2012: The End of the World?

Tradition says that the Maya cycle of time will end on December 21, 2012. Should we prepare ourselves for the end of the world?  The Maya calendar is slated to end on that fateful day but does it signal the end of time as we know it? The next presidential election is due to take place in October of that year—could the Maya have had a presentiment? Are the Republicans coming back in November 2012? Argh!! On the other hand, look on the bright side: if the world is coming to an end on December 21, they’ll never get a chance to actually come to power.

Not to put too fine a point on it, ancient Maya tradition also required human sacrifice for the sun to rise every morning so I wouldn’t place much faith in fear-mongers selling 2012 as the end of the world.

All kidding aside, I have been wondering where the deep desire for apocalyptic disaster comes from. The United States is one of the most religious countries in existence; over one-quarter (26.3%) of our population is made up of Christian Evangelicals who believe in the literal truth of the Bible including the visions of the Apocalypse and the coming Rapture; that is a huge number of Americans waiting eagerly to catch the train to the other world.  While Evangelicals make up the the largest single group of believers in the United States, Roman Catholics come in at 22% and mainline Protestants are 16% by comparison. 

However, one could hardly expect them to be spreading the word about ancient Maya writings; the ancient Maya represent the most “pagan” of cultures to the Evangelicals; would they give any credence to such a prediction?

The noise about “the end of time” is coming from some of the New Age believers in our midst. They combine religious beliefs cafeteria style, including whatever catches their fancy and they imbue them with significance. Religion in the United States tends to be an exercise in cherry-picking in any case because the traditional barriers between religious groups do not exist here. There are no ghettos confining the Jews; the RC Church may still preach hell and damnation but as many Catholics admit to having abortions as non-Catholic even though it is a practice strictly forbidden by the church on pain of eternal damnation; there are intermarriages between members of just about every religious group you could imagine. 

Jews come in Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, and atheist varieties. But you will also find “JewBu's” who are those born into Judaism who still have some identification with Judaism yet incorporate many Buddhist practices and beliefs into their lives. 

Atheists and agnostics are allowed to live in peace in this country (as compared to Europe in the days of the Spanish Inquisition) and even to publish obnoxious screeds about all the religious groups surrounding them. (Though if, like Salman Rushdie, you publish something that is perceived as anti-Muslim, you will be in deep trouble.)

Some of the authentically ancient cultures of this hemisphere, the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, Olmec, and Toltec cultures (all of which were virtually eradicated by the Spanish), have been adopted by some of the New Agers, even if they have only a very slender reed on which to fasten that belief. We know next to nothing about Toltec culture, one of the oldest of the pre-Columbian societies, for instance, and scholars argue about the little we do know. Most of the New Age interpretation of these ancient cultures is, in my opinion, nonsense. 

Some followers of the Toltec Way for instance, revere the writings of the late Carlos Castañeda, a 20^th century anthropologist who went into rural Mexico during the 60s and not only studied their ways but became a bit of shaman. His use of the word Toltec, to mean generic sages or "spiritual warriors" contributed to the confusion over the culture. He died in the 1990s, to the shock and disappointment of his followers who could not believe that he would die, especially of something as pedestrian as cancer. His modern followers have taken up and expanded his practices. These gurus have quite a following. 

I actually had a brush with Castañeda through one of his followers. I met NuryAlexander in the elevator at UCLA where she was in the same graduate program I was in. She was very elusive but eventually she told me that she was Castañeda’s daughter; I discovered that many of my classmates knew this fact. This was in the late 1980s and I was quite impressed by this information, particularly when she brought him around to UCLA for lunch on my birthday in December 1989. He gave me an autographed copy of his “Power of Silence.” I never questioned that she was his daughter; after all, who else would have been able to convince the secretive Carlos Castañeda to come with an autographed book to the birthday of a total stranger?

I knew Castañeda’s writings: Everyone of my generation did. I found them curious but had never been drawn into doing drugs beyond briefly sampling marijuana, and was less enraptured of him as were others I knew.

I remember at the time being tickled with the gift but disappointed that I was not invited to attend one of his circles. Nury told me that he said I was too “of the world.” I was not sure what that meant but I chalked it up to my dogged grounded-ness—I have never been in the airy-fairy crowd. Indeed, I studied history because I prefer things that are down to earth.

I lost track of Nury; she was very hard to keep in touch with. Then last week, things took a strange turn: As I was looking into "the Toltec Way," in preparation for this entry in my blog, I Googled “Castañeda”; the first entry that came up was a Wikipedia article about him. I read this passage:

A real girl was brought forward at various public sessions Castaneda and Tiggs and introduced as the Blue Scout, and Tiggs was referenced as her mother. This is strange because that girl was someone named Patricia Partin who had real, known biological parents other than Castaneda and Tiggs.

The remains of Partin, sometimes referred to by Castaneda as Blue Scout, Nury Alexander and/or Claude, were found in 2003 near where her abandoned car had been discovered a few weeks after Castaneda's death in 1998, on the edge of Death Valley. Her remains were in a condition requiring DNA identification, which was made in 2006.[6]             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda

Nury Alexander? Our Nury Alexander, my classmate?  I am still in shock. I was so taken aback that I simply shelved this blog entry as I absorbed this news about my old friend.

I am deeply saddened that Nury was drawn into a cult that led to her untimely death.  I knew her as Castañeda’s daughter; the truth is far weirder: She was his legally adopted daughter but also his lover. We, her classmates and professors at UCLA, did not know her real name nor did we know anything about her real life, neither as Nury Alexander nor as her previous identity, Patricia Partin. Reading all of the articles about her involvement with Castañeda, I feel a sickening sense of shock and disgust. How could have been going on so close to us and we never knew? 

I have never given much thought to the members of my generation who were lost to drugs and cults; bad enough that 58,200 were lost in the jungles of Vietnam. I have known people drawn into the Moonies, and to Scientology, which is regarded as a cult by some people.  Now that I consider the so-called gurus selling the Toltec Way as a mystical ideology, I am angry.  How many more will waste their precious lives while making snake-oil salesmen rich?

Atheists see little difference between organized religions and cults like Castañeda’s but there is a difference. Traditional religions, while they are not without their problems, seek to answer the basic questions people have about life, to preserve a set of traditions and practices, and to sanctify familial relationships. They are not inherently destructive but rather, life-affirming. All cults cannot be lumped in the same pile but among the things they have in common are that they separate families and create a set of practices that isolate them from their families and native cultures.

I always wondered what happened to Nury. In a way, I wish I’d never found out.

Not All Scars Are Visible

Wall of Remembrance, El Salvador

Teresa* showed me a picture of herself in a book about the Salvadoran civil war. It shows a group of guerrillas, seated at a table, their faces concealed behind bandanas. How do you know it’s you, I asked. “Because I was there; I remember my compañeros,” she says. Looking carefully, I recognize her eyebrows.

She stood before my class, a diminutive, vivid figure who looked much younger than her 54 years. Thirty years ago, she was a guerrilla in El Salvador’s civil war. She lost her husband, a guerrilla leader, when a shell tore off his shoulder and part of his face; a brother was killed; and a sister was disappeared. Another sister was kidnapped, gang raped and tortured; she won asylum in Canada but the scars of war did not fade; she now lives in an institution for the mentally ill. All of them were casualties in a war that killed 75,000 of her countrymen and -women. Her voice thickened with emotion as she recounted the losses in her life. 

While my students were touched by her losses and her passion, a few were particularly stricken. One young man spoke of his parents’ escape from Liberia during their civil war. They never speak of the horrors they endured or who they left behind. He said that hearing Teresa tell her story, he understood for the first time the sorrow in his mother’s eyes. Still another sent me a note thanking me for bringing her to the class. 

A student of mixed Dominican and Salvadoran parentage had a similar reaction. His mother came here during the civil war; she will not speak of her ordeal. Yet another student, a Cambodian, talked with Teresa for a long time after class ended, about his parents’ flight from Cambodia after the terrible secret bombing by the United States. These things have never been mentioned in his history classes before, he said. It was as if the whole world was keeping a secret. 

Reviewing her talk a few days later, one young woman asked about Teresa’s anger towards the United States for having funded the dictatorship that killed so many of El Salvador’s people. It was so “over the top,” she said; was she exaggerating? If you were born and have lived your whole life in this country, you might think so. 

United Statesians live in a kind of bubble and feel very put-upon when we incur the resentments of the world. Do we deserve this anger? Does the United States really do things like that? After all, people brave all sorts of terrible trials to come into our country illegally; if we were so bad, would people be dying to come in here?

There are two different issues here: One is U.S. foreign policy and its execution; and the other is the image of wealth and prosperity that we project to the world. 

Most of us barely are aware of what happens within the halls of Congress unless it affects our lives directly. The debates about health care momentarily raise our consciousness but most of our compatriots cannot name their U.S. Senator or Member of Congress. Only a tiny percentage has ever written a letter to any national official for any reason. Congress goes about its business largely undisturbed by citizens’ protests except when the media have whipped them into frenzy over an issue and when they do, it’s over an issue that is close to home.

Even though we may be unaware of it, Congress passes hundreds of bills in a session on many foreign issues, some of which offer nothing benevolent to the world. For example, we have been following the coup in Honduras. Did you know that last year we appropriated $44 million in aid, and an estimated $47million in FY2009 to Honduras? $47 million to the fourth-poorest country in the western hemisphere? What is the money being used for? 

We have 725 military installations outside the US territory. How do they stay in operation? Congress appropriates funds. What are they doing? Good question. The C.I.A. has operations all over the world, and it has a history of funding covert wars and all sorts of military dictatorships. During the second half of the twentieth century, it was involved in coups and military actions all over Latin America. How were they funded? From your taxes and mine; in most cast cases, secretly. What would happen if they appropriated all those funds to our schools, or for universal health care?

We participated in the coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973), among many others; and funded a Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s. When Congress did not appropriate the amount that President Ronald Reagan wanted, he bypassed Congress and obtained arms in an illegal scheme called the Iran-Contra Affair. He then apologized sweetly and was not impeached as he should have been for it. 

How many billions of our tax dollars go to military, C.I.A., and illegal foreign activities? There’s no way to know but the people against whom these forces are directed feel the effects, and a rich vein of hatred against the United States is the result. It is the reason that you sometimes hear foreigners distinguish between our government and our people. The secrecy is the reason that most Americans do not understand why people hate us. But ignorance and inattention play a role as well.

So why are all those foreigners trying to immigrate to the United States? In Mexico, half of the population lives in poverty and one-fifth live in extreme poverty. According to an IPS (Inter Press Service News Agency) report, “Nearly half of the country's indigenous people have earth floors in their homes, and nine out of 10 have no separate kitchen areas, while 40 percent of indigenous households have no clean water.”  

El Salvador has the fifth-lowest per capita income in Latin America and suffers from extreme environmental degradation and water pollution, in part, because of the defoliation of its landscape during the civil war. 

Why do you think they want to come here? 

*not her real name.

Life Is More Powerful Than Books

Dictator Augusto Pinochet

President Salvador Allende of Chile

This September, Dr. Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a philosophy professor at Brown University, published an essay in the Providence Journal, “What we will not say in my classes.” This is the beginning of her essay:

“BROWN UNIVERSITY’S fall semester classes began this month, and I began by telling students my usual ground rules. This presentation goes approximately as follows: 

“I expect you to come to class, but you don’t have to give me explanations for any absences. I will suggest paper topics and completion dates, but you don’t have to stick to them. I have one strict rule, though. In my courses, we never, never, never, never . . .” 

At this point, I add that I hope all these “nevers” are arousing everyone’s curiosity. Sometimes I ask students to guess. What is it that we never do? 

We never discuss our personal lives."                                                                                                    

I couldn't disagree more. Her essay reminded me of two experiences I had when I was a graduate student teaching assistant at UCLA.

One of my students was Mai, a young Vietnamese woman enrolled in the freshman summer program (much like our Talent Development Program at URI) who was the most fanatically intense student I have ever had. She took down every word I said and studied the entire weekend. She came to class exhausted from having studied half the night. I began to worry that she would make herself sick and I spoke to her about approaching things in a more moderate way, (This is the ONLY conversation like this I have ever had with a student.) Finally, I asked her why she was pushing herself so hard. She began to cry and she told me this story: 

She and her family were boat people. They had been standing on the shore, scrambling aboard the boat when Viet Cong soldiers came and started shooting. Her father jumped in the boat and pulled his children in; mom was helping them by pushing from the ground. When the soldiers started shooting, the boat took off leaving mom stranded on the shore. Her father and the children, including my student, came to America; they didn't know if mom was alive or dead. My student was working so hard because she wanted to finish college in as short a time as possible so she could go to law school to become an international lawyer, and go back and look for her mother. I had little doubt that her mother was dead but I had heard of a group that looked for missing Vietnamese people and I put her in contact with them. 

Our class had been discussing immigration and the civil wars in Central America. After she told me about her experience, she agreed to tell our class. You can imagine how shocked her classmates were that she had undergone such an ordeal. They gave her a great deal of support. I have always believed that sharing the story with them helped her a great deal and it opened their eyes to things they had never imagined. 

Another student I had during that period was Ana, a Chilean student. When were discussing the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, she looked stricken; so much so that when the class ended, she did not leave her seat. I asked her what was wrong. This was her story:

Her father had been a minister in Allende’s government. General Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the United States, overthrew President Allende, the democratically-elected president of Chile, and installed himself as dictator. He detained 30 to 40 thousand people. He tortured and disappeared and/or killed some 3000 people during the 17 years he was in power. Ana was 5 years old when the coup occurred. 

Her father disappeared during the initial days of the coup. The family was sick with worry, sure that he had been killed. Weeks later, he was brought home, half-starved, ill; the signs of torture on his frail body. The family was told that they must take what they could carry and that they were being sent to the United States. (I do not know why her family merited this treatment, especially after what they had done to her father.) Certain that they were going to be killed, Ana’s mother gathered a few belongings and gathered the children. They were taken to the airport where they were indeed sent to New York. They arrived with the clothes on their backs and little else. Ana was so traumatized that she stopped talking and stopped eating. It took a long time before they could convince the child to eat; it was years before she spoke. And they were the lucky ones; they got out. 

Ana wanted to tell the class about it but wanted to be sure I would not object. After hearing her story, her classmates looked shell-shocked. All the lectures, books and movies that I used to bring history to life could not compete with the lived-experience of oppression described by their classmate. 

We were lucky that these two young women were able to share their experiences with us. I grew up in a household where my mother adamantly refused to talk about the past except in the sunniest, Pollyanna ways and I did not know until I was in my thirties that she had lived through La Matanza, the infamous genocide of 30,000 indigenous people in the western departments of El Salvador. 

Neither history nor philosophy exist in a vacuum. These are humanities; in one way or another, they reflect and distill human experience. For my students and for me, Mai’s and Ana’s stories were gifts; each a dose of reality as an antidote to the sunny version of heroic history our governments tell our people. Undoubtedly, Felicia Nimue Ackerman would disagree. (967)

On Distance Learning

University of San Francisco, my alma mater

To me, getting a college degree via “distance learning” is like having a cab driver deliver your babies: You do it out of necessity not because it’s the best choice. 

Colleges and universities have always been arbiters of wealth and advancement in American society with elite private universities with huge endowments able to skim off the best students while state universities duck the endless cuts to their budgets by a state government and a citizenry who don’t value intellectual achievement. Community colleges are the unsung heroes of the system, providing remedial help to those whose secondary educations have fallen short and a foot in the door for the ambitious poor who cannot afford the tuition at the barely-subsidized state universities.

In fact, the funding from states to their universities has become so slim as to be barely significant. I teach at the University of Rhode Island, where only 11% of the university's budget is provided by the state of Rhode Island. Offering so little to the state’s flagship university, it is unmitigated chutzpah for the governor to cut the budget of the university, forcing students into paying more tuition. How far must the state’s share drop before we officially stop being called a state university? It seems to me that URI creates far more income for the university than it requires for its functioning. 

Lately, spam offering sexual enhancement pills and devices seem to have been surpassed by advertisements for quick on-line professional and PhD degrees. I don’t know how many of these are charlatans looking to make a killing but the gradual acceptance of distance learning as part of a regular college curriculum concerns me greatly because it creates an educational market where legitimate universities and the credentialed professoriate are mixed in with those who lack the proper qualifications for university instruction. 

The opportunity to listen to a professor’s lectures, to the comments and questions by their classmates, and to view the films that are shown are invaluable in gaining an understanding of a subject. I cannot judge chemistry or art history classes, but in my field, Latin American history, it is hard enough to understand the textbooks with  2- or 3-times-per-week contact; trying to do it on one’s own is forbidding, particularly for beginning students. 

There are advantages to the DL system: Students have direct time with the professor on-line but this does not make up for the fullness of the experience in the classroom. In terms of the professor’s time, only a small number of students can be enrolled in the class if anything besides Scantron tests (electronically graded, objective exams) are employed. I believe that part of mission of a liberal arts education is to produce literate citizens: Students need to write, and not just for English classes. 

I attended the University of San Francisco, a small Jesuit university; except for classes that fulfilled requirements for all students such as “Introduction to Western Philosophy” or “Physics for Non-Science Majors,” which were quite large, classes in my major typically had no more than 10-15 students. It might have been different for those departments with a large number of majors like English or history, but philosophy had only 38 majors. Naturally, this meant that even though I was a working-class student whose classmates were predominantly middle-class, I had the privilege of a lot of face-time with my professors, particularly since they were almost always in their offices when not in the classroom, and always welcomed our visits. My experience was closer to the Oxford or Cambridge model of tutors and small seminars than to any of my experiences as a professor. 

My undergraduate degree is in philosophy; I took very few tests besides essay exams, and very few of those, at that. Mostly, I wrote papers: Short papers, long papers, research papers, and opinion papers, all of which received careful attention from my professors. However, it was a very different situation from the one encountered by my students today.  

I teach in a state university. My classes usually have between 30 and 40 students; small by the standards of the University of California at Los Angeles where I did my graduate work (400-student lectures) but bigger and less personal than my undergraduate experience. On-line courses are restricted to 20 students each but the degree mills out there are unregulated; they could have 20 or 80 students or more; who’s to know?

When I was in the eighth grade and decided, on my own, to attend an academic high school, I did it with no guidance from my eighth grade teacher who celebrated my Italian- and Irish-American classmates but spent virtually no time with me, despite the fact that I had the highest grades in the class. (I earned more degrees than any of them.) You’ll do all right, she told me, and I had to figure everything out for myself. As a working-class high school student, I had little guidance when I picked a university. As good as my high school was, they did not provide counseling in choosing a college; or maybe they did but not to me; it has often been the case that I was ignored—like many Latino, working-class students--by guidance counselors. In college, when I asked for advice about graduate school, my otherwise attentive Jesuit professors didn’t take me seriously. I was a good student but the idea that I--a working-class Latina--aspired to study for a doctorate in medieval philosophy at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto or at Yale University was downright comic to them. With a little help, I would have arrived at my goals much earlier. That’s the thing about not being a part of the upper-classes, or even the middle-class; nobody believes that you can succeed because you don’t have the right background with all the shadings that that implies. 

Yet despite my economic challenges, I managed to achieve my goals; it just took me a little longer. I figure that I am ten years behind my colleagues of the same age because I had to figure out my own route and draw my own road map. Given today’s economic situation where so many of us have lost a significant portion of our pensions, I’ll have to work longer anyway. Maybe I’ll catch up by the time I retire.  

When I started college, I was armed with only an electric typewriter; I cannot even imagine what it would have been like to have had the resources, a personal computer and the Internet. The UC Berkeley Extension offered “correspondence courses,” but they were even more attenuated from the classroom than today’s distance learning classes since they relied on the U.S. postal service to transmit the student-teacher correspondence. 

What will happen to today’s working-class students? Some, like me will stumble along and with luck, find themselves in one of the outstanding graduate programs (like my other alma mater, UCLA), earn a degree and find a great job. What I fear is that instead of offering wonderful opportunities, the proprietary on-line learning programs will bestow second-class degrees on them, burden them with staggering debt, but offer them little chance to really “make it.” They will be proud when they earn their degrees but the market will chew them up and spit them out, giving the good jobs to those who attended "real universities."                                (1225)

Thinking About Human Sacrifice in the Americas

Recently, a student asked me about "Apocalypto," actor-director Mel Gibson's 2006 saga of a Maya peasant in pre-Colombian Mexico. Is there a Latin American history professor anywhere who hasn't been asked about  "Apocalypto"? Is there anything more sensationalized in Latin American history than human sacrifice?  If one goes by "Apocalypto," the Maya hunted-down and sacrificed anyone they could get their hands on.  In the film, a farmer with the physique and endurance of Superman is hunted down, captured, prepared for sacrifice but manages to escape despite what would be crippling wounds for anyone else, and outruns a jaguar as well. All of this is against the background of continual and unending human sacrifice; rows of captives painted blue and dragged to the altars to have their hearts ripped out while still alive, and their bodies tossed down the back side of the pyramid like so much firewood. Can you imagine the stench? The vermin?

I have always taught my students that religion is the incarnation of culture but some aspects of ancient cultures, like human sacrifice, are difficult for them to grapple with. Looking at Latin America's pre-Colombian history, the great tributary empires like the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, practiced human sacrifice not because they were inherently cruel and bloodthirsty but because they were trying to exercise some control over the unpredictability and arbitrariness of the natural world. The sacrifice was not random but part of a cosmology. Moreover, some empires, like the Aztecs were more centered on human sacrifice than others--like the Maya. 

Why didn't the Aztecs sacrifice just anybody or everybody? They sacrificed warriors captured in battle because warriors, according to their belief system, were seen as the most powerful and valuable members of society and thus the best sacrificial offerings to the gods who they regarded as capricious and cruel. The stakes were very high: Without adequate appeasement, Tlaloc, the rain god, could withhold the rain that made their crops grow; Cinteot, the Maize god could produce an inadequate crop and they would starve; and Huitzilpochtli, god of the sun, would lose its struggle with the Darkness and all would be lost. Only the sacrifice of the best could ensure its victory. The sacrifices, contrary to popular misunderstandings, did not occur daily but only at special festivals. There were other special festivals where children were sacrificed. The ancient peoples of the Americas did engage in other activities besides human sacrifice!

The same impulse that has motivated cultures around the world to develop arcane and elaborate strategies for dealing with the capriciousness of life and the natural world motivated the Amerindians to perform human sacrifices. Religion is complex because we use it to engage the forces that threaten us and at the same time, to create a protective barrier around ourselves. The big question is (to those who care about these things), is religion humanly motivated, divinely mandated, or divinely inspired? Or is it just the expression of our need to do SOMETHING in response to our feelings of helplessness? From our 21st century perspective, we have no doubt that there are no gods of rain and corn and the sun; only the Aztecs' desperate attempt to appease the hostile and overwhelming forces of nature. 

Atheists and humanists like Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," and Christopher Hitchens, author of  "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" regard our modern religions in the same way that modern people regard the religion of the Aztecs. Is it possible to examine another's beliefs without feeling superior or patronizing? 

The Spaniards, whose devout Roman Catholicism informed all of their actions, had little question about the religious practices they witnessed: To them, the Aztecs, Inca and Maya were simply savages, and there was no question that they were motivated by mere superstition rather than devotion to the "One True God." Their embrace of human sacrifice was the proof the Spanish needed.  The tables were turned, however, when the Spanish massacred the indigenous people they came in contact with, generally for no apparent reason. When the dust had settled, the Europeans' massacres coupled with the diseases that they spread inadvertently, had killed 90% of the indigenous people.

I think about and struggle with how to present these issues every semester when I teach the conquest. I still tear up when I read the words of the Aztec account of the conquest, even though I have taught "Introduction to Latin American Civilizations" every semester for the last 17 years, , "Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood..." These are among the saddest lines in human history. 

I make no apology for being a deist so I ask myself how could those who ostensibly worshiped a benevolent creator of life, massacre whole peoples with impunity? How? How? But then, that is the real "big question" of history for those who care about these things. How do religious people of any stripe justify the killing of those who oppose them? More fundamentally, why do people kill randomly and how do we stop it? Ironically, one would think that stopping the killing would be the proper role of religion rather than providing people with a sword and a crucifix to stand behind. 

Mahatma Gandhi said, "The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives." Not to let religion off the hook, but Adolph Hitler (Germany), Josef Stalin (Russia), Nicolae Ceausescu (Romania), Slobodan Milošević (Yugoslavia), Pol Pot (Cambodia) and Roberto D'Aubuisson (El Salvador) balance the boat, for they remind us that men do not need religion as an excuse to kill people. Hitchens and Dawkins lay all the blame at the foot of religion and simply ignore the "equally noble motives" because, it seems to me, that they are more interested in scoring the point against religion than in looking honestly at humanity's propensity for violence. 

By now you're probably thinking that you have landed in the territory of religionists of some sort who hate atheists. I'm a moderately religious secular Jew which means I'm not much of a synagogue-goer though I share certain core Jewish beliefs and values; and I love the melodies, and many of rituals of the Conservative movement in particular.  I don't hate atheists; I hate intolerance which is a word much tossed about by liberals until they encounter people they really disagree with such as religious fundamentalists. 

If I didn't teach Latin American history, I might ignore some of these questions completely but because that is my subject, I struggle with how to portray the Church fairly, with its persecution of Jews and its murderous relations with the native peoples of the Americas; and with the blood sacrifices by the indigenous people of the Americas that inspired the Spanish to think that they were dealing with demons, using that as an excuse for their own murderous impulses. From their perspective--and, incidentally, the traditional way of viewing the conquest--they believed that they "brought civilization" to the new world. If one ascribes great importance to the human sacrifice, then the Spanish did indeed bring "civilization" because it brought it to an end. If only someone had found a way to civilize the Spanish and other Europeans. (1231)

Justice Sonia Sotomayor - Trial by Fire

President Barack Obama and Justice Sonia Sotomayor portrayed as gangbangers on FreakingNews.com   They got his hair wrong!

I have been bouyed by the ascendance of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. I never expected to see a Latina on the court in my lifetime; maybe gazing down from heaven but not before. 

I have a law school degree but I didn't practice law. My experiences as an intern and the time demands when I entered a practice quickly made me realize that I really didn't want to be a lawyer. My daughter was an infant then and nothing could make me stay at work beyond my eight hours. But it was also that I hated many things about the last firm I worked at, among them, the lawyers who took advantage of their working-class clientele and spent most of their time on the phone discussing their investments; the cutthroat competition, and the exploitation of the all-Latina staff.  Moreover, the neighborhood scared me.  When I came to work one morning and walked past the corner phone booth which was covered with blood from a weekend altercation, I nearly fainted.

They had hired me because I was bilingual but when I translated carefully--because legalese is not the easiest jargon make understandable to working-class clients--they complained because I didn't do the instant and slapdash translations they had come to expect from their clerical staff.

The day I quit was one of the happiest days of my life. I had dreamed of being a judge but I'd have to be a lawyer first and I just didn't have what it takes. I closed the door and walked away; several years later, I found myself in graduate school, studying history, but that's another story. 

When Judge Sotomayor was nominated, I wrote articles in support of her and when she was confirmed, I prepared a public presentation on her career and nomination. Among the things I found in researching her career were almost 300 cartoons and photoshopped pictures of her, most of them criticizing her nomination; most of them caricaturing her in the most racist and sexist terms, such as the one above. By the time I was done, I felt beaten-up just looking at the hatred pouring out at her. How she withstood the barrage is beyond me. It is disheartening when an occasion such as her nomination gives the racists and sexists an excuse to crawl out from under the rocks where they've been hiding. 

I presented my talk during our university's "Diversity Week." In part, I wanted to talk about some of the nuts and bolts of the legal system; things that non-lawyers might not understand. I wanted to show the differences between the federal and states' systems; how a circuit court judge is only one of three on a panel of judges; how only about 80-90 cases of the 7000 sent to the court are heard by the court.

I also wanted to talk about Judge Sotomayor's nomination itself and to go beyond the quick glimpses of her life as offered up in the press to talk about what her record had been; how many cases are reviewed by the circuit court that she had come from, and how cases came to be heard by the Supreme Court. Most people would not have the patience to sit and sift through thousands of drawings and pictures to cull such a collection but I wanted people to see, in concrete terms, the racism and sexism directed at her. So I set up a slide show of the 300 cartoons and images to be screened as the audience came into the auditorium to be seated. It's one thing to hear or read about them; it's another thing to see each image, after image, after hateful image.

The slide show was very effective; as I waited to be introduced, I could hear the gasps from the audience as they watched the slides. 

Most of the people who talked to me afterwards said they had no idea of how the system worked. Social studies classes, even in good schools, stop short of explaining these fundamental functions. Civic education never gets to the Supreme Court yet the decisions made there affect all of us. Maybe it's considered too complicated for high school students to understand but if they can be made to understand calculus, they can get a rudimentary understanding of the legal system.

Misinformation about the courts allows demagogues to persuade an ignorant public that the Supreme Court is hijacking the law instead of actually showing how the judiciary checks the executive and legislative branches of government. I was very happy with the way the talk went. 

The morning after my talk, I exhausted but relieved to be done with it. I was dragging a bit as I went to teach my classes. My get up and go isn't what it used to be! Stopping at my mailbox, I saw an envelope from The United States Supreme Court. I had written a congratulatory note to Justice Sotomayor and sent the articles I'd written in support of her. I was giddy as I opened it. She thanked me for the articles and my good wishes. It made my day! We chose different lives but we're always happy to learn that people understand our journey.                      (873) 

"I am the decisive element in the classroom"

Washburn Hall, my home at the University of Rhode Island

I have a yellowed scrap of newspaper on my desk at the university, an old Ann Landers column with a quote from psychologist Haim G. Ginott (1922-1973) that has guided my life in the classroom:

"I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates the climate. My daily mood makes the weather. As a teacher, I posses a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be an instrument of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or deescalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized."  

My students aren't children but they are no less affected by my moods. Every day, I pump myself up so that I am lighthearted and energetic when I cross the threshold of my classroom. I may be under the weather or suffering from some personal sorrow but I consciously shut it out when I walk into the room. 99% of the time, I succeed though the past year was a very difficult one personally for me. 

A few months ago, I walked into the classroom on a day when I was emotionally stressed to the breaking point. I was trying very hard to gear myself up for the day's teaching but I realized I hadn't succeeded when one of my undergraduates, a young man built like a bear, said to me, "Are you okay?" a moment after I'd set my notebook on the podium. I smiled and said something like, "I'm just having a hard day." To which he replied, "Wanna hug?" Sweet boy. I laughed and thanked him saying that I would be fine but his kind gesture had snapped me out of it. I said to him later that he must have a close relationship with his mother. He gave me a big smile.  

There is a kind of chemistry in the classroom that is as delicate as butterflies' wings. For three hours a week, for fifteen weeks, their eyes are on you. You are doing many things besides imparting knowledge about your specialty. You are honing their ability to think and express themselves clearly. You are exposing them to worlds that they never knew existed until they met you. You are setting an example of being an teacher, of being an intellectual.  

Sometimes you connect with them so deeply that they go out of their ways to keep in touch with you after they leave your classroom. Usually, you don't know the effect you have on your students and there is no metric to measure it. You know when they show up in a second and third class you teach or when their younger siblings or friends show up in your classes telling you how much their friend or sister had enjoyed the class. Most of the time, you have no idea of your effect on their lives.

Teaching is like planting a tree; it is an expression of faith in the future.                        (517)