Foster Dickson's Blog, page 45
April 25, 2019
#throwbackthursday: The Columbine Shootings, April 1999
It was twenty years ago this week that America, its schools in particular, were changed forever by the actions of two high school students named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who carried out a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999. It was reported later that week that the disgruntled, heavily armed boys had set out to commit the violence on Adolph Hitler’s birthday. As a Gen-Xer, who was in my mid-twenties in 1999, I regard the Columbine shootings as a demarcation point for my generation. The youngest of us were born in 1980 and would have graduated from high school in 1998, the school year before this event occurred. Though school shootings did occur before this, during our time too, none was like this, and no school administrator in America could ignore the new reality that a shooting could happen anywhere on any day.
April 24, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Adia Victoria @ Saturn Birmingham”
I’ve got this friend who knows how much I like The New Yorker, but who is also aware that I don’t subscribe because I can’t seem to keep up with weekly magazines, so he passes on a stack to me after he’s piled up a few. When I get them, I thumb through each issue’s table of contents and fold them open to the articles I intend to read, relegating the others to the general-use stack in my classroom.
One morning, a few weeks ago, I grabbed one of those folded-back New Yorkers and hurried to the school bus stop for my monthly duty. I was flipping the pages and had just finished reading “Liberal-in-Chief,” Adam Gopnik’s piece about President Obama, when this woman’s stunningly solemn face appeared. Her glare was framed by a jet-black mod hairdo, and she was surrounded by tall wildflowers. This was Adia Victoria, the text below it explained.
April 23, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing and Noblesse Oblige
[image error]Among the array of colorful posters and artworks in my office are two that I intentionally placed on the wall right above my desk. One is a cardboard Amos Kennedy print with a royal blue background that declares in big block letters: PROCEED AND BE BOLD! Below is the name of Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, who was the founder of Auburn University’s Rural Studio. The other is a screen-printed piece from Standard Deluxe that features two little girls running with an Alabama flag and also a coiled snake accompanied by the words DON’T TREAD ON ME amid the jumble of colorful layers. Living and working in the Deep South, as a writer and teacher intent on seeing things get better, both sentiments seem necessary.
The latter, which comes from the Gadsden flag during the Revolutionary War, is today most often associated with far-right conservatives and gun-rights advocates, though to me it’s more about the generally American, albeit distinctly Southern belief in the greatest degree of freedom possible. This admonition has an ironic presence within Southern culture, considering the region’s historic habit of treading on all sorts of people: African Americans, the poor, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and LGBTQ people. Interestingly, the self-same culture that has many times wagged a finger of warning at the federal government and the rest of the nation about states‘ rights also spawned and fueled one of the world’s greatest movements for human rights.
The former, which lacks that historical baggage, is no less poignant— also only four words, it provides an insistent urging that is something like Winston Churchill‘s “never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never.” Mockbee was a Macarthur Foundation “Genius Grant”recipient whose mission to design and build better and more affordable housing for the rural poor led him to Hale County, Alabama, a place whose poverty and isolation were chronicled in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (and can more recently be surveyed in the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening). The phrase was also the title of a documentary about letterpress printer Amos Kennedy, whose spirit, I can attest from personal experience, is nothing if not bold.
To face what the Deep South has become requires anyone with an eye toward improvement to consider these notions: Don’t tread on me, and proceed and be bold. I can remember realizing, even as a teenager and young man in Alabama in the 1980s and ’90s, that our societal trajectory was a troublesome one. Coming to political and social awareness during the era of party-switching and crossover voting, at the time of Billy Jack Gaither’s murder and Revonda Bowen’s prom, and when the Christian Coalition set a precedent for defeating the state’s only hope for new revenue . . . I witnessed the post-movement evolution into our 21st-century culture, in which new groups are raising their voices to say, Don’t tread on me.
Yet, to proceed and be bold doesn’t mean to fight. I dislike the word fight as a political term. In election years, I see campaign ads in which candidates proclaim, “I’ll fight the Washington establishment,” and “I’ll fight for you.” I don’t want for us to fight anymore, and I don’t want to vote for people who regard politics as a fight. I would rather live in a culture where we differentiate the best and worst parts of our culture, where we listen and learn from good ideas, where we respect each other, compromise, and cooperate. I want for the people of the Deep South to look willingly at our long historical penchant for antagonism and choose now to proceed boldly into a better way, one seriously lacking in meanness and suspicion and refusal.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
April 22, 2019
April 18, 2019
#throwbackthursday: Go to Church . . .
Since it’s Holy Thursday (and Easter is this Sunday), it seems like a good time to remind everyone of the message on this infamous sign facing the northbound lanes of I-65 between Montgomery and Birmingham. I have no idea how long this sign has been there — for decades at least, since I can remember as far back as high school — though it has been blown (or knocked) over at least once. Today, a newer version stands in its place . . . but it still the same blunt message.
April 17, 2019
Going to the National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy!
I’m proud to share that I was accepted to participate in the National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy this summer as part of a “teacher team” with Gina Aaij from LAMP High School. Mrs. Aaij is the activities coordinator for her school, and I’m the school garden guy at mine, and we will be traveling to Missoula, Montana in June for the academy. About the program, the website explains:
The Rob and Melani Walton National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy is an intensive, five-day professional development workshop for K-12 teachers held every summer. Teachers of any subject and grade should apply with a partner from their school or district. These teacher teams receive a thorough introduction to sustainability science through hands-on activities and lectures by experts in the field. Engaging field trips highlight sustainability in action at local business and other organizations. Through ample networking opportunities, teachers become part of a dedicated community of sustainability activists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other educators.
The goal of the trip, of course, will be to bring back ideas for achieving greater sustainability in our schools, ones that could hopefully be implemented on a larger scale as well.
April 16, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
When the Hollywood agent OJ Berman first meets Paul Varjack at Holly Golightly’s wild party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, OJ asks the handsome young writer, “Is she or isn’t she?” Paul doesn’t know what he’s talking about at first, and Berman has to clarify: is Holly a phony? They then talk as men will, trying to discern the true nature of this charming woman who has endeared herself to them both. Yes, she is, Berman informs Paul, but she’s not just any old phony— she’s a real phony, a cunning chameleon who moves on once she has what she wants.
[image error]We’ve all known real phonies in our lives, and their airs can be enticing . . . for a while, and as long as we remember what they are. Their siren songs can be beautiful and alluring, but as our hero knew in the Odyssey, we must strap ourselves to the mast so we don’t follow their music to grave consequences. The temptations of the real phony litter classic literature because they’re as old as human history – the Tartuffes and Falstaffs – and Holly Golightly herself even articulates one of the dangers to poor old Doc as he boards the bus to return alone to Tulip, Texas: falling in love with a wild thing will not end well.
Alabama is well-known for its wild things, the eccentrics and characters – the author of the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s Truman Capote was one of them – but unfortunately, we also have our real phonies. Sometimes we see them coming, tipped off by their strange packaging, but other times their finery fools us . . . and we trust them, enable them, and even vote for them. Unlike Holly Golightly, whose elegant speech and grace of manners tease the rats and super-rats into giving her $50 for the powder room, ours grease the bearings with aw-shucks populism and promises to keep the political boogeymen at bay.
Meanwhile, the real problems persist, in part because the siren song says that the real problems are things like the Common Core standards and people who oppose plastic bags. We need to strap ourselves to the mast. Or, if we don’t, we’ll find ourselves once again like one of Holly’s suitors: duped, confused, and pleading through the door, while our prize escapes out the window once again.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
April 15, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “That’s news to me.”
On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the Wall Street Journal ran a chilling story about the young people of our nation. It wasn’t about drug use, unplanned pregnancies, binge drinking, casual sex, or dropout rates. Far more frighteningly, the report relayed the findings of a Stanford University study about the current generation’s inability to distinguish real news from paid advertisements. Put simply, they don’t know corporate bullshit when they’re looking right at it.
April 14, 2019
Deep Southern Gardening Mystery #10
This bush is in a yard in residential neighborhood, built in the 1960s and 1970s, that I pass on the way to pick up my son each afternoon. As winter moved out and spring came, its blooms flourished and are almost like very large versions of the puffy balls that come from cottonwood trees. By now, the blooms are falling away. Does anyone have any idea what this is?
