Farming in Nebraska

I know that being from Nebraska and writing about farming is a stereotype, but I do not live on a farm.  I don't ride a horse to work.  I don't own cows.  I don't grow corn.

Having said that, I do know some farmers.  As it turns out, if farmers don't belong to a co-op, they get no help.

Here is what we grow in Nebraska:  corn (only 20% of yellow corn is for human consumption, and sweet corn is less than 1%), soy beans (lots of uses which include food and non-food sources), wheat (straw/hay), milo (to feed cattle), sod (for rich people's yards), and alfalfa (again to feed cattle).

We don't grow vegetables in Nebraska.  You might find food in people's backyard, but not in large farming situations.  How can we progress as a society (or a state) if we don't grow things which people can actually eat?  Instead Nebraska grows things which become part of something of an industrial train.

Maybe, just maybe, we should all try to self-sustain, just in case.

My suggestion:  plant something edible in whatever space you have.  And then share.

Missing Out on School

There are a hundred reasons students should not go back to "school-as-usual" in a few weeks, but I want to talk about the most important one:

     Human interaction. 

Kids come into my classroom not just to learn, but also to find a reprieve from the chaos of high school.  They have been known to sit in recycling boxes as a safe space, to sit in a corner with a blanket and a pillow, to sleep (because they can't sleep at home), to eat lunch and talk about their lives, to ask questions about life and love, and to share.

So when "The Man" says that we need to open schools during a pandemic, because kids needs social interaction and social skills, The Man is batshit crazy.

Most classrooms in America do NOT have the room for 6 foot distancing.  Even the hallways, lunchrooms, and bathrooms don't have that kind of space.  More importantly, if they have to stay away from each other, we will not have the same kind of human interaction that the government so boldly says they need.  Everyone will be awkward, seminars will be less informative and less interactive, and the very things which help us communicate (like facial expressions), will be mostly hidden, behind a mask.  Students with anxiety or depression will not be helped by this experiment we seem prepared to do on our children.

If books and desks and chairs and doors have to be sanitized every time someone uses them, aren't we kind of describing a hospital ward?
If kids are being sequestered, aren't we kind of describing a prison?  (By the way, look at the number of COVID cases in prisons right now ...)

And let's remember that kids are kids, so they will take the masks off, try to be funny by coughing and/or sneezing on people, refuse to follow the rules, and then have to be "disciplined".  What am I supposed to do?  Tase a kid who's being a dick?  If so, we should have had tasers a long time ago.  But I think the point of schools is to EDUCATE, not just control.  We have options.  I don't want to be even more of a babysitter, nurse, therapist, guard ...  I got into education to TEACH, not police.

Isn't it enough that we already target our children with crippling student loans and high interest credit and five-days-a-week, eight-hours-a-day confinement in school buildings?

America has the unique opportunity right now to change, adjust, amend, and improve the way in which we educate our children.  Instead, we seem hell-bent on keeping the status quo, even when the status quo has proven again and again that our model of education often makes kids hate school, EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO PANDEMIC.

I suggest that regardless of everyone's political affiliation, Americans come together and fight this pandemic, get it under control, stop paying out billions of dollars to companies for a vaccine (even when those companies have NEVER brought a viable product to market), and THEN get our kids back to schools which reflect proactive thinking and real-life knowledge, not just plowing through a curricular syllabus to check off school district boxes of "proficiency" in any given subject.

American schools have an opportunity here.  I hope we don't squander it just to prove that we are too big to fail. 

COVID + School = Stupidity

It's 2020 America.  We are fucking everything up.

Schools are planning to open when COVID cases are rising daily. 

Teachers are rewriting their wills.

Protesters are tearing cities apart.  (Violence and destruction is not the right path.)

Police are shooting pepper spray into the faces of people who are exercising their first amendment right to assemble and to free speech. 

The federal government is sending military personnel into protest zones, and making them WORSE.

People are spreading false information about COVID, because the virus has become inconvenient to them. 

Partisanship is ruining the fabric of our country a little bit more every day.

Shit is so bad that KANYE is running for president again.  Jesus H. 

WAKE UP, AMERICA!

WHITE PRIVILEGE.

It is 8:30pm.  I am home alone, running a bath – all the doors are unlocked and/or open. 

            In no way do I feel unsafe, because of my surroundings.

I was born white.

I was born female.

I was born in the right zip code.

Our zip code had excellent schools.

I lived across the street from a Catholic church.

I attended school at the Catholic church until 9^th grade.

            (My education was better.)

My neighborhood was ethnically diverse, minus black people.

My father had a good, union job – one of the benefits being that we could fly anywhere, for free.

My parents went out of town a lot.  I held parties.  I disrespected their house for no reason.

I was forced to go to public school, and the public school was one of the best high schools in the state.

I went to college for 7 years.  My parents paid for it. 

I have three degrees in English.

I was never afraid of other people’s beliefs.

No one has ever called the cops on me for being in public without a purpose.

Racial slurs are never about me.  (And when they are, I am not offended.)

           

I live in a small-ish city, attached to many other, bigger cities.  My city is very white. 

White Bread, boring, spyware - video surveillance doorbells.  (FALSE sense of community.)

I am white, but the only thing I really understand is “privilege”.

(This entry is not terribly helpful in sorting out anything of importance.  You’re welcome!)

COVID 15 July Update on School

School is important.
I work for a school.

American students should not go back to "school-as-normal" this fall.
Life is not "normal" right now.
College sports started practicing, and Oh! students tested positive for COVID.
A couple of cheerleaders for a local high school were diagnosed yesterday.  They've been practicing.
I wonder ... if school starts back as normal, will people get sick?

So we (America) can do one of two things:  we can pretend like we know what's going on (quite literally I work for a school and have little to no idea what they're planning), OR we can adapt.

Darwin:  survival of those most willing to adapt.
If you keep doing the same thing in this pandemic, you will:  (potentially)

• Be fine. Nothing happens to you.
• Be fine.  You have been infected, but you were able to heal yourself.
• Get diagnosed by a doctor and have to choose whether or not your insurance is good enough - or if you have enough money - to be treated, because you are symptomatic. 
• You then cannot go to work.  Your medical bills are outrageous.
• You get it and succumb.  You die.  

*Of the above options, I choose all but the third.  

The government throws money at people "for COVID', as a stimulus, but it does not help those people who cannot afford to be either be off work or go to a doctor. The stimulus is so temporary, that it simply gave some demographics of people the time to breathe, before those people had to make life choices about work and child care and school and ... well, everything, pertaining to day-to-day life.  

We can be better. Our society and systems can improve.  

Peace and love. 

COVID 9 July 2020

Here is a snapshot of the bullshit going on today, during the world of pandemics and social unrest:

• "Nebraska is building a new state prison, which will cost upward of $450 million."  (What a shitty waste of money.  Like Nebraska needs another prison.  If we worked on social infrastructure, maybe we wouldn't feel the need to lock everyone up.)
• "Michael Cohen has already violated his early release by talking to the media."  (Is this shocking to ANYone??  He's a loud-mouthed idiot.)
• Donald Trump is ass-hurt about potentially having to hand over his financials ... (again, shocking.  He will fight that until he's dead.)
• "Trump/rally/surge of corona cases..."  (Hmmm ... thousands of people in the same space with no distancing and no masks.  I wonder why there is a huge, sudden outbreak.)
• "For the fifth time in nine days, the U.S. set a daily record for new corona cases."  (Great.  Go America.)
• "Health care workers a facing (another) dire shortage of protective gear." (Can the government seriously not get their shit together??)
• "Families look to homeschooling amid COVID."  (So ... how are they going to pay their bills if they have to stay home and teach your kid?)

Probably some good stuff happened in the last 24 hours.  I mowed the lawn and did some gardening, so maybe if take care of my own back yard and enjoy nature, I can ignore all the stupidity flying around out there. 

Peace and love.

COVID-19 8 July 2020

Every day, I wake up and look at my notifications on my phone.
Every day is a new version of shit.

Today:

• "The Ivy League will not play football this fall."  (Hmmm. No shit.  Kansas State comes to mind.  You start practicing, and a bunch of new people get COVID.  Shocking.)
• "George Floyd told officers more than 20 times that he could not breathe."  (Before they killed him.  Police officers need to get their shit together.  What the fuck are they teaching in police academies?)
• "It's an ideal setting for transmissions."  (Talking about reopening churches here.  Again, no shit.  Obviously god will protect you from a pandemic if you just go to church and pray.  Or not.) 
• "The Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation allowing employers with religious objections to limit access to free birth control."  (Asinine.  Ridiculous.  Birth control is cheap.  It's not breaking any big pharma company's banks.  And if you want to not have children, you should have access to birth control.  The conservative idiots backing this legislation are pro-life, only when it's a baby.  Once that unwanted child is born, who is going to pay for him/her?)
• "The U.S. will pay the vaccine maker Novavax $1.6 billion to develop 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by early 2021."  (Yes, that's what we need - huge corporations benefitting off of death, with a vague hint of a promise that may or may not even work.)
• "Everyone is feeling caught off guard."  (About school re-openings.  OBVIOUSLY.  Opening schools again is just going to cause the number of cases to skyrocket.)

I can't be the only one who is tired of the puking of lies and deceit and selfishness coming from our government.  If I had the money, I'd get the fuck out of here.  If Trump gets elected again, we will watch the collapse of the United States.  (And the democrats suck too.). 

Where are the people who are equipped to run a government??

Racism, socio-economic imbalance, and stupidity are the true impetus of this disaster we look at every day.

COVID-19 & Education 3 July 2020

3 July 2020

COVID-19 has given the public school system an opportunity to be better.

Public schools are still run the way they were in the 1960s.  Parents take their kids to school, drop them off, and then go to work or do their thing.  COVID-19 has taken that away.  Parents have to parent AND educate their own children right now, and they don't like it.

I understand why parents are struggling with their children right now, but let's remember that people have children, and that action comes with certain responsibilities.  Why would parents want to take their kids back to school in August, when schools will be the next enormous breeding ground for COVID?

I also understand that people have to work, so they need somewhere to take their kids.  Some single parents, especially, will be forced to choose between having a job and paying for daycare, or quitting their jobs and going on public assistance.  The United States can't afford thousands more people collecting money from a government which is already trillions of dollars in debt.

Many solutions exist here, and the WRONG solution is to just throw thousands of kids into the same building and hope for the best.  The president may think it's time to go "back to normal" and get kids back in school, but what the hell does he know about the logistics of the educational system?  He doesn't even read his daily briefings for god's sake.  All he wants is for the economy to improve so he can boast about "fixing" America.

If high schools are trying to get students ready for college (especially in the junior and senior years), they should be taking half their courses online anyway.  They shouldn't need to be in a brick box for eight hours a day, five days a week.  Let's help them grow up, but treating them like adults.  And let's not punish them and their parents and their teachers by exposing everyone to a pandemic which now has over 3 million infections (and counting).

Educators, teachers, and parents in the United States need to rewrite the rules and use this opportunity to improve our schools and change our mission statements to include the best interest of everyone, including society at large.

COVID-19 1 July 2020

I was told the other day - by a man who wants to drive recklessly and then pull the key out of the ignition - a man who wants to bury the speedometer and then pull the parking brake - to be patient. 

COVID can't be blamed on everything, but try "dating" someone who lives nowhere near you during a pandemic.  It's time to give up gracefully and move on.  Maybe COVID is the "reason" I needed to shed some excess baggage.

I haven't been going to work for four months.  I am both spoiled and bored.  I am honestly astonished at the "plans" school districts are pulling out of their asses to start back school in August.  The CDC is quite clear that cases will increase in number.  They already have, since society got all weird and decided they all needed to go to the bars and eat out. 

The better example with schools is to look at these college football programs that insisted on starting practice, and they all started blossoming COVID cases.  Kansas State had to just stop, because it was spreading so fast.  What the hell do public schools think is going to happen when we start letting kids back into classrooms?  A fucking nightmare, both logistically and health-wise.  Maybe it's time to rethink the entire education system, and improve it fundamentally so kids don't end up hating school by the 12th grade.  (But that makes too much sense, apparently.)

So time is messy now.  I don't know the day or time.  I don't care.  I get all used to life lived this other way. being a hermit.

And then - yesterday - my 21-year-old friend dies, tragically, and in front of one of my other friends.  His death breaks my heart, and the loss reminds me that we do need each other.  His parents are strong, social butterflies, so they will be okay eventually, but I wouldn't wish that kind of tragedy on anyone.  Ever. 

I will try to be better.  I will try to create more things of value rather than bingeing netflix and putting together puzzles.  I will remember that a pandemic is happening, and I will not let the decisions of others compromise who I am.  Guilt isn't going to work on me anymore.