Our power went out this morning. I believe someone hit a pole as there were sirens soon after, only a few though, so I am assuming no one was hurt. What it again brings forth is how dependent we are on power and also how freeing it is when it doesn't work. One can wash dishes by hand, or sit, or find some light and read. It is relaxing. Of course, now, obviously, it is back on.
We are all aware that mandatory testing in schools is not improving what and how our children learn.
I quote from the first paragraph of a book review in the SF Chronicle today. It is by Rick Ayers.
"I knew a man from a small Mayan village. He said something that has always stayed with me: "When you look out on the ruins of Tenochititlan, with its massive buildings and straight avenues, perhaps you see evidence of a great civilization. What I see is a fascist nightmare, built with the conquest of countless villages like mine." I couldn't help thinking of that phrase again and again as I read Linda Perlstein's "Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade." Perlstein, a former education reporter for the Washington Post, spent a year in a low-income elementary school in Annapolis, Md. Specifically she was looking at the impacts of testing, of No Child Left Behind, and the Maryland School Assessment (MSA) on children's lives. What she found, while not always fascist, was certainly a nightmare."
The article goes on from there.
There is also a book review of Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner. The heading is "Agency is more inept than malignant, reporter says, but it comes to the same thing."
Most of us pay an incredible amount in taxes. Most of us would do so happily if we could see the results first-hand, good roads, schools, parks. When I went to see the movie Becoming Jane, the previews were about vision, the space program as it was in the 60's. Remember! How have we fallen so far from the track and how can we get back on that track? Bush says he will veto a bill that mandates more use of alternative ways to power. Why? We are the nation that when set the task went to the moon, and we did it for the world.
All watched together, involved. I remember how we gathered in the school gym for each launch.
We went to the moon. How can we allow one man's unwillingness to contemplate, reach, or think, hold us back?
It is Sunday, a day to rest, renew, worship in our chosen ways. May something new come forth as the vision of the past renews!
