'But things were pretty good for me back then...'

I assume that a vast number of Americans are unconcerned about the results of the election. In fact, many people seem to assume that all the blustering and overt racism and sexism... all the vulgarity and obvious greed that the winner exhibited for months and months... was just an act. 

Maybe it was. More likely is that the most egregious plans he put forth just won't fly in a nation that has moved from racial splits and gender splits to reveal what it really has been for its entire history: a nation dominated by the wealthy. It's not that money can simply buy elections -- after all, the Democrats raised and spent far more than the Republicans -- but the wealthy will always come out fine.

The puzzle for me has always been that the wealthy continue to find ways to get the poor, the struggling, and the frustrated to vote for them. Most of America is like Charlie Brown, always hoping that the football will not be yanked back at the last second by Lucy, sending us crashing to the ground, defeated. 

I'm not sure what to make of people who choose to pay exorbitant prices for bacon or eggs or whatever foods they just can't live without. Another choice would be to simply NOT purchase the items with inflated prices, or buy less. At some point, change happens. It's the essence of capitalism.

Financially distressed people could forego that trip to Disney or whatever splurge their credit limit can handle. I hate to be that guy, but when I was young and had little money (but enough to cover housing and food), it never occurred to us that our happiness might be raised by spending beyond our means. In fact, we never really felt frightening financial pressure. We just kept working.

I read the other day that the average income in Mississippi was more than the average income in Germany and England. Imagine that! I know averages can be deceiving, since they mask the extremes, but at least one reading of that fact is that Americans are doing quite well. Most of the world certainly thinks so.

Americans don't.

My immediate take on the results of the election is that the country had a little fit... people decided that this was a chance to express their anger and frustration with the way the world has treated them. So, we threw the bastards out. We will throw out the new bastards quite soon, of course... maybe in two years or four, but they are going.

Every pundit can suddenly see that Democrats made x mistakes... and everything is so clear in hindsight. The pollsters will create some elaborate rationalizations for their latest inaccurate predictions (I know, they will say they don't predict... but come on). The devout will rationalize their abandonment of ethics and morality as important in our leaders (though they will also see their churches grow emptier as even most ignorant can only take so much hypocrisy). 

I am glad to see the curtain pulled back, so to speak, so we can all see that it was class all along. All the leaders of Trump's cult have advanced degrees and obscene amounts of money. All the leaders of the Democratic Party enjoy the same. 

I teach college classes as a sort of retirement hobby and one thing I can say for sure: getting a college degree is not beyond most people, if they want it. Many do not, but they still lust for the money and power a degree usually brings. We hate to be talked down to. We all want to be the ones doing the "talking down."

One thing is certain: our economy depends upon a large percentage of the population working semi-crappy jobs, focused mostly on how to pay their next bill. No time to analyze, well, anything.

It's understandable that every few years those people throw a fit using one of the few bits of power they possess: their vote. 

Then they can go back to being manipulated by the rich and educated. 

End of bitter rant.

Down to four days... and down to rock bottom

At this point, the firehose of arguments and craziness and news events and assorted bizarre pronouncements blurted by various geriatrics (I include Biden here for his fumbling remark responding to some unknown comedian insulting an entire island and then Trump refusing to take any responsibility or even acknowledge knowing any details) has reached peak nuttiness.

I just heard a women someone at CBS discovered who claimed to not want to vote for BIDEN but not liking Trump... so she's not going to vote. Well, that seems like her best choice. We don't need morons to mark their ballots. 

Or maybe the poor soul is just frazzled and has lost any semblance of rational thought. Covering our ears and eyes until, say, December might be the most rational choice we could make. 

I am going out on a limb and saying Harris will win, in the end. I have no logical support for that other than preferring to cling to the idea that most of our neighbors are, well, OK. I often quote Seinfeld's famous statement: "People. They're the worst." But the nihilistic appeal of that claim ultimately doesn't quite work for me. 

I'm not sure America is broken but I am quite certain that American politics is broken. We are entering unknown territory, where half of voters will feel aggrieved whatever happens next week and an additional 80 million Americans who could have voted will not do so. Well, that's how many did not vote in 2020 and that election featured record turnout.

That means that we have about a third of Americans of voting age not being able to muster the energy to participate in the looming "most important election of their lifetime." And then a third will vote for Trump and a third for Harris... and a small number of white women in Pennsylvania will determine the Electoral College winner. 

The only consolation I have right now is that Trump will be gone in four years, even if America's broken system permits his appalling return. I happen to think that he is a cult leader and unique. There will be no successor who can captivate the genuflecting masses. 

If I am right that Harris ekes out a win, Trump and minions will wail and protest and sue, well, everyone. But he will eventually run out of gas and retreat to his grotesque palace. He won't disappear but his increasingly bizarre and obscene ravings just won't matter.

I often note that big changes don't come until we hit rock bottom. We are almost there. My hope is that there may be opportunity for a large and complex nation to focus on the future, even as we shake our heads thinking about how a decrepit man has led us down.

Next time I blog, perhaps we will know a bit more about what sort of society we want to be. 

The last national polls have been taken... and we have voted

Kathleen and I continued our tradition of sitting at a literal kitchen table to study our ballots, with the help of the "blue book" -- the state ballot information booklet. 

A few questions on the ballot were truly "kitchen table" issues, as the political cliche goes. But most of the items on the very extensive ballot seemed distant from our daily lives. That doesn't make them unimportant, necessarily, but we agreed that we mostly had not paid much attention to them.

It was very easy to choose the Democrat in the national and state races, but the judicial retention choices, and there were many, pushed us to the "judicial performance evaluations" in the booklet. I know almost nothing about how the evaluation panel works, but it appears it consists of six non-attorneys and five attorneys, appointed by the governor along with senate and house leaders (including from the minority). According to the report, everyone on the ballot is satisfactory. 

I suppose a person could register a general sense of frustration with, well, everything, by choosing NO for each judge, but we went with YES, perhaps reflecting a general sense of things being OK in Colorado and wanting to support an institution that we rarely come into contact with. 

The real test was running through the seven state constitutional amendments and the seven propositions. Each of these citizen or legislative-generated items was described in the blue book, and the booklet is a model of solid professional writing, I have to say. It is texty, but how could it not be? It does pull summaries of "what a yes vote means," and "what a no vote means." There are also clearly written pro and con arguments. 

We favored extending a property tax exemption for disabled veterans, even if their disability was not due to service injuries. Seems like the least we can do. 

We favored repealing somewhat archaic definition of marriage language lingering the in the state constitution and voted "yes" to including an explicit right to abortion in the state law. We did briefly discuss the futility of this should the nut cases take over and impose a national abortion ban despite polls saying that over 70 percent of Americans favor choice.

Speaking of choice, we voted NO on a proposed amendment to include an explicit right to school choice. This is clearly a subtle inroad into adding more money for non-public schools and Colorado already offers all sorts of options regarding school choice. 

Among the propositions, we favored increasing taxes on bullets and guns and increasing state support for local law enforcement. 

After seeing the chaos from urban voters choosing to reintroduce wolves to the state (over the objections of rural voters), we rejected a proposition to add more protections for bobcats and lynx... both of which are already protected by law. We said NO to allowing more non-veterinarians to act like, well, veterinarians. We decided that the lack of clear standards and educational programs for these "para-professionals" meant that this proposal is premature. Plus, we were losing focus at this point.

We voted no on a proposition to establish all-candidate primaries and ranked choice voting for some elections. The mechanics are quite complex and we would become a living experiment. We noted that Alaska is voting this time to retract their own ranked choice law. No one is quite certain how it would work, but the fact is that seven multi-millionaires are funding the campaign for this proposition. 

One thing I know for certain: when the stupidly rich get exercised about a law or regulation, I grab my wallet and begin from the position of "no way." The last thing I would ever want to do is be controversial (ha!) but it is becoming more and more clear that class now dominates our societal dysfunction. Race and gender are powerful, of course, but the more powerful motivators will always be money and power.

I dropped off our sealed ballots on Wednesday night and we both received our ballot trax notifications that our ballots have been counted. Kathleen kept time and we invested 48 minutes, plus all those hours of commercials that we couldn't always avoid, in the process. 

I guess it's acceptable to expect a Coloradan to invest a bit less than an hour as part of being a citizen, plus driving to the drop off box about four miles to the west. 

Later we watched the unmasking of a transvestite on "The Masked Singer," and that show took the same time as completing our ballots. We did not get a chance to vote for our favorite but we were fine with that. We do resent not being able to vote online for our favorite "stars" in Dancing With the Stars. Only those in the Eastern and Central time zones get that privilege because of, well, time zones. 

Results from those TV shows are instantaneous (and unregulated, I assumed). The Nov. 5 election may take days for results to be finalized, and then will come the inevitable legal challenges, no matter who "wins." Americans will whine. Patience is not a virtue these days.

But at least we were asked to weigh in on some important electoral issues.

All is not well among Florida student writers

Humans have an often-useful ability to quickly move on from disaster and pain and disappointment. We are a hopeful species.

But there are some times when our short attention span and indifference to history can keep us from engaging with the effects of those past disasters, pains, and disappointment. We don't want to wallow in that, of course.

This past week I was reminded of a somewhat unfocused theory that the pandemic has had a wide range of negative effects on current high school and college students. Those two years or so of fear and confusion and isolation -- and that includes the entire country -- hit me forcibly as I was reading 102 feature stories from Florida students for a contest.

In short, they were depressingly bad.

They were fine in terms of spelling and grammar. In fact, I could sense plenty of writing skills and a seriousness of purpose. 

What was missing was curiosity, storytelling, focus, sourcing, and any sense of what readers want and need. Well... that's quite a list. I was asked to choose ONE overall winner and each entry received short comments on weaknesses and strengths or suggestions. Each entry could earn up to 50 points within the state association rubric. 

I chose that winner, but not one entry even came close to qualifying for the highest awards, called the All-Florida. I haven't heard back from the organizers of the contest but assume there will be some online conversation about the scores. 

The hurricane and Milton's effects on power and general destruction from the storm likely will delay any reply. I wrote a long email explaining my choices and included my concern that the pandemic has limited student willingness to get away from their screens to observe and talk directly to sources out in "reality." 

I won't get into all the specifics, but instead of what we might call features, which focus on showing people in action and taking readers beyond the basic 5Ws and H facts, I saw internet research, personal commentaries, basic news stories, and, most glaringly, missed opportunities. I typed something like, "Great idea for a coverage topic, but..." dozens of times.

I ended my email to my Florida coordinator by adding that I suspect the pandemic also has affected the teacher advisers. It is hard for me to believe that fully engaged instructors would be OK with most of these contest entries. In fact, they likely would not do well in any classroom. They just didn't have much content and local readers must have found it very easy to skip over these stories.

The common denominator for great student journalism is the adviser and the standards and coaching that are shared with students who are not used to writing for a public.

My theory is that those teachers are so overwhelmed, so damaged, that they are settling for writing that is spelled right and in recognizable English. 

Until the teachers get it back together, what hope is there for young writers? 

On the other hand, it's Florida. Maybe all the time on the front lines of the culture wars has done what we feared: ruined public education in the state. 

Refusing to even play the game

We are now in the midst of Week 5 of the fall semester and certain trends show up about now in my 16-week online courses.

For the Metro students, the original enrollment of 22 is now down to 20. That's normal as students discover that the online world just doesn't work for them or personal scheduling issues are interfering. In fact, it's smart for students to recognize that this might not be the right semester for this particular class, and to cut their losses (and maybe get some tuition money back).

More concerning is that there was an assignment due Tuesday night that simply required taking a stance on one of several sample "advice" essays that I shared in our readings. I asked for 400-500 words and that students paste their short essays into a discussion window through Canvas. One of my goals was to allow students to see what their peers were writing, not to mention seeing any responses from me on each argument.

The assignment is worth 40 points, which makes it fairly substantial in a course with about 1,000 total points. In the end, I mostly awarded all 40 points to each submission as they did solid work for early in the semester.

But here's the distressing thing: Of the 20 remaining students, only 12 completed the assignment. I am not sure I have ever had 40 percent of a class opt for a zero on any assignment. I emailed each of the missing individually and heard back from a couple with vague excuses about being "super busy" and "having a mental health issue," as two examples. 

I replied with encouragement and urging everyone to submit their work late, exchanging a few penalty points for the zero. It's Friday now and none of the 8 have completed the missing essay.

So, at this point, it appears that 60 percent of those Metro students are "in" for the course and the remainder are not so sure. 

Last week I read an email from CSU's instructional coaching mentor (it goes to everyone each week) which argued that the pandemic's effects are lingering and that instructors may need to make adjustments in everything from expectations to assigned workload to outside-of-class readings. Many current college freshmen and sophomores (the most likely level to be taking my basic writing class) must have been in 9th or 10th grade four years ago, at the height of the Covid nightmare, so I get the point.

They were damaged by the year or two where most education happened online and where secondary teachers were likely in as much despair as their students. "Standards" were lowered or eliminated. Students must have felt abandoned and without the support from adults they were used to.

Now I am working with students online, where I might as well be an AI program for all the personal interactions we are having. I share some quick videos from time to time, mostly to prove that I am a living being and I insert personalize (and sometimes quirky) responses on discussion posts and essay assignments. I respond to emails with speed. 

But it is clearly not enough for a good portion of these college students who missed a whole lot of preparation for the rigors and expectations of higher education. Even the threat of failure may not be enough to motivate them.

On the other hand, at least a handful of students in the class are doing excellent work, full of personality and insight. They went through the same pandemic. Very different academic lives now.

Two Americas, indeed.

They're eating the dogs... they're eating the cats...

Another week and another dramatic twist in the 2024 election narrative, and I am amazed that all the political pundits have the gall to show their faces/drop yet another commentary into the mix. Did anyone really see Kamala utterly destroying Trump on Tuesday, with the humiliation rivaling what Biden experienced in June? 

Mainstream journalists don't really know what to do with Trump and his endless and outrageous stream of consciousness, and appear to have forgotten how to cover candidates like Harris and Walz who seem "normal," at least in our turbulent century. What they do understand is "keeping score," and they use whatever the latest poll may be to anchor, well, everything.

Of course, they don't really understand public opinion polling, so there is little available that could help a reader in Highlands Ranch make sense of all the competing numbers. I laughed at Trump pontificating about 93-2 and 72-27 with not a shred of context and without a murmur of dissent from reporters simply hoping for a soundbite. But I also admit that any poll results from last week already seem questionable. I know Americans hate each other, but the only evidence I have for that comes from social media and TV.

David Brooks has established himself as the "voice of reason" for the New York Times, staking out positions based on a combination of traveling the country listening to people and his own brand of personal ethics. If I could sum him up, it might be that he prefers to give people the benefit of the doubt, and that is decidedly not what makes for good TV or for more clicks.

His latest column suggests that American culture goes through regular phases and that the culture has become exhausted (bored?) with the drumbeat of "our country is failing... millions are invading... they're eating dogs" rhetoric. He thinks Kamala is riding on a new feeling in the zeitgeist, with Americans wanting something more hopeful and at least cautiously optimistic. Most people prefer joy to agony and unfocused fear. Kamala and her team have chosen to highlight the joy. Trump and his minions are doubling down on the hate. 

What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work in the present or future. What wins one election may have little to do with the next. Biden won because he convinced just enough voters that he would make life seem a bit more normal after years of chaos. History will likely show that he did preside over more normalcy for most Americans, though there is always a lag between perception and reality. I see that gas prices are down nearly 15 percent nationally but all the media shares is that eggs are up 50 cents. Bad news sells, of course, but there must be a point where most people simply look at their bank statements and note that they are doing OK.

I also recognize that some people are so entrenched in their ideological positions that they will vote for whomever has a D or R after their name. The character or leadership or intelligence of the candidate are not important enough to force a different choice. 

Yesterday, Trump blurted in Arizona that Kamala Harris is a "Marxist, Communist, Fascist, Socialist." He literally pulled four terms that he clearly doesn't understand and linked them all together, disregarding any sense of logic or just common sense... and hoping that at least one of those pejoratives will bring cheers from the cult. I assume he got what he wanted. He is doubling down on the hateful rhetoric about Haitians who came to Ohio (Ohio?) to work and avoid endless strife in their own nation.

Now they are getting death threats and bomb threats and AI-generated videos showing them "herding geese" for tonight's dinner. 

There are millions of Americans who are right now discussing the existential threat posed by Haitian immigrants. They are afraid. They have lost the ability to fairly evaluate outlandish claims. They will vote for Trump.

That may be frightening, but let's get back to the latest polls.

It turns out that we are terrible at predictions

One of the relatively few benefits gained by being 74 is that living over seven decades helps smooth out the hills and valleys of history. So many events and tragedies and victories and disappointments and promises that seemed so momentous at the time now seem much less dramatic and overwhelming.

Hindsight really is 20-20, but hindsight also provides real answers to the questions about "what's going to happen?" It is quite natural to imagine the very worst possibilities in the moment -- some would claim that the tendency to prepare for the worst is what has helped the human species survive. On the other hand, dogs don't imagine much about the future and the species seems to be doing OK...

As our memory of history stretches out, we also have a chance to see just how wrong our "in the moment" predictions" turned out to be. 

An example of time "smoothing" history might be the Vietnam War. For me, it eventually led to being drafted and then enlisting in the Air Force and risking being sent to southeast Asia. I was sent to England instead, and that bit of luck led to a marriage now approaching 53 years and our first daughter... and then so much more. Fewer and fewer Americans are now living who remember the events of the 1960s and 1970s very clearly, and that includes those of us who lived through them. Most of my memories of the Air Force are vague or fleeting, despite those years being stressful and formative (I guess). Maybe I just assume those three years were formative since I can't draw any direct lines between what happened then and who I am now. 

I was thinking the other day that my grandchildren couldn't even imagine being separated from family and childhood friends for two years, as Kathleen and I were from 1971-73 while we lived near RAF Lakenheath in the days before easy phone access and the internet. Considered as a fraction of a lifespan, two years really is not all that long. At 74, those two years amount to about 3 percent of my life at this point. And that percentage keeps getting smaller.

An example of a prediction that turned out much worse that I imagined was the advent of the internet, which I went on record as predicting would be the end of censorship. My reasoning was based on the old saying that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press." Therefore, when all of us could publish online, without needing to work for a newspaper's ownership, freedom would reign and we would enter a golden era of communication. 

Then came social media and endless online platforms that can publish everything from valuable insights on the human condition to sheer garbage. The U.S. Justice Department this week charged a number of Russians with adding very effective lies and distortions to the news feeds of millions of people who are simply not equipped with the means of separating fact from fiction.

Many people don't even try, of course, and actually welcome the fantasy world of conspiracies and breathless rumors based on slivers of truth. After all, it's fun... not to mention many people clearly are living lives of quiet desperation and find reality more disturbing than any wacko conspiracy.

How else to explain most of the Trump cult?

Related to my inaccurate prediction of an internet golden era would be the affordability and accessibility of smart phones. I recall many educators proclaiming that schools could stop wasting space on computer labs and that we could leverage the reality that all human knowledge could be accessed from a device students carry in their pockets and purses and backpacks. 

Social media basically took off in 2007, which already seems forever ago, and most people are in agreement that young people, in particular, have been seriously harmed by smartphones and their access to platforms that focus on creating addictions. I would argue that all age groups have been affected, but young people are more depressed, more pessimistic, more isolated, more unhappy. Even Gen Xers will proudly remember their youth as not being overwhelmed by devices and social media (though they are certainly addicted now). 

The biggest trend in education right now is taking phones out of the hands of students, at least during school hours. Every educator who has experienced the relief of devices being removed from the classroom and hallways and lunchrooms reports more engaged kids, fewer disruptions, and more laughter and smiles around the school. 

Deep thinkers are asking, "How could we have ever allowed those phones to invade our schools?" Here's how: we made uninformed predictions.

Two freshmen and two math teachers were slaughtered this week at a Georgia high school by a freshman boy given an AR-15 by his father. Both will be going to jail, if there is any justice. The Republican candidate for vice president said that school shooting are just "a fact of life." 

Really? Aren't smart phones just a fact of life? But we are finding ways to put at least a few limits on their use. We aren't taking away the phones. Just regulating them, and just for a few hours each day.

Perhaps we can start to see ways to not just settle for "facts of life."