Michael Matsuda is Superintendent of the Anaheim Union High School District in California. He served on the board of the Network for Public Education.
Important Message Sent on Behalf of Superintendent Matsuda
Fifty years from now, when our students are old, when they have children and grandchildren of their own, they will look back and say, “Do you remember what happened?” I picture them pensively reflecting, staring silently, breathing deeply, perhaps tearing up, and then after reliving the experience to the very end, smiling, “Those were the times of amazing grace, when people came together with kindness and compassion to support each other, when they made sacrifices for complete strangers, when schools became beacons of hope for families who were food deprived, and when teachers transformed educational experiences through emotional connection, through affirming mental health, and through meaningful learning.”
It was a time when people realized that humanity has no barriers, and that love is limitless if we have the courage to embrace it and to share it near and far, with neighbors and strangers, with old and young, rich and poor, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, LGBT, black, brown, yellow, and white. It was a time like no other, when the world came together, collaborated, communicated, created, thought critically, and acted with compassion to save humankind.
I know this will be true because I see it happening right now. I see it in our Food Service workers as they prepare and pass out food for thousands of our children. I see it in our teachers as they work tirelessly creating new curriculum and a new way of virtual learning through a completely transformed system. I see it in our students who connect and help each other virtually with enthusiasm and care. I see it in our IT workers who have refurbished thousands of laptop computers for kids to use. I see it in our counselors and social workers who reach out to young people suffering from depression, isolation, and emotional starvation. I see it in our administrators who work endlessly, filling all the gaps in a topsy turvy world. And I see it in total strangers, coming out of the woodwork, volunteering time and sometimes money to pitch in and to help heal a fractured world.
I am so proud and blessed to be surrounded by people in the AUHSD who are absolutely committed to our students, our families, and our communities.
But as we face this threat today, let us go forward knowing that things will likely get worse before they get better, that stress will mount and tempers will flare, and that we may take it out on those we love most – our children.
Remember that one day, our young people will become adults, and how we respond in these most traumatic times will forever imprint on them whether it was our darkest or our finest hour. It is up to us.
Let us take this journey by learning how to forgive, beginning with ourselves. Let us be gentle and kind to our loved ones. Let us practice mindfulness, self-compassion and prayer. Let us just love.
As we adjust our sails and hold fast to the rudder, I ask you to be comforted by the words of a great author of several parenting books, L. R. Knost:
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break, and all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.
Michael Matsuda
Superintendent
Anaheim Union High School District
Extraordinarily beautiful. Thanks for writing this, Dr. Matsuda, and thank you, Diane, for sharing it!!!
I sure could have used superintendents like that when I was teaching. Thank you, Dr. Matusda for your caring and understanding.
What a wonderful message for our young people and the world! We need more people like him in leadership positions. I truly hope this is the one event that will be remembered, and that Covid-19 becomes a memory, not an annual event as some scientists fear. Right now scientists are hard at work trying to create a vaccine against this virus.
I wish I could be optimistic, but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and we are grossly unprepared.
Sorry to be the downer in a down time, but if we just keep reacting to things and do not plan ahead and actually change course, the iceberg will sink us for sure.
“The shape of things to come”
The shape of things to come
Is everywhere we look
To Appalachia from
The streets of Stony Brook
The shape of things to come
Is poverty and want
It’s water full of scum
And lead in drinking font
The shape of things to come
Is pestilence and plague
It’s greater than the sum
Of every war we’ve waged
The shape of things to come
Is climate change and drought
It’s warming on the run
And rising seas, no doubt
The shape of things to come
Is bridges falling down
It’s children in the slum
And homeless all around
The shape of things to come
Is neighborhood that’s gated
It’s people under thumb
And spying unabated
The shape of things to come
Has stared us in the face
Though most of us are numb
And caught up in the race
Sometimes, SomeDAM, your work transcends that light verse genre of which you are such a master and stands as first-rate poetry with the best work being done. I think that’s true of this one. Truth teller.
And, of course, and I hate to say this, you are right. This is the beginning of the nightmare phase. Welcome to hell.
For a long time we’ve been ignoring what’s happening.
Confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms, are only about 45 years old. They are now ubiquitous in the U.S., and we give 80 percent of the antibiotics we produce to these animals. In the presence of these antibiotics, bacteria develop resistance. And we consume meat full of those antibiotics, and after a while, they don’t work. So, CAFOs are like thousands and thousands of open-air labs full of Petri dishes for breeding the next pandemic. We’ve already seen the emergence in China of a disease that is resistant to all known antibiotics. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6777638/.)
At present, 70 percent of land used by humans is for growing feed crops. We heavily douse this land with artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers. These run off into our waterways and feed bacteria, which feed algae, which causes algae blooms, which leads to hypoxia (oxygen depletion) in the waterways the the deaths of the larger lifeforms. Since 1975, more than 58 percent of all vertebrate wildlife on the planet has disappeared through habitat loss or pollution. For invertebrate species like frogs and corals, the numbers are even higher. We’ve lost 75-80 percent of our flying insect populations since 1975. We are taking between 1.5 and 2 TRILLION fish a year from the ocean–a rate that will, according to Daniel Pouley, head of the Fisheries Department at the University of British Columbia, lead to the collapse of ALL WILD COMMERICIAL FISHERIES by the 2040s.. All these warnings, these canaries in the coal mine, are completely ignored by our politicians and bureaucrats.
And then there is global warming.
Yikes. Of course, frogs are vertebrates!!!
Clearly, our political institutions are not built to deal with these big issues. And they can’t be dealt with after the fact, after all the damage has been done. I’m very, very worried about the not-so-distant future. At a time when we are facing such issues, we have the most anti-science politician in our history in the Offal Office. This does not bode well.
That’s not the future. That’s now.
We have a public health crisis, and the president scoffs at science and experts.
Tragic that we all to suffer because of this ignorant buffoon.
clarification: 70 of the land used by humans FOR AGRICULTURAL PURPOSES is used to grow feed crops. BTW, when plants are eaten directly, you get most of the calories from them. But when you feed crops to animals and then eat the animals, 90 percent of those original calories are lost. They went into the life processes of the animal. This happens at every level in the tropic chain. So, eating animals is extraordinarily wasteful. It’s like leaving your water tap running 24/7 because you want to stop by, occasionally, and wash your hands. It’s getting cash for your paycheck and then taking $90 out of every $100, making a pile of those bills in the street, and burning them.
Trump’s behavior in the current crisis is beyond the pale, but we would face a crisis of major proportions no matter whom we had as President.
Our for profit health care system simply is unsuited for serving the public as a whole under circumstances like a pandemic. It is designed to serve individuals and even then, only those individuals who can pay. It’s not even designed to serve health care workers, who lack masks and other basic protective gear.
Our economic system is simply unsuited for protecting the well-being of millions of Americans in a situation like the current one. In fact, it’s unsuited for serving ANYONE in such a situation because it shuts down completely when people can’t work.
The basic problem is the system itself.
It’s not set up to serve people but to serve corporations and the ironic thing is it’s not even serving the latter at the current moment.
So, whom is it serving?
No one and nothing, apparently.
What a great system.
“Our for-profit healthcare system simply is unsuited for serving the public as a whole under circumstances like a pandemic. ”
Or under any other circumstances. But it sure does serve, well, the desires of healthcare racketeers, who siphon off billions each year from our healthcare spending into private profits, causing our system to cost TWICE AS MUCH PER CAPITA as those of the other OECD countries on average and much more than any other system in any of those countries.
But yes, this crisis throws all the issues into share relief–the huge number of uninsured, the huge number who are underinsured, the huge number who will find out that they are underinsured only when they get sick and find out how little, really, the company will pay. And then there are those who will find that when they do get sick, the companies will raise their premiums so high that they can’t pay them and must drop the insurance, at which point, the company will stop paying. And then there is the insane cost of having all these employers oversee “benefits.”
Is it possible to design a dumber system? I doubt it.
If an engineer designed such a fragile system, they would be drummed right out of the profession the first time the system failed.
But economists are celebrated with prizes, despite regular, quite spectacular failures.
If it were not so tragic it would be hilarious.
Well observed, SomeDAM.
The system is called “capitalism” but it’s not even real capitalism because it has to be bailed out with public funds to the tune of trillions of dollars every decade or so.
Nothing real about it
It’s fake capitalism run by fake capitalists.
The system is called oligarchy, or monopoly.
aka kleptocracy
I like this article, which addresses the larger context of both factory farms and Chinese wet markets.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/25/new-virus-china-covid-19-food-markets
About three years ago, Bethree, I finished writing a book about this and other issues related to animal agriculture. It’s called Trillions of Universes. I had worked on the book, off and on, for six years. It was my attention to treat comprehensively a subject that had been, I believed treated superficially in other works. The book was meant to be a series of warnings. Over a hundred literary agents rejected it. The reactions I got varied between “everyone already knows this stuff” and “nice job, but the book will be above the heads of most of its audience.” And now, here we are, with this pandemic originating in a wet market, and here we will be, soon enough, with even worse pandemics originating in our factory farms. And here I am, Cassandra, whistling into the wind.
cx: intention, not attention, of course. Sorry about the typo
Bob, as you are well aware, most members of our medical profession are oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of antibiotic use in the US is on farms for livestock, which are veritable breeding grounds for resistsng bacteria. The migration of bacteria from animals to humans is extremely well established so the idea that these farms might be the source of many of the antibiotic resistant bacteria in humans is hardly a stretch.
But for some reason, doctors still blame it on over-prescription of antibiotics for things like chronic Lyme disease.
While over-prescription of antibiotics is certainly an issue, the biggest problem is prescription of antibiotics for non bacteria infections (coronavirus causing the common cold, for example), not for stuff like Lyme disease.
And they completely ignore the elephant in the room: rampant use of antibiotics on industrial farms.
The ignorance of the medical profession on this matter is incomprehensible.
This is why, SomeDAM, it was so frustrating to me that agents responded to my book with “Yeah, well, everyone knows this already.” Mind-boggling stupid. But, of course, if I had submitted this book under the name of, say, Kim Kardashian, getting it published would have been no prob. My book addresses many other issues–habitat loss, pollution, degradation of wetlands, overuse of resources, overfishing, waste of calories, diabetes and cancer and heart disease and other diseases of affluence, etc., related to dumb agricultural practices.
It’s actually insane how little oversight and control there is over the use of antibiotics on farms. Basically none whatsoever.
Yes. Insane. I think that this is the single most significant existential issue facing us, and our politicians and bureaucrats have entirely ignored it. And, ofc, they are paid well to do so. Ag is a huge lobby.
SomeDAM Poet: It really bothers me that money always wins over decency and health.
……………………………………..
Emotions running high in Indiana farm fight
UPDATED: APR 14TH, 2016
Indiana currently has more than 1,800 concentrated feeding operations throughout the state, and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management says it receives 60 to 70 new applications each year – mostly for large-scale pork, beef and poultry operations.
As some of the CAFOs inch closer and closer to more populated areas, nearby residents have few options to prevent such farms from moving into the neighborhood.
According to state regulations, a CAFO can be placed just 300 feet from an existing home and 100 feet from a neighbor’s property line…
https://www.wthr.com/article/emotions-running-high-in-indiana-farm-fight
Doncha know?
Everyone knows
What no one knows
And no one knows
What everyone does
nailed it, SomeDAM
It’s only a matter of time (probably measured in years and not decades) before none of our antibiotics work against some very common bacteria.
At that point, it will be like preantibiotic days when any little infection could kill you.
This is a time bomb. Tick tick tick. And its horrific consequences are inevitable. But, hey, everyone knows this. Aie yie yie. And there are much more important issues to deal with like when the next Marvel Universe superhero movie will be released. Perhaps, when we have, again, a world without antibiotics, Black Widow and Captain America and Iron Man will save us.
Or the greatest superhero of them all:
Captain Orangutan
SomeDAM Poet: In Malay, “Orang” means ‘man’ and “utan” means ‘forest or jungle’. There are folk tales from the indigenous tribes about this mystical man who roams through the forest.
Would that Captain Orangutan roamed through the forest and did the sweeping that California citizens didn’t do.
In SomeDAM language, ” Orang” means orange and ” tan” means tan
So Orangutan means “orange tan” and Captain Orangutan is “Captain (sporting an) orange tan”
And now you know… the rest of the story
The shape of things to come
Is everywhere we fight
To California from
The West Virginia strike
The shape of things to come
Is unity and love
The beating of the drum
Protesting pow’rs above
The shape of things to come
The shape of youngsters’ faces
My students far from glum
With shiny teeth and braces
The shape of things to come
Not forever isolated
Slain giants with the sum
Of slingshots and of Davids
The shape of things to come
Is never easy fun
A struggle for income
A struggle for outcomes
Many against some
And We Shall Overcome
The shape of things to come
Is what we have to lose
It might be doom and gloom
But will be what we choose
That’s right.
In solidarity,
LCT
Intelligent Design
The system was designed
With CEOs in mind
It really is a hoax
It isn’t for the folks
It’s for the the oiligarchs
Who view us all as mark$
It’s really plain to see
It’s not for you and me
“View us all as Marx” works too
succinct — and sadly unheeded — summation: what stares us in the face is ignored as, instead, the race just goes on and on and on
Things to do during lock-down:
Bench press your toddler, your dog, or your cat.
Learn Old Norse online. Skol!!!
Write Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Attack of the 50-ft Woman fan fiction.
If you have enough hard-drive space, compile a daily list of Donald Trump’s lies and misstatements about the Covid-19 epidemic.
Compile a daily list of praises of Donald Trump by toadies allowed their turn at the microphone during the daily Donald Trump Covid Briefings and Campaign Rallies. Even more challenging!
Do research for an article about the 100 worst Netflix movies.
Name a volleyball and hold long, 19-year-olds-in-a-dorm-room-at-midnight conversations with him or her.
Read the novel you pretended to read when it was assigned to you in high school—you know, the one for which you read only the Spark Notes.
Forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.
Compose a quintet for ocarina, glass harmonium, Alpine horn, and beagle.
Oops: cx, quartet
“I see it in our teachers as they work tirelessly creating new curriculum and a new way of virtual learning through a completely transformed system.”
Ever the adminimal speak. Surrealistically optimistic.
But then again he gets paid the Supe Adminimal salary to say so!
“All things break, and all things can be mended.”
I hate to be a Debbie Downer (well, actually, it’s kind of one of my skills), but that is one of the most unhelpful Pollyanna falsehoods ever uttered. No, sorry, but not everything can be mended. Just the other day I was standing in my kitchen in my stockinged feet surrounded by innumerable shards of a glass pan lid. That lid cannot be mended.
This world can be mended, but the way we’re going, it won’t be. Neoliberalism has taken hold globally for forty years now and is served by nearly all politicians of nearly all stripes. The corporations and the billionaires aren’t going to give up their power or cash flow, and the politicians aren’t going to give up their bribes to make them.
We cannot tinker around the edges. Incrementalism will doom us. We need massive reduction in carbon emissions (as in, basically an end to the fossil fuel industry). We need rain forests and wetlands and oceans and ice caps. We need global redistribution of wealth and protections for all poor and marginalized individuals, including and especially those no one cares about like prisoners. We need guaranteed free-at-the-point-of use healthcare. Furthermore, we need these changes within the next couple of years, not decades, not centuries, or our planet will shatter like my glass lid. Which party do you see fighting for any of that?
Dienne,
Nothing good will happen without hope.
Lives lost during the pandemic can’t be revived.
People who die for whatever reason can’t be brought back To life.
Life contains a mix of tragedy and joy, also tedium and routine.
We don’t control world events. None of us alone can end the pandemic.
Mike Matsuda is urging us to plan for better days and believe in the future. Without hope, people give in to despair and don’t try to make things better. Without hope, people won’t bother to vote in November.
How do you think concentration camp prisoners survived, surrounded as they were by death?
Very true. That last line is especially important to remember.
Plus, it’s always welcome to see someone trying to be wise leader. Thanks to that superintendent
A wonderful list, Dienne, of what we need to strive for. Vive la révolution! And the need for hope, Diane? Well observed! I have a friend whose parents survived an entire winter in a whole they dug in the ground in the forest in Belarus, with the guy sneaking out, occasionally, to steal potatoes.
cx: in a hole, ofc
Ooops I posted on the wrong entry. This is in response to Supt. Matsuda:
Supt. Matsuda, you are a great inspiration. At this time when some of us are physically isolated, you bring us together in mind. What a wonderful world this would be if we would have world leaders with your frame of mind leading the world – thinking of others instead of self-gratification. Oh what a paradise we would live in if everyone had the disposition that reflected:
“Those were the times of amazing grace, when people came together with kindness and compassion to support each other, when they made sacrifices for complete strangers, when schools became beacons of hope for families who were food deprived, and when teachers transformed educational experiences through emotional connection, through affirming mental health, and through meaningful learning.”
And these meaningful words, “Let us take this journey by learning how to forgive, beginning with ourselves. Let us be gentle and kind to our loved ones. Let us practice mindfulness, self-compassion and prayer. Let us just love.”
Oh what a beautiful world this would be if this spirit spread throughout the world instead of just our community.
It is in giving that we receive. You can’t give away happiness; it keeps bouncing back at you.
Mary, thank you for the kind words. There is no going back. We are at the edge of an abyss and the fear of the unknown, what lies ahead, is giving us profound grief. But we, you and I are strangers no more. And that gives me comfort and hope that this pandemic with all the horrors ahead, brings humanity together. You and I share a common space, a common bond which binds us. I send you love, Mary, to you and your family. And I know that you will pay it forward. Michael
LOVE THIS!!! Thank you.
Kas
Is this the Kas Winters of Sneaky Mom?!?!?! Great work you do!!!
I know now why I treasure so many of the people who comment on this blog. Profound wisdom from all, the various views on what is happening from the superintendent to the other commentators.
Thank you.
We desperately need some wisdom these days.
Hope for the future but realism.
Someone once said, and I love this
keep an open mind but don’t let your brains fall out.
Gordon Wilder: Good one, Gordon.
Trump doesn’t have a brain so nothing will fall out.
Great quote Gordon. Made me laugh.
Thank you, Mr. Matsuda. We need many more school leaders like you.
I got so caught up reading the comments, I forgot to not how wonderful it is that Anaheim residents have a school superintendent who cares about them instead of caring about business partnerships and “philanthropists”. It is a gift.
Note, not not.
Some people view it as the ultimate challenge to conduct all life online. I view it as the ultimate challenge for the world to slow down. At least in the US, clearly the overall resources are there to sustain life. Why keep on building buildings or roads? Take a break for a while. If 1 in 1000 of the world’s population is the unthinkable tragedy, what about species going extinct, life in the oceans decimated? How can the same society return to taking cruises, jet travel, happy motoring, meat eating, and energy intensive / planet destructive lifestyle again?