View from the Loft

Linnea Lee Stade, 1953-2010

 
 
Most of the people who read this blog will understand why I haven't written in over two months. The death of my sister has taken a tremendous toll on me, rendering me sleepless, unable to concentrate, sometimes barely able to function at all. The grieving still goes on as reality asserts itself day after new day: I will never again see her, hear her voice, see a message from her in my e-mail in-box. I won't be seeing a new-to-me music video that she loves and wants to share with me. No more stories about her "group therapy" sessions with her seven cats, or her latest babysitting stint with one of her grandchildren. I won't share any more memories with her about our childhood or young motherhood. She's not in the world any more, and that cold, hard fact is hard to accept. But accept it I must.

I didn't dress up for Linn's funeral. I'm sure many people found my jeans, turtleneck, sweater coat, and scuffed ankle boots inappropriate. The truth is that I just didn't have the energy to look in my closet and choose something more in keeping with the occasion from the bits and pieces of my inadequate wardrobe (I hate buying clothes). I was exhausted from sleeplessness and weeping. In that state, in the face of the enormous fact of her death, I didn't much care and I couldn't be bothered.

Her funeral was free of religion. She would not have liked a man of the cloth there, that's for certain. Instead, many people got up to speak  about her. I wish I had recorded what each of them said, both laugh- and tear-inducing.  Linn was definitely a person who made an impression, at least for most of her life. The speakers reminisced about so many characteristics of my sister: her sense of humor, her love of children, her resilience, her diving into life headfirst, her refusal to judge or to advise when advice was not sought.

Jim put a slide show together that ran continuously on his laptop, accompanied by a few songs: Roy Orbison's "In Dreams"; the Dixie Chicks' "I Believe in Love"; Jackson Browne's "For a Dancer": Tom Waits's "Take It with Me"; and Iris DeMent's "Let the Mystery Be."

 

Here is what I read:

If you've seen the slide show Jim put together, you've seen the photo of Linn and me when we were little kids. It was my birthday, and we had the big cake--for the birthday girl--and the little cake, for the non-birthday girl. Linn gave me this snapshot a couple of years ago, when she had come out of what she called "the zombie years" or "my fifteen years in a coma." On the back of the photo she wrote "Together Forever" and drew an infinity sign.

Forever didn't last very long, from my point of view. But Linn had a different way of seeing things. We had many a discussion about life and death. She was horrified when I explained to her that Albert Camus's essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" made sense to me and was actually a comfort at a time when I was searching for answers to the big questions. For those who don't know the myth, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll down so that he had to push it up again, over and over. The crime of Sisyphus was that he captured and chained Death so that humans would not have to die. Camus thought that the fate of Sisyphus symbolized the fate of us humans. I won't go into the philosophical implications here, but trust me, it gave us hours of conversation.

Anyway, Linn always said that I identified with Sisyphus and she identified with the Phoenix, that legendary bird who rose from the ashes. (Recently Jim and I acquired a couple of kittens and Linn tried to get me to name them Sisyphus and Phoenix.) That's what Linn did--rose from the ashes again and again. So many times in her life she won against Death. For a long time she had sort of a living death, and when she miraculously woke up from it, I believe I was the first to notice, and I know I was ecstatic when I recognized that awakening. So when she gave me that photo, I actually wept for joy. My sister was back.

Linn also called herself the Bungee Cord girl--she might fall down, but she would snap back. And indeed she was resilient. She survived so much in her life. She had times of great despair, but in the end, her stubborn nature and her love for life and the people in it wouldn't let her succumb to despair. She loved, especially her sons and grandchildren, fiercely and wholly. 

She told me she was a perennial--when this life was over, she would come back like perennial plants do. She felt bad for me that I was convinced that I'm an annual--this is the only life I'll ever have. She actually got angry with me for my agnosticism, because she believed in something greater, some sort of universal consciousness.

Her blog was called "Take Yourself Back!" because she felt that's what she'd had to do over and over. She didn't like the 12-step recovery plan, in which you have to submit to a higher power and actually acknowledge your helplessness.  Screw that! For her, it was about reclaiming your power--taking yourself back from whatever had kidnapped you, whatever had erased your true self.

It is tragic to me that Linn could never fully believe that she was loved, or that she deserved to be loved. But that makes it all the more striking that she went on living as authentically and fully as she could, despite all misgivings.

Yes, it is an abrupt ending. Apparently that was all I could write ... Perhaps I should have said "despite all the moments of despair" or "despite all the times life knocked her down." And there was--and is--so much more I could have said about her. But this is what came to me when I sat down to write what I wanted to say as my eulogy. It may be that I'll have more to say, eventually, on this blog.

I also read this poem, one I wrote years ago, but which seems still appropriate:

For My Sister                 

                  The trees, the blue window
                  crackle with a scatter
                  of dry leaves.  A gray dawn
                  would have been better
                  would have accommodated
                  familiar griefs. As it is, the sun
                  makes demands.  All right then:
                  we will think not of separations
                  of the torn leaves
                  of the fall to earth, but rather
                  of the sparks
                  the fragmented sun.

                  We circle
                  each other, earth's axis, the sun.
                  We are aged by circle on circle.
                  Not only that.  Opposing forces
                  pull us two ways.
                  We might fly outward in wild and brutal isolation.
                  We might fall unspectacularly, tugged by earth.
                  We manage a balancing act, hang on,
                  play one force against the other, all the while
                  circling, unsteady.

                   Still, a warm web has been contrived,
                  a safety net of years
                  already survived, of old griefs
                  risen from
                  and rebirths ingeniously extracted
                  from the ash heaps.  Our collective memory
                  spins a continuous thread, a thread
                  bright with colors of the phoenix:
                  not the gray sheen of pain
                  not the silver glitter of tears
                  not the black knot of despair
                  not the ragged leaden stone
                  on the heart.  No,
                  the sun makes demands.

                  We will think of the warm web
                  catching the sun's sparks, shining
                  with rebelliously-spun threads,
                  circling
                  in the face of dark forces.

 It's hard to say goodbye. I'm still trying to say it.

 

 

OMG! A same-sex wedding!

Yeah, we were invited to one on Saturday last, and did attend.

What can I say? It was like every other Midwestern wedding I've ever attended. Nobody keeled over, had a seizure, heart failure, or stroke when the brides kissed, and in fact the traditional clinking of silverware on glasses proceeded apace at the reception, just as at any other (read: heterosexual) wedding.

The ceremony was held at an Episcopalian church, and while the church does not officially recognize same-sex marriages, believe me, it was a wedding, complete with vows of being faithful unto death. The brides, having a sense of fun and lightheartedness, included a reading penned by Sandra Boynton, and the priest (a woman) did refer to the one Bible reading as the "token" Bible reading. So in that sense it was refreshing, to say the least. As we left the church, I said something to the priest on the order of  "what a nice ceremony," and she replied, "Yes, wasn't that fun? I'm going to have to repeat that penguin reading ..."

The reception was very classy, with a guest book of fabulous photos of the brides--I mean really, really professional, fantastic photos--great food, and oh, okay, the wine wasn't that great but who cares. Most people seemed to be drinking cosmos, anyway...

As at every other wedding worth the celebration, I ended up removing my shoes so I could dance, etc. (See/hear "Sweet Old World" on that one.)

My point here is, what the fuck is wrong with people who are against same-sex marriages?? We were all pretty weepy at the beauty of it all, the brides were happy and radiant, and nobody seemed scandalized. Well, one of the brides' uncles was an asshole who refused to attend the church ceremony, but apart from that, it was all pretty usual.

Jim and I just felt completely befuddled as to why people get all foaming-at-the-mouth about same-sex weddings. We were so happy to be part of the celebration, and so happy to see these two women--who have been together over a decade--finally declare their commitment to each other in front of family and friends. They were ecstatic, and so were their guests.

And any time I can dance to the B-52s at a wedding reception, I got no complaints.

Natural science

Anya's an avid bug collector (catch-and-release, mostly), so she availed herself of the sweep net during her visit last weekend. She even rescued a grasshopper from the swimming pool.

Her mom and little brother look on.

Tristan wanted a turn, too.

Checking out the captive.

She caught several kinds of grasshoppers, identifying each one with the help of our insect field guide. Kids really are natural scientists.

We also happened to trap a raccoon, which delighted the kids. Even their mom went along for its release in an undisclosed location. Unfortunately, our trap got a workout this summer: seven groundhogs, two raccoons, and a possum. The raccoons destroyed our corn, and as usual, the groundhogs got our broccoli.

You just can't beat an outdoor laboratory.

Kite-flying weather!

We had beautiful kite-flying weather a week ago, much to the delight of kids and adults alike. Here's Grandpa with Anya and Tristan:

Anya letting that kite soar:

Register homeschooled kids? What's the agenda?

A bill sponsored by Michigan Democratic state representatives Joan Bauer (Lansing), Mark Meadows (East Lansing), and Mike Simpson (Liberty Township) would require parents to register their homeschooled children with the local school district and provide the parent's or guardian's name and address.

Sound innocuous? Maybe. But when seemingly harmless legislation is proposed, especially that which is completely unnecessary, it's wise to look for an agenda on the part of sponsors and supporters.

Michigan and its school districts have managed to function just fine without requiring homeschooled children to be registered, but suddenly, we are to believe that such legislation would "address questions of truancy" and that it is critical to our knowing, in Rep. Bauer's words, "where and if our children are being educated."

Beats me how registering homeschooled children would clear up questions about truancy. Just how would that work? A child who is truant from school is one who is registered at, and attending, a school; his or her continued, unexplained absence would point to truancy. It seems to me that registering homeschooled children would just muddy the waters here, as they'd appear on school rolls without actually ever attending.

The more revealing comment is Rep. Bauer's: "where and if our children are being educated [emphasis mine]." "If"?

How would merely registering a child with the district give any information about whether that child is "being educated"? Well, it wouldn't, of course. And that points to the real purpose of this legislation: to establish a record of homeschooled children that will then allow the next slide down the slippery slope of more and more regulation of homeschooling. The real agenda is given away in that casual (unguarded) remark.

No wonder homeschooling parents turned out to protest in Lansing. They see this bill for what it is.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, there's a persistent belief that homeschooling is usually inferior to public education. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's also a horror out there of children unrestrained by the regimentation of school: witness this opinion piece by Jack Lessenberry, in which he says that this bill is necessary:

For one thing, if we don’t know who is home schooling their kids, how can we know who is teaching their kids at home – and who are simply letting their kids run wild?

Apart from some terrible writing ("if we don't know who's teaching their kids at home, how can we know who's teaching their kids at home?"), there's an assumption here that needs to be addressed. That assumption is that numbers of homeschooling parents are shirking their duties and, instead of teaching their children, are just letting them turn into little Lord of the Flies wannabes. There's also the implication that the real purpose of registering homeschooled kids is so that homeschooling parents can be spied upon to ensure that the children are being educated instead of just being allowed to be little savages. That's precisely what homeschooling parents immediately sniffed out in this supposedly innocuous bill.

Lessenberry goes on to call for greater regulation of homeschooling:

Actually, this bill doesn’t go far enough. We need a strong package of bills firmly regulating home schooling. They should prescribe a curriculum and require home schoolers to prove they are qualified to teach. We owe it to our kids and ourselves.

I believe that a bill establishing registration of homeschooled children is the first step toward exactly that kind of regulation. Once you know where they are, and once you pass laws regulating homeschooling as to curriculum and whether or not parents are qualified to teach, it's a simple matter to hunt down families and force their compliance.

There may also be a motivation for the individual school district to add students to its rolls. Whenever schools in my area experience a drop in student enrollment, the schools always talk about this in terms of loss of federal funds to the district. So, in the monetary crunch the state of Michigan is currently experiencing, getting all those homeschooled kids into the classroom may be seen as a plus. This doesn't actually make sense to me, as more kids means more teachers, classrooms, equipment, buses, and so on, but since schools regularly mourn the loss of students as a loss of federal dollars, I can only speculate that such might be the case.

Whatever the motivation, it certainly isn't concern for children and families and their needs. Some variation on this comment by Lessenberry is often heard:

More and more, we are evolving into a place where two kids the same age have wildly different educational experiences.

That’s a prescription for eventually losing our identity as a people and a nation. And if that doesn’t scare you more than internet porn, you clearly need more education.            

Actually, it doesn't scare me. There's enough cultural sharing through mass media alone to make that a silly bugaboo. Americans also share a government and a history, a popular culture, and so on. Beyond that, most homeschooled children learn just what publicly schooled children learn--only more of it, and in many cases, with the kind of in-depth treatment and critical thought that public schools just don't prioritize in this standardized-test-driven era. But that fear of "losing our identity" is often echoed by other critics of homeschooling. I once visited a blog on which the author had posted a tirade against homeschooling that declared homeschooling parents to be traitors! She was quite serious, claiming that to homeschool a child was to defy the state. If so--more of this, please.

I also think that people invested in public education and employed in public education fear for the future of that institution. Homeschooling becomes more attractive as public education becomes less effective. Perhaps some see public education as able to continue only if parents are forced to place their kids in public schools. That's pretty sad. A better solution would be to revitalize public education, but alas--we don't have too many thinkers outside of the box when it comes to creative ways to do so.

Finally, let's not forget that the public schools are all about providing what the corporate culture demands. For all the spouting off about how we need highly educated citizens in this technological age, blah blah blah, in fact most of the jobs that are being created are in the service sector, mostly having to do with serving food and drink. For that you need people who will do what they're told without fuss and without suggesting a better way to do it; otherwise, it's too difficult to standardize menus and foods and so on. Not rocking the boat is much more important at most places of work than coming up with creative solutions or suggesting changes. Homeschooling is not efficient at providing what late capitalism/high consumerism demands, namely, an unthinking subjection of the self to market forces and advertising. I don't say it doesn't, given American culture, produce workers who fulfill corporate needs, only that homeschooling isn't nearly as efficient at doing so.

For all these reasons, there are a lot of people out there who want to make homeschooling difficult and fraught with regulation, red tape, prescriptions, and proscriptions, in order to discourage it or make it nearly impossible. Registering homeschooled children can have no other purpose than to gradually introduce such a process a bit at a time. It's just the first step in eventually taking away the right of parents to educate their children at home.

Michigan education reforms: bad for kids

My local newspaper editorialized recently that lowering the state's compulsory age of education to five, mandating all-day kindergarten, and raising the dropout age to 18 would all lead to a brighter economic future for kids and the state of Michigan both.

My reaction to this was summed up neatly by a response from Detroit Free Press reader Mindy Nathan:

Families in Michigan and everywhere else should have educational choices available to them based on their families' and their children's needs, values, hopes and dreams. When did education and learning become about marketability and a brighter economic future? Perhaps when it stopped being about children and their healthy intellectual, social and emotional development. Perhaps when schools became the sites of a corporate agenda that does not view children, especially 5-year-olds, as people with free will and free spirits.

While she was responding specifically to the call for mandatory all-day kindergarten, we can all recognize the appeal to marketiblity and economic success in every one of the proposed "reforms." Along with a "brighter economic future," promised benefits include a reduced dropout rate, fewer people ending up in prison, and fewer people relying on government services.

I call bullshit.

Let's just take a look at lowering the compulsory age of education to five years. First, not all five-year-olds are ready for half-day kindergarten, let alone all-day kindergarten. My daughter's friend reports helping out in her child's class and seeing one little girl crying the entire time she was there. She reported it to a room aide and was told glibly, "Oh, she does that every day. She misses her mom."

How can that be good for a child? How can it lead to an enthusiasm for school that will keep her in school until the state decides she can leave? If a child is ready for school, fine, but if not, it's difficult to argue that forcing a child to be miserable six hours or more a day is beneficial. Life does not begin with adulthood; childhood is not just a preparation for adulthood. Childhood should be a time of satisfaction and happiness just like any stage of life. It is life itself, not "getting ready" for life. This is often completely discounted, if not forgotten entirely.

Second, where is it written that school, and only school, provides learning experiences for children? Or, for that matter, that "learning experiences" are the only things that matter? Children need imaginative play, time for creativity, enough emotional security to venture out into broader experiences, and so on. It's way past time that the state and the entire educational apparatus looked beyond the narrow strip of utilitarian highway we call "a brighter economic future" and started looking at the entirety of a child's existence, including her present circumstances. Rationalizing every educational decision in terms of some possible future benefit is cynical and materialistic if it does not allow for individual differences in present circumstances, readiness, personality, needs, and the like.

All-day kindergarten is similarly something that many children are simply not ready for. That's a long time away from home every day. The idea, again, is to spend longer hours getting a jump on academics, a goal I find questionable. If a family is comfortable with it, then fine--go for it. But not all kids are.

As for raising the dropout age to 18, it's hard for me to see how this is going to be a real boon. Yes, dropouts have higher rates of unemployment, crime, etc. But if a kid is sitting in school until age 18 and resenting every moment of it, getting nothing out of it, how is that a good thing? If our educational system is already failing these kids so badly, how is forcing them to endure more of it going to be of benefit? If they've experienced only frustration, boredom, anger, and resentment at having to be in school, are two more years of those emotions really going to result in improvement and prevent all those evils statistics tells us dropouts are more likely to incur?

Particularly under the mind-numbing rigors of No Child Left Behind, with its rote learning and regurgitation of same on standardized tests, It's hard to see how an extra couple of years are going to make a difference. I foresee a lot of resistance and a problem with enforcement if this "reform" should pass.

There are reasons for kids leaving the school system before graduation. They're not just stupid people who can't see what's good for them. If we were honest, we'd acknowledge that school, for many kids, is a pointless, boring exercise, that it feels like a prison (and truly, schools are tending that way more and more), and that it's not going to lead to improvements in their lives.

Something I'm not reading about anywhere is a challenge to the notion that there are numerous high-tech jobs out there just waiting to be filled by educated people, if only we could produce enough of them.

Is that true? Isn't it true that we're seeing increasing unemployment, much of it due to outsourcing of technical jobs, as well as to companies' cost-cutting measures in hiring immigrants with work visas? Is every student capable or desirous of attending college? Isn't it true that for many, hands-on work is what will guarantee a job? It's pretty hard to outsource engine repair, for example.

I like the idea of Britisher Tony Howell, who thinks that kids should be able to leave school at age 14 in order to receive other kinds of training, particularly in apprenticeship-type settings. Naturally, his proposal netted the usual responses about how children who stay in school earn more money, are more successful (whatever that means), etc.

This is a knee-jerk reaction that comes from looking at statistics and drawing doubtful conclusions. Yes, the statistics show that those who stay in school do better in various ways, but it's simplistic to think that merely being a warm body in a classroom seat automatically leads to success. Those who don't drop out have some motivation for staying, whether it comes from their parents, from social pressure, or from a desire to succeed at school. Those who drop out have no such motivation, and forcing them to stay won't magically imbue them with such. What it will do is create a lot of angry, resentful, frustrated people who would rather be doing something else.

I haven't even mentioned the financial aspects of expanding schooling in the ways various proposals have suggested; how Michigan in its present economic state could possibly fund such reforms is beyond me. I'm more concerned with the effects on kids, and, to some extent, the effect on public education itself and our perceptions of what education is and what it can and can't do. Public education as it is currently constituted is not a panacea for what ails us. More likely, it's part of the problem--but that's a subject for a different post.

"America's Family Prison"

Have you heard of this facility?

In May 2006, the Department of Homeland Security opened its first prison for immigrant families 30 miles north of Austin. It is the first family detention center in the country to be based on the penal model, though plans were quickly made to build more.

The T Don Hutto facility holds men, women (some pregnant), children, and infants, none of whom have a criminal past. Administered by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's largest for-profit corrections company, Hutto lacks proper licensing and medical facilities, and has been proven to traumatize families.

Until a settlement resulting from the action of the ACLU, all of the "residents" (actually inmates) wore uniforms, even the infants. But let me quote from the ACLU itself on the improvements that occurred only after a lawsuit was brought against CCA:

Conditions at Hutto have gradually and significantly improved as a result of the groundbreaking litigation. Children are no longer required to wear prison uniforms and are allowed much more time outdoors. Educational programming has expanded and guards have been instructed not to discipline children by threatening to separate them from their parents.

In addition to making those improvements permanent, the settlement also requires ICE to provide, among other things:

• allow children over the age of 12 to move freely about the facility
• provide a full-time, on-site pediatrician
• eliminate the count system which forces families to stay in their cells 12 hours a day
• install privacy curtains around toilets
• offer field trip opportunities to children
• supply more toys and age- and language-appropriate books
• improve the nutritional value of food

ICE must also allow regular legal orientation presentations by local immigrants’ rights organizations; allow family and friends to visit Hutto detainees seven days a week; and allow children to keep paper and pens in their rooms. ICE’s compliance with each of these reforms, as well as other conditions reforms, will be subject to external oversight to ensure their permanence. [my emphasis]

Remember, all of these improvements happened only because of litigation. CCA couldn't have cared less about providing such necessities had they not been threatened. I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised that when a prison-operating corporation runs a facility, it tends to be, well, a prison.

The ACLU's suit was settled in August. But way back in February, there had been enough disgust and protest that the prison conducted a tour for news media to show that

Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”

Look at this and tell me what you think about this statement. Worse, let me quote from a report by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women & Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, "Locking Up Family Val­ues: The Detention of Immigrant Families":

In the medical wing, for example, pregnant detainees were X-rayed with no lead screen; detainees received dental work without anesthesia; pregnant women were not allowed milk and were shackled when taken outside the facility for checkups. Additionally, the report reveals that overheated water scalded children at times. To punish children deemed unruly, guards "would turn up the air conditioning so that the room became very cold" and would turn off hot water for bathing, the report states. But the worst offense was that so-called errant parents and their children lived under the threat of being separated.

There has been at least one documented case of a sexual assault of a detainee by a guard, and in an irony not really that surprising, undocumented workers have been proven to work for the CCA at Hutto. Apparently, Williamson County's only concerns revolve around possible liability issues stemming from these outrages.

Don't kid yourselves: with the rabid anti-immigrant sentiment today (anti- brown immigrants, of course), we'll see more of these "residential facilities," and they'll all be sold to us as ways to keep families together. In reality, they are just one more way to intimidate the brown hordes and play to the nativist, xenophobic elements of the far right. I am frightened and chilled to think that the United States of America has sunk so low.

You can help. Sign the petition. Visit the Texans United for Families action page. E-mail your elected officials and ask them to agitate for a more humane way to deal with families whose immigrant status is in limbo. And please tell everyone you know about this horrific reality in today's America.

What I've been doing instead of blogging

Ah, spring!

Green is exploding everywhere, and the lushness of it all is balm to a Bush-weary heart. The herb garden is looking good after some vigorous weeding and pruning, the garden is ready for planting, and best of all, we've been cutting asparagus. Really, everyone who can ought to have an asparagus bed; the tender green spears are the only fresh vegetables available right now (unless one has a cold frame or a greenhouse). In her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver has a whole chapter on asparagus and her enthusiasm for it.

That's a book I can most heartily recommend. I wish everyone, especially everyone in a position of power who has an ounce of empathy for us commoners, would read it and, more importantly, act upon its insights.  Kingsolver's argument for locally grown, cooked-from-scratch food converges with the way I've been thinking about food, but it must surely be convincing even for those readers who haven't thought much about the topic. I'll have more to say about this book in the near future; stay tuned.

Our daughter and grandkids were here for a few days while my son-in-law was out of town. It's always such a joy to have them here. We had lunch at the restaurant Tristan favors for its automobile decor; we visited a local nursery and bought some plants; we played many games of Yahtzee and Parchesi, with grandma being very impressed by six-year-old Anya's math skills as revealed by those games. Probability, strategy, addition and subtraction all come into play, especially in Yahtzee. For the home schooled, educational possibilities are infinite and almost always fun. At the nursery Anya looked for a perennial with a red flower, and finally found a variety of lupine that met the criteria. Her mom and I bought pepper, tomato, parsley, and rosemary plants. Hannah's already started her own herb garden in a burst of new-found interest, so we dug up some chives for her, along with a lovage plant that had sprung up on its own out in the garden (James and I did this yesterday, wearing our raincoats and tall rubber boots; it had been a stormy morning).

Hannah and I also baked some sourdough bread and I gave her some of my starter (and, of course, a loaf of the final product). In recent weeks I've been trying to perfect my bread baking, with mixed success. The flavor of the sourdough rye is usually excellent, even if the loaves don't always rise as much as I think they should or tear because I've proofed them too long. Jim bought some European bread proofing baskets that I love. The final rise of the dough occurs in these cane baskets, thoroughly dusted with flour, so that the breads are imprinted with a floury pattern that looks very cool.

There's always bug- and rock-collecting at grandma's, too, and this time was no exception. Anya's even getting her two-year-old brother interested--well, somewhat interested, as his first love is anything with four wheels. He does know the word "fossil," although I'm pretty sure he doesn't really know what that means. And he is definitely interested in bugs. We had a couple of bug and spider rescues, courtesy of Anya.

So that's how I've been spending my time--very pleasantly, with little time and no inclination to read about political scandals, government incompetence, impending economic disaster, or the apparently unending war in Iraq. It's been a lovely break.

Homeschool as treason

Whatever one thinks of homeschooling, it's hard not to be shocked at this (via Freelearner), if true [warning: this is a Christian site with an unconcealed fundamentalist agenda] :

The Brussels Journal reports that Katherina Plett responded to a knock on the door from an undercover police woman Thursday morning at 11:00PM. Once the Baptist woman opened the door, police officers, hidden outside the house, stormed into her home and arrested her for the crime of homeschooling her children. The female officer insisted that she watch Mrs. Plett as she changed her clothes claiming, “She would arm herself and shoot us all.”

[snip]

The arrest of Mrs. Plett came as the latest act in struggle between 7 homeschooling families in Paderborn and the local education board of the county. According to the board’s director, Heinz Kohler, “The parents’ right to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society.”

[snip]

Manfred Müller, governor of Paderborn country, has also justified charging homeschoolers with “High Treason,” saying “the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation that cannot be tampered with.”

According to the Brussels Journal, Landrat Müller threatened to charge Hermann Stücher, a 68 year old man giving aid to these families with “High Treason and incitement of the people against the authorities (Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung), the same charge used by Nazis to squelch any resistance to their absolute power.

Yes, the last sentence of that last paragraph is a bit of editorializing. But don't let the article's emphasis on comparisons to Nazism obscure the fact that here state power is brought to bear against parents who wish to raise their children as they see fit, and moreover, that such parents are accused of treason.

While many decry the Christian fundamentalists who seek to "protect" their children from the blasphemous and worldly ways of the public school, it should be remembered that the invocation of state authority over the rights of parents can be used against parents of any religious or political stripe, and not just in Germany. In the past, such authority has been used in the US, Canada, and Australia to justify separating aboriginal children from their parents in boarding schools--even to the extent of kidnapping them and imprisoning parents who refused to send their children to the white man's schools. And I've run across at least one modern-day American homeschooling critic , Carrie Luce (whoever she is), who believes that all homeschoolers are guilty of treason:

Homeschoolers say they have many reasons for what they do, but it all boils down to one simple thing:  Treason.

Although they say otherwise, it isn't because of "better academics" (which they tout through flawed research) or fear of violence (which is just as likely to occur at home as it is at school - and if they ever DO let their children out into the real world, they are exposing their children to other threats - just like the rest of us). Homeschoolers, quite simply put their own selfish biased agendas above the well being of the society and community that supports them.

I get pretty nervous when someone claims the right of the state to exert its authority at will over the rights of individuals, and when those who rebel against such a claim are accused of treason and of undermining the social order. That smacks ot Stalinism and fascism (and probably a whole lot of other isms).

The idea of police storming a private home at night, frightening the entire family and hauling a mother away to jail, is damned scary.

Unfortunately, the way things are headed in this country, it doesn't seem all that impossible here in the United States, especially with such brainwashed "thinking" as that of people like the above-cited Ms. Luce.

Evening at Jewell Lake

We recently went on our annual camping trip with family and friends, something we've been doing for over twenty years. Here are just a few photos.

Sunset on the lake:

Our granddaughter, Anya, struggling to stay conscious at the campfire while a fellow camper's miniature dachshund, Sunny, snuggles on her lap:

Jim surprised a raccoon in the campground. The glowing eyes are attributable to Jim's use of a flashlight to light the scene enough to grab the photo, the camera flash, or both.