Midlife Meditation

Not nearly as scary as Trump wants you to think. It's been yet another time-dilated week, a week crammed with presidential verbal bullying, dehumanizing policy proposals, racist fear-mongering, and on top of all that, pipe bombs sent to prominent critics of the Trump regime, an arrest revealing the bomber to be a rabid Trump believer, and finally a synagogue massacre. That last atrocity was committed by a right-winger who believes Trump colludes with the Jews he mowed down with an assault rifle, but it's still of a piece with every other horror that has issued from the putrid mouth and thumbs of our monstrous accidental president. In an effort to escape the horror of the news cycle, Amy and I took advantage of a break in the weather to walk through a new development near our home. The neighborhood was still going up, and we passed several houses under construction. The carpenters' work was lent an air of festivity by the music they had playing: mariachi-style Mex...

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."--Mitch McConnell, October, 2010 If you've read my posts about teaching in the Reynolds School District, you've probably come across the term "high flyer." That's teacher talk for a student who is an exceptional child in ways that no parent wants his or child to be exceptional. The child may very well be bright, even gifted academically, and may not have any of the disabilities one normally associates with being on an Individualized Education Plan, but still is on the radar of every administrator and behavioral specialist of the school for one reason alone: he or she makes it hard for the rest of the class to learn. High flyers are obstructionists. They interrupt the teacher without being called on, talk with neighbors while the teacher is lecturing, distract everyone around them. When they do raise their hands, it is to ask to use the bathroom, g...

Thanks, voters. Now we get to look at this guy's face even more. Old people suck. I am, at this point, talking about my own generation, as well as the one that came before. Last night’s election was dominated by two generational cohorts: 45-60, 60 and up. Demographically, these are the older voters, the ones who dominate midterm elections, and who are far more likely than the younger cohorts to vote Republican. These are the people who just displaced Democrats from Senate leadership. They also increased the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, returned Scott Brown to the governorship of Wisconsin, and overall made it a wonderful night for Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and anyone else proudly displaying an elephant logo on his or her lapel. All this despite Congress having the lowest approval rating in many generations, in huge part because of Republican obstructionism, and an economy in better shape than it has been in decades, in large part b...