All It Takes Is A Little Love

Senator Mark Kelly is the kind of person that every mother holds up as a model for her children. He is a truly good man who served for years in the United States Navy, spending time in Operation Desert Storm and almost being shot out of the sky. He became an astronaut who flew on several missions. He only left his Naval career after his wife, Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head in an horrific incident that left her struggling for life in a hospital for six months. As a good husband he was by her side as she worked to relearn how to walk and talk. Then he decided to dedicate his life to representing his fellow citizens of Arizona in the United States Senate. He is an honorable man who stands for all that is good in our nation. He is tough and courageous enough to speak what he believes to be the truth even when he knows that it may create difficulties for him. Now in reiterating the oath that all military personal take upon accepting their role in protecting the Constitution he has become the recipient of vile threats both from the President and the Secretary of Defense. 

We now live in an upside down society in which people standing up for their principles are all too often harassed and threatened with violence. The fact that such incidents have become more and more commonplace is concerning in a country where free speech is supposedly protected. When the man holding the highest office in the land suggests that someone like Mark Kelly should be tried for treason and hanged we have reached a point of danger for us all. Senator Kelly and his five associates were simply reminding the members of our armed forces that their pledge is to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not to become players in illegal actions. They have every right under the law to refuse to take part in illegal maneuvers. In fact, history has shown that those who do not object to illegal actions are eventually held accountable for their transgressions. Every person serving in the military must take his/her pledge seriously. That is all that Senator Kelly was asserting and his admonition is certainly not treason. 

It is also important that the rest of us who love the United States of America speak out whenever we witness transgressions that we know to be wrong. It is rather easy to see that one man should not be making all of the serious decisions without consultation with experts capable of advising him regarding the Constitutionality of each measure. Our system of checks and balances demands that every member of our three branches of government treasure our laws just as Senator Kelly and his colleagues have suggested. It is only when we follow the protocols with great respect that we do not devolve into an authoritarian morass. 

I just finished watching the Ken Burn’s epic documentary of The American Revolution. I learned so much about how difficult it had been for the leaders of that movement to stay the course to the freedom that they so desired. The eight years long war must have been debilitating for everyone as they sacrificed to keep going. There were those who were not so sure that leaving the largesse of the King of the British Empire was a great idea. There were many reasons why the outrageous idea of a government for and by the people would not work. The plan was imperfect and left many groups wanting like women, Native Americans and slaves. Nonetheless, it was an improvement over bowing to the whims of a single person who thought himself endowed with authority by God. The war went on in the hopes of a kind of freedom never before seen on this earth. The victory was an important moment in the history of humankind and spawned one revolution after another as people longed for the ability to speak their minds without punishment from despots. 

The new year will bring us to a celebration of the Declaration of Independence which was written and signed two hundred fifty years ago. Senator Kelly is the poster boy for freedom of speech at this moment along with all of the Americans who have protested in the streets during this year and anyone who wants his/her ideas to be heard. It is our right according the the Constitution to speak our minds, to remind all citizens to use and protect the Constitution that maintains the rule of law. We rid ourselves of a king who made decisions for us and swore to never again be under the thumb of a single person. 

  Senator Kelly did not suggest that soldiers should disobey orders simply because of their personal whims. He simply reminded them to be wary of doing something that feels contrary to the Constitution.. He has done nothing illegal in providing such sage advice but the president is wrong to suggest that Kelly and his accomplices should be charged with treason. It is Trump who is treading on the Constitution, not Senator Kelly. 

It is  the duty of every American to protect our laws and to be certain that our military is not used for foul purposes. We are already in a dangerous situation when our troops are sent to police cities. We will no doubt disagree with each other on many issues and that is simply a demonstration that our freedoms are still in intact. It is a good thing to have lively debates as long as no one voice dominates the final decisions. Not only should our military defend our Constitution but so must we all. 

Since the first moment that Russia invaded Ukraine I have supported the Ukrainian efforts to maintain their freedom. I am but one small voice in a world filled with billions of souls but I did my best to attempt to convince the people that I know that the United States has a responsibility to defend freedom wherever it is threatened in the world. We may not have to physically engage in war, but we should make it clear that we never side with despots whose only design is to grab land and precious resources. 

I have done small things like writing blogs about Ukraine, displaying sunflowers inside my home, sending donations to organizations that bring food and aid to citizens in war torn areas, and even praying daily that Ukraine will one day find peace and that Russia will be punished for its audacity in attempting to blame the conflict on an innocent nation. 

My heart is broken to learn that our nation is attempting to force Ukraine into a peace plan that would ultimately deprive them of much of their land and many of their precious resources. It would be an unfair capitulation and surrender that even includes a promise from Ukraine to never become a part of NATO. There is truly nothing in the deal that makes the years of war and destruction worthwhile for the citizens of Ukraine where many of them would end up under the oppression of Russia. I can’t even imagine the audacity of Trump and Putin and their water carriers who want us to believe that any common folk will benefit from the audacious deal that they are attempting to push onto Ukraine. 

The world is seeing in real time that the United States of America is no longer dependable. The cabal of our present government is in it for enrichment of themselves. They are brokering business deals, not peace plans and using innocent souls in the process. The oligarchs of Russia will grow richer if they have their way and the richest people in the United States will share in the distribution of goodies, including big contracts to rebuild the devastated areas of Ukraine.

I am offended and even a bit frightened by the audacity of it all. This is a con game and we will all be affected by the money grab that is going on in plain sight. While the tech boys and the Trump family grow ever more wealthy, the rest of us all over the world are dealing with their selfish policies. People in third world countries are dying because this same group took down USAID, a fairly inexpensive program that provided food to starving people across the globe. Every American is seeing the rising costs of virtually everything that they purchase due to tariffs and inflation. Even the cost of utilities is rising in places where tech companies are building massive structures that will require more water and electricity than entire towns. In the meantime we seem to be sitting back silently watching an attempted takedown of President Zelensky, the people of Ukraine and our supposed allies in Europe. 

Trump wants us to believe that his policies are filling the coffers of the United States creating a better world for everyone across the globe but he is wrong. We do indeed pay for the tariffs that he created. I have seen examples in my own transactions. I wanted to order a small item from a store in London from which I have often purchased things. The cost of the tariff offset was almost equal to the cost of the item. In other cases I have been unable to order from other nations at all because of the tariffs. My small complaints are by no means the norm but they do represent a truth that Trump is attempting to hide from the American people with his bluster. We pay the tariffs.

I don’t know where all of this will lead. I hope that we do not destroy Ukraine in an effort to rush a peace treaty that amounts to forced capitulation on their part. I pray that the nightmare of the last year will begin to fall apart. This is the United States, an imperfect nation founded on the idea of freedoms that are presently being threatened. I see people waking up to the dangers of this administration and it gives me hope, but we must continue to be vigilant and use our promised freedoms to work to end the destruction of our reputation and our Constitution. It is past time for every American to turn off the propaganda machine and face the truth that our president is not a brilliant businessman but a buffoon who sees an opportunity to join in the profiteering of the snake oil salesmen from across the globe. This is not who we are nor who we should wish to be!

I hope with all of my heart that Ukraine will not be sold down the river as a sacrifice for the enrichment of others. I hope that the American people will rise up just as they did two hundred fifty years ago and have the courage to support a just cause, not the whims of brokers whose goal is to enrich themselves. I want to believe that ultimately good will triumph over evil. 

We humans have a long history of wrongly torturing people simply because their beliefs do not correspond with ours. Religious wars are nothing new. They have been responsible for death and destruction in the name of some god or moral belief since before Jesus walked on the earth. For some reason we humans often think that forcing our beliefs on others is our gateway to heaven. Instead of accepting that there are many ways of being spiritual we insist that only one way should be allowed and so we push our ideas into the political world and create havoc. 

It does not take too much research to find the many ways that humans have used religion to punish or hurt each other. The back and forth battles between Catholics and proponents of the Church of England led to bloodbaths for those on the losing side. Galileo, a devout Catholic, was held prisoner by clerics who believed that he was a heretic for claiming the earth revolves around the sun. Early religious settlers in the American colonies did horrific things to the Native Americans in efforts to convert them to what they believed was the one true religion. 

The list of crimes against humanity committed by religious zealots goes on and on but sometimes the crimes appear to be more benign, a way of saving a lost soul. Much of the trouble in the world today comes from seemingly well meaning people who want to create their version of a truly moral world.

For years gays and lesbians were treated like criminals and punished when they were caught being themselves. The prejudices against them are still present today in many corners of the world. It is not just Christians who believe their behavior to be sinful but many other sects as well. While I would never want to prevent anyone from maintaining their strongly held beliefs, I would ask them to allow others to keep theirs without retribution. It hurts nobody when we live and let live. In fact our religious goals should focus on love and understanding rather than disdain and judgement. Love truly is love.

We began our government of the United States with an agreement to separate church and state matters because our founders were acutely aware of the problems that occur when people mix the two. Our ways of doing so have been imperfect but over time we moved closer and closer to peaceful coexistence. Suddenly we find ourselves once again debating issues that should have been settled on personal levels, not in the public square. 

Our LGBTQ community has been living quietly among us with very few exceptions. They have contributed to our betterment but some only see them as a evil that must be eliminated. Most of us now have friends and family members from the LBGTQ community who are not only allowed to live and express themselves in their own ways, but who are some of the best people that we know. Why would anyone deny them the same comfort and happiness that the rest of us enjoy? What have they taken away from us by marrying and finding the joy that comes from being able to live the way that feels best to them. Why have some been determined to make them afraid again? Why is religion being used as a cudgel rather than a peaceful way of living?

There are certain ideas that seem to be common sense like not hurting each other, not stealing from each other, not lying to each other. Ten of those ideas have been codified in a set of commandments but it was Jesus himself who reminded us that the main rule that we must follow is to love one another. He put no restrictions on who or how we should love. People are the ones who have made the kind of decisions that set us against good people in our midst who do not think exactly like we do. 

Retribution is not a stairway to heaven but kindness is. We do not fully understand the complexities of human minds and feelings. Why should we assume that only certain ways are good and that those that do not conform to our wishes are not just bad, but must be eliminated? Surely we have learned that self-righteousness is not healthy for anyone. 

We are a highly advanced civilization and yet we too often find ourselves engaged in battles over our opinions. Instead we would do well to work on issues that truly matter like feeding and housing the world’s people, working for true peace on earth, learning how to work together. It is absurd that the courts in our nation are being asked to determine how individuals should express their sexuality and their love when allowing them to be themselves hurts nobody. 

Busybodies have always been around. They are the same as the women spreading gossip in the time of Jesus. He made a point of calling them out. They are hypocritical like the Pharisees who put a gentle man to death because his message of love was making waves in their autocratic world. Isn’t it time that we just love like we were asked to do? 

I would never have the audacity to claim that I have a special understanding of the spiritual aspects of our humanity. I grapple with understanding what is expected of us in terms of religion as much as I struggle to understand the way things work in the world of science. Mine is an ongoing journey of exploration into the meaning of life that I have been studying for most of my life. 

I was baptized as a Catholic at All Saints Catholic Church when I was an infant. Ironically the priest who performed the sacrament would one day become a person whose thoughts on religion would greatly influence me. it would be many years before I met him again and during that time I completed twelve years of Catholic schooling which included daily religion classes where I learned the fundamental beliefs of the Catholic faith. I was a rather devout child who attended mass on most mornings and read every book about saints that was in the library. I suppose I got my ardor for religion from my mother who read the Bible daily and sacrificed financially to send me to Catholic school even after my father died and her income was significantly reduced. 

I decided not to attend a Catholic university even though many were offering me full scholarships. I felt quite limited in my knowledge of the world outside of my church. I understood that if I were to be able to survive in a very diverse world it would be important for me to get to know and understand those whose upbringing had been very different from mine. To this day I believe that it was a wise move on my part because in the years to follow when I would encounter coworkers and students who were from many different cultures. My success as an educator came because I was open to accepting them just as they were, not as I thought they should be. 

It is not surprising that I ended up marrying a young man who had also attended Catholic schools. We married in a Catholic ceremony presided over by the same priest who had baptized me many years before. He was a friend and counselor to my mother-in-law who worked for him. Through her and through him my religious education would continue. 

Whenever my husband and I visited his parents on a Sunday afternoon a kind of routine evolved. We would have a nice Sunday dinner and then the men would wonder off to watch whatever sport was being featured on the television. While they were enjoying man time my mother-in-law and I would partake of a pot of hot tea and some of the most remarkable conversations I have ever experienced. 

She had been born an Episcopalian but when she married my father-in-law, who was a Catholic, she wanted to learn more about his faith. She found a priest who instructed her in the basic ideas of the Catholic religion and before long she had decided to convert to that faith but her education did not end there. She was a life- long learner who read tracts from St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, popes, philosophers and ministers of other Christian faiths. Learning about Catholicism and Christianity was her passion and she truly enjoyed explaining to me what she had learned. 

One of the things that worried her was the rise of a kind of Christianity that seemed to pervert the message of Jesus. She pointed out that in the course of history there had been many religious wars predicated on false ideas that hardly resembled the message of Jesus. She mentioned a preacher who had been popular when she was a young girl whose homilies were hateful screeds that demeaned whole groups of people. Even as a little girl she realized that Jesus had spent all of his time including everyone, even those who were spurned by the society of his time. 

I am still very Catholic. I was once the Director of Religious Education at a Catholic Church. I mostly recently was a Eucharistic Minister until Covid hit and I had to attend church remotely. My long search for the answers of what is right and what is wrong have led me to believe that all too often there are people picking and choosing and interpreting verses in the Bible that fit their personal beliefs. They ignore passages that say that women should keep their heads covered and not wear pants like men but seem to stretch their interpretation of the words that they find to hint that members of the LGBTQ community are somehow decadent sinners. The truth is that nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus take the time to warn us about gays or lesbians or trans people. In fact, he shows us again and again that he was willing to break the religious rules of the time to demonstrate that all people were worthy of his love.

Let’s look closely at what Jesus did. He rescued and healed people on the Sabbath. He befriended Mary Magdalene who was a societal outcast. He invited a tax collector to have dinner with him even as doing so made tongues wag. He baptized a Eunuch who had been ostracized. He made a Samaritan the hero of one of his stories even though such people were thought to be avoided at the time. He cared for people with leprosy. He told us that there was a new commandment which simply put asked us to love our neighbors as we would love ourselves. He did not put limits on who we should love. Nobody was left out of his command. He died on a cross as a common criminal in his time, which was a purposeful way to show us that our prejudices should not dictate who gets our love. 

Why is it so hard for humans to understand how we have been directed to behave toward one another? Why are we so judgmental of one another. Why are we demonizing innocent people? Why can’t we see that hate should have no place inside a church? Our new Catholic Pope is reminding us daily of our responsibility to care for our fellow humans. Why are so many not listening? These are questions that I wish I might ask that wonderful priest who baptized me and my loving and spiritually brilliant mother-in-law, but I think I already know what they would say.

I just spent an hour or so attempting to master a method for factoring quadratic functions that made me more and more livid as I attempted to understand the purpose behind the exercise. I’ve been teaching Algebra I and Algebra II for years and I have developed ways for helping my students to understand both the purpose for doing so and how and why certain methods work. The one that was baffling the student whom I tutor is the so called tic tac toe method. 

I don’t have any problem finding a sure fire way for students to do mathematics in an easier manner but it really has to make more sense that just repeating a set of rules to reach the answer. Sadly the tic tac toe way of doing things was more confusing than helpful based on the materials that the teacher gave to the student. It had little to do with understanding the art of factoring compared to other methods. 

The real difficulty came about because the original teacher of the Algebra II class left the school after only working there for a week. She was young and perhaps not aware of the challenges of teaching math can be so she just left.

It took until November for a full time teacher to be hired while a series of substitutes kept the class going. Sadly most of them had little or no experience teaching higher level mathematics so they were not particularly gifted in explaining how and why things work. The result is a large number of very confused students who have so much catch up work to do in a short amount of time.

There is always more than one way to perform different calculations and processes so there is nothing innately wrong with using a method that is less complicated than guessing and checking but it has to be presented in a manner that makes sense. While surfing the Internet to learn how to use tic tac toe I found other ways of factoring that were explained so well that I picked up on the whys and wherefores of them in less than five minutes. Little was present for tic tac toe until I finally found a slide presentation that at least clarified the methodology even if it never bothered to explain why it works. Soon I was tic tac toeing my way to factor heaven but I knew that many other ways of doing so are available and most of them make way more sense. 

One of the problems with mathematics in general is that one will always hit a wall if he or she has only memorized an algorithm. Sooner or later the difficulty level will rise to a point where even the slightest change will send the person into a panic of confusion. I decry so-called shortcuts that don’t take to time to demonstrate the logic and beauty of mathematics. 

One of the things that I love most about how most modern day math teachers provide knowledge is that they use words, examples, visuals and physical manipulatives that literally show in concrete manners what the different concepts are. They bring in real life examples of how math is used and why it matters the know that the slope of a line represents a constant rate of change, not just a slanted line on a paper. 

Some students figure out such things on their own but all too many people report in adulthood that they always hated math and felt confused and frustrated most of the time. I often wonder how many folks who might have proven to be excellent in mathematics gave up on themselves early in the game because a teacher or teachers were unable to show them the wonderful connections between mathematical ideas.

I’m picking up the pieces with the student that I am presently tutoring. He has also taken the initiative to meet with an experienced teacher dury study hall time at school. He is a very bright young man who is frustrated right now and anxious to master what he has missed. I have taught him before and know that he usually catches on to new information very quickly. The fact that he is showing papers with half of the problems blank tells me that he is in a very bad place mentally and it may take a great deal of effort on his part. the new teacher, and me to help him fell one hundred percent confident again. 

I don’t think that there would be as many problems finding good teachers for every school if we valued educators as a society. Sadly many Americans have totally unreal beliefs about the lives of teachers. They imagine teachers lolling around swimming pools once the clock strikes three and having no more work to do until maybe nine the next morning. They speak of all the holidays that teachers have and the long summer vacations. The truth is that the average teacher brings home work every single night and works long after most people have gone to bed. 

School hours are not just compacted into an eight hour day and those summers are much shorter than most people imagine. Many teachers are lucky to have six weeks of vacation time once all of the demands for new learning and preparations for the coming school year are met. Sadly their salaries are based on a ridiculous belief that they don’t really work as long and as hard as others and so they are still grossly underpaid for the skills that they have to offer. Add to that the audacity of advice from so called experts whose only connection with schools has been going to them as a children. It is not to difficult to understand why so many teachers are leaving he profession. 

I’ll be going in a few minutes to pick of the pieces of destruction that have rattled the student that I sometimes tutor. I will do my best to help him understand that most of this was not a reflection on his intellect. Our society is neglecting and insulting our schools these days and it really is a shame. In the meantime if you find yourself needing help understanding how to factor with a tic tac toe grid just call me. I have figured it out even as I am not so sure that it is as helpful as it was meant to be.