Arkansawyer

Here’s our last installment, and here’s today’s, in two parts:

But for math the ACCUPLACER says “you cannot go to college until you learn multiplication tables” – period. It is no wonder that many 19-year olds walk out and say “f*ck that!” and give up on college. They found their way to college, found their way through getting financial aid, got registered, arranged transportation, found the cafeteria, and yet, they are told that “college is not for them” by a f*cking computer program. And a computer program for which there is no negotiation – the advisors will never override the program – the student simply needs to go home and spend the rest of their life as an unskilled worker working for low wages.

This seems so unfair. I wish pundits would get more pissed about this as “fair access” / “social justice”.

Me, too. It’s lonely out here. And following on the heels of this:

I suggest a simple fix in the short-term and then some deeper analysis to fine-tune things.

His argument is specific to local conditions, but worth reading nonetheless.

Bonus link: Bob Moses (who is a one of my personal heros) and The Algebra Project.

Two quotes from this short article:

But where Bloch differed from other Marxists was in his insistence that it was not possible to simply dismiss religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature in a hostile world” without recognising that the sigh contained the pre-illumination of a different and better world.

and

The resurrection of God presents a challenge to those such as Dawkins and Hitchens because they continue to perceive religion as an opiate which is handed out by states and their tame priests and mullahs in order to keep people quiet, rather than as a home-grown product consumed by people in order to dull the pain not only of global economic disadvantage but also of a deep, yet unidentifiable sense of loss.

Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity has been waiting its turn on my shelf for some time now. I think it just got bumped up in line.

(via CAUTE)

Shuffling off this digital coil

If I knew the author approved of embedding, you’d be seeing it without clicking.

(Note: Why did I leave this in draft form for eight months?)

What a sad paragraph!

The questions we ask one another are so critically important. If you and I ask each other what we believe, we will get into talking about very heady stuff. We will put forth our beliefs and then support them with evidence and argument. All too often we will end up arguing. I know. I have done more than my share.

I understand the rhetorical trick involved, balancing this paragraph against the next:

However, when we ask one another what we truly love, what we truly value, what we care about more than anything else in life, something amazing happens. We don’t argue. We listen. We connect. We discover that we love and want the same things. We care about one another. We want honesty, depth, and intimacy in our relationships. We want enduring friendships.

Two paragraphs, setting two ideas into opposition, in this case head against heart, the sad old duality that manufactures fractured lives. Where does it come from? Where does it go?

It comes from disagreement–not disagreement itself, but that it exists where one might hope it did not, where the machinery with which to deal with it is absent or in disrepair–and it ends in despair.

Let’s learn instead how to go on in the face of disagreement, how to find the things on which we do agree, how to make an argument rather than have an argument, how to not hurt each other when we do disagree. Let’s learn instead to be, as Philip Larkin says of words spoken while lying in bed, “At once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.”

We are a people with a purpose: To Go to Hell, and Empty it.

So I have friends who wonder what an atheist gets from church, particularly from the old symbols in which I no longer believe. This is what:

To go to hell and open a community center of safety. To go to hell and dream together. To go to hell and feed the hungry. To go to hell and do something for the children there like open a library, like help their teachers, like go to hell and make it a place of art. To go to hell and start a free health clinic. To go to hell and not just be content to get someone out of there, to save someone from hell, but to stay there all together, one more person, one more party all the time, until in the fullness of time we empty Hell by crowding it out. Relocate to hell, redistribute love within it, reconcile it with Heaven, and heaven with it, transforming both.

This is the hell, and the heaven, in which I believe: The one right in front of our eyes (behind them, too).

A little Easter gift for you: Rev. Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock: “Lamentation” Friday and the Power of Love:

Heloise understood compassion as something more than full identification with another’s pain and sorrow and the internalizing of the most abject, abyssal suffering. For her, compassion was more than subjective feeling, weakness, and devotion. Her compassion maintained a tensile consciousness that combined empathy for another’s pain with sufficient self-possession to be able to offer to someone mired in his own suffering a world beyond pain and helplessness, a world glimpsed in community and companionship—a world that offered, still, the possibilities of love, of friendship.

“America the Beautiful”, known between Quincy and myself as “Oh Beautiful”
“My Ride’s Here”, which didn’t have a name I can think of tonight
“Come As You Are”, which Quincy asked for as “Drenched in Mud”

I’ve sung others, but those over and over (and I never really got tired of them).

Okay, this one really is via Will Shetterly:

Today, says David Brooks, “the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them.” And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference — financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family — are treated as if they were positively un-American.

A quote from an excerpt from Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned To Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. I’ve got the book waiting for me at the public library.

The first one doesn’t have the greatest artwork, but it is funny and it is my life.

The second one (via Will Shetterly Steve Caldwell) is like if Randall Munroe had a degree in theology.

Don’t get your Lincolns confused. Abraham Lincoln: Democrat. Blanche Lincoln: Republican.