I frequently get comments by people who are very angry. They are hateful, and their comments are hateful. They say horrible things about anyone who dusagreees with their worldview.
I try to block them but they sometimes slip through. Life is too short to argue with people who wish you were dead.
Ben Meiselas of the Meidas Touch blog had the rare opportunity to interview President Joe Biden in the White House. Please watch the interview.
What comes through is that President Biden is thoughtful, well-informed, and fully functional. This interview should shut up the hyenas who claim that he is senile. Trumper recently wrote on this blog that Biden was a “vegetable.” So many lies, so much hatred for a man who has tried to solve problems and help people.
The other thing that shines through is that Joe Biden is a good man. A good man. He has tried to do what is best for the American people. He has a conscience. He has a soul. He is decent. His heart is filled with kindness, not hate. He is not angry. He does not have an enemies’ list. What he does have is a long list of legislative accomplishments.
Could anyone say the same about the other guy? No.
Robert Hubbell is one of my favorite bloggers. I could not resist reposting his Thanksgiving commentary. It’s so beautiful!
He wrote:
We are living through challenging times. It isn’t easy to feel gratitude in the midst of trying circumstances. The answer to regaining a sense of gratitude is to expand our perspective—which allows us to look beyond today’s troubles to the greater blessings that will endure for generations to come.
To help regain perspective, I suggest reading an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, which references our home planet. The Planetary Society website explains the background for Sagan’s reflection and quotes the most famous passage from his book. It is a fitting reflection for Thanksgiving.
Many readers have used Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot as their reflection for Thanksgiving dinner.
First, this introduction from The Planetary Society:
The following excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990. As the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it turned around for one last look at its home planet.
Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Here is Carl Sagan’s reflection on the photo and our place in the cosmos:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a strange headline, but it’s true.
Here is the story: Politico reporter goes to Arizona to cover the voucher story. Discovers that the chief advocate for vouchers is a beautiful, charming mom who uses state money to home-school her five children.
Writer is wowed by this mom. Writer notes that mom is funded by DeVos and Koch machine. It doesn’t matter. She’s so charming and pretty, who cares that vouchers are busting the state budget?
Writer pays more attention to the adorable mom than to those fighting to stop the damage she is doing to kids, public schools, and communities. Somehow she becomes the hero of the story.
Who cares that vouchers are used mostly by families whose kids never went to public schools? Who cares that vouchers are harming the state’s public schools?
Who cares that Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion? Who cares that the legislature ignored their vote?
Who cares that less than 5% of the state’s students are undermining the state budget and the schools that educate the other students?
Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these in the name of parents’ prerogative to shape their children’s education or by pointing to wasteful spending by public schools. As a result, ESA costs have ballooned from the legislature’s original estimated price tag of $100 million over two years, to more than $400 million a year — a figure, critics have noted, that would explain more than half of Arizona’s projected budget deficit in 2024 and 2025.
Ain’t it grand?
Love is love, even when it is underwritten by billionaires!
James Talarico is a Texas legislator who is studying to be a minister.
He gave this speech recently in response to the claims of Christian nationalists. It has received more than 500,000 views.
The clip is from Instagram. I hope you can open it.
I loved it. I hope you do too. You don’t have to be religious to applaud his message.
If you want to be inspired more by this remarkable man, watch this. James Talarico explains that there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism.
This story from Oklahoma went viral. It is a powerful counterpoint to the nonstop negativity that deformers spew to the media about public schools. It is also a rebuke to the nonsense that Oklahoma legislators spout about the state’s public schools.
It is a story of caring, concern and dedication to the students. It stands in sharp contrast to the charter schools built on the “no-excuses” model of iron discipline and conformity. What can charter schools learn from public schools like Bizby North Intermediate?
If only Oklahoma’s Governor, its State Superintendent, and its legislators cared as much about the state’s children as its dedicated educators!
BIXBY, Okla. (KFOR) – Out at a school in Bixby, Oklahoma is a principal whose hug was caught on camera and passed around online last week spreading what’s said to be some much-needed positivity.
“We do this all the time and tomorrow my team will do it all over again,” said Bixby North Intermediate Principal Libby VanDolah.
She was captured on camera taking care of one of her many students.
VanDolah said that while speaking with other members of her staff she noticed a student with their face in their hands sitting on the ground.
“At first I thought they were tying their shoes but then when I looked again they were still on the ground,” said VanDolah. “I don’t even know if I even finished what I was saying, I just walked off because I knew this student was needing some assistance.”
VanDolah got down on the ground and that’s when she noticed the student was crying.
“My team went into action. I got down and hugged that student, and my counselor went and got that student breakfast,” said VanDolah. “We sat there and hugged and it was a few minutes before we were ready to move. It was just a moment.”
That hug was captured on camera and posted online by Jessica Jernegan, Bixby Public Schools Director of Community Engagement. And that’s what the picture did, it engaged the Oklahoma community.
“That picture encapsulates what public school is about,” said VanDolah. “We meet the kids where they are and we give them what they need. All educators do it. It happened to me yesterday (Thursday) but it could have been my assistant principal or it could have been someone in another district.”
The student had walked into school without a backpack or a coat and was stressed VanDolah said.
The post by Jernegan was shared by Representatives, online influencers, and by many teachers. Jernegan posted:
“Not one question from the principal about being tardy or where’s your backpack or where are you supposed to be?!
A moment. A hug. And breakfast.
In case you’re still with me on this post and wondering if all the rhetoric you’re hearing about public schools is true…let this be a small but very real and tangible reminder that it is most definitely not.
We’re just over here meeting kids where they are and giving them what they need.”Jessica Jernegan, Bixby Public Schools
“I think the reason why it went so viral is that people are hungry for positive things, especially centered around education,” said VanDolah. “We do it every day because we care so deeply about our kids. Yes, I have the honor of being 475 different moms. I think the reason so many people connect with it is because they have an educator in their life that they’ve seen this happen with.”
The student had walked into school without a backpack or a coat and was stressed VanDolah said.
The post by Jernegan was shared by Representatives, online influencers, and by many teachers. Jernegan posted:
“Not one question from the principal about being tardy or where’s your backpack or where are you supposed to be?!
A moment. A hug. And breakfast.
In case you’re still with me on this post and wondering if all the rhetoric you’re hearing about public schools is true…let this be a small but very real and tangible reminder that it is most definitely not.
We’re just over here meeting kids where they are and giving them what they need.”Jessica Jernegan, Bixby Public Schools
“I think the reason why it went so viral is that people are hungry for positive things, especially centered around education,” said VanDolah. “We do it every day because we care so deeply about our kids. Yes, I have the honor of being 475 different moms. I think the reason so many people connect with it is because they have an educator in their life that they’ve seen this happen with.”
We in this nation face many challenges this year, especially with a Presidential election this November.
The country is polarized on many issues, and yet there is so much that binds us together. We should build on these commonalities and remember that we are all Americans, we are all human beings, we want the best for our country and for our children and grandchildren.
Rev. Dr. William Barber was involved in an unfortunate incident in Greenville, North Carolina last Tuesday. He went to the opening of the new film “The Color Purple” and brought his own chair, to accommodate his disability. The movie theater would not permit him to use his own chair, and he was evicted. Dr. Barber was the keynote speaker at the NPE conference a few years ago in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he inspired every one who heard him. He is a man of humility, faith, and courage.
After the news was reported, the AMC theater chain apologized profusely, and the chairman of the AMC chain asked to meet with Dr. Barber to apologize and to discuss how its movie theaters can make changes to meet the needs of people with disabilities.
At the end of the article, Dr. Barber said something that I would like to put up in lights:
Rev. William Barber: “There’s no way to follow Jesus without learning to pay attention to whoever is broken and vulnerable in society,” Barber said. “Because that’s where God shows up.”
Please remember this. Please share it with your friends.
Merry Christmas to all of those who read this blog!
Thank you for reading and sharing your views.
If you are surrounded by family and friends, enjoy them and treasure them.
If you are not, go to a church or community center and help others. Some are serving Christmas dinner and would welcome your help. Find out where community groups are sharing with others. Help them. They need you.
Christiane Amanpour interviewed Robi Damelin, an Israeli peace activist, about her organization’s work to replace hatred with compassion. Damelin’s teenage son was killed by a Palestinian sniper 21 years ago, and she has dedicated her life since then to building a parents group of both Israelis and Palestinians.
She advocates listening to the stories of others. She recognizes the terrible suffering of Palestinians, and she works with Palestinian friends to foster understanding.
The hope for the future of both Israelis and Palestinians lies with enlightened leadership, which neither side has now. Damelin remains steadfast in believing that change will come, built on a mutual desire to end the cycle of fear and death.
Damelin speaks for me, and I hope, for most people. She wants peace and dignity for all sides, and an end to shouting and hatred, which only breeds more shouting and hatred.
Diane Ravitch's blog 