Category: Commentary

I write blogs each day of the week unless some appointments or special events crowd the hours of my day. My essays are somewhat spontaneous, reflecting how I am feeling in the moment. The words generally flow from my mind into my hands that tap tap on the keys of my laptop. I marvel at how many ideas pop into my head and seem to demand to be recorded on paper. Sometimes though my emotions are in such an upheaval that that I cannot calm them enough to make my thoughts clear. The chaos in my mind is too disjointed and heavy to make sense of how I am feeling or what I truly want to say. 

January 8, 2026, the day after Renee Good was shot by an ICE officer in Minnesota was one of the days when I struggled to keep the depth of my emotions in check. I managed to spend four hours tutoring students in mathematics but that kind of task is second nature to this old teacher. I learned long ago how to curb my feelings when my duty is to care for my students. 

It was only after my sessions with earnest young people that I internally fell apart. I felt anger and grief for the loved ones of Renee Good and for the citizens of Minnesota and all of the United States for that matter. What happened to Renee on a cold Wednesday was horrific and triggering. It was something that was bound to happen sooner or later in the super charged atmosphere that Trump has so unnecessarily created. Sending hoards of ICE agents dressed like storm troopers to American cities that he does not like simply because he is angry with the leaders and the people in those places is a show rather than a solution.  

It is a true fact that my state of Texas has more immigrants than almost any other state in our union. I have no doubt that many of those immigrants are here illegally and yet there has been hardly a stir here compared to places like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis where the voters generally lean toward Democrats and the leaders often criticize Trump’s actions. It is obvious that he is punishing particular places while somewhat looking the other way in locales where his support is higher. It is as though he is purposely causing mischief and riling up populations to create a false impression that insures his grip on citizens who blindly believe his lies without checking the facts. 

The stage was set for tragedy and sadly it came to pass. Renee Good was protesting the door to door invasion of the homes of Minnesota immigrants, with a particular emphasis on those from Somalia. I thing that she believed that she was doing good work in observing what was happening and attempting to protect her community from what she saw as unfairness. She seemed to be not a radical but someone with a good heart and so on a cold day she tried to block the progress of the ICE agents in what she probably hoped would be a peaceful manner. She must have thought that she was doing her part to protest what she believed to be wrong just as I have participated in three marches in my city and written countless blogs criticizing what I see happening with the present administration. I doubt that she had any idea that she was going to be killed on that day.

I don’t know what I would have done in her situation. I suppose that having camo clad men bearing arms surrounding her car must have been terrifying. My guess is that her brain went into fright and flight mode just as it was designed to do. She might have stepped out of the car but maybe she was terrified about what would happen if she did so. I doubt that her thinking was clear at all in the fateful moment when she chose to drive away, not to attack one of the agents. 

The videos are quite clear that she had no intention of harming anyone. Her only mistake was attempting to get away from the situation. At that point it would have been quite easy for one of the agents to record her license plate information and track her down later if they wanted to press some kind of charges against her. In the heat of the moment drawing a weapon and shooting not once but three times into her car was a move even more egregious than her decision to flee. Lying that she was aiming her car at the ICE officer does not help any of us feel a sense of justification for her death. Shooting at someone should be an act of last resort as should invading a city with armed officers putting on a show of force. The unnecessary creation of tension made it almost inevitable that someone would be hurt. 

I do not believe that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist anymore than I am when I voice my opposition and concerns to what I see happening in my beloved country. She was simply asserting the freedoms granted to all of us by the bravery of the individuals who fought for a new kind of government of the people and by the people two hundred fifty years ago. I grieve for Renee Good and those who loved her just as I grieve for America. This is not who we should be. 

When I was a young woman attempting to find my purpose in life I entered college hoping to encounter the foundations of a possible career. I changed my majors so many times that I finally settled on unspecified arts and sciences for a time while I enrolled in one differing course after another hoping that a spark of interest would lead me to the career that I would follow. 

My first experiences in the Department of Education were far from inspiring. A general music class convinced me that I was way out of my league if I was ever asked to head a class in the basics of singing and playing instruments. An introductory class in the science of education lead by a brilliant professor piqued my interest enough that I made my major official and embarked on a series of courses where I learned how complex excellent teaching would actually be. Along the way I finally decided to take a required course called ‘Multiculturalism in the Classroom.” I would lie if I did not admit that this sounded like a fluff piece that would give me an easy A without much effort. Boy, was I wrong!

The professor was a young Black man, the first nonwhite teacher I had ever had. Before college was a student in the mid- nineteen fifties until nineteen sixty six. Living in the segregated south my only interaction with the Black people in my city was in passing until my senior year of high school when a talented Black student came to our campus. Since I had no classes with him I generally only knew of him. I knew immediately when I saw a Black man leading the multicultural class that it would be much more interesting that I had imagined, and it was.

Our professor was a gifted speaker and he made every topic enchanting. He challenged us and showed us a world that we had never known. He even poked fun at himself by telling a story of his own innocence about the people of the world. He recounted a time when he did enough research to determine what part of Africa had been his ancestral home. With great excitement he even learned what the historic garb was for that region. He purchased clothing that he believed would put him in good standing with the people that he would meet in the land where his ancestors once lived. Dressed in what he hoped would instantly impress the people he would encounter he stepped off of the plane to the amusement of those who were meeting him. They were decked out in western clothing and he instantly realized that he had insulted them by stereotyping who they were. 

This same man required us to choose an older part of the city of Houston to learn the history and evolution of the area. Because my grandparents had settled in the east end when they arrived from the Slovakian area of Austria Hungary I chose that part of town to study. The paper that I wrote was massive in its analysis of the demographics and economic aspects of how things came to be. I learned that Harrisburg was initially the capital of the Republic of Texas and that most of the land was dedicated to farming. After the devastating hurricane of 1900 in Galveston enterprising entrepreneurs decided to dig a waterway from the Gulf of Mexico to the east end of Houston. That big ditch eventually became one of the busiest ports in the United States. It was no doubt one of the reasons that my grandfather decided to move to Houston just before World War I broke out.

I found out that the movers and shakers of Houston aggressively advertised, sometimes falsely, to draw immigrants from around the world. There was a need for workers to build the infrastructure that would one day make Houston the fourth largest city with the most diverse population in the United States.

I treasured everything that I learned in the multicultural class long before DEI was even a thing. The professor opened my eyes and my mind so that I would forevermore meet my students and their parents with great respect. What I learned there was a key to my success as a teacher. It made me incredibly aware of the dangers of stereotyping and prejudice. I learned how to meet my students and their families just as they were. I realized how all of us have the same hopes and dreams for ourselves and our children. I saw that we each celebrate our backgrounds and our cultures and that there is much beauty in allowing each person to have the freedom to live as they wish rather than according to some dictate that forces them to change. Embracing multiculturalism not only helped me grow in the classroom but it became the strength of our great city. 

We are many nations, many cultures in Houston, Texas. We know many languages and take pride in our respective histories. Each individual has something special to offer the world and teaching became a way for me to help each of my students to find themselves just as I had done in the long ago. 

I will forever be grateful to the incredible man who lifted the scales from my eyes. He did not use propaganda to get me there nor did he pit one race or culture with another. He simply showed me how to value everyone that I would meet in the adventure called my life. He was perhaps one of the most consequential people in my life who helped me to fully understand that diversity, equity and inclusion do not hurt anyone but instead they help everyone. 

“After this year, will we be better able to recognize a pilgrim in the visitor, a seeker in the stranger, a neighbor in the foreigner, and fellow travelers in those who are different? The way in which Jesus encountered and allowed himself to be approached by all people teaches us to value the heart’s secrets, which only he can read.”—Pope Leo XIV, Homily, Solemnity of the Epiphany, Closing of the Holy Door.  

The world has always had problems and yet I have hoped during my lifetime that we humans were slowly but surely evolving in our understanding and concern for each other. I have watched the roles of minorities and women become more and more important during my seventy seven years on this earth. I no longer feel the need to hide my intelligence lest it be misconstrued by men who believe that my place in the grand scheme of things should be to take care of children and cater to the needs of the male half of the population. I have come to know people from many different races and cultures as my brothers and sisters in our journey on the earth. It has felt wonderful to believe that so many human prejudices that were in abundance during my childhood have been set aside for a more inviting view of people with many different faces and beliefs. 

I have never been naive enough to think that we had reached a state of perfection. There is still much to be done, but in general the ugliness that was so ever present when I was young seemed to have melted into the past. The kind of general prejudices and beliefs that were so common when I rode on a segregated bus to downtown Houston as an eight year old appeared to be fading away. Little did I realize that my lack of attention to reality was hiding the anger of those who somehow think that our brave new world is monstrous. They were quietly and persistently advocating for a return to a time before my parents were even born. They longed for a guided age of wealthy white men who were smart enough to rule the the earth and keep the rest of us in our appropriate places. 

I was suppose that I was so giddy about the progress that I observed that I failed to notice the buildup of angry people who felt that women like me were a threat or that my Black neighbors needed to go back to the communities from which they came. I rejoiced that people from around the world were moving into my state and bringing their customs and cultures with them. I embraced them the way that my mother and her family should have been embraced when they were instead victimized with slurs and injured by hurled rocks simply because they were immigrants. I rejoiced in the pilgrims, foreigners and fellow travelers who made my city of Houston one of the most diverse places on earth. I did not notice the whispers from people who instead held a grudge against them. I blithely celebrated what I saw as a steadily growing arc of acceptance for all people, even those who had once been treated as pariahs. 

I suppose that I actually was indeed as naive as many of my friends insist. I was so busy embracing the idea that we would never again return to the horrific times when eugenics and segregation and sexism were commonplace that I did not realize the extent to which an angry group of people were embracing a bully raging in a pulpit of vindictive hatred. I thought that surely everyone would see that the man who is overseeing our democracy for the second time is unfit for the job and enough of a criminal that he should face the consequences of his egregious deeds. It is incomprehensible to me that he has even one supporter for the anger that he fosters like a madman and yet here we are. I have no idea what to do other than to use the tiny voice that I have to spread the warning alarm that must be raised. 

I don’t just suspect, I know that many of the people around me would prefer for me to be silent. They believe that if we just take a deep breath and have some patience this too will pass. They are certain that things will right themselves and we will be able to move forward again without much ado. Sadly I once agreed with them but I see the horrors of what is happening so clearly now that I understand that silence is the enemy. We have to voice our concerns with truth and conviction or the beautiful world that was only beginning to unfold will take decades to repair. 

I suppose that I sound like the little girl crying “wolf” with a puny voice that mostly goes unnoticed. I am an annoyance more than a crusader dedicated to a good cause and yet I read the words of Pope Leo and know in my heart that I have to repeat them and live them or I am no better than the souls who have bought into the lies and anger of our president. Our focus on this earth should always be in leaving it better than it was when we first arrived. Surely we know that the miracle of Jesus lay in his teaching that all people are sacred and worthy of our love. 

I will not be afraid to say what I mean and mean what I say. I can’t go back to pretending to be demure simply because I am a woman. I cannot return to a time when people were judged by physical appearances rather than the content of their hearts. I will speak out for a return to providing every person with the dignity that should automatically be theirs. Mine is a message of hope and a warning that we have so much to lose if we simply look the other way when we see the wrongs that are multiplying by the day. Our voices must overcome the daily roar coming from the White House. We must push back or ironically lose our freedoms in a year that was supposed to be a celebration of our democracy and progress in achieving the ideals of our Founding Fathers. Let us hope that we will not bow to the whims of a man who seems only to be concerned with his own power and wealth much like the kings of old. Let’s take off the blinders now!

In my early years of teaching I made so many mistakes but luckily I was working for incredible principals who gently helped me to learn from my mess-ups before they became disasters. I believed that a set of hard and fast rules would set the right tone in my classroom so I created a poster board filled with considerations of every possible infraction along with the punishments that would be enforced without hesitation. In fact, I spent most of the first day of school explaining the laws of my classroom to the glazed faces of my students. 

It did not take long for me to realize that enforcement of my regulations would be a full time job that all too often interfered with the presentation of lessons that I had worked very hard to create. Luckily before I had totally lost the attention of my students and created a dally riot a visit from the principal set me in the right direction. 

As she left the classroom after an observation she smiled and motioned to me that she had left a note on my desk. As soon as I got the children busy doing some quiet work I read the brief invitation to her office that made me wonder if I was going to hear praise for the interesting lesson that I had given while she was watching. I could hardly wait to hear her feedback.

She was a lovely lady with a true knack for understanding both the students in her school and the teachers that she had hired to guide them. She began our discussion by complimenting the thought that had gone into my lesson and the earnestness with which I had presented it. Then she asked me how it was going with my rules and consequences for bad behavior. She did so in such a way that I did not feel that she was criticizing me. Instead I decided to lean into her experience to guide me in a project of classroom management that was becoming more and more overwhelming with each passing day. 

I admitted that keeping track of all the infractions and then administering the written laws of my classroom was taking more time than I had imagined. I even noted that there were moments when I ended up having to punish one of my better students just to keep things fair. Somehow the whole system felt unwieldy and untenable for an an entire school year. 

Without insulting me or acting as though she had caught me doing something very wrong she then asked me what I thought might help. I honestly admitted that I was unsure of the best way to proceed and asked her if she had any ideas. Only then did she suggest the I retool the whole issue by selecting the five most important rules, writing them up with positive and generalized sentences and then ditching the idea of hard and fast punishments associated with each infraction. She suggested that sometimes there were indeed valid exceptions to rules, reasons that made sense for trying a different way to motivate an individual to do the right thing. 

I spent that evening. rewriting my poster and settling on four major ideas about getting along in a group setting. I used happy colors on the poster and made it appear to be something positive rather than a recitation of sins and penances. The next day I told my students that whenever I do something wrong I like to admit and then rectify my mistakes. I asked them to honestly tell me how they had felt with all of the rigid rules that I had covered on the first day of school. I then introduced my new poster and asked them to comment on the generalized ideas for harmony in our space that would now be the way things would go in our mutual environment. 

They were eager to talk about the new guide for working together in a mutually respectful way. They talked about how much they liked it when every person seemed to care about the needs of everyone else. I recorded their additional suggestions for how to react whenever someone seemed to forget the decorum and needed a nudge to get back to the spirit of getting along together. They smiled and began doing all of the things that I had listed on the first poster without any need for such ideas to be written in stone. Life in our little space instantly became better. 

I never forgot the lesson learned nor how wonderfully my principal had guided me to answering my own questions about my failure to create a classroom atmosphere that worked for everyone. Using her technique I made my students think about why we need rules and how to enforce them. Classroom management became a guide for living in mutual respect and forevermore was only a small part of my duties as a teacher. 

I think that the founders of our nation somewhat understood the power of the right kind of rule making when they embarked on a new kind of government two hundred fifty years ago. Even they understood that their efforts were imperfect but the heart of their Constitution lay in the respect for our differences. They were especially sensitive to the many different religious beliefs that people have and they were determined to protect the right of each of us to follow our own spiritual destiny. They wanted a press that would not be influenced by politicians and a kind of government in which the three branches made certain that no one demagogue would be wielding a cudgel. They gave citizens the right to vote and be part of the process. They never intended for one person be in charge of everything. 

They were indeed wise and it is up to us to be like my wonderful principal and make note when things don’t seem quite right. We are all in this microcosm called the United States together and every voice has the right to be heard and not every rule has to apply exactly the same way in individual situations. Working together with respect and harmony works better than any other method. Hearing the problems voiced is a good thing that always makes us all better. Working for a common cause in which no one group gets all the goodies assures that our freedoms will be equally enjoyed.

My father in law is moving toward his ninety-seventh birthday. Just before Christmas he fell and spent almost two weeks in the Trauma ICU at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas. His injuries and subsequent difficulties seemed almost unreal given the fact that all he had done is fall down in his bathroom. 

He broke his nose and his hand and had tiny fractures in a couple of ribs. The extent of the damage indicated that he was much more frail than he had seemed to be. As the son of a doctor he had taken good care of himself over the years. He exercised each day and took a regimen of eighteen pills recommended and prescribed by his doctors. He was always thin and wiry and never seemed to gain weight like most people so that was also in his favor but he has many different ailments including a slow moving cancer, heart disease, diabetes and essential tremors, as well as a tendency to develop gastrointestinal problems. To keep going well into his nineties he follows the dictates of his doctors like a man obsessed. He does not vary from his regular medical appointments nor does he question the advice that they give him. 

When he was in the hospital with his injuries his body began to react in very scary ways. He developed a thoracic bleed, his kidneys were not fully operating, he was unable to eat and he had difficulty breathing. The doctors in the ICU attacked each of his symptoms quickly and with my father in laws full permission. What initially seemed like the potential end of his days slowly but surely demonstrated the brilliance of the medical community to which he has always been a faithful believer. Ultimately he overcame each and every challenge with the help of the doctors and nurses who doted over him. Now he is working to regain his strength and ability to walk and be independent once again.

I mention all of this not because I believe that he is somehow more blessed with health than others but because the doctors in our country are so advanced in what they are able to do. I have little doubt that if they had only relied on faux medicines and wacky beliefs he would surely have died. Instead they applied their knowledge, skills and medical machinery to bringing him back to a stable state of health. It was science and inventiveness that saved my father in law, not silly ideas that he was a chosen one who got to stay alive rather than someone’s brother or child or neighbor who died in the same moment. 

We have a society in which all of the advances in medicine are being challenged by an untrained man who seems to believe that the very things that kept my father in law alive are actually hurting us. Vaccines are on the chopping block even as we forget how devastating polio was before children regularly received immunizations to prevent this dreadful disease. Few people have heard stories of smallpox like I did from my grandfather who nursed his father and stepmother when they became so ill that “their noses seemed to be in danger of falling off of their faces.” Few people have had measles of late like I did before there was a shot to prevent me from being ill with high fevers for over a week. I could go on and on and on because when I grew up most inoculations were only beginning to become commonplace in reducing the spread of foul diseases. 

Our present government has unfunded many research programs that were designed to save lives. My oncologist niece has told me that advances from such programs have saved lives of cancer patients who might have died only ten years ago. It is shortsighted to attempt to save money by discontinuing the kind of programs that led to the procedures that kept my father in law alive in his recent visit to the hospital. 

On top of all of that most of his doctors and even some of his nurses had come to the United States with special visas which are now being threatened. It is estimated that forty percent of Primary Care Physicians and Oncologists working in the United States have come here with such visas. Now many of them are considering leaving and the new supply of doctors will not make up the deficit. There will be rural areas without doctors as all.

My grandfather always called the present the good old days. He remembered his grandmother trying to help sick people get well with homemade poultices and tonics. While he was proud that they called her Doc Reynolds he also understood how important our advances in medicine had been in saving lives. He never knew his mother because she had died in childbirth. He mourned for an uncle who was his guardian who died from an infection before penicillin had been invented. He believed that the progress being made in science and the way we treated people was glorious because he had witnessed the tragedies the occurred because of ignorance. 

I am lucky to live in a city with one of the biggest centers of medicine in the United States. I have wonderful doctors and know that if I need emergency treatment help will be available. I hope with all of my heart that we do not go backwards in the remarkable progress that we have made in saving lives. It would be foolish to attempt to save money by risking the health of the nation when these should still be the good old days.