority at an "Asian" school, or a school integrated with black and Latino students from similar socio-economic backgrounds."
F is for FCC: "TV producers tell us that they're just supplying the product that people want. How do people know they want that? Why do TV shows need to advertise if that's what people want anyway? The reality is that tragically, we have learned to look to TV to tell us what normal, successful people are supposed to look like. 'Reality' TV purports to show us what real life looks like, and while adults with life experience know that the reality they show is pure fantasy, children are being taught to expect life to look a certain way. All that being said, we parents need to make some hard decisions. I would love it if my child could turn on the TV and I didn't have to worry about what they might see. Since I can't do that (and probably won't be able to anytime soon), I'll take responsibility for my own child and keep the remote control on top of a high shelf, and make TV time something we do together."
G is for GUANTANAMO: "What's a worse injustice: for a criminal to go free, or for an innocent person to be locked up? Here's a better question: What's a worse injustice - for a criminal to have a trial, or for an innocent person to be locked up without a trial for 5, 6, 7 years? We're the good guys because we don't lock people up for years without a trial, because we don't attack countries we don't like without being attacked first. It makes us vulnerable, but we can't give that up without giving up our identity. What cost security? Are we willing to give up our souls to feel safe? We are taking the first steps on a road that will make us to the world what Saddam and the Republican Guard were to Iraq. Let's get off that road!"
H is for HOLLYWOOD: "Film and Television represent that rarest of things: a medium in which an artist can actually ditch their day job. Say what you will about the quality of the art being turned out, it is art, nonetheless, and the artists who create it should not be exploited by the middlemen who distribute it. The writers are the originators of a work, and if someone else is able to take that and turn it into millions of dollars, it's only because the writers themselves did not spend their time raising capital and developing distribution companies... they were too busy writing! If you make money off of what the writers wrote, pay them for it. Simple. End the strike by doing the right thing."
I is for IMMIGRATION: "Any proposal to address immigration that has any chance of implementation must address both sides of the issue: What is the cost on our society that will be alleviated by this solution, and what is the cost that will be incurred? To date, I have heard no proposals that involve voluntary or forced deportation of undocumented immigrants that incorporates a system to save the industries that will suffer collapse due to the loss of a vital workforce, most notably the hotel and restaurant industries. Nor do they address the unavoidable implication of skyrocketing produce prices leading to a collapse of American agriculture and a growing dependence on cheap food from overseas if American growers don't have the affordable workforce necessary to harvest what they have grown. It's one thing to be dependent on foreign powers for the gas we need to drive to the grocery store; it's quite another to be dependent on them for the very food we need for our survival."
J is for JOURNALISM: “Ideally, the job of a journalist is to present a forum in which both sides of an issue can be presented and verify or dispute the facts (not conclusions) as presented by both sides. When journalism becomes about reporting only what is said about an issue and doesn’t do the hard work of verifying claims made, it loses credibility. Politicians can also skirt the verification problem by making grand pronouncements about what they’re going to do in the future and then just not following through. Journalists these days aren’t great at follow-up. The media has a dual role of keeping the public informed and of keeping those in power accountable. If either of those roles is forsaken, the media becomes irrelevant.”
K is for KARMA: “You know you’re in trouble when the future of the world depends on other countries NOT following your example. We spend so much time spinning our wheels trying to get other countries to believe that they really shouldn’t try to become like us and then wonder why they don’t take us seriously. We don’t want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons, to have a strong military, to launch pre-emptive strikes on their enemies, to pass legislation aimed at forcing conformity to religious norms, to disenfranchise minority groups politically, to put supposed enemies in prison for years without access to legal counsel or a speedy trial, to pursue reckless industrial development at the expense of environmental responsibility, or to make decisions for their own benefit without taking the impact on the rest of the world into account. In other words, we don’t want them to be like us. And we wonder why they hate us.”
L is for LEGISLATING MORALITY: "Should a political candidate who self-identifies as a Christian be held to the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition by other Christians? Absolutely. Does it become an obligation on the part of that candidate to support legislation that would make it a crime against the United States for citizens who are not Christians to violate the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition? Absolutely not! Should the religious leaders of the candidates denomination threaten to refuse the sacrament of holy communion to any person, be they candidate or not, who willingly and repeatedly violates the ethical and moral standards of their religious tradition and is blatantly unrepentant? Perhaps. But should they threaten to withhold the sacrament of holy communion to politicians who do not support legislation making it a crime to violate Christian ethical and moral standards? Absolutely not! It is one thing for a Christian to commit adultery and proclaim themselves free of guilt or regret. Such a person is denying their identity as a Christian which is founded on submission to the teaching of scripture. It is quite another, however, for a Christian to choose not to pursue legislation that would make adultery a jailable offense. Should people who lie about the size of the fish they caught or use foul language when watching the game with their buddies be locked up? Do you think God would actually be pleased to have a bunch of people acting like they respect him only because they're afraid of being thrown in jail? That is not the God of Christianity."
M is for MARRIAGE: "I find it offensive that the secular government feels that I need to get their permission to marry at all. Marriage is a cultural and religious institution, and should not be moderated by the government in any way. The government is useful as a record keeper and mediator of social contracts that individuals enter into granting to each other financial and social rights that the law reserves only unto individuals, and as such, the government should continue to hold onto records of such arrangements, whether they occur in the context of traditional marriages, civil unions, or "common-law" marriages. The actual designation of a relationship as a "marriage" however, is something I think the government should have no place in. I was married to my wife under the authority of God and the church according to Christian tradition. I appreciate the government doing the paperwork that allows me to include my wife as a dependent when applying for health care, but I don't think the legitimate role of the government should extend beyond that. The government can't tell the church who they must marry. The church doesn't get to tell the government who gets to be declared as a dependent on their taxes. It's really that simple."
N is for NO-BID CONTRACTS: “Seemingly illogical actions and choices on the part of those in power can be better understood when we realize that they won’t always hold their office, and it pays to have rich friends who are grateful to you when you retire. Maybe the future of Iraq and Afghanistan are being set up for further failure, and maybe the economy of our own country is being destroyed, but these guys are making their friends rich and earning a lot of good will… so why should they care?”
O is for OIL SPILLS: "The front pages of every major newspaper in the Bay Area proclaimed the 100's of volunteers demanding to be put to work saving the aquatic wildlife being threatened by the tragic spill. 'HEARTBREAKING' exclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle on the front page, above a photo of an oil-covered seabird. It breaks my heart that 100's of volunteers don't show up to clean up the sewage soaked bedrooms of children in Hunter's Point who are awakened by the horror of the plumbing in public housing projects nearly drowning them in human waste at 2 o'clock in the morning. Where are the volunteers when the lungs of children in poor families are filled with the pollution caused by industrial waste that surrounds their neighborhoods (after successful campaigns to keep those plants out of more affluent neighborhoods), resulting in alarmingly high rates of asthma among the most vulnerable among us, most without adequate health insurance? I'm not saying we shouldn't care about the birds. I'm saying, why do we care so much for the birds, but not for the children?"
P is for POLITICIANS: “It used to be that someone could be born in a log cabin, split rails, put themselves through law school and run for President. The cost of running a successful campaign has gotten to the point that the only people capable of running for office are representative of a narrow minority of American society whose interests often run contradictory to the vast majority of the population.”
Q is for QUAIL: “If I shot somebody in the face, I would feel really bad about it, even if they were a complete stranger. If they were a good friend, I would be sure to stay with them until their family told me to get lost. One has to wonder what went wrong with the underlying humanity of a person who could shoot a purportedly good friend in the face and then get back to business as usual. If the hunting down of ‘rogue quail’ is deemed to be a sufficiently important task as to justify so easily writing-off the potentially fatal wounding of a good friend, how can we believe that the welfare of American troops personally unknown to our leaders is important in the face of the supposed threat posed by Iraqi insurgents? And if you’re an Iraqi civilian, forget about it. You can rest assured that your well-being and survival simply don’t factor into any equations.”
R is for REALITY: “Politicians are becoming afraid to present realistic options for the tough problems facing our nation and our world in part because they’re afraid to admit that things are really so bad. Many of the press conferences we’re subjected to seem to be devoted to convincing us that things are going great. Numbers are flung at us to prove that no matter how miserable we feel, the economy is strong and everyone’s doing well. It’s a hard sell when we live every moment in the reality they’re denying, and it’s hard to see them as relevant to our lives when they seem so totally disconnected from our experience.”
S is for SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “I imagine that if the troops were asked if they felt supported by the stop-loss or the extended tours, they would politely decline to answer. I can’t imagine that policies that mean more time away from their homes and families over and over again feel incredibly supportive. I can think of two ways to support the troops: devise a strategy for quick and decisive victory and then implement it, or concede that we’ve done the best we can and bring them home. I have yet to hear anyone bring forth a viable option for the former. I suspect that this is because it would have to involve more troops than are currently interested in being supported, and instituting a draft would disturb the veil that has thus far shielded the eyes and hearts of most Americans from the harsh realities and costs of this war.”
T is for TAXES: "Unless you want to build your own road from your house to your work place, or hire some guys to hang around your front yard 24/7 just in case a fire breaks out, or broker your own personal peace treaty with North Korea, we need to pool our money together and get some people to take care of these things for all of us. That means government, and that means taxes. I have no problem with paying taxes, as long as I can still provide food, shelter and clothing for my family after I'm done. I have no problem with abolishing taxes for people who are struggling to do that, and I have no problem with raising taxes dramatically for those who make more money than some countries. But we don't really need to raise taxes; we just need to collect the taxes that are owed. Let's tighten the loopholes and increase enforcement of the existing tax code and we'll be doing alright. Multimillionaires (and billionaires) get away with tax dodges that cost the rest of us billions of dollars every year. I think that we can avoid raising taxes if we're able to figure out a way to get the money that's already owed us."
U is for UNINSURED: “The truth is that we end up paying for the medical care of uninsured Americans anyway. What happens is that without insurance they stay away from the doctor until they need an expensive hospital stay. Who pays for it? The taxpayers do. Sure, the patient ends up bankrupt, unemployed and a further drain on society, but then we end up paying for that, too. It’s interesting to see the level of preventive care I get from my provider when they know that they’ll either pay for preventive visits or extended hospital stays. It’s cheaper to keep people healthy than to treat sick people. The question is who will pay for that care? Right now the insurance companies are refusing to pay for the preventive care and the government ends up paying for the eventual treatment. The shareholders get rich and the government taxes us more. This is the issue that a single-payer system would address.”
V is for VICTORY: “What are we trying to accomplish in Iraq? What does ‘victory’ mean now? How will we know when we’ve won? I’m sure that the troops would be much more effective if they had concrete, measurable objectives that they were working toward, and could see a way home and out of this mess at the end of the tunnel.”
W is for WAR: "Jimmy Carter said that 'War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.' War is rapidly changing from the option of last resort to the option of first resort, or of only resort. The decision to enter a war should always be heart wrenching and fraught with sadness and regret, not jubilation. We must begin each war with the daily hope that this could be the last day. We must sacrifice every comfort we enjoy in peace time if such sacrifice might bring a speedier end to bloody conflict. War is being prosecuted today in a way to ensure that it impacts the ordinary life of average Americans as little as possible, in hopes that we will let it drift to the back of our minds and be forgotten but for the occasional shocking image on the evening news. No war is fought without cost, and if a war absolutely must be fought, then we should be working every day to bring it to a swift resolution. 'Kill them all' is an unacceptable path toward this goal."
X is for X-RAYS: "Airport security has been taken over by the federal government, and now the underpaid, overworked, poorly equipped, disgruntled workers have new uniforms. Wouldn't it make sense for some of the billions that we spend each day to fight a war 'over there' were spent to protect against our getting blown up 'over here'?"
Y is for YAHOO!: “The internet gives us more access to more information… but what information? It used to be that in order for something to be made available to the public, a publisher had to believe that the information was valuable enough to invest a lot of publishing capital in it. It wasn’t always true, but it was at least entertaining. Nowadays, misspelled bigotry is held out side by side with well-researched journalism, and we haven’t been given the tools to distinguish between the two. More information isn’t automatically a good thing. They say that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and we’re seeing the truth of that borne out.”
Z is for ZAMBIA: "AIDS is ravaging Africa. Should be good news for the pharmaceutical companies: a vast market for their antiretroviral drugs! There's no reason that we can't figure out a way to get the drugs to the people who need them and Big Pharma can make a profit. If they absolutely must make a huge, enormous profit, though, we run into problems. Africans dying of AIDS can't support the billionaire lifestyle to which Big Pharma has become accustomed. If only AIDS were ravaging New England or the Silicon Valley instead of Africa. Everyone's problems would be solved... especially the Africans!"
So there it is, my political campaign in a bottle. If there are any actual candidates that would like to license my views for their own uses, I have a wish list on Amazon...
- "It’s politics, man, politics.”
Lots of issues are back on "the public's" (i.e. the media's) lips these days, what with an election coming up and all. Pretend that I'm running for elected office and read my sound bites (okay, they’re too long to be sound bites. “ Sound snacks”, I guess) on the hot topics of the day (they're not all original ideas, but I'm going to go full-on politician mode and pretend that they're all mine!). Here they are, from A to Z:
A is for ABORTION: "From my perspective, it seems that this issue hinges on one question: Is an unborn fetus in fact a person, and therefore entitled to the same rights extended to every other person on earth, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or creed? If this is the question we are attempting to answer, let us tread very carefully, and be mindful of our nation's shameful history of answering this question "no" when it has been applied to Native Americans, Blacks, women, and others. History shows that this is not a question to be answered easily nor without a willingness to accept the harsh implications of either outcome."
B is for BARRY BONDS: "Did Barry Bonds use steroids? Probably. Should he have an asterisk next to his name in the record books? I don't think so... unless everybody else gets one. To pretend that every season, every player begins and ends the season under conditions identical to every other player since the beginning of baseball is ridiculous. Every era, every team, every ballpark has its quirks that make the experience of every player different. This isn't science; it's not a controlled experiment - it's entertainment! It's actually to the benefit of the public that baseball isn't exactly the same every single time... the fun wouldn't last very long. Barry Bonds played in an era of steroids, as the recent congressional report confirmed what everyone had long suspected. Barry was competing against teams with "enhanced" hitters, facing "enhanced" pitchers, and his experience was in this regard totally unlike anything Ruth, Aaron, Maris or Mays ever faced. Even without considering the issue of steroids, there are myriad reasons why every hitters case is different: The extensive use of middle relief and closers, the ever changing strike zone, new stadiums a mile above sea level, the wide variation of distances to the wall (and heights of the wall) from ballpark to ballpark, and more. If records can only be broken under the exact conditions under which they were set, no records could ever be broken. Was Barry wrong? Of course he was, and what's worse, he took part in a growing culture of steroid use that is spreading to college and high school athletes at an alarming rate. Barry had no excuse to abuse the position that his fame puts him in as a role model and add fuel to this growing public health crisis. Should he be in the record book, though? I think so. If Hitler and Stalin can be Time's Men of the Year, I see no reason that Bonds (or Rose, for that matter) should be kept out of the record books or the Hall of Fame. They were phenomenal ball players, who made phenomenal mistakes."
C is for CHINA: "It's unrealistic to expect China or any other fast-growing economy to take the environment or fair trade policies into account when the biggest example of a rich, successful nation is utterly unwilling to make any concessions on any front or even to acknowledge that the concerns of 90% of the world's population should in any way influence our energy policies. If we bite the bullet and adopt and enforce stricter environmental regulations, we can set the model that the rest of the world will follow."
D is for DARFUR: "If we're not afraid to go against the world and invade Iraq, and we're not afraid to take on up-and-coming nuclear states like Iran and North Korea, what are we afraid of in Darfur? Whose permission are we waiting for to go in and save innocent lives? The lack of a military response may be justifiable to many like me who are hesitant to believe that violence is ever a solution, and who never look to it to bring about progress, but only as a last-ditch resort to slow down wholesale slaughter with no end in sight. The lack of an aggressive diplomatic push with the full weight of our economic and political influence across the world, however, is totally inexcusable. How many people do we think we're saving with our "Save Darfur" T-shirts? Is the Janjaweed susceptible to political pressure expressed only through "Genocide Sucks" bumper stickers? What in the world are we waiting for?"
E is for EDUCATION: "Half a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education, schools in the deep south are largely integrated while the enlightened coasts are more segregated than ever. In the guise of innocuous sounding programs like 'neighborhood schools,' 'vouchers,' and the closure of 'under-enrolled' schools due to a dearth of school-age children (at least, of certain ethnicities) in urban school districts, schools in the big cities of our nation are becoming monochromatic. In San Francisco, the alleged capital of progressive political ideology, a complex school-choice system ensures parents with political clout that their children will not be stuck in "under-performing" schools, and the implications of this practice can be seen when taking a tour of the cities elementary schools and being able to categorize them at a glance as "black," "Asian," "Latino," or "white" schools, with the only concession to integration being a white minority at an "Asian" school, or a school integrated with black and Latino students from similar socio-economic backgrounds."
F is for FCC: "TV producers tell us that they're just supplying the product that people want. How do people know they want that? Why do TV shows need to advertise if that's what people want anyway? The reality is that tragically, we have learned to look to TV to tell us what normal, successful people are supposed to look like. 'Reality' TV purports to show us what real life looks like, and while adults with life experience know that the reality they show is pure fantasy, children are being taught to expect life to look a certain way. All that being said, we parents need to make some hard decisions. I would love it if my child could turn on the TV and I didn't have to worry about what they might see. Since I can't do that (and probably won't be able to anytime soon), I'll take responsibility for my own child and keep the remote control on top of a high shelf, and make TV time something we do together."
G is for GUANTANAMO: "What's a worse injustice: for a criminal to go free, or for an innocent person to be locked up? Here's a better question: What's a worse injustice - for a criminal to have a trial, or for an innocent person to be locked up without a trial for 5, 6, 7 years? We're the good guys because we don't lock people up for years without a trial, because we don't attack countries we don't like without being attacked first. It makes us vulnerable, but we can't give that up without giving up our identity. What cost security? Are we willing to give up our souls to feel safe? We are taking the first steps on a road that will make us to the world what Saddam and the Republican Guard were to Iraq. Let's get off that road!"
H is for HOLLYWOOD: "Film and Television represent that rarest of things: a medium in which an artist can actually ditch their day job. Say what you will about the quality of the art being turned out, it is art, nonetheless, and the artists who create it should not be exploited by the middlemen who distribute it. The writers are the originators of a work, and if someone else is able to take that and turn it into millions of dollars, it's only because the writers themselves did not spend their time raising capital and developing distribution companies... they were too busy writing! If you make money off of what the writers wrote, pay them for it. Simple. End the strike by doing the right thing."
I is for IMMIGRATION: "Any proposal to address immigration that has any chance of implementation must address both sides of the issue: What is the cost on our society that will be alleviated by this solution, and what is the cost that will be incurred? To date, I have heard no proposals that involve voluntary or forced deportation of undocumented immigrants that incorporates a system to save the industries that will suffer collapse due to the loss of a vital workforce, most notably the hotel and restaurant industries. Nor do they address the unavoidable implication of skyrocketing produce prices leading to a collapse of American agriculture and a growing dependence on cheap food from overseas if American growers don't have the affordable workforce necessary to harvest what they have grown. It's one thing to be dependent on foreign powers for the gas we need to drive to the grocery store; it's quite another to be dependent on them for the very food we need for our survival."
J is for JOURNALISM: “Ideally, the job of a journalist is to present a forum in which both sides of an issue can be presented and verify or dispute the facts (not conclusions) as presented by both sides. When journalism becomes about reporting only what is said about an issue and doesn’t do the hard work of verifying claims made, it loses credibility. Politicians can also skirt the verification problem by making grand pronouncements about what they’re going to do in the future and then just not following through. Journalists these days aren’t great at follow-up. The media has a dual role of keeping the public informed and of keeping those in power accountable. If either of those roles is forsaken, the media becomes irrelevant.”
K is for KARMA: “You know you’re in trouble when the future of the world depends on other countries NOT following your example. We spend so much time spinning our wheels trying to get other countries to believe that they really shouldn’t try to become like us and then wonder why they don’t take us seriously. We don’t want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons, to have a strong military, to launch pre-emptive strikes on their enemies, to pass legislation aimed at forcing conformity to religious norms, to disenfranchise minority groups politically, to put supposed enemies in prison for years without access to legal counsel or a speedy trial, to pursue reckless industrial development at the expense of environmental responsibility, or to make decisions for their own benefit without taking the impact on the rest of the world into account. In other words, we don’t want them to be like us. And we wonder why they hate us.”
L is for LEGISLATING MORALITY: "Should a political candidate who self-identifies as a Christian be held to the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition by other Christians? Absolutely. Does it become an obligation on the part of that candidate to support legislation that would make it a crime against the United States for citizens who are not Christians to violate the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition? Absolutely not! Should the religious leaders of the candidates denomination threaten to refuse the sacrament of holy communion to any person, be they candidate or not, who willingly and repeatedly violates the ethical and moral standards of their religious tradition and is blatantly unrepentant? Perhaps. But should they threaten to withhold the sacrament of holy communion to politicians who do not support legislation making it a crime to violate Christian ethical and moral standards? Absolutely not! It is one thing for a Christian to commit adultery and proclaim themselves free of guilt or regret. Such a person is denying their identity as a Christian which is founded on submission to the teaching of scripture. It is quite another, however, for a Christian to choose not to pursue legislation that would make adultery a jailable offense. Should people who lie about the size of the fish they caught or use foul language when watching the game with their buddies be locked up? Do you think God would actually be pleased to have a bunch of people acting like they respect him only because they're afraid of being thrown in jail? That is not the God of Christianity."
M is for MARRIAGE: "I find it offensive that the secular government feels that I need to get their permission to marry at all. Marriage is a cultural and religious institution, and should not be moderated by the government in any way. The government is useful as a record keeper and mediator of social contracts that individuals enter into granting to each other financial and social rights that the law reserves only unto individuals, and as such, the government should continue to hold onto records of such arrangements, whether they occur in the context of traditional marriages, civil unions, or "common-law" marriages. The actual designation of a relationship as a "marriage" however, is something I think the government should have no place in. I was married to my wife under the authority of God and the church according to Christian tradition. I appreciate the government doing the paperwork that allows me to include my wife as a dependent when applying for health care, but I don't think the legitimate role of the government should extend beyond that. The government can't tell the church who they must marry. The church doesn't get to tell the government who gets to be declared as a dependent on their taxes. It's really that simple."
N is for NO-BID CONTRACTS: “Seemingly illogical actions and choices on the part of those in power can be better understood when we realize that they won’t always hold their office, and it pays to have rich friends who are grateful to you when you retire. Maybe the future of Iraq and Afghanistan are being set up for further failure, and maybe the economy of our own country is being destroyed, but these guys are making their friends rich and earning a lot of good will… so why should they care?”
O is for OIL SPILLS: "The front pages of every major newspaper in the Bay Area proclaimed the 100's of volunteers demanding to be put to work saving the aquatic wildlife being threatened by the tragic spill. 'HEARTBREAKING' exclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle on the front page, above a photo of an oil-covered seabird. It breaks my heart that 100's of volunteers don't show up to clean up the sewage soaked bedrooms of children in Hunter's Point who are awakened by the horror of the plumbing in public housing projects nearly drowning them in human waste at 2 o'clock in the morning. Where are the volunteers when the lungs of children in poor families are filled with the pollution caused by industrial waste that surrounds their neighborhoods (after successful campaigns to keep those plants out of more affluent neighborhoods), resulting in alarmingly high rates of asthma among the most vulnerable among us, most without adequate health insurance? I'm not saying we shouldn't care about the birds. I'm saying, why do we care so much for the birds, but not for the children?"
P is for POLITICIANS: “It used to be that someone could be born in a log cabin, split rails, put themselves through law school and run for President. The cost of running a successful campaign has gotten to the point that the only people capable of running for office are representative of a narrow minority of American society whose interests often run contradictory to the vast majority of the population.”
Q is for QUAIL: “If I shot somebody in the face, I would feel really bad about it, even if they were a complete stranger. If they were a good friend, I would be sure to stay with them until their family told me to get lost. One has to wonder what went wrong with the underlying humanity of a person who could shoot a purportedly good friend in the face and then get back to business as usual. If the hunting down of ‘rogue quail’ is deemed to be a sufficiently important task as to justify so easily writing-off the potentially fatal wounding of a good friend, how can we believe that the welfare of American troops personally unknown to our leaders is important in the face of the supposed threat posed by Iraqi insurgents? And if you’re an Iraqi civilian, forget about it. You can rest assured that your well-being and survival simply don’t factor into any equations.”
R is for REALITY: “Politicians are becoming afraid to present realistic options for the tough problems facing our nation and our world in part because they’re afraid to admit that things are really so bad. Many of the press conferences we’re subjected to seem to be devoted to convincing us that things are going great. Numbers are flung at us to prove that no matter how miserable we feel, the economy is strong and everyone’s doing well. It’s a hard sell when we live every moment in the reality they’re denying, and it’s hard to see them as relevant to our lives when they seem so totally disconnected from our experience.”
S is for SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “I imagine that if the troops were asked if they felt supported by the stop-loss or the extended tours, they would politely decline to answer. I can’t imagine that policies that mean more time away from their homes and families over and over again feel incredibly supportive. I can think of two ways to support the troops: devise a strategy for quick and decisive victory and then implement it, or concede that we’ve done the best we can and bring them home. I have yet to hear anyone bring forth a viable option for the former. I suspect that this is because it would have to involve more troops than are currently interested in being supported, and instituting a draft would disturb the veil that has thus far shielded the eyes and hearts of most Americans from the harsh realities and costs of this war.”
T is for TAXES: "Unless you want to build your own road from your house to your work place, or hire some guys to hang around your front yard 24/7 just in case a fire breaks out, or broker your own personal peace treaty with North Korea, we need to pool our money together and get some people to take care of these things for all of us. That means government, and that means taxes. I have no problem with paying taxes, as long as I can still provide food, shelter and clothing for my family after I'm done. I have no problem with abolishing taxes for people who are struggling to do that, and I have no problem with raising taxes dramatically for those who make more money than some countries. But we don't really need to raise taxes; we just need to collect the taxes that are owed. Let's tighten the loopholes and increase enforcement of the existing tax code and we'll be doing alright. Multimillionaires (and billionaires) get away with tax dodges that cost the rest of us billions of dollars every year. I think that we can avoid raising taxes if we're able to figure out a way to get the money that's already owed us."
U is for UNINSURED: “The truth is that we end up paying for the medical care of uninsured Americans anyway. What happens is that without insurance they stay away from the doctor until they need an expensive hospital stay. Who pays for it? The taxpayers do. Sure, the patient ends up bankrupt, unemployed and a further drain on society, but then we end up paying for that, too. It’s interesting to see the level of preventive care I get from my provider when they know that they’ll either pay for preventive visits or extended hospital stays. It’s cheaper to keep people healthy than to treat sick people. The question is who will pay for that care? Right now the insurance companies are refusing to pay for the preventive care and the government ends up paying for the eventual treatment. The shareholders get rich and the government taxes us more. This is the issue that a single-payer system would address.”
V is for VICTORY: “What are we trying to accomplish in Iraq? What does ‘victory’ mean now? How will we know when we’ve won? I’m sure that the troops would be much more effective if they had concrete, measurable objectives that they were working toward, and could see a way home and out of this mess at the end of the tunnel.”
W is for WAR: "Jimmy Carter said that 'War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.' War is rapidly changing from the option of last resort to the option of first resort, or of only resort. The decision to enter a war should always be heart wrenching and fraught with sadness and regret, not jubilation. We must begin each war with the daily hope that this could be the last day. We must sacrifice every comfort we enjoy in peace time if such sacrifice might bring a speedier end to bloody conflict. War is being prosecuted today in a way to ensure that it impacts the ordinary life of average Americans as little as possible, in hopes that we will let it drift to the back of our minds and be forgotten but for the occasional shocking image on the evening news. No war is fought without cost, and if a war absolutely must be fought, then we should be working every day to bring it to a swift resolution. 'Kill them all' is an unacceptable path toward this goal."
X is for X-RAYS: "Airport security has been taken over by the federal government, and now the underpaid, overworked, poorly equipped, disgruntled workers have new uniforms. Wouldn't it make sense for some of the billions that we spend each day to fight a war 'over there' were spent to protect against our getting blown up 'over here'?"
Y is for YAHOO!: “The internet gives us more access to more information… but what information? It used to be that in order for something to be made available to the public, a publisher had to believe that the information was valuable enough to invest a lot of publishing capital in it. It wasn’t always true, but it was at least entertaining. Nowadays, misspelled bigotry is held out side by side with well-researched journalism, and we haven’t been given the tools to distinguish between the two. More information isn’t automatically a good thing. They say that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and we’re seeing the truth of that borne out.”
Z is for ZAMBIA: "AIDS is ravaging Africa. Should be good news for the pharmaceutical companies: a vast market for their antiretroviral drugs! There's no reason that we can't figure out a way to get the drugs to the people who need them and Big Pharma can make a profit. If they absolutely must make a huge, enormous profit, though, we run into problems. Africans dying of AIDS can't support the billionaire lifestyle to which Big Pharma has become accustomed. If only AIDS were ravaging New England or the Silicon Valley instead of Africa. Everyone's problems would be solved... especially the Africans!"
So there it is, my political campaign in a bottle. If there are any actual candidates that would like to license my views for their own uses, I have a wish list on Amazon...
- "It’s politics, man, politics.”
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