Nicole Walker's Blog, page 3
March 2, 2016
Metaphors. Letter #75
There are good things and bad things about metaphor. I try to distinguish between metaphors that collapse two things into one and metaphors that highlight the connection between two things while simultaneously highlighting their differences. The second kind, in Charles Altieri’s lingo, expands the available universe. A bigger universe, abundant and interconnected, an ecosystem brought to you by literary devices. A collapsed universe metaphor might be something like A Dog is a Bear. We did name our dog “Bear” and he does look like a tiny bear cub. Black and fluffy and squishy. But he also looks like a pig and a hedgehog and swims like a fish on the snow. To say he is a bear is to ignore his other animal-partners. He’s rolling on the ground right now with the dog we named Zora because Zorro in Spanish means fox and this one looks like a girl fox but she also looks like a coyote and a wolf. She acts like a mama to Bear the Dog. She acts like a sister. Like a brother. To describe either of them well, you have to keep turning the circle of metaphors. Bear is a big baby but he’s also a ferocious forest beast. It’s for our own safety that I make these metaphors multiple. I use a lot of metaphors to try to describe the effects of the budget cuts on Higher Ed. I think I’ve used the word “eviscerate” before, which, now that I watched the latest Walking Dead, has a whole new meaning for me as one of the zombies was walking around with his intestines hanging out like spaghetti pouring from his stomach. But it’s a semi-apt metaphor. We at the university are still walking around, at least some of us who haven’t been let go, but kind of in a daze. We’re hungry too. A little desperate, although I don’t think of spaghetti as appetizingly as I did before. Perhaps “cut off at the knees” is a good metaphor. Again, we are still mobile but people (other universities) run past us, taunting our scabby, stubby knees with their research grants and fully funded graduate students. It’s a little slower to get things done, but you’re right, what does not kill us makes us stronger. Or at least covered in scar tissue. I’ve also tried to describe to you the idea of collectivity—that the more educated every single student is, the more educated Arizona as a whole could be. We lift each other up by devoting time, energy and money to every single child in the public school system and, if we can, in the Higher Ed system. I think of it like a web of interconnectedness. Even if there is selfishness to it: I am better off if every single person has an opportunity to have a better education and a better job and a more secure economic situation. I imagine this web, not really like a spider’s, more like the mycelia on the forest floor, connecting tree root to mushroom—cloth-strong and pervasive. I imagine lifting it up, out of the forest, onto the quad where everyone can step on it and recite from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “I contain multitudes” and each of us is elevated above their concrete-bound situation and is able to aspire to new heights. Inspiration, aspiration. These dreams of education. Lofty dreams indeed but like any metaphor, you can poke holes in this analogy. You could argue that higher isn’t better or that not everyone wants to abandon the concrete. You could argue that the top is only for some. Only they at the top get to decide who rises and who stays put. We are committed to a system of hierarchies. How would we understand a world where even they who walk on their knees, who walk zombie-like, who come from families with no mycelia at all, who come from other countries where all the trees have already been obliterated, where no mushrooms grow at all, are all walking at the same speed that they who born running through the forest already run? Oh. That is what I thought they called the United States of America. That forest of equal opportunity. That mycelia that makes a blanket upon which each of us can stand and rise up together. That’s what I love about metaphors. Metaphors are multiple. If you keep them spinning, you end up with a pretty good picture of a dog, or a country.
March 1, 2016
Scarcity. Letter #74
Dear Governor Ducey,
In a study about squirrels eating and caching habits, Mikel Delgado published an article in the Open Access forum PLOS. This article, “Fox Squirrels Match Food Assessment and Cache Effort to Value and Scarcity” sought to discover how squirrels make the decision rather to cache or eat food. The study asked, do squirrels make decisions based on scarcity and abundance? Do squirrels evaluate whether certain foods should be cached depending on the likely abundance of nuts. Can squirrels predict the ephemeral nature of the seasons? When food is scarce, do the squirrels invest more time in caching their food? Apparently they do. In the summer, when the trees produce fewer nuts, squirrels are much more sensitive to the food value (peanuts provide more nutrition than hazelnuts). They are more aware and observant of other squirrels around them, making sure other squirrels don’t see where they hide their nuts. Paranoid and stingy, the squirrels become. In the fall, when the seeds are more abundant, squirrels eat more freely. They don’t keep checking over their shoulders to see if someone is eyeing their cache.
Universities are supposed to be collaborative places. Researchers are meant to bring their work into the classroom where they share their students what they do. They’re supposed to perform their research so then the students can imitate them. They’re supposed to be this place of a free exchange of ideas between surprising groups of people, places where scientists see art that inspires them and writers discover squirrel research and write about it. It’s supposed to be this place filled with music that inspires music theorists and musicians theorizing about resonance that inspires physicists to study resonance. Since the budget cuts last year, scarcity is the prevailing mood. Everyone is keeping their heads down, doing their work. We are teaching and researching but when you’re not sure what’s going to come next, if you’re colleagues will still have jobs, if there will be more centralization, if there will be more “do more with less,” you teach your heart out and write your own research to make sure that at least maybe you will survive this scarce season. I remember when I first moved here. Before the 2008 crash. Before the 2015 decimation of Higher Ed budgets. Then, I began to work with Colorado Plateau researchers, forestry scholars, mushroom scientists. I co-taught a printmaking class. It’s been harder lately to collaborate. It’s expensive to have two professors from different disciplines teach one class. It’s hard to make it to lectures across campus when most of your time, you need to find ways to fund your graduate students and fund your program or have emergency meetings about how the latest budget cuts will affect your plans. The past two days, I have been reminded of the season of abundance. The graduate students hosted the Peak Conference—The English Department’s annual conference for NAU students and other graduate students across the country. One of the panels I chaired had two students from our graduate program but also a grad student from San Jose and one of our undergrads. Bringing together people from different places and different cohorts reminded me of the times of the university where ideas to scaffold the next big thing began. A professor from NAU whose work on the resilience of the Glen Canyon after Lake Powell’s water receded could lead to a new chapter in a book I’m working on called Resistance and Resilience. It could lead to a new movement to let Glen Canyon recover. It could lead to scientists being allowed into this National Recreation area to study the idea of resistance and resilience. Later, Ana Teresa Fernandez, an artist from San Francisco, brought images of the border wall in Tijuana she painted to match the ocean and the sky. A section of the wall disappeared. She inspired some of us to paint. She inspired some of us to think about what it means to erase borders which is supposedly what the university is meant to do: erase the walls of thinking in our minds. As one of my colleagues said about Fernandez’s paintings: it’s one thing to talk about erasing borders. It’s another to physically see them erased. This conference reminded me of what the university is supposed: an abundance of ideas and ideals of the students and the professors. What I would give for that feeling of abundance to prevail.
In a study about squirrels eating and caching habits, Mikel Delgado published an article in the Open Access forum PLOS. This article, “Fox Squirrels Match Food Assessment and Cache Effort to Value and Scarcity” sought to discover how squirrels make the decision rather to cache or eat food. The study asked, do squirrels make decisions based on scarcity and abundance? Do squirrels evaluate whether certain foods should be cached depending on the likely abundance of nuts. Can squirrels predict the ephemeral nature of the seasons? When food is scarce, do the squirrels invest more time in caching their food? Apparently they do. In the summer, when the trees produce fewer nuts, squirrels are much more sensitive to the food value (peanuts provide more nutrition than hazelnuts). They are more aware and observant of other squirrels around them, making sure other squirrels don’t see where they hide their nuts. Paranoid and stingy, the squirrels become. In the fall, when the seeds are more abundant, squirrels eat more freely. They don’t keep checking over their shoulders to see if someone is eyeing their cache.
Universities are supposed to be collaborative places. Researchers are meant to bring their work into the classroom where they share their students what they do. They’re supposed to perform their research so then the students can imitate them. They’re supposed to be this place of a free exchange of ideas between surprising groups of people, places where scientists see art that inspires them and writers discover squirrel research and write about it. It’s supposed to be this place filled with music that inspires music theorists and musicians theorizing about resonance that inspires physicists to study resonance. Since the budget cuts last year, scarcity is the prevailing mood. Everyone is keeping their heads down, doing their work. We are teaching and researching but when you’re not sure what’s going to come next, if you’re colleagues will still have jobs, if there will be more centralization, if there will be more “do more with less,” you teach your heart out and write your own research to make sure that at least maybe you will survive this scarce season. I remember when I first moved here. Before the 2008 crash. Before the 2015 decimation of Higher Ed budgets. Then, I began to work with Colorado Plateau researchers, forestry scholars, mushroom scientists. I co-taught a printmaking class. It’s been harder lately to collaborate. It’s expensive to have two professors from different disciplines teach one class. It’s hard to make it to lectures across campus when most of your time, you need to find ways to fund your graduate students and fund your program or have emergency meetings about how the latest budget cuts will affect your plans. The past two days, I have been reminded of the season of abundance. The graduate students hosted the Peak Conference—The English Department’s annual conference for NAU students and other graduate students across the country. One of the panels I chaired had two students from our graduate program but also a grad student from San Jose and one of our undergrads. Bringing together people from different places and different cohorts reminded me of the times of the university where ideas to scaffold the next big thing began. A professor from NAU whose work on the resilience of the Glen Canyon after Lake Powell’s water receded could lead to a new chapter in a book I’m working on called Resistance and Resilience. It could lead to a new movement to let Glen Canyon recover. It could lead to scientists being allowed into this National Recreation area to study the idea of resistance and resilience. Later, Ana Teresa Fernandez, an artist from San Francisco, brought images of the border wall in Tijuana she painted to match the ocean and the sky. A section of the wall disappeared. She inspired some of us to paint. She inspired some of us to think about what it means to erase borders which is supposedly what the university is meant to do: erase the walls of thinking in our minds. As one of my colleagues said about Fernandez’s paintings: it’s one thing to talk about erasing borders. It’s another to physically see them erased. This conference reminded me of what the university is supposed: an abundance of ideas and ideals of the students and the professors. What I would give for that feeling of abundance to prevail.
February 29, 2016
Leaving. Letter #73
Leaving
I found out a couple of days ago that Barbara Hickman, Superintendent of Flagstaff School District, is leaving her position to take another job in Colorado. She’s been here since 2007. She weathered the global recession in 2008, the uptick of charter schools, the downturn in enrollment, the passage of bills to raise taxes to compensate locally for funds from which the state had divested. I don’t know much about her but she seems pretty dynamic, being able to manage such vicissitudes. I suppose that is one thing we, who serve at the pleasure of the state, should understand: Sometimes, you’re the tail. Sometimes, you are also the tail. Most of the time, it is you who is getting wagged. You don’t do much wagging. It would be nice to be the one who wags but teaching for the state has perks: it’s a relatively secure job, you have time during the summer to devote to research and reworking your curriculum, and you have some kind of autonomy in the classroom. Sometimes, you’re not the dog of the budget but you’re the dog of your days. Or, at least some part of your days, when the kids and the paperwork and the testing and the evals don’t get you down. Still, teaching in this state is its own beast. Bills are on the table to provide vouchers to kids who go to private school, further decimating the block of funding districts receive. The pot of funding public schools continues to get smaller and smaller. Through voucher systems, class size actually increases because if you take ten kids out of a school, you can afford to pay for one fewer teacher. The remaining teacher’s class size is that much bigger. I wonder how long Superintendent Hickman has been trying to go. Maybe not long but possibly since the beginning. It’s possibly to want to get the hell out of your job and still do a good one. Who could blame her for hightailing it to a state that, though not perfect, doesn’t pretend that the recession of 2008 is ongoing and doesn’t claim businesses will flock here because we keep the taxes so low? Businesses really don’t want to move their families or hire from a population whose state per-pupil spending is 49th in the nation. I understand that it might be politically smart to keep people under-educated so they keep voting for you, but business leaders tend to want people who can think critically and who, you know, know stuff. Sometimes I worry that my favorite teachers will leave because they haven’t had raises in over 9 years, because the threat of budget reductions looms every year even though the state has a surplus and a rainy day fund, because their class size gets bigger, but, more fundamentally, because they work for a dog who hates this very tail. One of my favorite teachers takes workshops in the summer, attends conferences, learns new math-teaching techniques on her own time. She runs an in-class newspaper, elections to teach the kids how government works and how fractions work and how to think critically about books the kids read. She makes the kids dig deep into understanding how a book is composed by asking kids to write their own books. She makes the kids think math is a choose your own adventure story: you can do it this way. You can do it that way. There are four ways to figure out how to add fractions. I will show you each of them. What if she left? What will the dog wag now? I have colleagues at NAU who are, according to my students, some of the best teacher they’ve ever had. They serve on committees. They organize internships. They publish articles and books. They contribute some of the most cutting edge scholarship in the country. What if they left? Who would be the best teachers then? What’s the point of a dog without a tail? I love it here and I love my job. I would have a hard time leaving. I love my colleagues, the friends I’ve made here, the Flagstaff. I love the work do but I understand why Superintendent Hickman will leave. It’s hard to stay in a place where you have to fight for everything and where, no matter how hard you fight, no one listens because you’re just a tail. Unless, of course, the people who believe in the good work of the tail rise up and get together and find a way to wag that dog.
I found out a couple of days ago that Barbara Hickman, Superintendent of Flagstaff School District, is leaving her position to take another job in Colorado. She’s been here since 2007. She weathered the global recession in 2008, the uptick of charter schools, the downturn in enrollment, the passage of bills to raise taxes to compensate locally for funds from which the state had divested. I don’t know much about her but she seems pretty dynamic, being able to manage such vicissitudes. I suppose that is one thing we, who serve at the pleasure of the state, should understand: Sometimes, you’re the tail. Sometimes, you are also the tail. Most of the time, it is you who is getting wagged. You don’t do much wagging. It would be nice to be the one who wags but teaching for the state has perks: it’s a relatively secure job, you have time during the summer to devote to research and reworking your curriculum, and you have some kind of autonomy in the classroom. Sometimes, you’re not the dog of the budget but you’re the dog of your days. Or, at least some part of your days, when the kids and the paperwork and the testing and the evals don’t get you down. Still, teaching in this state is its own beast. Bills are on the table to provide vouchers to kids who go to private school, further decimating the block of funding districts receive. The pot of funding public schools continues to get smaller and smaller. Through voucher systems, class size actually increases because if you take ten kids out of a school, you can afford to pay for one fewer teacher. The remaining teacher’s class size is that much bigger. I wonder how long Superintendent Hickman has been trying to go. Maybe not long but possibly since the beginning. It’s possibly to want to get the hell out of your job and still do a good one. Who could blame her for hightailing it to a state that, though not perfect, doesn’t pretend that the recession of 2008 is ongoing and doesn’t claim businesses will flock here because we keep the taxes so low? Businesses really don’t want to move their families or hire from a population whose state per-pupil spending is 49th in the nation. I understand that it might be politically smart to keep people under-educated so they keep voting for you, but business leaders tend to want people who can think critically and who, you know, know stuff. Sometimes I worry that my favorite teachers will leave because they haven’t had raises in over 9 years, because the threat of budget reductions looms every year even though the state has a surplus and a rainy day fund, because their class size gets bigger, but, more fundamentally, because they work for a dog who hates this very tail. One of my favorite teachers takes workshops in the summer, attends conferences, learns new math-teaching techniques on her own time. She runs an in-class newspaper, elections to teach the kids how government works and how fractions work and how to think critically about books the kids read. She makes the kids dig deep into understanding how a book is composed by asking kids to write their own books. She makes the kids think math is a choose your own adventure story: you can do it this way. You can do it that way. There are four ways to figure out how to add fractions. I will show you each of them. What if she left? What will the dog wag now? I have colleagues at NAU who are, according to my students, some of the best teacher they’ve ever had. They serve on committees. They organize internships. They publish articles and books. They contribute some of the most cutting edge scholarship in the country. What if they left? Who would be the best teachers then? What’s the point of a dog without a tail? I love it here and I love my job. I would have a hard time leaving. I love my colleagues, the friends I’ve made here, the Flagstaff. I love the work do but I understand why Superintendent Hickman will leave. It’s hard to stay in a place where you have to fight for everything and where, no matter how hard you fight, no one listens because you’re just a tail. Unless, of course, the people who believe in the good work of the tail rise up and get together and find a way to wag that dog.
February 28, 2016
Compassion. Letter #72
Dear Governor Ducey, I was listening to NPR after the New Hampshire primary. The hosts were discussing Kasich, who they said is the last of the “compassionate conservatives like George W. Bush” and I was like, if George W. Bush aka millions in Iraq killed over false reports of weapons of mass destruction then we are in a more Orwellian double-speak bind than I thought. Still, when I see pictures of your face, you seem like a nice guy. I look at Wisconsin’s governor, whose face is full of spite, and think, well, at least Governor Ducey smiles. But, it’s possible you’re just smiling because of the big checks the Koch Brothers deposit in your bank account. I wouldn’t write these letters, though, if I didn’t sense a compassionate streak. Nor would I write them if I didn’t believe in meeting compassion with compassion. My new friend John reminded me the other day that compassion and empathy is really the only way we’re going to make any changes. John said he saw you at Martanne’s the other day, here in Flagstaff. He and his wife sat right next to you. John told his wife, I’m going to talk to him, which made his wife walk as far away from John as possible in small Martanne’s, understandably. Even though I write to you weekly, I think I’d get tongue tied to meet you in person. The gap between us is canyonesque. I feel like opening my mouth would release a torrent of insults and apologies and stammerings that would be considered only “compassionate” when the nurses at the psych ward process my admission papers. But John, possibly because he began with compassion, did not stammer or make strange bird noises at you. He said, “Governor, it’s nice to meet you. I’ve been reading about proposition 132 and I hope it does what you say it will do to bring funding back to Arizona. You know, I grew up in Louisiana where we would say we were always glad to have Mississippi next door—Louisiana always scored near the bottom of near everything but Mississippi scored lower. We could always point to Mississippi as the real bottom. Now, I’m raising three boys here in Arizona where we are the new almost-bottom. I didn’t think I’d be pointing at Mississippi from here to say, ‘they’re worse.’ So I really do hope that this new bill helps to bring the state’s education funding up but I have to tell you, even with that hope, you see my wife over there, paying the bill, not looking at us? She has worked for the public school system for 9 years. And over those 9 years she’s had a $1000 raise. $1000 over 9 years.” John says that the governor’s wife, over her plate of chiliquiles, puts her hand to her heart in sympathy. The governor shakes his head. It seems like there is compassion here. That these people understand that a $1000 raise over 9 years is $110/ raise a year. They understand how little money that is to raise a family on. They seemed to get that teachers are the ones building Arizona’s future. John meets compassion with compassion. He doesn’t harp on the governor. Ducey’s kids are with him. John doesn’t want to embarrass the governor or the governor’s wife. John sympathizes with his fellow human, feels a little sorry that he must encounter an unhappy populace wherever he goes. John empathizes with what must be the governor’s family’s disappointment: because people love to come up from Phoenix to marvel at the concept of cold and snow, he says. “Sorry there is no snow.” To which the governor replies, “No worries. We love Flagstaff, snow or not.” I wish I could have said, if I had been there, if I had been as brave, not being as smart and measured as John. I might have added, “I hope you love Flagstaff’s students too.” John jokes that he’s afraid the secret service had a bead on him the whole time. I told John that at Rita Cheng’s installation ceremony as president of NAU, Ducey was swarmed by secret service. “I didn’t have a single secret service agent assigned to protect me,” I joke.
We laugh at the idea. People in Flagstaff don’t get, or need, secret service agents. We have snow and compassion to protect us.
We laugh at the idea. People in Flagstaff don’t get, or need, secret service agents. We have snow and compassion to protect us.
February 10, 2016
Brain Surgery
Dear Governor Ducey,
A fundamental element of the dissolution of support for Higher Ed comes is the attack on the Liberal Arts of which Creative Writing, which I teach, is definitely a part. I do love to teach creative writing but sometimes I wish I could teach lessons that have a more palpable outcome. Teaching someone to ride a bike is awesome. You run. They pedal. You run. They pedal. You let go. They fall. Rinse. Repeat until you let go and they ride on without you. I like to teach my kids how to read. How to cook. I would like to teach brain surgery or mushroom identification. It’s obvious how they turn out. Patient lives! Good job. Mushroom tastes good and patient lives! Another good job. Teaching writing is more nebulous. I tell the students as much concrete information as I can. I show them Brian Doyle’s essay “Leap.” Doyle describes two people jumping out of the window of the Twin Towers on 9-11. I read this sentence aloud as I walk the steps as if in on a floor in an office with windows looking onto Liberty Street: “Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped.” I stop at what would be the edge of the windowsill. I pause and then keep reading. I feel like if I can make their bodies imitate what they read on the page then they can put on the page what they want their readers to imagine other bodies to do. It’s not the same as teaching brain surgery where I can put my hand over theirs and guide the knife, but I hope I give them something palpable—something they can hold onto with those visible footsteps and audible breath. I was teaching Max to ski last Sunday. I screamed for him to slow down. He kept speeding up. I clicked my skis together, pointed my toes downhill and tried to catch up. I couldn’t. His head hit the ground first. I saw one ski fly off. Then the second. He was crying when I finally reached him. “I am not putting my skis back on. I hate skiing. I hate it I hate it.” “Come on,” I said. “Let’s try it again. If you do this run one more time, you will hate it less.” “I won’t. I won’t,” he repeated all the way up the chairlift and all the way back down the mountain.
The next day, 23 students stared at me as I pulled three oranges out of my bag. It looked like I was going to give them each one. I wasn’t. I only had three. I was trying to cure my cold. Instead of filling them with vitamin C like a good doctor, I started talking about my forthcoming books, Micrograms and Egg, which was embarrassing, but then we started to look at the essay “Swerve,” by Brenda Miller, we’d read for this week & it stopped being embarrassing because my students had smart things to say. Phoebe pointed out the images of lights and Hannah pointed out the images of darkness and Zia pointed out the tone. Allison noted the glass. Andrea read the piece aloud. I pointed out the eggs. Since I couldn’t give them each an orange, I gave them each an assignment: Write two paragraphs. The first should be a close up scene, cinematic, like a movie. The second paragraph should read like a collage to make it feel like time has passed. Choose an image register like building materials. Like oranges or snowglobes or lemon fresh scent. Make them as palpable as surgery. If you note one of your images comes off in the first paragraph, take that image off in the second like mountains take skis off six year olds. Weave a thread from the first part of the essay through the second part of the essay. I know you will hate it at first but when I notice you on the lift again, crying but writing about bricks and stones and citrus, you will hate it less and less and, although I am not that kind of doctor, you have learned a practical lesson about the effects of oranges on students in winter.
A fundamental element of the dissolution of support for Higher Ed comes is the attack on the Liberal Arts of which Creative Writing, which I teach, is definitely a part. I do love to teach creative writing but sometimes I wish I could teach lessons that have a more palpable outcome. Teaching someone to ride a bike is awesome. You run. They pedal. You run. They pedal. You let go. They fall. Rinse. Repeat until you let go and they ride on without you. I like to teach my kids how to read. How to cook. I would like to teach brain surgery or mushroom identification. It’s obvious how they turn out. Patient lives! Good job. Mushroom tastes good and patient lives! Another good job. Teaching writing is more nebulous. I tell the students as much concrete information as I can. I show them Brian Doyle’s essay “Leap.” Doyle describes two people jumping out of the window of the Twin Towers on 9-11. I read this sentence aloud as I walk the steps as if in on a floor in an office with windows looking onto Liberty Street: “Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped.” I stop at what would be the edge of the windowsill. I pause and then keep reading. I feel like if I can make their bodies imitate what they read on the page then they can put on the page what they want their readers to imagine other bodies to do. It’s not the same as teaching brain surgery where I can put my hand over theirs and guide the knife, but I hope I give them something palpable—something they can hold onto with those visible footsteps and audible breath. I was teaching Max to ski last Sunday. I screamed for him to slow down. He kept speeding up. I clicked my skis together, pointed my toes downhill and tried to catch up. I couldn’t. His head hit the ground first. I saw one ski fly off. Then the second. He was crying when I finally reached him. “I am not putting my skis back on. I hate skiing. I hate it I hate it.” “Come on,” I said. “Let’s try it again. If you do this run one more time, you will hate it less.” “I won’t. I won’t,” he repeated all the way up the chairlift and all the way back down the mountain.
The next day, 23 students stared at me as I pulled three oranges out of my bag. It looked like I was going to give them each one. I wasn’t. I only had three. I was trying to cure my cold. Instead of filling them with vitamin C like a good doctor, I started talking about my forthcoming books, Micrograms and Egg, which was embarrassing, but then we started to look at the essay “Swerve,” by Brenda Miller, we’d read for this week & it stopped being embarrassing because my students had smart things to say. Phoebe pointed out the images of lights and Hannah pointed out the images of darkness and Zia pointed out the tone. Allison noted the glass. Andrea read the piece aloud. I pointed out the eggs. Since I couldn’t give them each an orange, I gave them each an assignment: Write two paragraphs. The first should be a close up scene, cinematic, like a movie. The second paragraph should read like a collage to make it feel like time has passed. Choose an image register like building materials. Like oranges or snowglobes or lemon fresh scent. Make them as palpable as surgery. If you note one of your images comes off in the first paragraph, take that image off in the second like mountains take skis off six year olds. Weave a thread from the first part of the essay through the second part of the essay. I know you will hate it at first but when I notice you on the lift again, crying but writing about bricks and stones and citrus, you will hate it less and less and, although I am not that kind of doctor, you have learned a practical lesson about the effects of oranges on students in winter.
January 24, 2016
Eggs for All--Letter # 70
Dear Governor Ducey,
I think I told you I’m writing a book about egg for a series of books called “Object Lessons” by Bloomsbury. “Hood,” “Hotel,” and “Remote” are some of the other titles. Each author writes about the object from whatever angle they see fit. I’m writing from a creative/destructive point of view. I try to incorporate as many clichés as possible: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” And, this one is for you: “I always feel like I’m walking on eggshells.” For part of the book, I asked people to tell me their first memory of eggs, their moms’ stories about eggs, what idiomatic expressions they used. I had people from China, India, Ukraine, Argentina, Korea contribute stories. I asked one of my former students for stories about eggs. She is Diné and had been in my poetry courses. After she graduated, she got a job in Navajo, New Mexico where there was only one store. The produce aisle was half an aisle long. “Did they only have bananas?” I asked. She said, “Not even that, sometimes.” She was last hired so first fired when the budget cuts hit. I asked her, “It’s as bad in New Mexico as in Arizona?” “No,” she said. “Just for Diné.” Now she’s back in Flagstaff. She said she didn’t have that many egg stories—just one about how her grandpa wouldn’t eat chickens because they were related to dinosaurs, which are monsters in the Navajo creation stories, similar to the snake in Garden of Eden stories. There’s evil in the snake. You don’t want it inside you. “The Warrior Twins fought monsters, which we’ve come to think of as dinosaurs.” She said, “He was kind of right. Chickens are related to dinosaurs.” She had one other egg story that she heard while on The Walk. One of her fellow walker’s grandfather also didn’t eat chicken or eggs because he too thought “dinosaur.” I asked her what The Walk was. She told me she and other Diné people her age walked from sacred mountain to sacred mountain to call attention to resource extraction across the reservation. The four monsters of our time: fracking, copper mining, oil drilling, uranium mining. “We’re kind of fighting dinosaurs ourselves. Dead, fossilized dinosaurs.” They hiked for 200 miles between some of these mountains. There are four sacred, cardinal point mountains to the Diné: East, Tsisnaasjini' (Mount Blanca) near Alamosa in San Luis Valley, Colorado, South, Tsoodzil, (Mount Taylor) near of Laguna, New Mexico, West, Doko'oosliid (San Francisco Peaks) near Flagstaff, Arizona and North, Dibé Nitsaa (Mount Hesperus) near La Plata Mountains, Colorado. Lyncia and her group trekked four separate Walks. MTV wanted to broadcast the walk but the Walkers would need to agree to let NIKE sponsor. Some people thought that would be selling out. Lyncia and I agree that sometimes, you need to sell out a bit to get the word out about your cause. Post Walk, post teaching, Lyncia’s new job is to develop Food Sovereignty Curriculum. I told her about a Navajo student of mine who is farming on the reservation. “Where does he get the water?” I wondered. “The Little Colorado?” She said, “Where does anyone get anything? I think we’re at the breaking point.” “There are just not enough resources. No access to water. To the Internet. To education,” I said. “Or food.” Lyncia reminds me how on the very edge of subsistence some of her people live. “I used to think,” she said, “that I would go to high school, then college, then get a job, with, you know, dental care. But now that seems impossible.” The gap between those with resources and those without widens. She’s so brilliant and yet she feels like things are getting worse, not better. Here’s the thing: I want her to come back to school. I want her to get her MFA. Her MFA will help her teach. It will help her write. It will help her broadcast the troubles on the reservation: The resource extraction. The lack of resources. I told her there may be support for Navajo students but with the budget cuts, the support for students who need it most is drying up. I feel like I should be able to help people achieve their goals, to find resources for them, to support their teaching and their writing but the resources are becoming as scarce as water in the Little Colorado.
I think I told you I’m writing a book about egg for a series of books called “Object Lessons” by Bloomsbury. “Hood,” “Hotel,” and “Remote” are some of the other titles. Each author writes about the object from whatever angle they see fit. I’m writing from a creative/destructive point of view. I try to incorporate as many clichés as possible: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” And, this one is for you: “I always feel like I’m walking on eggshells.” For part of the book, I asked people to tell me their first memory of eggs, their moms’ stories about eggs, what idiomatic expressions they used. I had people from China, India, Ukraine, Argentina, Korea contribute stories. I asked one of my former students for stories about eggs. She is Diné and had been in my poetry courses. After she graduated, she got a job in Navajo, New Mexico where there was only one store. The produce aisle was half an aisle long. “Did they only have bananas?” I asked. She said, “Not even that, sometimes.” She was last hired so first fired when the budget cuts hit. I asked her, “It’s as bad in New Mexico as in Arizona?” “No,” she said. “Just for Diné.” Now she’s back in Flagstaff. She said she didn’t have that many egg stories—just one about how her grandpa wouldn’t eat chickens because they were related to dinosaurs, which are monsters in the Navajo creation stories, similar to the snake in Garden of Eden stories. There’s evil in the snake. You don’t want it inside you. “The Warrior Twins fought monsters, which we’ve come to think of as dinosaurs.” She said, “He was kind of right. Chickens are related to dinosaurs.” She had one other egg story that she heard while on The Walk. One of her fellow walker’s grandfather also didn’t eat chicken or eggs because he too thought “dinosaur.” I asked her what The Walk was. She told me she and other Diné people her age walked from sacred mountain to sacred mountain to call attention to resource extraction across the reservation. The four monsters of our time: fracking, copper mining, oil drilling, uranium mining. “We’re kind of fighting dinosaurs ourselves. Dead, fossilized dinosaurs.” They hiked for 200 miles between some of these mountains. There are four sacred, cardinal point mountains to the Diné: East, Tsisnaasjini' (Mount Blanca) near Alamosa in San Luis Valley, Colorado, South, Tsoodzil, (Mount Taylor) near of Laguna, New Mexico, West, Doko'oosliid (San Francisco Peaks) near Flagstaff, Arizona and North, Dibé Nitsaa (Mount Hesperus) near La Plata Mountains, Colorado. Lyncia and her group trekked four separate Walks. MTV wanted to broadcast the walk but the Walkers would need to agree to let NIKE sponsor. Some people thought that would be selling out. Lyncia and I agree that sometimes, you need to sell out a bit to get the word out about your cause. Post Walk, post teaching, Lyncia’s new job is to develop Food Sovereignty Curriculum. I told her about a Navajo student of mine who is farming on the reservation. “Where does he get the water?” I wondered. “The Little Colorado?” She said, “Where does anyone get anything? I think we’re at the breaking point.” “There are just not enough resources. No access to water. To the Internet. To education,” I said. “Or food.” Lyncia reminds me how on the very edge of subsistence some of her people live. “I used to think,” she said, “that I would go to high school, then college, then get a job, with, you know, dental care. But now that seems impossible.” The gap between those with resources and those without widens. She’s so brilliant and yet she feels like things are getting worse, not better. Here’s the thing: I want her to come back to school. I want her to get her MFA. Her MFA will help her teach. It will help her write. It will help her broadcast the troubles on the reservation: The resource extraction. The lack of resources. I told her there may be support for Navajo students but with the budget cuts, the support for students who need it most is drying up. I feel like I should be able to help people achieve their goals, to find resources for them, to support their teaching and their writing but the resources are becoming as scarce as water in the Little Colorado.
January 15, 2016
Dear Governor Ducey--We Got New Dogs, Letter #69
Dear Governor Ducey,
I think I wrote you about this before. Our dog Cleo died last April. She was a big German Shepherd/Malamute mix who had hip dysplasia when she was a puppy. She had surgery on each hip, readjusting it, lifting the socket so the joint fit inside properly, pinning the bones together so she could walk. The veterinarians weren’t sure she would avoid arthritis. They weren’t even sure she would live to be three years old. But she lived for thirteen and half years, and, until the last year or so, lived pretty happily. Eventually, she didn’t have enough strength her hips to stand up. We had to carry her outside every morning. She lay on her dog bed and ate biscuits until she wouldn’t even eat those anymore. I have missed her a lot. I imagined her coming around the corner of the house or hear waiting at the back door or scratching at the front. I told Erik that I couldn’t get another dog until I stopped seeing visions of Cleo. A month or so ago, Erik started sending me pictures of dogs at the Humane Society. Those visions began to layer in my brain. I would ask him, why this dog instead of all the rest? When he finally convinced me to go to the shelter I said, How could we choose just one? So we didn’t. We chose two. A German Shepherd-mix puppy (oh my god, who gets a puppy?) and a sweet one-year old German Shepherd-mx. Apparently, German Shepherds speak to me. Or the visions of Cleo have turned imaginary to real. I am still a little resistant to this idea. I have three books to finish! I don’t have time to let a puppy outside every 6 minutes. I don’t have time to carry the mad cats over the dogs so they can get to their litterbox and food. But Erik says, we have enough love for more and I said, yes, that is true. So, two dogs, two cats, two kids, and two saps live together in our three-bedroom house and yard with no fence. To keep the dogs from bugging the cats and from peeing in the house all day, I’ve been snowshoeing in the forest behind our house. This forest is State Trust Land. It is well-loved in that there are probably too many trails and we run into many other dog-walkers and snowshoers but it’s the greatest thing about Flagstaff—that out my door and over one block is the beginning of the largest contiguous pine forest in the United States. In the forest, redtail hawks eye you from branches. I think I saw an owl yesterday. An osprey-like creature hangs out in a big snag close to the little man made lakes. One morning, I smelled something musky. I looked up and a heard of elk hung their heads in the early morning mist. Deer, rabbits, squirrels, and yes, humans and their dogs. I could walk to the Wupatki ruins in Walnut Canyon in just 10 miles. I could walk nearly forever, in this large, contiguous pine forest. State trust land is a weird thing. Unlike Forest Service land, it’s saleable. Every time I see a tractor or a dumptruck parked at the end of the street, I get nervous. Who did they sell the land to? I begin to wonder. Why would they destroy this best thing? This is why I live here. If they start digging to put in more student housing, well, there would be no point in staying here.
Puppies are saleable too but, as indicated by the Humane Society, there are enough puppies already. And, it seems that the State actually has enough money in its Rainy Day Fund and its Surplus to restore the Budget Cuts of 2015 to Higher Ed, to commit to raising the salaries of public school teachers and lower the classroom size without selling any of this state trust land. Selling land to pay for education is shortsighted. There is only so much land. Like puppy populations, human populations continue to grow. There has to be a more sustainable model, like perhaps raising taxes just a little on this ever-expanding cohort of humans, than selling something that is rare and only as valuable as it remains contiguous and vast and available, not just to a single developer but to every single person who would like to snowshoe and dog-walk on State Trust land.
I think I wrote you about this before. Our dog Cleo died last April. She was a big German Shepherd/Malamute mix who had hip dysplasia when she was a puppy. She had surgery on each hip, readjusting it, lifting the socket so the joint fit inside properly, pinning the bones together so she could walk. The veterinarians weren’t sure she would avoid arthritis. They weren’t even sure she would live to be three years old. But she lived for thirteen and half years, and, until the last year or so, lived pretty happily. Eventually, she didn’t have enough strength her hips to stand up. We had to carry her outside every morning. She lay on her dog bed and ate biscuits until she wouldn’t even eat those anymore. I have missed her a lot. I imagined her coming around the corner of the house or hear waiting at the back door or scratching at the front. I told Erik that I couldn’t get another dog until I stopped seeing visions of Cleo. A month or so ago, Erik started sending me pictures of dogs at the Humane Society. Those visions began to layer in my brain. I would ask him, why this dog instead of all the rest? When he finally convinced me to go to the shelter I said, How could we choose just one? So we didn’t. We chose two. A German Shepherd-mix puppy (oh my god, who gets a puppy?) and a sweet one-year old German Shepherd-mx. Apparently, German Shepherds speak to me. Or the visions of Cleo have turned imaginary to real. I am still a little resistant to this idea. I have three books to finish! I don’t have time to let a puppy outside every 6 minutes. I don’t have time to carry the mad cats over the dogs so they can get to their litterbox and food. But Erik says, we have enough love for more and I said, yes, that is true. So, two dogs, two cats, two kids, and two saps live together in our three-bedroom house and yard with no fence. To keep the dogs from bugging the cats and from peeing in the house all day, I’ve been snowshoeing in the forest behind our house. This forest is State Trust Land. It is well-loved in that there are probably too many trails and we run into many other dog-walkers and snowshoers but it’s the greatest thing about Flagstaff—that out my door and over one block is the beginning of the largest contiguous pine forest in the United States. In the forest, redtail hawks eye you from branches. I think I saw an owl yesterday. An osprey-like creature hangs out in a big snag close to the little man made lakes. One morning, I smelled something musky. I looked up and a heard of elk hung their heads in the early morning mist. Deer, rabbits, squirrels, and yes, humans and their dogs. I could walk to the Wupatki ruins in Walnut Canyon in just 10 miles. I could walk nearly forever, in this large, contiguous pine forest. State trust land is a weird thing. Unlike Forest Service land, it’s saleable. Every time I see a tractor or a dumptruck parked at the end of the street, I get nervous. Who did they sell the land to? I begin to wonder. Why would they destroy this best thing? This is why I live here. If they start digging to put in more student housing, well, there would be no point in staying here.
Puppies are saleable too but, as indicated by the Humane Society, there are enough puppies already. And, it seems that the State actually has enough money in its Rainy Day Fund and its Surplus to restore the Budget Cuts of 2015 to Higher Ed, to commit to raising the salaries of public school teachers and lower the classroom size without selling any of this state trust land. Selling land to pay for education is shortsighted. There is only so much land. Like puppy populations, human populations continue to grow. There has to be a more sustainable model, like perhaps raising taxes just a little on this ever-expanding cohort of humans, than selling something that is rare and only as valuable as it remains contiguous and vast and available, not just to a single developer but to every single person who would like to snowshoe and dog-walk on State Trust land.
January 14, 2016
A Collective Goal--Governor Ducey letter #68
A Collective Goal
Each of these letters assumes one thing that I realize I cannot assume: that prosperity for all is a collective good. There would be some truly cynical people (or times when even an optimist such as I becomes cynical) who would argue that perhaps you do not want the whole of the population to prosper. At the darkest times, I sometimes wonder if there is something to be gained from keeping people under-educated and in poverty. In poverty, you do whatever you have to to get by—mine for minerals, dig ditches, clean public bathrooms, work the graveyard shift. To “economic minded individuals,” you must rely on poverty. Someone has to clean the grease traps, so goes the argument. Jesus said, there will be poor always. But this is a pretty parasitic view of the economy. The rich sit in comfortable leather office chairs, spinning toward the full-length windows to look out across the horizon as the street-level workers scrub and sell and dig. And I suppose, even in my most idealistic brain, that there will always be “levels” of work. I am embarrassed to ask the student workers in the office to print letters of recommendation for me, but I do it because I have fifty more letters to write. Some division of labor is necessary. However, I do think that there should be fluidity between these divisions. That if someone doesn’t want to work the graveyard shift anymore, there is a way for them to quit. That the swiveling leather chair isn’t guaranteed to the man who sits in it and certainly isn’t guaranteed for his son to claim. That there should be some kind of symbiotic relationship between industries and its workers. That maybe you put some time in mopping floors but that time in counts towards a goal. When companies pay workers to go to college, there is symbiosis. You work doing a less-great job. We’ll pay you to go to school so you can get a better job. Raising people up isn’t just socialism, it’s good business sense. When you have employees with a strong liberal arts background, they are more inventive, more creative, more communicative. As Loretta Jackson Hayes, associate professor of chemistry at Rhodes College in Memphis, wrote in The Washington Post in an article called “We Don’t Need More Stem Majors, We Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training.”To innovate is to introduce change. While STEM workers can certainly drive innovation through science alone, imagine how much more innovative students and employees could be if the pool of knowledge from which they draw is wider and deeper. That occurs as the result of a liberal arts education. https://www.washingtonpost.com/postev...
Or, even if employees just get advanced degrees for jobs they already occupy, the new insight and new skills attained make way for new inventions, plans, and models.
If you are convinced that government should be run like a business, perhaps think of this symbiotic business model. Even if you still need, say, window washers so that you can look out the windows of your high rise, don’t you think that some certain number of years put in washing windows should allow for enough money to pay tuition to go to college so that you don’t have to wash windows forever? Don’t you think that your business-state would benefit from having someone who once washed windows invent a solar-gathering window device? If you think of the government as a separate entity from the people (as a business is from its employees), perhaps you can think of it as a symbiotic one. Sometimes businesses/governments like to make metaphors from nature. Think, Wolf of Wall Street. But in the real forest, symbiosis is the underlying structure. Lichen, fungi, berries, ant, nurse trees all serve to help the forest grow. Even wolves, who in the movies need nothing or no one, appear have a symbiotic relationship with ravens. The ravens spot potential food for the ravens. The wolves tear open tough hides for the birds. Go ahead and run your business like a real wolf. Tear open the expensive hides of Higher Ed by returning state funding to the universities. Let the ravens eat. They’ll signal more food for you later.
Each of these letters assumes one thing that I realize I cannot assume: that prosperity for all is a collective good. There would be some truly cynical people (or times when even an optimist such as I becomes cynical) who would argue that perhaps you do not want the whole of the population to prosper. At the darkest times, I sometimes wonder if there is something to be gained from keeping people under-educated and in poverty. In poverty, you do whatever you have to to get by—mine for minerals, dig ditches, clean public bathrooms, work the graveyard shift. To “economic minded individuals,” you must rely on poverty. Someone has to clean the grease traps, so goes the argument. Jesus said, there will be poor always. But this is a pretty parasitic view of the economy. The rich sit in comfortable leather office chairs, spinning toward the full-length windows to look out across the horizon as the street-level workers scrub and sell and dig. And I suppose, even in my most idealistic brain, that there will always be “levels” of work. I am embarrassed to ask the student workers in the office to print letters of recommendation for me, but I do it because I have fifty more letters to write. Some division of labor is necessary. However, I do think that there should be fluidity between these divisions. That if someone doesn’t want to work the graveyard shift anymore, there is a way for them to quit. That the swiveling leather chair isn’t guaranteed to the man who sits in it and certainly isn’t guaranteed for his son to claim. That there should be some kind of symbiotic relationship between industries and its workers. That maybe you put some time in mopping floors but that time in counts towards a goal. When companies pay workers to go to college, there is symbiosis. You work doing a less-great job. We’ll pay you to go to school so you can get a better job. Raising people up isn’t just socialism, it’s good business sense. When you have employees with a strong liberal arts background, they are more inventive, more creative, more communicative. As Loretta Jackson Hayes, associate professor of chemistry at Rhodes College in Memphis, wrote in The Washington Post in an article called “We Don’t Need More Stem Majors, We Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training.”To innovate is to introduce change. While STEM workers can certainly drive innovation through science alone, imagine how much more innovative students and employees could be if the pool of knowledge from which they draw is wider and deeper. That occurs as the result of a liberal arts education. https://www.washingtonpost.com/postev...
Or, even if employees just get advanced degrees for jobs they already occupy, the new insight and new skills attained make way for new inventions, plans, and models.
If you are convinced that government should be run like a business, perhaps think of this symbiotic business model. Even if you still need, say, window washers so that you can look out the windows of your high rise, don’t you think that some certain number of years put in washing windows should allow for enough money to pay tuition to go to college so that you don’t have to wash windows forever? Don’t you think that your business-state would benefit from having someone who once washed windows invent a solar-gathering window device? If you think of the government as a separate entity from the people (as a business is from its employees), perhaps you can think of it as a symbiotic one. Sometimes businesses/governments like to make metaphors from nature. Think, Wolf of Wall Street. But in the real forest, symbiosis is the underlying structure. Lichen, fungi, berries, ant, nurse trees all serve to help the forest grow. Even wolves, who in the movies need nothing or no one, appear have a symbiotic relationship with ravens. The ravens spot potential food for the ravens. The wolves tear open tough hides for the birds. Go ahead and run your business like a real wolf. Tear open the expensive hides of Higher Ed by returning state funding to the universities. Let the ravens eat. They’ll signal more food for you later.
January 6, 2016
Happy Birthday Max--I made your birthday note a Letter to Governor Ducey!
Dear Governor Ducey, Tomorrow, my son Max turns six. Six is so old. I can still pick him up because he’s kind of small for six but soon I will not be able to. I don’t want to be one of those mom’s who constantly feels nostalgic for the times the kids were little. I don’t believe in nostalgia. I don’t believe times were better then or that the past was more idyllic than these present, modern, smoggy, warm-climating, huge income-gap, gun-ridden times. I believe things will get better. I believe that Max and Zoe will go forward into a future that figures out how to power our luxurious refrigerators and furnaces and cars with the power of the sun. I have felt the sun on my back when I’m wearing a black jacket and even with snow on the ground and the temperature hovering around 14, I can still feel the sun’s heat. I believe in the sun the way I believe that sowing a seed in black soil will, eventually, produce a sprout. I believe in the magic of clouds pulling oceans into them and carrying those oceans like upside down aircraft carriers inland and letting go their cargo, bringing the ocean onto my roof, into my gutters, into my rain barrels where I will open the spigot and fill the bucket and carry that one-time-ocean to my now-sprout. To have kids, you have to believe in that kind of magic. The kind of magic that allows a President to issue an executive order that might protect one small kid from getting shot—maybe my kid. The kind of magic that suggests that the studies that show that students with liberal arts degrees are the students most wanted by industries as diverse as medicine and marketing, hedge fund management and non-profits because these people know how to analyze, to distill, to construct, to communicate. Maybe Max will be a doctor. Maybe a solar power engineer. Maybe he will be a teacher in a place where teachers are valued for the social work and emotional work and the making-sure-the-kid-has-gloves work as well as the math work and the reading work. Maybe Max will be a professor in a university where he can show his students the slow, hard work of understanding how the grammatical structure of a story underpins the meaning of the story. Maybe he will be a professor with tenure who can speak without too much fear (some fear, but not enough to stop him) from speaking up for his students and his colleagues. Maybe he will be a governor who will pride himself on turning his state’s near-to-last-place in test scores and in funding into first place and this will attract solar power engineers and hydrologists and farmers and social workers to this state to work with the forward-thinking graduates from this state’s education system and they will find a way, in Arizona, waterless, sun-filled, to make a place where everyone has access to a reasonable house kept at a reasonable temperature and enough water to drink and wash their hands and water their garden, even as the population grows. It is a kind of magic—taking so many people from so many backgrounds, some with so much and some with so little, moving them into the desert, and saying to each of them, you deserve a great education so you can build a great environment in a state that requires a big kind of magic to support so many humans. I’m pretty sure education is that magic.
Max is at school right now. He wanted to impress his teachers by finishing his homework due on January 31st, by his birthday. He woke up early to write three words that begin with snow. Snowplow. Snowshoes. Snowman. Then he drew a snowman. He’s lucky that he has teachers who will find him some more homework if he finishes this. He’s lucky that he has a sister who will help him with his Spanish. He’s lucky that he loves to play piano. He’s lucky that he will get ever-more Lego’s for his birthday tomorrow. But his future won’t to rely on luck. It will rely on magic. And that magic will only be possible if there is magic enough for everyone.
Max is at school right now. He wanted to impress his teachers by finishing his homework due on January 31st, by his birthday. He woke up early to write three words that begin with snow. Snowplow. Snowshoes. Snowman. Then he drew a snowman. He’s lucky that he has teachers who will find him some more homework if he finishes this. He’s lucky that he has a sister who will help him with his Spanish. He’s lucky that he loves to play piano. He’s lucky that he will get ever-more Lego’s for his birthday tomorrow. But his future won’t to rely on luck. It will rely on magic. And that magic will only be possible if there is magic enough for everyone.
January 5, 2016
Optimistic numbers--Letter #66
Dear Governor Ducey,
Generally, I’m an optimist. I can even be pretty naïve about the current trends of events when I want to be, when I think of my kids, when I think of my friends and my family and even spend time on Facebook I say, “Look at this good news. These people are doing good things. The world must indeed be getting better.” But then I leave my cloister of Facebook and the generally positive world of my friends and family and see signs of things getting worse. I was watching Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Foodon PBS where a chart showed diabetes in children doubling over the last 10 years. The rate of childhood diabetes was something like 3.2 percent in 2005. Now, 10 years later, it’s nearly 7.5 percent. More than double. The number of police shootings in LA alone has doubled in the last year. In the atmosphere, the particulates per million surpassed 400. 350 was the original make-or-break point for irreversible global warming. My kids and I watched “Life” on BBC. Orca whales tracked and surrounded a crab seal. Using only a tiny iceberg as its shield, the seal deflected the whale’s attempts to eat him. At one point, an orca lunged. The seal submerged. My daughter hid her eyes. We knew he was a goner. But then he popped up. Alive. The whales moved on to easier prey. The other seals looked on from their ice floe. I resisted saying to Zoe, in a couple of years, there will be no icebergs for the seal to use as deflection. No ice floes for the seals to watch from. No ice floes as refuge. No ice floes, no seals. No seals, no orcas. I read while watching TV in the paper the AZ Merit Test results. 25 percent passage rate in some districts in Arizona! How proud you must be! I turned to Zoe and said, “I know you did well on the Arizona Merit test but that doesn’t mean anything unless everyone does well. If your fellow students don’t do well, the world is getting worse, not better. You can’t make the world better on your own. It will take all of you.” I get preachy when I read news headlines about test scores while simultaneously watch ice floes shrink. It has been 10 years since I started writing letters to the editor. My first was published about the wanton shooting of cougars, treed with dogs no less, in the state of Utah. I wrote my first letter here a few years ago about wolves. The wolf population has increased so much that they’re on the verge of being delisted as an endangered species. Delisted, they will be subject to the same statistics that chart childhood diabetes and police shootings. The threats to the wolves becomes greater their number. I do think that I am getting better at recognizing the world is getting worse. I have memorized the names: Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. Michael Brown. I have memorized the stats. 50%. 25%. I have counted the wolves. I have counted the cougars. I understand there are two tax codes. One for the wealthy, who can hire tax attorneys and find loopholes in ways to stash their money in the Bahamas. I understand that the 150 men who just invaded the National Wildlife Refuge in Malheur, Oregon believe they are patriots for a country that does not exist. If they were Muslim, they would be called terrorists. If they were black, they would be dead already. I understand these letters are just word, just numbers but, back in my idealistic mode, I believe that perhaps before change, there must be an accounting.
I am still an optimist even in the face of dismal numbers. I believe that some police will be held accountable. I believe that the wolves will make a comeback. I didn’t say anything to my kids about the melting ice and the numbered days of the crab seal while we watched the show because maybe my kids will be the ones to reverse global warming having remembered seeing the show about the seals and the orcas. Maybe seeing that the test scores are what they are might stoke some people to say, perhaps 40 students per classroom isn’t the way to go. Maybe the letters won’t make it to you but maybe they’ll make it to a lot of people, which might be the way accounting works.
Generally, I’m an optimist. I can even be pretty naïve about the current trends of events when I want to be, when I think of my kids, when I think of my friends and my family and even spend time on Facebook I say, “Look at this good news. These people are doing good things. The world must indeed be getting better.” But then I leave my cloister of Facebook and the generally positive world of my friends and family and see signs of things getting worse. I was watching Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Foodon PBS where a chart showed diabetes in children doubling over the last 10 years. The rate of childhood diabetes was something like 3.2 percent in 2005. Now, 10 years later, it’s nearly 7.5 percent. More than double. The number of police shootings in LA alone has doubled in the last year. In the atmosphere, the particulates per million surpassed 400. 350 was the original make-or-break point for irreversible global warming. My kids and I watched “Life” on BBC. Orca whales tracked and surrounded a crab seal. Using only a tiny iceberg as its shield, the seal deflected the whale’s attempts to eat him. At one point, an orca lunged. The seal submerged. My daughter hid her eyes. We knew he was a goner. But then he popped up. Alive. The whales moved on to easier prey. The other seals looked on from their ice floe. I resisted saying to Zoe, in a couple of years, there will be no icebergs for the seal to use as deflection. No ice floes for the seals to watch from. No ice floes as refuge. No ice floes, no seals. No seals, no orcas. I read while watching TV in the paper the AZ Merit Test results. 25 percent passage rate in some districts in Arizona! How proud you must be! I turned to Zoe and said, “I know you did well on the Arizona Merit test but that doesn’t mean anything unless everyone does well. If your fellow students don’t do well, the world is getting worse, not better. You can’t make the world better on your own. It will take all of you.” I get preachy when I read news headlines about test scores while simultaneously watch ice floes shrink. It has been 10 years since I started writing letters to the editor. My first was published about the wanton shooting of cougars, treed with dogs no less, in the state of Utah. I wrote my first letter here a few years ago about wolves. The wolf population has increased so much that they’re on the verge of being delisted as an endangered species. Delisted, they will be subject to the same statistics that chart childhood diabetes and police shootings. The threats to the wolves becomes greater their number. I do think that I am getting better at recognizing the world is getting worse. I have memorized the names: Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. Michael Brown. I have memorized the stats. 50%. 25%. I have counted the wolves. I have counted the cougars. I understand there are two tax codes. One for the wealthy, who can hire tax attorneys and find loopholes in ways to stash their money in the Bahamas. I understand that the 150 men who just invaded the National Wildlife Refuge in Malheur, Oregon believe they are patriots for a country that does not exist. If they were Muslim, they would be called terrorists. If they were black, they would be dead already. I understand these letters are just word, just numbers but, back in my idealistic mode, I believe that perhaps before change, there must be an accounting.
I am still an optimist even in the face of dismal numbers. I believe that some police will be held accountable. I believe that the wolves will make a comeback. I didn’t say anything to my kids about the melting ice and the numbered days of the crab seal while we watched the show because maybe my kids will be the ones to reverse global warming having remembered seeing the show about the seals and the orcas. Maybe seeing that the test scores are what they are might stoke some people to say, perhaps 40 students per classroom isn’t the way to go. Maybe the letters won’t make it to you but maybe they’ll make it to a lot of people, which might be the way accounting works.
