Quit Pushing

QUIT PUSHING

 

Alright already, I’m up, I’m up.  Christ, it stinks in here.  Can somebody please get this dog out of my room.  I mean really, this is where I sleep.

“Farfel has four legs too so I’m sure the horses will love having him sleep with them.”

Wrong!  I hate this mutt.  He pissed on my leg, shit in my hay and he barks at anything that moves.  I can barely turn around in here and they have to stick precious Farfel in here too.  Some palace this is.  They should sleep in here and see what a palace it is.

Yeah, open the freakin’ doors and get some fresh air in here.

 

Race day? 

Whoa, wait a minute, Saturday, Saturday is race day.  Today is Sunday pal, I trot a few laps and back to the paddock for lunch with that cute filly with the long face. 

Getting ready for what Derby?  Derby, Schmerby, I never agreed to this.  They said I race on Saturday so I don’t really have to…what, shoes again?  What’s wrong with these?  They feel fine.  

Hey, HEY, easy with the pliers fella.  

How come fucking Farfel doesn’t have to wear shoes? 

Fine, alright, I’m coming.  I know, I know, the saddle, I'm not an idiot..
Easy, wait a minute, WAIT A MINUTE, will you hold on for one second, I told you the third hole on the strap is the one, the fourth one is too TIGHT. 
Jesus, I can’t breathe.  How do you people expect me to race when I can’t breathe.  

Go ahead, walk behind me, just one clean shot - taste my hoof.  

Keep laughing Farfel.   

 

Hmm, the track's a tad muddy.  I think we should go back, I can't run in this.  Hey, are you listening?  I’ve told you a hundred times I don’t like running in the…

…hey Runamuck, they got you running in this slop too, huh.  What’s the good word?

    Same shit, different track.  

I know, you believe this mud.  This whole place is a dump, the food sucks, tiny rooms.  Do they make you sleep with dogs?

  

Hey Runamuck, what ever happened to that fella from Kentucky?

    Oh, you mean Ima Walkin’, with the brown and white face.  Funny bastard. 

 

Remember when he farted in the guy’s face at the loading gate.  Almost knocked him over.  Boy he was funny…ran like a cripple, but funny as hell.

    They timed him with a calendar. 

Buwahahaha.  

    I heard he retired last year.  He’s pulling some wagon in New York with all the other losers.  

    He’s a walkin’ alright, walkin’ twelve hour days for some jackass in a top hat.  And get this, he has to wear a 

    diaper.  Poor bastard.  Remember Mount Up, he was a fast sucker.  Now, he did it right.  

Sure, you win a bunch of races and you retire to Florida.  The guy gets up at noon, roams around all day yuckin’ it up with his buddies, eats whatever the hell he wants and get this, they bring in girls three, four times a week!  

Me?  Another one, two more years then I’m done with this crap.  

Yep, I figure another couple of wins and it’s Florida here I come.

 

Ah, yes, gate #6, my lucky number.  Alright, who do we have today.  What a bunch of losers.  

Is this the best you people can do?  Dog food on four legs.  

Hey Runamuck, look at this beauty – blinkers? C’mon ya big baby, afraid to see me passing your ass?  I’m gonna beat you like a rented mule. 

 

    What’d ya say pal?  You’re gonna beat who like a what?  Furlong where?  Yeah, I got your furlong right here! 

 

Yeah, yeah, meet me in the winner's circle Elmer.

 

Look at this one, another bag a glue in #5.  

C’mon people, some competition please!  

Hmm, he’s little bigger than I thought.  
OK, yep, definitely bigger than I thought.  
Wow, really big.  
Jesus, where’d this guy come from. 

Runamuck, you know this guy? 
Anybody seen this guy before.  
This must be a mistake.  

Hey, I thought this was just for three year olds?  

Well, I’d check this guy’s papers.  Seriously.  

Will you just wait a minute and listen.  There’s no way he’s three, look at the size of him.  

First you make me work on my day off and now this. 

OK, that’s it, I’m done; this guy’s cheating so I’m not racing.  This whole thing is bogus and I’m outta…

…alright put the whip down.  
Just put it down and let’s talk about this. 

Yes, yes, OK, ALRIGHT, I was just kidding, can’t you take a joke.  

Yes, right, I know, I’m in #6, next to Godzilla.  

Look #12 is open, let’s go in there, much more room for me to...

…why not?  

Who’s being fussy?   

What’s the difference, #6, #12.  

If anyone’s being fussy it’s…

…alright I’m going.  

Quit pushing.

Head Lights

There is a shift occurring in the way our children are being educated today.  Over the past several years, more and more online courses are being offered to high school and college students.  In fact, there are school districts around the country who are working hard to make online courses a mandatory component of their high school curriculums.

Since their inception, online courses have seemed like an efficient tool in educating a greater number of students and the arguments for their increased use in middle school, high school and college sound worthwhile.  Computers are part of our daily lives and students should learn to use them proficiently.  The internet, as a tool for research and knowledge has become de rigueur.  Administrators who support the growth of online classes add that they allow for wider educational opportunities to a greater number of students.  For example, the Early English Literature class typically chosen by only a handful of students would likely be cancelled due to lack of interest.  Now, that course can be offered online, providing those few students with educational enrichment they would otherwise not have been exposed to.  Everyone seems ready to add online education to the remarkable list of benefits drawn from perhaps the greatest invention of modern times – the internet.  Not so fast. 

I suspect the real motivation behind this shift to online education is money.  And that blade cuts in two directions - saving school boards and colleges money on teacher salaries and classroom space while still allowing them to collect ever higher taxes and tuition from us parents.  Can you blame them?  In this time of financial uncertainty and mounting deficits from statehouses to our houses, shouldn’t a cost effective way to educate our youth be celebrated?  The answer depends on how you define “educate.”

In 1978 as a college sophomore studying marketing and management, readying myself for what I hoped would be a high paying and successful career in business, I had very little interest or use for literature.  There was compulsory reading -  the Wall Street Journal for school and the New York Daily news for Yankee scores.  Beyond those, I couldn’t tell you if I had ever read a novel on my own outside of a high school classroom.

The next year everything changed.  That’s the year I met Dr. John Daniels and through him, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Dr. Daniels didn’t look like an English professor.  No beard, no tweed coat with suede elbow patches.  He had withering gray hair, a long face of the same color and a bulbous pink nose.  His ever present pipe jutted out of his jaw silently accepting responsibility for the brownish yellow nuggets that passed for teeth.  But when the old man read passages from Melville’s “Billy Budd”, he smiled an inviting smile and the wretched nuggets became invisible.  All I could see on his face was the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning showing his dad how cool his new toy was and begging him to try it too.  And I did try it and I loved it.  The debates over language, the use of words, phrases and their meanings, not a single meaning but many, open to the reader’s interpretation, the development of rich characters and a story by a creative mind that can captivate a reader, the classroom was a thicket of ideas and Professor Daniels the machete creating light.  I saw things I didn’t see before thanks to this ancient hardscrabble English professor.  Dr. Daniels and his classroom forced me to ask myself questions about my future.  I seriously considered a career change to professor of literature.  In the end I didn’t change, but I was never the same.

Suddenly every class I attended seemed different.  Marketing, advertising, philosophy, they all became a thrilling game I couldn’t wait to play in.  Professors and students, new ideas and viewpoints, questions with no answers, many answers.  The realization came that finding the answer isn’t always what education is about.  The goal of education is the exposure to and engagement of ideas and questions that expand our minds, make us think differently and ultimately make us better and more curious human beings.  A lucky few are disciplined and inquisitive enough to educate themselves through reading - Abraham Lincoln comes to mind.  But for most of us, whether in high school or college, the classroom and its confluence of student, teacher and subject shouldn’t be minimized.   

Asking our high school students to sit in front of already overused computers following a silent, static online curriculum, not to mention abstaining from the temptation to plagiarize from thousands of websites in an attempt to provide a quality education misses the most valuable element of education.  It may save some money and allow a few students read Early English Literature on a brightly lit screen, but that’s no education.  

A Place That's Always Safe and Warm

A few days ago, the son of two very dear friends returned home from a tour of duty as an Army nurse stationed in Afganistan. His arrival home, complete with "Welcome Home Captain Davis" signs and tearful hugs from his wife and family was something I have seen on the news many times but never experienced through close friends. When I saw the photo of the soldier hugging his young wife at the airport, a song immediately began playing in my head, Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm."

It wasn't long before I started putting this homecoming together with Dylan's song. But the song is four and a half minutes long and a simple idea became a bigger production.  And as so often happens in life, things that seem impossible suddenly and inexplicably fall into place; each image plucked out of the internet universe by its destined verse.  When it was done I thought that maybe it was a little overdone and indulgent.  Then I thought about where Captain Davis was and what he was doing for the better part of two years and I thought, maybe not.

Big Bang

In 2009, Paul Haggis, the Hollywood screenwriter with credits including such acclaimed films as “Crash” and “Million Dollar Baby” and a devout follower of the Church of Scientology for thirty four years suddenly left the Church.

After reading his story in The New Yorker this week titled “The Apostate”, I realized there could have been many reasons for Haggis to quit the Church.  First, achievement and growth as a Scientologist is directly tied to study or “auditing” which according to the article’s author Lawrence Wright, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Next were the alleged claims of forced child labor in Scientology’s “Sea Org” and the claims of physical abuse from some members.  Then there was the practice of directing its members to “disconnect” from family and loved ones who were considered by the church to be P.T.S. or S.P. (Potential Trouble Sources or Suppressive Persons) as well as the use of polygraph tests on aspiring Scientologists. 

Finally, if those weren’t enough, there was the unauthorized publication of the Church’s sacred scriptures written by the creator of Church and the author of its foundational book “Dianetics”, L. Ron Hubbard.  This one convinced me that Scientology was nothing more than a lunatic cult.

In 1985, the Los Angles Times printed the Church’s secret scriptures – which the Church allows only the highest ranking Scientologists to read because they could “cause severe damage if read by the uninitiated” – and described them as follows:

“A major cause of mankind’s problems began 75 million years ago when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of ninety planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu.”  Overpopulation was a serious problem so Xenu decided to take radical measures and shipped surplus beings to volcanoes on Teegeeack for destruction using H bombs on the volcanoes.  The Times went on to say that “this destroyed the people but freed their spirits called “thetans” which attached themselves to one another in clusters.  These clusters were “trapped in a frozen compound of alcohol and glycol” and were “implanted with the seed of aberrant behavior”.  Finally it said, “when people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves.”

It seemed like there were a host of reasons to choose from in deciding to leave this Church and this lunatic genesis story was certainly at the top of the list.  But Haggis stuck around for twenty four more years.  He didn’t seem to have a problem with a religion based on despots killing excess people and causing spirits to be locked in antifreeze.  It turns out that he quit the Church because of a statement made by one of its California branches.  It seems that the Church’s San Diego office made a public statement of support for California’s Proposition 8 which called for a ban on gay and lesbian marriage.  Haggis asked the Church to renounce Proposition 8 and when it refused – claiming the comments by the San Diego office did not officially speak for the Church of Scientology – Haggis sent them his letter of resignation from the church.  High profile Hollywood celebrities are the heart of the Church of Scientology and when one of them leaves, it creates quite a big bang among Church leadership.

We expect great screenwriters to be creative sorts and you would have to be to believe the genesis story of Scientology wouldn’t you?  He could live with Hubbard’s H bombs in volcanoes on Teegeeack but not with his Church’s support for Proposition 8.  To Haggis, he was asking the Church to take a position on a moral issue not a political one.  His decision to quit was the personification of the highest ethical standards.  Haggis’s actions demonstrated that he had a firm grasp of his moral compass, if not his senses.  There was one fact that made his decision to quit the Church easier; two of Haggis’s daughters are gay. 

Considering the impact Proposition 8 would have on his daughters, tossing away a religion that Haggis had spent thirty four years studying had an air of righteousness. He had reached Scientology’s highest level of achievement – he was an Operating Thetan VII – and had spent over three hundred thousand dollars paying for the courses and audits to achieve that level and yet he threw it all away in a moral act of unselfish love for his children. 

I’m still left with the question of why Haggis and other celebrity Scientologists like Tom Cruise, Anne Archer and John Travolta didn’t run like the wind when they heard the Church’s genesis story.  Aren’t we all sure that if we heard such as story from a religious group that we would prepare strait jackets for all?  Imagine a religion based on a crazy science fiction like Scientology’s, say, a story of an invisible omnipotent spirit being named Elohim who resided in a black void of nothingness before time began who decided to wave his hand and create an infinite universe of fiery hot stars and chemical infused planets. 

Strait jacket anyone?