A professional baseball player goes up to the plate. A hulking six foot man goes up on a little mound and hurls a stitched horsehide sphere at him, ideally around ninety miles an hour, hoping to throw it past him three times, or, failing that, coming close enough to his head that he forfeits the next two. If the baseball guy swings his hitty-stick at the ball and smacks it into the field in a place where nobody can catch it three out of every ten times, that man will soon be a millionaire if he isn’t one before swinging the hitty stick for the first time.
As a public school teacher it was my job to teach kids how to read and write. It is a lot harder thing to do when you consider how teachers are expected to do that job. You are in a classroom of up to thirty kids, no more than ten per cent of whom are self-starting and self-maintaining. The rest are problem-filled haters of reading and wordless when it comes to writing. You have to lead them into the land of joyous literacy. And when you step up to that plate, if you are getting a hit only three times in every ten at-bats (as measured by beloved state tests that are inherently biased in a multitude of ways) you will lose that lovely teaching job. You are expected to hit 8 out of 10 or higher. And that is just to keep your job year to year even though you make less money per year than a city garbage man. No chance you will ever be a millionaire. And they don’t even let you use a hitty stick to do your job.
But I promised you this rant was about farming and farmers.
My roots are in the farmlands of Iowa. I am the result of the union of the Beyer family farm and the Aldrich family farm. I know what farming is all about. And we do the job of feeding the nation, and possibly the world. But it is not an easy job. You gamble each year that you will be able to produce corn and soybeans and possibly beef or pork, and when the harvest comes, you have to hope you can sell it for more than it cost to produce it. Tornadoes, hail, floods, and droughts get more than their fair say in the outcome.
So, why isn’t what the farmer does worth more?
The answer is simple. People with money and power are the ones who control who makes money and who doesn’t. Through speculation and commodity trading they control the price of corn and beans, and they control who makes the profit.
We do the majority of the work and take the majority of the risk. We don’t get the majority of the rewards. Other people than farmers decide who does, and only rarely do they decide those matters fairly. But thus the world is. Or rather, thus we have let it become.
I Have No Idea
Yesterday I posted a weird picture that I haven’t used before and made myself cry gushers of tears again for the boy the picture is a portrait of. I suppose it is a catharsis I didn’t really need. I woke up today with a blistering headache to keep my perpetual backache company. Could that have been caused by the crying and the blues that ensued? Probably.
So, I have no idea for today. My brain hurts and my heart is burned out.
I checked Facebook where I had posted this quote from Malala ;
I wasn’t really prepared for controversy. I should’ve been. It is obvious from the guns versus books graphics that it would stir emotions in my liberal author and teacher friends, as well as my conservative cracker anti-Muslim friends.
My aunt, a former career teacher, responded first. She wrote, “Like the thought.” She was a great third grade teacher in Iowa for many years. She loved all kids then and still does today. I want to be like that in retirement too.
But the next response was from a former high school friend who voted for Trump and hates all the people the Republican Party orders him to hate.
“Sounds great like most sound bites. Much harder to explain and implement.” My friend, Ali Hassenbutter (not his real name, but this will make him angry as well as protect his actual identity), likes to take jabs at me for being a liberal, and the subtext here is that, even though I was a teacher for many years, I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to education. So, I answered him with some heartfelt teacher-ism.
“I had Egyptian and Lebanese and Arab students in my classes at Garland ISD. They are people just like us. You help them learn English. They make American friends. Americans learn that most Muslims are not terrorists. What’s so complicated about that? Unless you start slamming doors in their faces and treating them as less valuable than you are.” I admit to maybe being a bit snarky in that last line, but sometimes he gets my goat. (I know I should just let him have it. I have never liked my goat that much anyway. It smells bad.)
A fellow ESL teacher from Garland chimed in even though she doesn’t know Ali. “And these students added spice in our classroom… Just like they do in the USA.” She knows all the students I was referencing.
Then one of my other Belmond classmates who knows and probably detests us both as heathens added his words of wisdom, “The real concept here is that we are in fact ALL HUMAN.” See there? The Bible banger gets it. And I really appreciate when he steps in and tries to make peace. He’s somewhat nutty at times, but his new-found religion allows him to believe like I do that we should choose love over hate as our default response, even to terrorism.
But Ali comes back with; “It takes both approaches to this problem. But then there is Berkley as a shining example of education gone off the rail.” He’s at least trying to sound like he is listening to our comments, but then he pulls this old red hot chestnut out of the fireplace. He offers it like the opinion of the crazy, racist uncle at Thanksgiving Dinner.
“Yes, because it was the teachers’ fault at Berkley. That poor young racist agitator from Breitbart was supposed to have a peaceful forum for spewing his hateful mouth garbage at young liberal college students, and the college administrators who granted him that right didn’t bend over backwards far enough to prevent a violent reaction.” I know, sarcasm is the resort of the defeated. I should be championing love over hate and freedom of speech over my personal revulsion to Milo.
My teacher friend had this to add; “I understand the “right” instigated that incident.”
“Yes, but they wore masks to hide their identity. That makes them automatically liberals, doesn’t it? If I am able to follow Fox News Logic, anyway.” Sez I.
And so, there we stand, at the very beginning of a month-long Facebook love/hate debate. And I will lose. You can argue with brick walls and score more debate points than you can arguing anything political with Ali. And the frustrating thing is, he’s an ordinary decent human being and stand-up guy too. Not just a dismiss-able deplorable because he voted for Trump.
I have no ideas today. I have a headache. If I can’t defend Malala’s heroic logic, then I can’t even argue my way out of a bowl of chicken soup. Doomed to drown in chicken broth. At least I will die healthy at the bottom of that mixed metaphor. That should be worth a laugh.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, compassion, education, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, Liberal ideas, politics, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as arguments about education, Facebook friends, Malala