Mother’s Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Amen!

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail & commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesars but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

—Julia Ward Howe, 1870

The Color of School Closures Spread the [rather obvious] word: “Mass school closings have become a hallmark of today’s dominant education policy agenda. But rather than helping students, these closures disrupt whole communities. And as U.S. Department of Education data suggests, the most recent rounds of mass closings in Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia disproportionately hurt Black and low-income students.” From the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign.
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The Color of School Closures

Spread the [rather obvious] word:

“Mass school closings have become a hallmark of today’s dominant education policy agenda. But rather than helping students, these closures disrupt whole communities. And as U.S. Department of Education data suggests, the most recent rounds of mass closings in Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia disproportionately hurt Black and low-income students.”

From the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

Woo! Hoo! Occupy the Corporations!

Susan Ohanian’s piece in Daily Censored needs wider distribution. Here are two highlights:

“In response to a poverty rate that tops 90% in many urban and rural schools –and 1.6 million homeless children—many in schools with no libraries–education reformers at the White House, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Governors Association call for a radical, untried curriculum overhaul and two versions of nonstop national testing to measure whether teachers are producing workers for the Global Economy.

…

“There is resistance. A national movement of parents opting their children out of standardized testing started when Professor Tim Slekar and his wife went with their son Luke to a school conference to learn why Luke’s grades were slipping. The teacher showed them a sample paper, with a test-prep writing prompt: Write about the two most exciting times you have had with your family. Luke’s response, started, “Whoo-hoo! Let me tell you about my great family vacation trip to the Adirondacks.”

“The teacher stopped Luke and asked him to explain to his parents why this opening was unacceptable. “Whoo-hoo! isn’t a sentence,” he acknowledged, adding that the first sentence to a writing prompt must begin by restating the prompt. The teacher said that according to standards, Luke’s response would have been scored a zero, and her obligation was to prepare children to pass the state test. Feeling that education shouldn’t be about preparing students to write answers in a format low-paid temp workers can score, the Slekars decided to opt Luke out of future standardized testing. “We would not allow our son to provide data to a system that was designed to prove that he, the teacher, the system, and the community were failing.” Tim found people of like mind– Peggy Robertson, Morna McDermmott, Ceresta Smith, Shaun Johnson and Laurie Murphy–and together they founded United Opt Out, a national movement to opt students out of standardized testing. Its endorsers include John Kuhn, an outspoken Texas school superintendent, who says, “Parents and students have the power to say when enough is enough.”

Enough? It’s been enough for years. And it may be quite a few more before enough people say enough is enough. And, afraid to say, it’s unlikely that a tipping point will be reached. Ever the cynic am I, but while Seattle parents may (in an encouraging development) put a halt to the insanity in their back yard, parents in, say, Nashville, and Oklahoma City, are clueless, lack information, and will probably not say enough until it’s quite too late.

Hey, You Okay?

Fell back asleep this morning while reading. Must have been more tired than I thought. Started having dreams. Last one was about going to Dad’s funeral. For some reason, we took a train to get to the church. Also, I refused to go to the funeral on time and had to be dragged out by a brother-in-law. (Which is partly true; I had a hard time stepping out to walk into the church at the real funeral. Taking that step meant that the funeral would begin and it would be the last we’d see of him and I wanted everything to stop and go back to the way it was.)

Back to the dream: as we were getting off the train and going in to the funeral, I was getting balky like a mule again, just like at the real thing. One of my female relatives gave me a hug and as I hugged her, I felt her cold, wet nose nudging me in the face.

I immediately woke up … and there was a big, cold, wet Basset Hound nose sniffing around my nose and mouth! He was very worried, I guess by the sounds I was probably making because of the dream. So he had come in and hopped up on the bed and checked me out thoroughly. Once satisfied I was awake and breathing, he wiggled down onto his back for belly rubs.


Good ol’ Roux. (Although, did you have to have the nose THAT close to me when you checked me out?! I suppose you did, but YEESH!)

Just Like Nixon

The person I personally refer to as Joey the Rat, Pope Ben-a-Nazi XVI, announced his resignation today. A review of his greatest hits is at the link above.

Interesting (on many levels) that his resignation letter is addressed, not once, but twice to “Dear Brothers,” with nary a mention to, oh I don’t know, all those nuns and the 51% of humanity which is of the female persuasion from whence those nuns come.

Meanwhile in Ireland, Joey’s church created a gigantic, stinko mess (speaking of its attitude towards and treatment of women) and it has now slunk off and left it up to the Irish state to take care of it. Not that they will take care of it, but it’s defaulting to them anyway.

What a legacy. Member of the Hitler Jugend (“No! I was forced to join!”); Luftwaffe auxiliary who helped load AA guns and set tank traps (“No! I was forced to pull the trigger!”); to the massive world-wide coverup of generations of sexual abuse by the clergy (“No! Those priests loved those children!”); to decades of gay-bashing (“No! Those people don’t deserve equality ‘cause they’re endangering humanity!”); to his embrace and pardoning from excommunication a Holocaust denier (“No! I was just re-integrating the Society of St. Pius X into the church!”) … well, it was just as fabulous as his red Prada shoes.

Yeesh.

It's Richard

Researchers in England confirmed this morning that the skeleton found underneath a Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, last Plantagenet king and the last king of the country to fall in battle.

“There were cheers when Richard Buckley, lead archaeologist on the hunt for the king’s body, finally announced that the university team was convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” that it had found the last Plantagenet king, bent by scoliosis of the spine, and twisted further to fit into a hastily dug hole in Grey Friars church, which was slightly too small to hold his body.”

—The Guardian UK

I’ve long been fascinated by Richard and the War of the Roses; Shakespeare’s smear job/propaganda piece Richard III is my favorite of all the Bard’s work. I also loved the Ian McKellen cinema version of the play from 1995, which set the play in a 1930s fascist setting.

But it was Sharon Kay Penman’s fictional alternative, The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III that captured my attention when it came out. It’s a portrait of the events, including the princes in the tower, done from Richard’s perspective, showing the perfidy of Henry Tudor and the Stanleys.

But now we have the real skeleton of the Last Plantagenet, curved spine and all and it’s a starting point towards separating reality from myth and truth from Tudor propaganda. Fascinating stuff.

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

[Meanwhile, his gay brothers and sisters tap their feet, waiting impatiently. Well, then, hurry it up already!]

Barack Obama

The political consequences of academic paywalls

“The suicide of Aaron Swartz, the activist committed to making scholarly research accessible to everyone, has renewed debate about the ethics of academic publishing. Under the current system, academic research is housed in scholarly databases, which charge as much as $50 per article to those without a university affiliation. The only people who profit from this system are academic publishers. Scholars receive no money from the sale of their articles, and are marginalized by a public who cannot afford to read their work. Ordinary people are denied access to information and prohibited from engaging in scholarly debate.”

Excellent reporting from Dr. Sarah Kendzior on Aljazeera.com.

If 6,000 white male children and young adults were being murdered every year in the U. S, as is the case among African-American males, do you think we would see any hesitation in taking serious actions to restrict the availability of guns?

Jim Horn

(My aside: It’s a salient point, but my reply is, sadly, no. You are dealing with people who truly believe that collateral damage (be it in Vietnam/Iraq/etc., or Newtown) is an acceptable price that must be paid for, in the case of the former, America being #1 (whatever that means), and in the case of the latter, the “Second Amendment” being the most important part of the Constitution. I.e., the Tree of Liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of six-year-olds.

Source: schoolsmatter.info

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