A Learning Curve

The Five Rings

Of Special

 

An inability to perform tasks often demands attention.  The human instinct to make that inability ability.   However, one should never rely on compassion.   People will either bend over backwards to help, they’ll ignore you and act uncomfortable, or your inability becomes an object for their mockery. 

The first is what I most often find from educated adults and children.  They have nothing to gain.  There are no monetary or psychological profits that would come from helping.  Suppose this were the case.   It’s usually not, and there is an unavoidable pat on the back on the table.  However, occasionally the ego is secure and its stroking can be left untouched.   Embrace that Samaritan.  There’s one in every group of ten. 

The next is a shifty bunch.  Spines disappear with the wave of a cane or crutch.  They leave a crack open enough to smell the smoke of their burning need to do good a deed.   But they also have an exit strategy in case they choke on their own condescension.  I’ve seen it on cruise ships from passengers and crew alike.   I’ve also seen it from bouncers in low-end bars who stare with dour, evasively straight faces.  Both want to help, they mean you no harm.  They just can’t cognate the difference; they can’t get past the disability.  It is their job in either case to “help” you out if humanly possible.  A disability just wasn’t in their training.  They’re helpless and really have no clue, but they are trying as they think any humane person ought to do.

The last group is usually the youngest.   They are the troubled souls that kindly escorted me through junior high school.  Compassion fears to enter their minds.  I’d like to think that group has grown smaller since then.   Total ignorance remains still though, from people of any age.  Not necessarily malicious, but simple blatant refusal to realize someone might have special needs.

 

 

I fear the repeated use of special word can condition someone to think they are above the rest.  Over years, being termed special due to a disability can make someone they think they are entitled to more than others.  I’ve seen it happen.  Maybe they are entitled to more?   All I am saying is the disabled individual should not be taught to count on special treatment.  If it’s there, fine, take it.   The seven-letter word has become the fuel for stereotypes.  It is what makes the second and third group act at all.  It’s what causes nerves and ignorance.  The mind game festers; it’s emboldened and reiterated each time a parking permit is used with questionable need.  That’s just how it is; all because of one word.

Michael Phelps was ADD, and he became the most decorated Olympian.  He did that competing in The Olympics, no Para.  My guess is that no one ever called him special.  Granted, Attention Deficit Disorder is common and not usually a greatly handicapping condition.  Still, it can be nurtured like any handicap and end up making a person dependent and greatly diminish their drive to pursue what makes them happy.

The “_ _ _ _ _ _ _” Olympics make me crazy.    I get the image of the Down’s syndrome athlete being told he’s special.   He’s clutching his medal with genuine tears in his eyes with the vague notion that he’s part of something, well…special.   The name of the event is subliminal.   To me it is sad and degrading.   Those athletes deserve no more or less recognition than Kerri Strug (the gymnast who vaulted with an injured ankle in the 1996 Olympic Games).  Do these athletes really require any more nurturing; a perennial motivator to grow up strong and confident, if not also dependent?  Athletes are athletes.   I don’t think a word that overtly distinguishes them from other athletes should be hung around their neck. 

The Paralympics, I can live with that.  It comes from the Greek (the ones who gave us the games) meaning “around.”  Around the Olympics; that is an avenue we had to enter.  It is unbiased and does not put the player on a higher field.  The name does not convey any sympathy.  It simply gives greatly handicapped athletes a chance to compete with athletes who share handicaps of that degree.

For about five years I competed with the ABA (Armature Bodybuilding Association).  In all those years I never heard special.  I competed in a division for “physically challenged” athletes.  I had no issue with this.   The name stated the facts; no sugar coating.  Some had CP (cerebral palsy), one competitor was and amputee, I had ataxia (a neuro-muscular condition).  I remember one guy was blind.  Any significant “challenge” that made preparing for competition harder put us in this division.  Before I knew about the ABA I competed for five years with the NPC (National Physique Committee.  There were no “physically challenged” divisions then and I shared the stage with bodybuilders who were not challenged by anything.

 

                                           

Special is just a word though.   Children simply have needs; some are less simple than others.  In 1974 I went back into my city’s public school after a two-year hiatus.  I had been going to Michael Dowling School in Minneapolis after a traumatic head injury.   The MVA (motor vehicle accident) interrupted my kindergarten year in Richfield’s public school.  My classmates at Dowling had physical and/or cognitive inabilities, in many cases much more severe than mine.  I went back to my school in a new program called mainstreaming.   I could not write well or quickly.  “Adapt to his needs and get a typewriter for him.”  It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, but I remember teachers who just wouldn’t budge.  The IEP (individual education plan) created mountains of paperwork for the special education teacher.  Schools didn’t roll well with the punches thirty-nine years ago.  Coming from Dowling back to the public schools was anything but a smooth transition.  I was ready for them; they were not ready for me.  Many conferences went on in my behalf between my parents, social workers, teachers, and doctors.  After one such meeting my doctor said “mainstreaming in alright if you don’t drown.”   Well, thirty-nine years later as a college graduate, I obviously did not drown.  I did come close though.  In some respects I, along with my parents and doctors, might have taught them (the teachers) as much as they taught me.

Special is as special needs. Today Dowling is called Michael Dowling Urban Environmental School.  The type of school I went to no longer exists.  Dowling was founded in Minneapolis in 1924 for children with disabilities.  Many of those kids learned to swim in the pool dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1937.  There is no separation anymore.  Distinctions in levels of learning are ascertained and adaptations are made; from a computer in the room to a private instructor.    The “art” of education, continues to be a learning process for all involved.   The tactical responsibilities fall on the teachers, the parents, and the students.  There’s a balance of nature and nurture.  The factual nature of a student’s disability can’t be nurtured more or less than is necessary.   Ideally the advantage of the needier student should not be greater or less than that of the rest of the class.

Words resonate more loudly to some.  Some words carry stigmata.  Their connotations are positive or negative depending on who hears them.  I remember when the word crippled preceded children in Shriner’s Hospitals.  I was outraged as I’m sure were many of my peers from Dowling.  That word eventually fell back into the archaic bag of wisdom from which it came.   Special does not come close in its debilitating value, but it is a close second.  Perhaps in ten years special education might be termed something like “education plus” like Google plus.   Or we might cop a title from Monty Python and call the Special Olympics “the secret athletes other Olympics.”

 

MBMoshe LLC

©2012

 

 

The Speakers from Illinois

 

Predications

Mud oozed blood and hid dead faces.  Bayonets slit throats and their butts cracked skulls.  Carnage flashed through rain as though nature were guiding the battle.   Rebel soldiers fell with their bigoted convictions intact.  The battle scene scored for the Union Army.  History was unabridged, but biased as told in Spielberg’s Lincoln.

The opening scene reminds us of the war’s horrible costs.  It shadows the three long years of fighting already endured.   The simple way men fought two centuries ago was captured.  Tactics whose odds favored death much more than today.  Men are seen scrapping and punching, the hand-to-hand pedestrian approach to combat that passed as official, commissioned, Civil War.  The scene filled in those years from 1861 through 1864 when the nation divided and offered the black man freedom on the end of a gun.  Abe is meeting the troops just before the battle of Wilmington, North Carolina in the winter of ’65.  Black soldiers explain how they have earned the white’s respect by fighting, but still make 3.00 less in pay.   He says in a few years they could be ranking officers.  In fifty years they might reach the rank of Colonel and in a hundred years they might be able to vote.

 

Hindsight

The fifteenth Amendment was ratified February 3, 1870.   The “Reconstruction Amendment” prohibited governments in the United States from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of race.  Lincoln was a crafty one.  He had no hand in writing that amendment, but his previous legislation shaped the words posthumously. 

The opening scene closes with the president listening to a white Union soldier parrot his 1863 Gettysburg address verbatim.   The film proceeds though the months leading up to Lincoln’s assassination.  And I would think of Obama from time to time, our first black Commander in Chief 143 years later.  Our president has often quoted Lincoln.  But it occurred to me that the way Obama initially went about securing affordable healthcare for millions had parallels to how Lincoln went freeing the slaves.  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 was a product of his constitutional authority as commander in chief.  It was not a law passed by congress and only freed slaves in states that were in rebellion.  The ruling did not apply to the so called “border states,” states that did not declare their secession before April, 1861.  Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky were not free until the passing of the thirteenth Amendment in December of 1865.

Political poetics

Lincoln wrestles with the smooth passage of the amendment.  He knows the law, perhaps too well, from his years as an Illinois lawyer.  He capitulates and avoids portraying the tyrant that men like Booth thought he was.  He can’t free the slaves too fast.  Lincoln’s methods are measured carefuly and the legality of each clause is weighed.  The need to uphold his oath to “protect and defend” the constitution bears down on him.  It influences his decision back when such integrity still hung in the balance.

When the kitchen got too hot Abe would lighten the mood.  He’d tell stories; tales gathered from experiences as a lawyer and voracious reader.  He told a story about Ethan Allen.  After leading the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 Allen met with King George III in England.  He excused himself to use the WC (water closet).  In the facilities he noticed a portrait of George Washington.  Later the King George asked Allen whether he noticed the portrait.  He asked Mr. Allen if he found the placement of Washington in poor taste.  Ethan replied, “not at all, nothing would make a British soldier shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.

Whether the anecdote actually happened is not clear.  Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln delivers the stories with wit.  The credibility of them is not to be questioned.  They fall into that category of intentionally unanswered elements that I am left with after many Spielberg movies.  His constituents bought it, and his intent to lighten the mood succeeded.  Through January of 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment gets past the senate and stalls on the House floor.  It is voted on twice in the film and defeated.

Not a line of dialogue was heard.  Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse April 9, 1865 was shown but not told.  A writer could see the value in this.  The war ended.  A scene shows the president on horseback cantoring though the carnage of Richmond, the last battle of the war.  An estimated 600, 000 young men were killed in four years.

The stage is set

“Death to tyrants” is tucked discreetly in history.  It is never uttered until the fat lady has sung.  The phrase won’t come to mind until all the king’s horses have been fed to his men.  Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s theater on April 14 is a footnote.  The killing took place on Good Friday; an irony I doubt history has missed.  140 years later our first black president is echoing his words.  Obama’s “emancipation” of millions of uninsured Americans originally drew from the same prudence Lincoln exercised to posthumously pass the Thirteenth Amendment. 

Republicans and the tea parties may think Obama is as much of a tyrant as the democrats thought Lincoln was.  “King Abraham Africanist” is a quote from the movie that lodged itself insidiously in my mind.  It spoke of the sympathy Lincoln and his supporters had for the black man.  It echoed the vehement resentment felt for that sympathy.  It said how the South would fall if their chief source of production was suddenly taken away.

 

Bootlegging time

Prohibitions don’t work and the antagonistic feeling they cause may not be worth the fight.   In an 1840 speech to the Illinois House of Representatives Senator Lincoln said “Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance.  It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.  A Prohibition Law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”  Lincoln knew the score.  He could reason that prohibiting anything, up to and including the unpaid servitude of human beings, could possibly irreparably sever the union. 

The pressure was on Lincoln as he began his second term.  He made his decisions and implementations of mandates cautiously.  Like Obama, who is beginning his second term, his administration veered towards appeasement by compromise.  In the film, Lincoln says that if he passed on any opportunity to end the war he would be a hated man.  He held out and risked being unpopular.  If getting the black man lasting freedom from involuntary servitude was the end result, he would weather angry clouds of resentment.  Now, at the beginning of the 21^st century, after presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton tried to reform health care, the young man from Illinois succeeded.  Obama’s approval rating dropped, again and again.   It rose with the killing of Bin Laden, but then fell again. 

The issue for Obama was affordable health care and laws preventing insurance companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions.    The issue for Lincoln was slavery.  By 1861 the majority of the union’s states and territories were free.  Each issue was contested; each had monetary loss at stake.  In Lincoln’s case the time was right.  Abolition of slavery had been an issue in America since the Quaker’s efforts in the late 18^th century.  

However, in the case of health care reform, the timing may have been wrong.   I saw what Obama intended when he addressed the nation in 2009.    I saw how he saw health care reform looked like a vital part to dealing with two wars and a sagging economy, much of which can be attributed to his predecessor.  His plan came with a hefty price tag.    But then, most things that benefit posterity do.

MB Moshe

©2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

worst case senarios

AMERICA, THE LAND OF THE FREE:

               ­­­­Long, long ago, in a monarchy far, far away, the seeds were planted for a democracy.  In 1776, when the leaders of the 13 original colonies decided to declare their independence from King George III, Thomas Jefferson had no idea that the simple idea of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” would metamorphose into greed, lethargy and the pursuit of drugs.  The concept of welfare, apparently innate  to American government, (we acquired a statue in 1885 from France and immediately inscribed the words “Give us your tired, your poor...” on its base)  all started with altruistically sound intentions to help those “men created equal” catch up in America by way of many programs of the 1960’s.  Since then it has culminated into a laughable, infallible hierarchy that will help anyone who is fortunate enough to be a citizen of this great democracy, either by birth or by a fairly elementary test.  Ironically, those immigrants who take the test, and do not take their citizenship for granted once they get it, can, in most cases, pass the test much easier than their natural-born counterparts, many of whom greedily benefit from our welfare programs.

 

Betty Boop and Dudely Doright.

 

In this article I choose to point out the truly loathsome, contemptuous and other parasitic manifestations of citizenry who see America as a helping pot, not a melting pot.  One young woman, who I will call Betty Boop, is taking the system for all it’s worth.  She has screwed her life beyond recognition and expects the government, i.e., honest taxpayers, to bail her out, caring not where her next meal is coming from, assuming that the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program will provide for her.  If she is pregnant, she could even receive more.  WIC will provide for her and the child (until the child’s 5th birthday).  Betty finds this out and decides she had better have a kid before her child turns five.  These children will most likely never know who their father is.  They are disenfranchised urchins who grow up thinking America is the biggest push-over in the world.  WIC is not bad, in the right Betty Boop’s hands.  It provides nutrition and education of nutrition for mothers and their infants.  However, the Betty Boop in this case is, as far as I’m concerned, abusing the program to the limit.  She has, as I understand, no intention of ever getting a job, her criminal background making this almost impossible.  She intends to keep having children by various men so she can support her drug habit and not work.  Most likely, if she doesn’t die or end up in jail, she will go merrily along collecting her WIC and TANF (temporary aid to need families), more commonly known as welfare programs, never giving a thought to where, or from whom, the money is coming.  She will just stand in line and cash her check at the many convenient check cashing facilities (it is no coincidence they are all over the low-rent housing areas) seeing this and the minimal paperwork she must go through as the small price she pays while we ultimately foot the bill.  TANF replaces the former AFDC (aid to families with dependent children) as a result of changes under the PRWORA (personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act) of 1996.  In the case of this Betty Boop, she has reaped the free treatment and medical aid of the county.  None of the free drug rehab she received lasted for more than a few months when I would hear she was back on the streets dealing for crack.   She has had baby after baby with the taxpayers paying to essentially bring unwanted children into this world (obviously unwanted by her) that eventually end up in foster homes, another taxpayer expense. 

 

Betty Boop is obviously playing America for a sucker, squeezing every ounce of freedom out of a government for which she does not pay.  I’ve never known her to hold a job for more than a few weeks, so how can she be taxed.  This person is the most pathetic leach on the system I have ever known.  Sure, there are mothers who honestly need the assistance and make honest efforts to pull themselves up from poverty, but the majorities I hear of are no more than criminals with a license to steal, a birth certificate.  The 60- month limit on TANF is too generous and does not impose strong enough limitations, still sending the message that our democracy will raise your family if you choose not to after the fact.

 

Dudely Doright

 

I encountered this man, who happened to be a Native American, one day on a city bus. There he sat all fat and sassy, without a care in the world.  For a while we rode as the clatter of bus windows blended with the incessant chatter.  With a wide, impish grin he suddenly decided to regale me with the details of his wonderful life.  He lived in a motel, drinking and watching TV, emerging every so often to cash checks, government checks.  The U.S. government, out of some sense of guilt over hundreds of broken treaties with the first Americans over the past three centuries, affords a stipend to anyone who can prove Native American bloodlines.  Is it fair after all this time?  What about the African-American, the Asian-American and, for that matter, almost any ethnic group to wash ashore here.  As history has taught me there were more groups that were discriminated against in the beginning than those that weren’t.  I am simply saying that there comes a time when we must question whether it is fair to hold a whole country responsible for the wrongs perpetrated generations ago.  Now, Dudely, who to me epitomized the lethargy and lack of dignity that can be the end result of America’s guilty conscience, seemed more or less happy with his existence at the expense of a nation, most of whom have no responsibility for promises broken to his ancestors. 

 

All we owe the Native American and other groups that have been wronged in the past is equality from this point forward.  That is all that is pragmatic and plausible in a true democracy.  A country of generation Xer’s (some of whom probably don’t even know who George A. Custer was) can’t be expected to be included in the debt created two centuries ago by people with manifest destiny on their minds.   However, the aforementioned men and women that were not “created equal” do deserve some extra from the pot since they were held back in the game.  Be it  Dudely Doright, who does have something to moan about, or  Betty Boop, who, for the most part, has no one to blame but herself, America must be aware that these programs are left wide open for abuse. 

 

This 227-year-old “experiment” has gone awry.  Actually, it never really lived up to its intentions. In the beginning, and slowly progressing and regressing through time, basically only white, wealthy, Christian men could truly pursue happiness.  Perhaps we should look more closely at the people who participate in the experiment two centuries later.  As the 21^st century begins, void of culture, family systems, to say nothing of integrity and dignity, it only seems fitting that I would portray the rapacious of America as cartoon characters.

A tale of two Controversies

Oscillating Fans

            I had time to kill in a hospital.  As I looked around the room for something to read, a Time magazine caught my eye.  It featured an article examining the procedure’s progress and regressions since 1973’s Roe vs. Wade decision.  The controversy is fascinating and compelled me to page to the debate. (Interestingly though, gun-control seems to be more controversial).

A sterile environment

The picture was familiar.  I’d seen it posted by pro-life advocates many times on Facebook.  On a silver tray, in perfect alignment, were the instruments necessary to perform an abortion.  A friend once called Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, as if this was the only thing they did.  He was adamantly pro-life.  I didn’t correct him, realizing, after years of debate, that some people refuse education.  I knew Planned Parenthood offered a lot more.  It offers choices, and that is the operative word.  They counsel the young mother; informing her of the other options available.  Now, I, as an adamantly pro-choice male, admit that it is unfortunate that abortion is at the end of that line of choices.  In the U.S. one out of three women chooses this by the time they’re forty-five.  They always will seek and find them, whether it is legal or not.  It might as well be done in a sterile environment.  So a clinic was created, perhaps in the back rooms of the Planned Parenthood building.  I doubt anyone’s happy about this; I doubt they come out smiling.  The doctor, the patient, the woman’s man (if she knows), the woman’s parents (who now must know when the mother is a minor) all are not proud of such a choice. I’d hope they aren't.  But the choice it’s there.  You'd might as well come to terms with it.

Restricting values

            Since January of this year the following restriction have been placed on obtaining an abortion in Minnesota:

·       The woman must get state-directed counseling that includes information to discourage her from the procedure.  She must then wait twenty-four hours before having it done.

·       Parents of a minor must get notified before an abortion is done

The caveats sound rational enough to me, but again, I’m only a man.   It also sounds somewhat familiar. 

            The stuffy echelons of the right-wing want the world like it was, at least before the sixties.  Some will pine for a time even earlier than that when men were men and women, well, had fewer rights than men.  They cherish a time when their gun was their only friend.  They’ll fight to the death (lately dyeing with pretty good success) the right to obtain that firearm with few, if any, restrictions. 

The Circle of life

            I can’t say when life begins.  That’s for judges, scientists, and doctors to ponder feudally.  It is not the issue here.   We know a few facts and, in the end, these are all that can direct our moral compass:

·       Women will abort their fetuses

·       People will always want guns; either to kill others or because they feel safer with them

·       America was founded as a democracy.  Freedoms and rights are infused it its citizenry

Okay, so the conservatives want abortion abolished (aren't these the descendants of the people who voted against the 13th Amendment?).  I constantly see schmaltzy Facebook posts overtly claiming how wrong the “killing” of babies is.  Aren’t these some of the same people who at one point tapped the domino that ultimately made it possible for the gunman to execute his plan at Sandy Hook Elementary?   I’d point out the hypocrisy in more detail but it would be lost.  It would fly over the heads of the gun lovers like the bullets flew at young children.

Come Together

            One side can’t wait, and sees it as an infringement on their constitutional right if they are asked to wait.  The other side sees it as a hurdle, a block not originally in the deal, if they have to wait.  Each wants instant access to their promised freedom.  You can’t ignore the irony here. 

            A group of women, one out of three to be exact, (58% in their 20’s, 61% who are already a parent, 85% unmarried, 69% economically disadvantaged, 73% with a religious affiliation) seek to eliminate their fetus.

These women have chosen to exercise the right Roe vs. Wade, a Supreme Court ruling, afforded them forty years ago.  Yes, they are killing in a simple sense of the word.  Although the fact is anyone can take out a life or the undetermined suggestion of one.

            A group of vigilantes, sovereign by the Second Amendment, seeks to “protect” themselves and their young children against the psychotic killer.  In 2009 there were 307 million people in the United States.  According to data from firearm manufacturers there were 300 million firearms owned by civilians.  100 million were handguns.  These patriotic Americans have chosen to exercise their Constitutional right afforded to them 222 years ago.

            Each seeks to take out a life; someone else’s, their own, or the debated one of the unborn.  They both want to be unfettered and free of government rule.  However one side valiantly tries to keep the flow of guns alive in America.  The other simply wants a choice.  All they ask is to be able to choose in the end whether they want to abort a pregnancy in a sterile environment.  Carrying it to term might endanger their life.  There might not be enough money, support, or education to raise a child; a child that could very well grow up feeling unloved, uneducated and resentful.  This is the psychopath, the one for whom the gun made accessible was earmarked.  It’s a tug-of-war.  The relatively smaller group of women’s actions will possibly prevent the angry young man Elvis mentioned in his song In the Ghetto from being born.   The other 300+ million are fighting to put a gun into his hands.  It got there completely unintentionally, but that is how the speculum bounces.

 

 

the competence of anarchy

Synopsis of The Orthodoxy of Arrogance

Mordichai (Moritz) Lebenschizt was raised by Orthodox Jewish parents. After his parents are killed when he is 11, he settles in Schaan, Liectenstein. There he learns to suppress his Jewish tendencies, among other things. The year is 1928 and Mordichai sees a crazy Jew hating man rising out of the ashes of WWI. Mordichai becomes Moritz, a more Christian sounding name. He never has a bar mitzvah and never grows payess like his father. Moritz has a hard rebellious bend. He is brash, arrogant, and pompous, with a knack for charming people.

In 1935 he meets Hannah Krankenstein in the Haage during a protest against the National Socialist Party. Hannah was also orphaned but became reclusive, introverted and reticent. Moritz found her to be charmed by him. She hung on his word and fed his enormous ego. By 1939 they had settled in the town of Dachau, Germany. There they curtailed their Judaism and flew under the Nazi radar. They would escape through a tunnel to a beer hall in Munich when the Gestapo came calling. By 1944 they were tired of playing the game.

Hannah and Moritz make their way a night through Munich. They follow the Rhine south along the Austrian border to Switzerland. They board a train destined for La Harve, France. In a small apartment in Le Harve they wait out the war. Moritz has built a small sailboat. In the fall of 1945 they make their way with their boat to a beach at Calais. At the narrowest point, the cross the English Channel to Dover. After spending a few weeks in South Hampton they get on an ocean liner to New York as “displaced persons.” They are married by the captain of the ship.

In referrence to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC:

"This museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone forever changed--

a piece of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope; an ally of education

against ignorance, of humility against arrogance..."

--William J Clinton