Indiana Oh Indiana

Many people, when they hear The Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss, have mental images of dashing men in blazing red velvet uniforms with waxed moustaches and gold epaulets and their ladies in swirling hoopskirts, bouncing curls and ribbons gliding around sumptuous ballrooms ablaze with gilded mirrors and candlelight. I, however, still picture the stark white rockets and space shuttles of the 1968 Kubrick film, 2001, A Space Odyssey in a different kind of stark elegance, but the images still dance.  JB

Chapter 11 Freshmen Fake Book Reports and Other Foibles

When I was a student in high school, girls had carried around tattered old copies of books like GONE WITH THE WIND, and PEYTON PLACE. During my first year of teaching, more than half of the girls in the school carried, among their other books, copies of Erich Segal’s wildly, if mysteriously, popular LOVE STORY, a sentimental Romeo and Juliet kind of tragedy of surprising brevity, that became a best seller and stayed on the charts for way too long.  I read it myself just so that I could discuss it intelligently, if not enthusiastically, with the girls in my classes.  Reading tastes for boys had not changed much since my days in high school. MAD MAGAZINE was still at the top of their list of “cool” reading material with CRACKED coming in a close second.  These were tough competition for the selections I was assigning my freshmen, books like, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, 1984, ROBINSON CRUSOE, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, JUNGLE BOOK, THE PEARL, ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL, TREASURE ISLAND, THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, LITTLE WOMEN, and NIGHT (Wiesel).  Students also had to read at least two other books of their own choice, submitting written reports on them by the end of the term. To get my freshmen thinking about those extra book possibilities, I compiled a list of titles, most of which had not been made into films, with brief summaries of the stories.  Two of those titles and summaries I fabricated completely, curious to see if anyone might try to do a report on a book that didn’t even exist.  Freshmen are experts at creating more baloney than Alaska creates snow, so it was a matter of interest to see what might happen.

FIRST BASE, SECOND BASE I said was about a boy named Carl from the slums of New York’s lower East Side, who became a great player for the Yankees, despite grinding poverty and childhood illness.  The other phony book was ROSES AND THORNS, the story of an Irish girl named Fiona, who rose from foster care to become, with her husband’s help, a great nurse and advocate of child care.  I added the comment that I had not read those two particular books. Two boys turned in reports on FIRST BASE, SECOND BASE, padded with the most creative but ridiculous rubbish.  Three girls submitted their reports on ROSES AND THORNS, providing even more extraneous nonsense than the boys had been able to invent, including some silly stuff about the author.  All this showed me that students could become great opportunists when given the chance, especially if it meant not having to do a lot of extra work.  It was also a mirror image of what I had been as a high school freshman.  It made me begin to think that maybe sneaky people could make decent teachers for high school kids.

Debbie Brown, who had already plagiarized Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most famous poem, asked me one afternoon if she could do a report on a book called CANDY, and thinking she had said CANDIDE, I gave her the OK.  At the time, I thought that Voltaire’s satire might be a bit much for Debbie to digest, but it was a relatively short book, so I thought that if she had any problems with it, she could come to me for help. I thought no more about it until a week later, when she turned in her written report on CANDY, a piece of embarrassingly vile pornography about a prostitute, the namesake of the novel.  In her paper Debbie revealed details that would make a sailor blush and that made me begin to worry that if her parents found out that I had approved such a piece of trash as reading material for a freshman (or anyone else), I could soon expect a message over the P.A. saying, “Will Mr. Bolinger report to the main office.  Please clean out your desk first.” As it turned out, I graded the report, adding a note that I had misunderstood the title she had originally given to me.  Nothing further was ever said about it, but I continued to imagine a book with a partially clad prostitute on the cover at the Brown house, placed tastefully on a coffee table next to copies of BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS.

I encouraged all my students to read, wanting them to enjoy reading as much as I did.  Also, I tried to promote the school’s amazing theatrical productions by giving extra credit to those who tried out for productions and were chosen, or who helped out by being on stage crew.  In high school I had been in only one play, a very weak production of OUR TOWN that would have made Thornton Wilder commit suicide right there in the theater.  I played the drunk church organist in Grover’s Corners.  The only other play I remember my high school producing was HILLBILLY WEDDIN’.  By amazing contrast, Morton High School, where I was a teacher, did massive and high quality productions of musicals like CARNIVAL, CAROUSEL, OLIVER, and OKLAHOMA.  Other plays were done equally well like, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, and even ROMEO AND JULIET.  Those shows always made me feel proud to be a teacher in that school.

The choral department had standards just as high and did concerts at Christmas and in the spring yearly that would have impressed the most discerning tastes.  I never missed a concert or play all the years I taught at MHS and always had goose bumps while sitting in the audience watching especially those kids I thought would surely end up on AMERICA’S MOST WANTED list.  Being at those performances gave me a deeper perspective on what our students could do and how important something could be to them.  This of course included their performances on basketball courts, wrestling mats, soccer, baseball, football fields, and at swim meets.  It meant so much to them that their parents and teachers were there to cheer them on, even if they didn’t always say so.

A conflict arose between me and a Baptist minister in the community, whose flock included a girl named Roberta in my third period English I class. At the time, my freshmen were reading ROMEO & JULIET, a play filled with some of the most glowing and sumptuous poetry in our language. In class we did readings, sometimes making audio tape recordings of scenes that included battle sound effects with cafeteria butter knives as swords.  Those were the scenes the boys seemed to enjoy most, but girls appreciated the figurative language, and the innocence of the two lovers, something already familiar to some of those girls.  Maureen Eason, for example, sat in the back of the room weeping over some of the lines from the first balcony scene, when Juliet was testing Romeo’s sincerity at his swearing his love for her by the moon, “That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops” and Juliet’s response, “Oh swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” Then when Romeo asks what he should swear by, Juliet answers, “Do not swear at all, or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry.”  There was little Maureen in the back row, shedding tears over those lines.  Many more tears came from other girls at the play’s sad conclusion, tears I would never have expected from freshmen.

In front of me right now is an old copy of the text we used that spring of 1970.  Signatures, in the inside cover, of students who used the book over the years are still in the “rented to” column next to signatures of teachers, several of whom have since died, who used the same book in their freshman English classes. The names Norman, Dana, Brenda, Jeff, Pam, Bobby, Lisa, Gretchen, and Robert are still there, a roster of some of those who held the book in their hands, some loving it, some hating it, some reading it just to get by.  I don’t know why, but I feel as moved seeing that little history in those signatures on that page as I ever was by the play itself. I suppose it’s a little like looking at an old family album and remembering good things again.

Half way through our study of that play in the spring of that year, I received an official-looking letter from Pastor Jeffry Bowman of the First Baptist Church. The communication was an admonition against my teaching the play, ROMEO & JULIET. The pastor had heard from some of his parishioners that the play was being taught. His contention was that his church did not believe in or condone “sexual intercourse before marriage.”

My first thought was that there must be another play called ROMEO & JULIET about which I knew nothing.  All my attempts to contact Pastor Bowman by telephone having been thwarted by his secretary, I finally wrote a letter to say that the play about which he had written in his letter was definitely not the play we were reading in class and that ours was the one by William Shakespeare, in which there was no “sex before marriage,” except an innocently affectionate kiss in the balcony scene.  I never heard back from him on the subject. Weeks later, however, I received another letter from Pastor Bowman, again criticizing my choice of literature, this time for my sophomore English class, which was then reading 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke, a book in which the pastor claimed man’s evolution from apes was being taught.  My letters of reassurance that evolution was not being taught at all never received a response.  It was later learned that the pastor had also, without reason, been grandstanding from his pulpit about his righteous diatribe against “the sinful teachings in our public schools.”  I also found out that another English teacher had received a letter from the same pastor, criticizing her teaching of Emily Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS, another to a teacher using Mark Twain’s PUDDINHEAD WILSON, and to a biology teacher for even using the word “evolve” in his classroom lectures.

Had Pastor Bowman not been an absolute buffoon, we teachers might have felt intellectually bullied or educationally terrorized, but in order for his threats to have carried any weight, the “bully” in question would have needed to possess intellect or education, both of which were utterly absent from his list of alleged virtues.

Despite these minor verbal scuffles, teaching went on its way with the support of almost all parents and cooperative efforts of most students.  Johnny Madison’s father had a long talk with him on the subject of the love he and his wife had for their son. The talk evidently included some reference to the genuine concern of his English teacher.  Whatever was said in that talk seemed to have a positive effect on Johnny’s work in my class, not all at once, but gradually over the rest of that term.  Even though he had failed English I and would have to take it again in summer school, Johnny would be receiving a credit for English II and become one of my most capable writers.  Another triumph of second semester was that though Debbie Brown’s poems continued to be the most awful tripe I had ever read,  there was no more plagiarism.  That poetry was absolutely hers.

Available at Amazon.com as a paperback and at Barnes & Noble…..The Amazon Kindle edition is under my first edition’s title of Come September, Journey of a High School Teacher.  JB

In our time, being nonpolitical is very difficult, if not impossible. The more I observe the very emotional stands people take for their chosen candidates, the more I’m convinced that most or all of us believe pretty much what we want or need to believe, regardless of pesky facts that so often get in the way. Most of us are quite skilled at choosing facts that suit us and discarding those that don’t and giving more weight to the ones that condone what we already think is true. We are, of course, steered by our fundamental values and ideologies based upon a compendium of what we see as our best selves. Few among us want to be horrible people unless there is a psychosis involved. We like to see ourselves as ethical beings, not cheats or dishonest thugs taking advantage of underdogs. Anything that triggers the adrenalin rush of righteous indignation feels good, especially when that rush is shared by others. This is also the basis of mob rule, which can come about suddenly even among the most civilized folks through sheer anger and disappointment.

Our political parties have lost all sense of compromise, to the extent that issues seem absolutely black and white (no racial overtones intended, though such overtones may certainly be included in the wider view of where we are as a nation). There seem to be no areas of give and take. Thanks to mostly unbridled public opinion via Twitter, Facebook, radio talk shows, and television coverage tainted by the most shameless self-interest, we find that those who steer clear of Hillary Clinton do so not from simple aversion but from an abhorrence and abomination just this side of exorcism. Those who are not fans of Donald Trump are generally volcanoes of loathing for him not unlike the intense revulsion for plagues and tsunamis. There is no gray area anymore, because the person who is not our choice is automatically a pariah about whom any horror story of scandal and corruption is what we are predisposed and expected to believe, because it supports our comfort zones, where our own candidates can then bask safely in the glow of heroism against everything that has been annoying the hell out of us about government.

I long to see a middle ground from where we voters can see with cooler heads the good and bad on both sides with a willingness to accept the fact that no candidate is all good or all bad. There are no haloes in politics. There are sometimes duplicitous, deal-making and endless conniving to get things done for the greater good, despite even the most comatose or constipated congress. Even Abraham Lincoln and FDR were not above political shenanigans from time to time. No saint could ever survive or be an effective or realistic president, but we need at times to stand back without our rose-colored glasses to judge those qualities in a candidate that represent the ability to bring about change and also to honor some level of stability at the same time he or she is fighting the hotheads and deadweight in Washington so that it doesn’t become a mere wax museum.

Don’t believe everything you hear about any candidate just because you want to. Don’t be afraid to fact-check and then to check the fact-checkers. This election of 2016 for the White House may prove to be the most important in the lifetimes of us all, and I believe it’s still important and very American to be open to all reasonable ideas from candidates on all sides without the need to vilify or crucify an opposing candidate just to make the other look good. Name calling is for unruly kids, not for potential leaders of the Western World, and that goes for all candidates and their followers. We’re all in this together and shouldn’t be fighting one another to cloud issues the resolutions to which may help us to be a better nation now and for our children.   JB

Two weeks before Donald Trump entered the presidential race, Ann Coulter’s book Adios America was issued in bookstores nationwide. The contents of the book represent a level of fear-mongering not attempted since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Trumpster called it “a great read,” though I don’t know if his unsavory and unfair use of the label “rapists” for Mexicans came from Ms. Coulter’s copious and colorful synonyms for the word that she used in her book. Like Bill O’Reilly of Fox News (faux news), Ann Coulter likes to stir the pot, turning gullible and already angry Americans into forces of mob mentality akin to those carrying torches in Frankenstein movies.

With little to no dependence upon facts and statistics, Ms. Coulter careens her way around every cornerstone of decency, compassion, and fairness to demonize immigrants and would probably sell tickets to the tarring and feathering of the illegal ones. She even suggests that in a few years we will all have to move to Canada (becoming immigrants too?) to escape the raping.

 Ann Coulter is, at least to me, just a skinny Rush Limbaugh with long hair. She is, like Limbaugh, a sensationalist whose blowhard style of bullying and decimating her liberal adversaries is like the shameless tactics of tabloid rags that entertain or frighten the uniformed and simply embarrass the well-read. She is the National Enquirer of pop culture, but there are too many disconnected folks, already furious with the government, who actually take her seriously, as though she were The Washington Post or The New York Times.

There is perhaps no better peddler of panic to be found anywhere else except perhaps in the Trumpster himself. The problem is that her followers see her as sagacious, when she is really nearer to being seditious in her going against every image and value we have left of America as a nation that welcomes the tired and poor, a country founded upon diversity and equal opportunity. Perhaps I’m being puerile when I admit that I have a satisfying mental picture from a favorite childhood movie that I summon whenever I hear or read Ann Coulter. The image is that of someone dropping a house on her.   JB

I have a profound feeling that diatribes against Hillary Clinton have nothing really to do with Benghazi or the e-mail blunders (mistakes made also by others before her). Had an intelligent Republican (Is that an oxymoron nowadays?) done the same things, the mistakes would swiftly have been swept under the nearest rug followed by surprised expressions of dismay when asked to explain them. “What? That never happened.”

Since everyone else seems to be going on “gut feelings” in this election (i.e. the astonishing and irrational adoration for Donald Trump), I have to say that Hillary’s weakest point is that she is not a man. That’s public opinion, not mine. We have been a racist nation since the Civil War and a misogynistic one since before women got the vote. The deep resentment has never left some peoples’ psyches, because they feel those rights for Blacks and women are entitlements they should never have had in a male-dominated society that still snickers at the idea of a woman, however brilliant, experienced, and capable, could ever be Commander in Chief. The jokes still come too easily about her choice of eye make-up being more important than an international conference.  Colossally stupid remarks of misogynistic tone, however, don’t hide the fear in many faces of reactionary men (and even some women) who don’t want change to make progress that may be a threat to their happy years of napping in the comfy hammock of predictable  political outcomes, based solely upon what goes back to the 1600’s.

Many hyper-traditional males and females in government and in our nation see Hillary as a person of strength and defiance. That’s pretty scary stuff. They see her as an “uppity female” the way they saw Barak Obama as an uppity black man (I’m deleting the very ignorant other term left over from The Civil War and the aftermath of Carpetbaggers). I heard those comments from people I thought knew better, but I’ve learned that there are no limits to the fabricated tales of monumental hate and fear that come from our country  turning a new corner to see something better for more people and some folks feeling left behind in a fading historical perspective that no longer works as well as it used to.

Nothing thus far in this election should have been a huge surprise to anyone. I have to remember that in my lifetime there were still diners in the South that refused to serve Blacks and wouldn’t even allow them to use drinking fountains hatefully and stupidly labeled “Whites Only.” The rest of the world has been watching us ever since, but there are still pockets of backward and unlettered people who defiantly refuse to acknowledge  people of darker skin color, and that includes accepting even black college professors, successful business men and women, not just the punks and gang bangers, who come in all colors anyway. The Rosa Parks battle was supposed to have ended sixty years ago, but there are still white folks, who feel threatened and angry by any success of citizens who happen to be black.

The America that frightens me is the one whose  voice comes from gullible people, who believe exactly what they want to believe. The number would probably terrify most of us.

I read on Facebook this morning a comment begging people not to buy Hillary’s hype. Should I buy Donald Trump’s instead? Every election has hype, but I want someone in the White House whom I won’t be embarrassed to call The Leader of the Western World, someone who knows the shenanigans of Washington first-hand and can get things done through savvy moves and sheer intelligence beyond  name-calling or closing a big deal for a golf course or is disinclined to share any of his tax returns. One of the big positive comments about Trump is that “He speaks his mind.” I’ve heard that a thousand times. By that logic, my Uncle Harvey who has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home blurting out anything that pops into his head to the occasional amusement of those around him, could be President, because he’s “honest and unfiltered.” Will Uncle Harvey withhold his tax returns too? Just saying.

Bernie Sanders was my first choice, because I believe he is the most honest, compassionate, energetic runner in this election. My second choice will be Hillary, not because she is my favorite person in America, but she knows what she’s doing on the world stage, which for the Trumpster seems to be nothing more than a puppet theater of Grand Guignol proportions. The Punch and Judy show is over now. I want someone I can take seriously in all aspects of government.    JB

The usual meaning of the phrase “over the hill” is in reference to a person’s having passed his or her prime. It is an expression of at least mild derision with an overtone of dismissal after one has reached life’s zenith of success and productivity. However, the words have a much different and more personal significance to me. They take me back to the first twelve years of my life and the times my family and I paid visits to my mother’s favorite cousin, Jean Moore.

It was always summer when Dad, Mom, my younger siblings David and Connie, and I would pack our swimwear and beach towels, heading for Miller Beach in Northern Indiana’s Lake County. Jean, her husband Clyde, their children Jim, Judy and Mike, along with Clyde’s father Sam, lived on Lake Michigan in a cedar shingled house that was only steps away from a huge sand dune separating them from the beach and lake on the other side. We kids, with our parents, would scale the dune like intrepid explorers on those warm summer days, sliding back two steps for every three we attempted, carrying picnic baskets, a cooler of iced tea, our colorful beach towels and blankets and beach balls up to the crest of the hill where the air changed suddenly to a breezy coolness, even on the hottest days.

The fragrance of the water and sand was so invigorating during our easier trek down the other side of the dune to the beautiful white sand ,where our parents would spread out beach blankets with umbrellas, while we kids would head straight for the lake and inch our way into the clear water from icebergs melted eons before even our parents were born. It was the most wonderful part of what summer provided, besides the three-month parole from Warren G. Harding Elementary School.

When evening came, we always built a fire on the beach, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows while watching the sun disappear over what we kids imagined was the distant Illinois border, shadows and light flickering across our faces as the flames crackled, scenting the air with wood smoke. The climb up the hill again was the finale to our time outdoors as we saw lights of surrounding houses. Then we kids would play Monopoly or Old Maid at Jean and Clyde’s house, drinking Kool-Aid and eating popcorn while the adults droned on about politics, sports, and fashion.

So the term “over the hill” summons for me those sensory recollections of a lovely part of childhood, and the make-believe mountain that, after a climb, would take us over the top into a kind of paradise, where cool breezes and shimmering water gave us a summer idyll that would remain among the happiest memories of being so young.   JB

My sister Connie lived in a very private world, usually keeping people, even those closest to her, at a respectful distance, not because she didn’t love them, but rather because she felt that any problems she might be carrying should never weigh down those around her, and opening those locked doors meant releasing pain she did not want to share with others even if it signified receiving the regard and healing that those around her often wanted so much to give her.  Part of this, of course, was based upon Connie’s fierce pride in her own independence, but part came also from her staunch personal resolution never to wound anyone with her own burdens.

The place where my sister found peace, beauty, and healing was in music.  That is where the material world dissolved for her through seeing new harmonies and breathtaking melodies.  Anyone who ever found the real Connie discovered her there, where musical invention came from her speaking to God and from God’s responses through Connie’s heart and down through her fingers at the keyboard.

My sister had a short temper and could, with little provocation, verbally julienne someone like a cat shredding window drapes.  But, she also had a wonderful sense of humor, a generous heart, and a faith in God not often shaken, even by the enormous trials she faced.

I remember holding my sister in the little pink blanket used to bring her home from the hospital after her birth.  I was seven years old.  We became over time each other’s chief promoter and protector, and now that I will miss her, I am thankful for the fifty-eight years of memories we shared together.  Thank God for Connie Lynn.

Shortly before she died, Connie gave me a copy of the poem “On Playing a Church Piano,” which she said expressed perfectly what she felt each time she sat at the keyboard in that place.

On Playing a Church Piano

It’s something about the darkness of the place, when I relax a moment to decide what makes this work so pleasing; is it the thrill of lights fixed on the tall bronze cross, or perhaps the colored figures in the glass?  But then the stack of staves upon the stand cries out for study, and my fingers arch again and dance, though not gracefully at first — more like cautious children avoiding creaky boards. Yet hidden strings in the wood awake and sing –and the dark, cool room seems full.  And then I realize:  It is.

As a former school teacher, I find that as I age, I see behind me a panorama of those who are gone now, those whom I have loved and those who were A+ human beings among friends, former students, and family and who in life’s grand record book are now sadly absent. Though it has been five years since my sister’s death, I sometimes still have a fleeting urge to pick up the phone for a chat with Connie Lynn and to hear her laughter again.  JB

Connie with our maternal grandparents, June, 1978

I have written other commentaries about my alarm concerning the number of new pharmaceutical drugs flooding the market and their prevalence on television as commercials every few minutes. The FDA approves a staggering number of new medications almost daily as we Americans are lulled dreamily into accepting a blur of new names which no one can possibly remember.  We are so accustomed to hearing about new ones in a quiet parade of silly names that we hardly blink an eye during the hundreds of new commercials that quietly slip into our collective subconscious mind.

There is usually some kind of harmless, lilting music in the background humming happily along as the characters, often elderly folks in euphoric family locale with their grandchildren, demonstrating an almost impossible ideal of the perfect life, filled with laughter, and bucolic scenes as those folks smile through the list of terrifying side-effects that accompany most or all of these drugs, side-effects that are often much worse than the original ailment itself.

I’ve compiled a list of the names of the new drugs that I find most amusing in terms of the effort it must have taken to create those names. I picture late night meetings by physicians, ad men and women, legal teams, and empty gin bottles littering the office floor at two in the morning, when everyone really wants just to go home as a chorus of “Yeah, that sounds good” resounds as a name is finally accepted. Here is a brief list of ones with the ailments they are supposed to alleviate and that, for one reason or another, made me smile in imagining the awful struggle to keep up with finding labels for the deluge of new pharmaceuticals overwhelming us Americans.

Abilify……….antipsychotic

Brilinta………blood thinner

Eliquis……….blood thinner

Dulera………..depression, pain, asthma

Epidno……….acne

Farriga……….diabetes

Jublia…………toenail fungus

Latuda………..antipsychotic        This is my favorite and brings a vision of a little girl with a saucy attitude :    

Lovaza………..constipation

Myrbetrig……overactive bladder

Raptiva……….psoriasis

Spiriva………..bronchospasm (bronchial issue or something in a corral?)

Vaniqua………hair removal

Zostavax……..Shingles preventative

Imagine trying to keep up with creating a fresh supply of names. No wonder the names are getting sillier and sillier as they submerge our ability even to process the number of them as they appear with astonishing frequency (almost every seven minutes), especially on evening television programs. Even more disturbing is the almost cavalier way in which a disembodied voice near the end of each commercial lists the grisly side-effects, read with calm in a vision of flowers, laughing grandkids, and warm, fuzzy music. Either we are becoming joyfully numbed to the scary innuendo of such messages, or there is a gigantic amount of money being made in foisting off all these panaceas upon the American public. Now which of those two explanations do you, the reader, think is the more likely and more accurate?    John Bolinger

English, along with its dialects, is a language developed and nurtured over many centuries. It is a standard used for clarity in everything from law to poetry. It is certainly not the only language, but for anyone to call Standard English racist descends from some social and moral decrepitude that smacks of laziness, envy, and some level of self-imposed ignorance. Standard English is the conventional templet that provides the benchmark or measure for clear communication. It is for those who wish to share basic verbal communion in The United States, Great Britain and other places where the language and grammar are used as a yardstick of verbal exchange through speaking, reading, and writing it in a shared effort to make thoughts understood by all who have taken the time and effort to study and learn it. It doesn’t mean one has to read and learn Chaucer or Shakespeare, but it does mean putting forth the effort to use standard basic rules of grammar and communication that will work everywhere from Seattle to Little Rock. All races have their own idioms as well, but they are not standard in business and law. That’s just the way it is.

Frankly, someone who plays the race card for language itself is indulging in the worst case of sour grapes I can imagine. The study of Standard English is open to all who wish to learn and use it. It would seem that anyone who wishes to rise socially or at least to participate in a society shared by others would take advantage of the most important key to convivial communication with the same basic rules and expectations anywhere it is taught and studied. Does anyone call Ebonics or other forms of dialect “racist?” Someone traveling to a foreign country doesn’t call the language there (i.e. French, Spanish, German) racist just because he or she is having trouble learning it. The choice to learn a language well is open to anyone who wishes to put forth the effort required. That knowledge is an arsenal against the poverty, ignorance, and bitterness that come from the shadow of not understanding a standard language in one’s own country, wherever that may be.

Language is fundamental to prospering in any nation. English is not an easy language to learn, but as soon as someone begins fishing for excuses not to endure the labor of knowing and using English (or any other language), he is doomed to a life of blaming others for his own indolence and sloth. Excuses and accusations will not change the landscape of that person’s life, nor that of the nation itself. One part of the American system, for better or worse, is that anyone may choose to wallow in his own ignorance and make it appear as though it’s always someone else’s fault, but if one looks at history, he can see so many examples of those from all races who rose from poverty and prejudice (which exists on both sides of that coin) by resolve and hard work without spending all their time and energy blaming others for their own lack of ambition and toil, as well as their choice not to embrace our best mode of universal communication, which is language itself. Standard language usage is intended to bring people together in something shared, not to separate people as if language were some impossible code to break in an elitist club.

History is filled with ugly and irreparable error and greed of one race against others, but the tools for reparation are here now for everyone to use. It is a choice to learn or not to learn the standard language of one’s own country, but choosing not to learn it and blaming history as an excuse is simply not reasonable. Using standard communication through speaking and writing is essential. Language is power, and only the individual can choose to take advantage of that power…but no one ever said it would be easy.   My question to those who are against keeping a set of language standards is what do you see as a solution? Shall we scrap standard language and start over or simply have hundreds of mini-forms of English to confuse even further the issue of communication?  JB

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1849)

During junior year in high school I recall the passionate introduction by our wonderful English teacher, Mrs. Bea Johnson, to Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. It was 1963, and the digital age was yet only a glimmer of what it is in 2016, but the message was immediately a profound one for me, a gangly teenager with rather low self-esteem, and with social skills that made Silas Marner look gregarious. It wasn’t that Thoreau was a hermit. He was in his Walden years less than two miles from the City of Concord, Massachusetts, and his ten by fifteen-foot cabin occasionally accommodated as many as thirty guests at once. His solitude was by choice and more about attaining some sort of perspective and balance in an ever busier and noisier world that, by then, had trains and the telegraph.

Walden Pond was a place where Thoreau was better able to connect with nature and his own thoughts without what at that time seemed to him a bombardment of noise and busyness of less than profound importance to his own psyche. I wonder what he would think of the constant infringements today upon humanity via cellphones, endless texting, neon signs, the barrage of media messages every few moments urging us to purchase cars, medications, and electronic devices with equal zeal, not to mention the never-ending coverage of natural disasters, human stories about crime, war, massacres and mudslinging in politics around the globe. In this deluge of information (requested or not) and entertainment of the modern age, we have developed numbing devices in our brains that separate quickly the TV images of toilet paper commercials from the news features about beheadings of American journalists by Isis. It’s how we survive the mountains of messages thrown at us without ceasing.

At least subliminally, we have evolved a kind of off-switch without which our minds would almost certainly go into overdrive. This unconscious but perhaps necessary mode of protective desensitizing has come about by our seeing televised images almost daily (sometimes hourly) of everything from graphic ravages of war to hundreds of people being swept away by tsunamis, images with which the sensitive mind cannot hope to deal, especially in such frequency.

Thoreau, if he were somehow transported to our time, could easily go mad, which makes me think further about how much more technology will intrude upon and perhaps stifle our humanity over the next century. Is there a limit to the illusions about technology’s solving all our problems and that we are more in control through electronics, when technology is controlling us instead? The word “upgrade” has become a term of almost religious reverence in our time, and many of us leap without question at every new device or “improvement” that insists it will be leaving us behind if we don’t install it right away. Everything seems to be about being further “connected” in a world where many teenagers are becoming almost android in their devotion and attachment to devices like cellphones and actions like texting, reducing our language to its lowest terms, so that at last we seem to be more disconnected than we can imagine. The delusion of being constantly “tuned in” and forever in contact is already, I believe, having negative effects upon personal growth, social skills, and contemplative thought. We all need to be asking the cost, not in dollars but in terms of what being connected really means, and if there are limits to human beings becoming automatons themselves through a seemingly eternal flood of external stimuli that can often inform but also smother the creativity that is such a vital part of being human.

The “marrow of life” to which Thoreau referred is not necessarily to be found through technology alone. Other writers after Thoreau, like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein have shown other imagined future scenarios through their fiction, based upon trends current to their times and upon human nature itself, which is at last something that cannot be “plugged in” or use batteries. A balance must be found between the benefits of technology and the most profound and timeless meanings of what it is to be human in the first place.    John Bolinger    4/20/16