Daily Archives: April 15, 2010

The First Rule of Teaching and Writing: Have a Lesson or a Story to Tell

Writing,

Years ago, when I was 7 years old, I used to belong to the Santa Monica Boys’ Club, which used to sponsor all sorts of educational junkets. It was the place where I first joined a football team, a choir, a field hockey league, and all sorts of other activities. So, one day, I was signed up to join an archaeological dig.

Keep in mind, at the time the kids of Santa Monica weren’t really all that well to do financially. That’s changed a lot over the years, so that if I mentioned Santa Monica now, you’d probably be talking about some pretty affluent kids. But back then, my area of Santa Monica was slowly wavering between destitute and crack neighborhood. At this time, we were just destitute (hadn’t made that final drop into crack neighborhood yet).

Anyway, so I signed up. Turned out we were going to be heading off into the hills of Santa Monica (or Los Angeles) where someone had found some artifacts at one point. The guide, who was also the driver (and to be honest, I don’t remember exactly who he was from the staff at the Club back then), showed us an artifact he’d dug up some weeks before that he was carrying around in a tissue for all of us to see. No, it wasn’t an Indiana Jones level of archaeology we were exploring here; it was more a “some older guy who likes to dig in dirt to see what he can find” kind of archaeology. Imagine the next rung above a coin seeking metal detector old guy, and that would describe the level of this particular adventure.

So, we got into the mountains, and we split up into groups of kids, and a couple of friends of mine from the Boys’ Club and me started digging into the dirt of some mountainside. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but it was archaeology, and even though Indiana Jones hadn’t been made yet, this was the level of fun we were experiencing because we really didn’t know any better, and sometimes it’s really nice to get out of the bad environment that was our daily lives anyway.

But at one point, we found something. Lots of somethings. And we started digging them up. We dug up a whole bunch of shells from the side of the mountain, and we unburied them. All in all, we probably found 20 or so artifacts of old buried shells in the mountainside.

But it was during the trip back when we were kind of analyzing what we had done that I hit on the question that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. You see, back then, the idea that these mountains would have been under water at one time wasn’t taught. Still isn’t actually. The idea that a high area of California was once under water doesn’t make a lot of sense from a typical science perspective. So I asked about it, and the teacher who was with us was kind of stumped. He didn’t seem to want to go out on a limb and state that California might have been underwater at some point in the past, so he kept trying to avoid ansnwering the question. I kept asking about it, and it kind of got him annoyed.

To this day, I have yet to figure out why we were able to find ancient shells in the mountains of Santa Monica. One person conjectured that perhaps there was a lake there once, but even that didn’t seem to satisfy my curiosity. But what got me even more intrigued was that the person who brought us out to this dig had no idea why he brought us out in the first place, other than to give a bunch of poor kids something to do. And that’s my comment for today because I think it has as much relevance to writing as it does to amateur archaeology. Don’t start writing a story until you know why you’re writing it.

Oh sure, there are lots of exercises to get you writing that don’t require you to know where you’ll end up, but at some point during the writing, you probably should have an idea of why you’re writing in the first place. Otherwise, you’ll end up going all over the place, digging into places that don’t make any sense, and when you finally come up with gold, or shells, or a story, you may have no idea what to do with it even though you’ re holding it in your hands.

So, the moral is: Know what you’re writing beforehand, or you might end up underwater in the mountains of California. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best moral. I really should have thought about that before I started writing it….

The US Government’s Problem with the Census

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There was another article today about how the Census is trying to target students to fill out their census cards because of the “need”. Every time there is an article of this nature, there is this commentary on how the census is necessary because without it our areas lose funding for roads, schools and all that. But here’s the problem that the government keeps running into: The information they’re asking has nothing to do with funding for roads, schools and all that. The questions they are asking are personal, have more to do with personal demographics, and because of that, have a tendency to cause people to become more pissed off the more they look at the questions.

Look, if the government was asking people about where they lived and ended it at that, I’m sure the majority of people would probably have very little problem with it. But they want to know my ethnicity, race, how much money I make, and questions of that sort of nature. The questions they are asking are identity questions, not accountability questions, and that causes people to start getting suspicious because those are the questions that are usually asked when a governmental entity is trying to pry.

If I answer “white”, “Native American” or “race of the Avatar people, even though I never saw the movie so I don’t really know what planet they’re from”, how does that make a difference in the money that my county is allocated for road repairs? Do we get more money if we have more Avatar-race people? Do we get less? That’s the question that hasn’t been answered once by the government, yet every public relations campaign is all about how important it is that people return their Census information cards.

And then you get the loonies, like Glen Beck, who claim you shouldn’t fill out any information at all, except for your address, because Constitutionally, that’s all the government is really supposed to be able to ask. That sounds fine until you read most articles that cover these sorts of stories; it usually has a mention that if you only put that information in, SOMEONE is going to come to your house to get the rest of the information, that you are legally obligated to answer the questions. And believe it or not, that pisses people off.

From a rational choice perspective, meaning people do what’s easiest and most logical, someone who feels uneasy about giving out so much information to the government (for whatever reason) is going to choose to not return the card because then there’s not GUARANTEE that someone is actually going to come out and strong arm a citizen for the “required” information.

Part of the problem is that the media has been in cohoots with the government on this due to the tin foil hat syndrome that seems to follow the issue. Think about that for a second. Whenever the government claims that some nut case is protesting the Census, the media laughs and talks about how people are just being paranoid. But is it really paranoia if the rationality behind the Census doesn’t make a lot of sense to people? What the government is having to deal with these days is a public that doesn’t feel represented any more. And that’s dangerous. We have congressional leaders that represent their own best interests, not the interests of the people they are supposed to be representing. Historically, the census mainly affects those people. It decides what districts get more people to represent; it doesn’t give people more representation. The people representing them are still elites, and unfortunately, changing the sheets still maintains the same elite status for the power structure that is still in place.

If you wanted to attract people to the Census, you might want to find some way to make the government more representative, but that’s never been a thought every ten years. We haven’t increased the number of representatives for many decades now, and there are no plans to do so in the immediate future. So we’re mixing up the marbles even further and allowing the elites to change their colors every ten years without really affecting the membership of the elite club.

So, when some formerly unemployed guy knocks on my door every ten years and flashes a badge that he won’t be able to wear after the Census is over, I have a hard time thinking that he’s representing me when he does so. He doesn’t even represent himself. He’s representing a power structure that has been in place for a very long time that justifies itself by pretending that it’s working for us, when it’s really working for itself. To be honest, the only positive thing about the Census is that if I don’t turn in my card, someone gets employed for three months because someone needs to come out and question me. Otherwise, the only benefit of the Census is that the people in power are then told to “represent” different lines on a map, even though they will still be in power.

I’ll leave you with my usual criticism of Census government because it mirrors my other pet peeve of stupid people who always pop up whenever it comes to representation. I’m talking about the people who always vote who then comment: “If you don’t vote, you don’t have a right to complain.” This is one of those statements that makes a huge assumption that voting actually makes a difference rather than causes one to choose between two already predestined outcomes that were chosen for us in the first place. I’ll say this again: Voting does not equal democracy. Lottery equals democracy, but John Adams decided to ignore the lottery portion of democracy when he was putting the big plan together some odd 200 years ago. He liked the democracy part of Athens; he just didn’t like the part that completed the equation.

Anyway, I’m ranting now. Time to take my medication that makes it all seem better again.