Roseanne the Reboot

Purely out of curiosity, a curiosity perhaps colored by the wistfulness of a one-time affection, my wife and I watched the premiere of the re-booted television series, “Roseanne.” The show features most of the original 1988-1997 cast, including John Goodman, as the resurrected Dan, killed off by the end of the show’s nine-season run, but brought to life again (with a CPAP mask on, no less) through the magic of failed novelist’s (Rosanne) backstory.

My expectations were a bit low. By the time the original “Roseanne” series ended, I’d become saturated with the constant political messaging and overworked story lines. In all fairness, I’d felt the same about “All in the Family” (1971-1979, followed by four more seasons of “Archie Bunker’s Place”), when it began to run out of jab and steam and its characters began spinning off. There is just so much punch, punch, punch cynicism one can take; eventually one must leave the ring for a while.

Prior to watching the opening show, I read the New York Times and The Washington Post reviews of the reboot, and came away from the column with some hope that the show should be given a chance.

In his March 26 television column in the New York Times, James Poniewozik reviewed the revival of Roseanne.

“The Conners aren’t just preserved,” wrote Poniewozik. “They’re stuck. And they’re stuck in a way that underlines the show’s original mission of representing the kind of paycheck-to-paycheck life that other, more upscale sitcoms of the era left behind.” “Close your eyes, and you could be listening to vintage “Roseanne.” Poniewozik continued, “This is good and bad. The series’s voice is intact, but the zinger-based dialogue and rhythms can feel dated.”

 “But the beauty of the show’s language is how many feelings those zingers can communicate. The Conners use insults to express love and test old wounds. A conversation can shade from friendly chain-pulling to actual fighting and then back again.”

Hank Stuever’s, TV critic for The Washington Post, Sunday column was headlined, “Rebooted Roseanne is a proud ‘deplorable.’ Can she be the Trump era’s Archie Bunker?” 

In his column, Stuever wrote, ’Roseanne’ is back, in part, because everything else is back, because the 21st century turned out to be so thoroughly unappealing that our entertainment culture regresses into old shows instead of finding new ones to love nearly as much. After ‘Roseanne’s’ era, broadcast network comedies got faster and smarter but somehow shallower, mastering the art of snark while losing an ability to resonate with a broad audience.”

 Stuever continued, “And so, sporting a fresh layer of relevance, ABC’s groundbreaking sitcom ‘Roseanne’ makes an engaging return to life next week with its superb original cast (Roseanne Barr, John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert, Lecy Goranson and Michael Fishman) happily intact. They’re older and unhappier and, to a character, well acquainted with the demise of the American Dream.”

It is important for me to add this disclaimer: I use a CPAP machine, and several of the prescriptions Roseanne and Dan mention during the premiere reside in my medicine cabinet as well. The aches and pains of age, and the other health concerns about which the couple jokes are very real in my household. I see those concerns every day in the faces of the elderly, poor, and struggling families at our neighborhood grocery store and at the pharmacy counter when the price of their pills on the register screen stuns me. I am, thankfully, well-insured, but so many people are not, and that's a good part of the reason why this new version of “Roseanne” failed to make me laugh too often, though many of those references did make me groan in sympathy if not empathy.

In contrast, when I was thirty years younger (or forty-plus years younger during ‘All in the Family’s’ run), it was easier to laugh because I was not nearly as vulnerable, and because I was not looking in detail at the realities of poverty, aging, families-in-trouble, and healthcare. My laughter at those shows then came from my ignorance of what was going on all around me—even though I thought that with my good liberal arts education, upward-trending employment, intact family, solid bank account, and sound health, I was socially, racially, sexually, and politically astute.

Those “valuable attributes” were pure artifice when it came to seeing—not just looking at—the real world. Sad to say, those same things made it easier for me to laugh at other people’s troubles—television characters mimicking the world of the writers, producers, directors, and networks—while distracting me from the slowly rising tide of real-world issues that would eventually flood 21st century America with divisiveness, distrust, discord, and danger.

All of which is to say that the new “Roseanne” made me uncomfortable by turning the volume up on 30-year-old replays of political differences, gay rights, economic disparity, health concerns of the aging and poor, unemployment, and racial stereotyping. Yes, there was a positive nod to deployed-military service, and a good discussion of school bullying related to cross-dressing, but to me, these were thrown in as momentary station stops, not as long-term meaningful points of departure for the larger story line.

Peter Dunne Finley, a newspaperman of the late 19th and early 20th century, writing in 1902 under the pseudonym of the popular “Mr. Dooley,” said, “The purpose of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Dooley’s comment was meant sarcastically—a swipe at the journals of the time that dug into the personal lives of the rich and famous, while concurrently taking advantage of the travails of the poor to editorial advantage. 

I could be charitable and suggest that “Roseanne’s” network, ABC (owned by Disney), by rebooting the series, is trying to right the ship of Dooley’s sarcasm as it applies to television shows about the nation’s middle- and lower-classes. If the genuine intent of the show is to afflict the comfortable and send a message of support to those who feel left behind or who are struggling just to run in place, then I’m good with that.

I’m betting that many people who watched last night did get the points, and did respond with the right kind of laughter…laughter aimed at the bumblers and criminals who infest our government and corporations. If they will turn that laughter into action, so much the better. Toward that end, I suggest to Roseanne's producers and writers that they develop scripts that encourage personal and community action.

Did the show afflict my sensibilities, as reasonably comfortable as I am at this stage of my life? Not really. It brought up the same issues that surrounded me and my generation thirty years ago. But I’ve learned a lot since then, become more aware since then, become a vocal advocate for many of those causes since then. My goal as a social-media journalist really is to afflict the care-less-comfortable, the hateful-stupid, and the downright-dangerous forces that are eating away at the foundation of our society.

So one-liner digs at Trump and Clinton, the Rs and the Ds, the liberals and conservatives, big pharma, bullies, gay-bashers, self-righteous-but-clueless do-gooders, and overly-protective parents/grandparents just fluttered off the screen and came to rest on our television room floor. It’s not that I don’t care about those issues, quite the contrary: It’s that I care—have been caring—passionately about those issues, and “Roseanne” missed the boat I and many of my generation sailed on years ago.

Stuever closes his Post column with this observation, “’Roseanne’ needs to do more than acknowledge that a Trump-voting grandmother can get along with her liberal-leaning sister and adore her sparkle-riffic grandson. It should courageously allow the Conner family to more tumultuously grapple with the idea that America is coming apart and changing profoundly.” 

I couldn’t agree more.

The Time’s Poniewozik ends his review with, “’Roseanne’ is a revival that’s willing to grapple with the time that’s passed rather than deny it. It’s feisty and funny and a little sad. And like that old couch you can’t throw out, it may just have a good year or two left in it.” 

I agree with the “little sad” but it’s going to need a lot more "feisty and funny" to keep me from throwing the couch out.

My own opinion of “Roseanne” rests somewhere in between Stuever’s and Poniewozik’s conclusions. It is watchable, with moments of good acting (and moments when the actors seem to be looking at cue cards), with characters familiar enough to make you feel glad they’re back, and with themes that are important, if, in some cases, overly flogged on cable news long before they were written into the “Roseanne” script. 

The opening voiceover claims the show is filmed before a live audience, but, if so, it was a muted group, not so much unresponsive as underwhelmed as evidenced by its thin laughs and occasional collective intakes of breath. I get that. Seemed the same from my seat.

The Unseen Colors of the March For Our Lives

The opportunity to attend the March For Our Lives here in Washington, D.C., last Saturday was irresistible; fifty-one years ago, as an 18-year-old high-school senior and a wet-behind-the-ears news photographer for a local daily newspaper, I photographed tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam War marchers streaming across Arlington Memorial Bridge on their way to the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War on another Saturday, this one, October 21, 1967.

Anti-Vietnam War Protest Marchers, October 21, 1967, photo © Jim Moore

Before the main body of the marchers continued beyond the bridge, they paused, and a banner they were carrying, “Support Our GI’s [sic] Bring Them Home,” sagged across one of the rows of marchers. Being the 1960s, there were many protest songs being sung, including “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” written by Bob Dylan in 1964, and made popular by Peter, Paul, and Mary (who sang at the Lincoln Memorial at the beginning of the demonstration), Joan Baez, the Byrds, and many other artists prior to and years after the Pentagon march.

Half-a-century (plus a year) later, this time as a 68-year-old photographer without media credentials, and with the significant hitch of age in my physical mobility, I journeyed from my Alexandria home with a photographer friend to the rally on Pennsylvania Avenue on a bright, cool, spring morning. I brought my cameras and a healthy dose of optimism about the March’s mission—to bring the visual, vocal, and social-media power of young people to bear against the onslaught of gun-related deaths in America. My optimism proved right, though frankly, it was overwhelmed and ultimately boosted to a new height by what I experienced for the four hours I spent in the midst of the hundreds of thousands of people who packed Pennsylvania Avenue for nearly 14 long D.C. blocks. 

Participants at the March For Our Lives, March 24, 2018, photo © Jim Moore

This was no loose confederation of idealists, destructionists, chanters, off-message ranters, and unfocused protesters. Unlike the 1967 Pentagon march, which had a number of dark facets, bitter undertones, and political rancor detracting from a simple anti-war message, the 2018 March For Our Lives organizers and participants were absolutely on-point, on-message, and on-fire with vision, energy, and determination. While many adults attended (I saw thousands of my generation, and dozens of my parents’ generation there), what happened on Saturday was of, by, and for the nation’s young people—the generation to which will fall, in just a few years, the full weight of local, state, and national governance. 

The shooting deaths of 14 teenagers and three adults at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, brought to the national media stage some of the most articulate, politically-savvy, deeply philosophical, and empowered teenagers and pre-teenagers I have ever seen. And in the crowd that jammed Pennsylvania Avenue, it was clear to me that what the public sees in the faces of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas (MSD) students who are the impassioned spokespersons for the movement, I saw in their peers from every corner of the country. 

Six blocks from the Capitol, Pennsylvania Avenue was overflowing with marchers, photo © Jim Moore

Make no mistake; MSD student Emma Gonzales was riveting in her 6-minute-20-second speech. Likewise, her classmates David Hogg, Delaney Tarr, Cameron Kasky, Samantha Fuentes, Jaclyn Corin, and Alex Wind spoke with assured eloquence and ingrained determination (Fuentes was so emotional, she threw up during her speech, but soldiered on to complete it, with praise from the crowd). But there were also speakers from other schools and communities plagued by gun violence, and each, in his or her turn, spoke truth to the aged, unreasonable, unchecked, and deaf powers standing in the doorways and blocking the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and in the offices of the National Rifle Association.

Eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler, a student at George Mason Elementary School here in Alexandria, an organizer of a student walkout at her school, spoke with a confidence belying her age on behalf of “…African-American women who are the victims of gun violence.” Edna Chavez, a high school student from South Los Angeles, who lost her brother, Ricardo, to gun violence, noted in her speech, “I learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read.” And Alex King and D'Angelo McDade, from North Lawndale College Prep in Chicago, partnered on the stage with powerful voices ringing with words from Martin Luther King, Jr., and impassioned accounts of life under the constant threat of violence.

The crowd, having been brought to a high emotional pitch by so many of their peers, found itself as one mass of people lifted even higher by the simple words of one of the day’s last speakers, nine-year-old Yolanda Renee King, Dr. King’s granddaughter, “I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world.”

By the time Yolanda spoke, I’d returned home, tired and sore from the physical experience, but excited by what I’d felt and seen while taking pictures of people representing the broadest possible U.S. demography. I watched the replay of all the speeches—those I’d been there to hear, and those I’d missed—and my energy level increased. What I and several hundred thousand people experienced was part of what I’m going to have to describe as a part of the social-political spectrum heretofore unseen, but nonetheless quite real and important.

As any prism-and-sun experiment confirms, white light is really a combination of the full spectrum of colors visible to the human eye, from violet on the far left, to red on the far right.  

Visible light: the narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum humans can "see"

How the eye-brain combination works to discern individual colors must be left for additional reading outside this blog, but here’s what’s most important in the study of the spectrum: There are colors we cannot see, but which are nonetheless very much a part of the spectrum.We humans cannot “see” ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths—our eyes are just not designed that way—but they exist. 

Radio waves, microwaves, and X-rays, are part of that spectrum—heating our food, burning our skin, exposing our bones, delivering music to our ears—but it was only with equipment designed to make those wavelengths known and measured that we discovered the true span of what is called the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible color is but a small portion of that spectrum. 

So it is with America’s social-political spectrum. What we perceive as the social-political spectrum comprising the far-left to far-right political persuasions coupled uneasily to the myriad visible social strata in between: from black to white; from undocumented to dynastic blue blood; from dire poverty to untold wealth; from under-education to privileged education; from homelessness to penthouses; from debt-doomed illnesses to insurance-supported health; from huddled lives of daily fear to care-less lives of ignorance of those who live in daily fear.

These, and other visible segments of the social-political spectrum, are aspects of American life we can see, touch, experience, write about, dwell on, decry, exalt, wring our hands about, or ignore as we choose. The question is, do we have to accept this spectrum as the norm for our time (or worse, as the norm for future generations)? The answer, spoken forcefully from the March For Our Lives’ podium on Saturday, is “no.” No. We do not have to accept the norm, and, what’s more, there is a once-unseen and unheard portion of that spectrum that has the power to make that “No” a reality.

March participants watch Delaney Tarr, a student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, photo © Jim Moore

America’s teenagers and pre-teens (as evidenced by Naomi Wadler and Yolanda King), are that long-overlooked, politically-ignored and unappreciated portion of the social-political spectrum that, in truth, is the source of the yet-untapped, but clearly sustainable energy the nation needs if we are to ever overcome the inequalities that color virtually every feature of our past, present, and (if left unaddressed) future histories.

Of course they have always been a part of the spectrum. There is no doubt that far too many teenagers were only appreciated by their government as necessary to the military, or as entry-level (if that) employees as a staple of the workforce. But, ask virtually any politician if he or she considers teenagers positive or negative factors in their continued electability, you will get either a condescending remark, or an “I-don’t-really-care” shrug. To many politicians already in office—local, state, or national—the potential of teens to make serious contributions to the pressing social issues of our time has, up until Saturday, been dismissed or, at best, patted on the back.

Let me be clear: I am not calling out all politicians, or all adults; there are a handful of politicos, and millions of parents, grandparents, teachers, and probably many employers, who stand firmly behind the young people they love, educate, and employ. And at Saturday’s March, I saw and photographed many aging folks like me who heard the strains of “The Times They Are a-Changin’" and recalled, wistfully, a time when we teens were fired up and ready to turn the world on its head.

Well, what we couldn’t do then, today’s teenagers are going to do tomorrow. I believe that. I believe that in the crowds here in Washington and participating or watching around the country, there are millions of young men and women who were inspired and energized by the March. They will need help focusing that inspiration and energy onto the problems facing the nation, but they saw role models on the podium at the foot of the Capitol, role models who are focused and energized, and who have a plan to bring their peers with them on a grand mission. 

The time is over for those in Congress who ignore the voices of tomorrow's voters, photo © Jim Moore

A new color of the American spectrum was revealed on Saturday, a color that was always there, but, until teenagers all across America stood their ground against violence, political ignorance, and ballot-box reluctance, it was a color politicians chose not to see. Beginning on Saturday, and gaining strength toward the Novembers of 2018, 2020, 2024 and beyond, there will be a new color painted on the walls of Congress and the Oval Office. My advice to today’s politicians and candidates who have not yet gotten the message: Help the painters or get out of the way.

Learning Ally...A Great Narration Opportunity

This morning I read a not-uncommon post in one of the Facebook audiobook narration forums. It was from a new narrator who is trying to break into the audiobook market, and, having had some coaching, hopes for some work that has yet to materialize. He sees the road ahead as perhaps too daunting. In part he wrote, “…really believing I could do this, that there was a lot of work in this up and coming market of audio books; and have had no luck. Now there is over 60k producers on ACX and barely 1700 books to narrate. Guess I missed the train:( “.

The follow-on remarks in this particular thread were all, without exception, encouraging, supportive, and helpful by offering similar stories of initial discouragement followed by eventual success, along with some useful tips. No one wants this new narrator to fail. The audiobook narrator community is a very large community, but we are a nice bunch of folks who don’t mind at all bringing a new narrator along.

My contribution to soothing this new narrator’s feeling of frustration is to suggest he—and any narrator, new or with some experience--look seriously at doing volunteer narration for Learning Ally

[Note: The link I’m using is not the home page link for Learning Ally…it is the specific link for narrators interested in signing up with Learning Ally.]

Here is Learning Ally’s mission statement, taken from their website:

Promote personal achievement when access and reading are barriers to learning by advancing the use of accessible and effective educational solutions

The site also notes:

“We are a national non-profit dedicated to helping students with print disabilities, including blindness, visual impairment and dyslexia. Learning Ally improves the way students learn at home and in the classroom.

Up to 1 in 5 students has a learning difference. That means 10 million students in grades K-12 alone are struggling to read the printed word. Together it’s possible to help these students succeed in school, feel more confident, and stay on a positive path for years to come.”

I have been a Learning Ally narrator for several years, having gotten into it through my work with the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a D.C. area non-profit whose more than 300 volunteer readers record The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications every day, seven days a week, year-round, for people in the Washington area (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia for the most part), who are blind or visually impaired or physically unable to read. One of my colleagues at the Ear mentioned that he also narrated for Learning Ally—at that time with a local studio in Bethesda, Maryland, about a 30-minute drive from my Virginia home.

I visited Learning Ally and found one of the most eclectic group of narrators I’d ever encountered. There are retired college professors who represent almost all the undergraduate and graduate disciplines; there are high school teachers, and former government media professionals; there are parents whose kids are finally in school, leaving some time open for getting out of the house; there are stage actors who are performing in theaters in the Washington, D.C. area; there are men and women, young, old, and pretty darn old but active, who are lifelong readers.

We all have one thing in common: We want/need to share our love of words with others who are struggling with decoding what seem to them to be complex patterns of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and whole books. And we also want to bring the pleasure of listening to a good story well read, or vital written information, to those who cannot read at all due to blindness or other visual impairments.

I fell in love with the concept at once, and, after a brief trial period in their studios, began a weekly routine of narration for Learning Ally. I learned to read for the pre-teen and young adult audience; I read from encyclopedias; I read short stories; I read non-fiction. And, over time, I built two things: 1. Confidence in my narration ability and; 2. A body of work of which I could be proud, a body of work that was meaningful and had nothing to do with income. I also accumulated quite a few hours of volunteer time, which, when combined with the volunteer time I log with the Washington Metropolitan Ear, amounts to nearly 200 hours per year.

And the books you’ll narrate are not obscure; I’ve read popular YA literature right along with Stephen King’s 20+ hour “Changing Seasons”). You can read as much or as little as you like, and the staff support is top-notch and as timely as a phone call.

Initially I had to work from the Learning Ally studios, then Learning Ally developed a downloadable app that made it possible to record from home, but with a proprietary protocol and limited narrator editability. Now, the Learning Ally narration process nearly mirrors what most of do in our normal audiobook recording sessions—using popular recording and editing programs, with file-naming protocols that most audiobook producers use, and uploading MP3s of your files to Learning Ally. I can go from working on an Audible-intended audiobook to a Learning Ally audiobook with no changes in my basic DAW settings.

The takeaway message here is simple, and it is directed at both new narrators still waiting for their first audiobook contract and experienced narrators who can make time to use their skills in a non-profitable but highly-rewarding way. Get in touch with Learning Ally  and offer your skills and time to an organization that is doing so much for so many people who are in real need of exactly what you do every day in your home studio or other recording studios. If you are in any kind of program that encourages volunteering, Learning Ally logs your narration minutes/hours in their system, so you will have a record of what you are contributing in your own time.

If you are a new narrator, there is no better way, IMHO, for you to hone your narration/voice acting skills and build a catalog of audiobooks while you also work on snagging that first important audiobook project on ACX or for the several audiobook producers like BeeAudio, Deyan Audio, Dreamscape, and others. If you are an experienced narrator, and simply want to break your routine or reach out to an organization that will be grateful for your time, then Learning Ally is the place to go.

DeVos and Education: A Toxic Mix

Ad Astra, by Richard Lippold          Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. 

A year ago last January, a few days before President Trump’s inauguration, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in favor of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.

Mr. Romney began his op-ed by writing,

“The nomination of Betsy DeVos for secretary of education has reignited the age-old battle over education policy. The heat is already intense not just because it involves the future of our children but also because a lot of money is at stake. Essentially, it’s a debate between those in the education establishment who support the status quo because they have a financial stake in the system and those who seek to challenge the status quo because it’s not serving kids well.”

I replied to Mr. Romney’s column by saying he did not identify the essential debate, though he did identify players whose self-serving positions obscure the fundamental failings of the American education system. The thinking of the nation’s leadership team (such as it is today, which isn’t saying much, including Ms. DeVos), must not be focused on purposefully-deceptive shiny objects and frenetically-distracting Tweets.

Our planning—for defense, for infrastructure, for energy, for social programs, and for education, among so many other needs—must, instead, be long-term and strategic. Arguments for advancing the nation’s best educational interests must be aligned with education goals of local, state, and national political campaigns and executive, legislative, and judicial actions not one-year hence, not seven years hence, but 20-40 years hence and far beyond.

When Betsy DeVos’s nomination was presented to the Senate more than a year ago, I shook my head in disappointment, again, for that portion of the electorate that voted for Donald Trump. A Trump voter had and has every right to his or her own thoughts on the direction their duly-elected leader seeks to take the nation. And I had to admit that many well-educated and ostensibly well-informed voters pulled the handle, or pushed a button for Mr. Trump. Perhaps they believed that the team Mr. Trump would pick to run the Executive Branch would be the equivalent to Lincoln’s Team of Rivals. But when Mr. Trump placed Betsy DeVos’s name up for Secretary of Education—a department in which I worked for several years—I was rocked back on my heels with dismay. Prior to the consenting vote that launched Secretary DeVos into office, I expressed the hope that the Senate would not shirk its duty and would, in the end, reject Ms. DeVos’s nomination. I continue to bemoan the willful ignorance of the members of the Senate who voted to approve Trump’s nomination.

Their vote, and Ms. DeVos’s continuing publicly displayed befuddlement as to what her job as Secretary of Education must be, is an admission that Congress is still not ready to take on the hard work of preserving our democracy if they are not willing to question those who promised a journey to the stars with no plan to teach us how to get there.

In her recent Sixty Minutes interview, Ms. DeVos did not know of, nor could she even explain—much less defend—the dismal scores of schools in her home state of Michigan, admitting that she does not "intentionally" visit underperforming schools in that state, and added an asterisk of “Maybe I should.” It was an embarrassing and abysmal performance by someone who has no practical experience whatsoever in the public school system. This was hardly the first time Ms. DeVos has been at a loss to explain her role or any practical vision for her department or for the nation’s schools.

It is not just the “future of our children” that is at stake; it is the future of a nation built on ethics, decency, humanity, and the fundamental right to feel safe within the borders of the country, the community, and the home. Whether our children and their children will be responsible for that vision of the future is not a certainty.

Mere educational outcome metrics, no matter how they are massaged by competing factions, do not reflect the underlying failure of our society to hold parents, communities, teachers, and leaders to much higher moral and ethical standards, and to do so by creating an atmosphere in our schools—all schools, public, private, and home schools—conducive to, and encouraging, educational rigor, logical thinking, and non-judgmental debate of the issues facing all of us. We must unlearn fear and distrust, and relearn reliance on others, acceptance of differences, and the immutable value of personal accountability. So far, Ms. DeVos has shown no interest in speaking to, or acting on, those issues. In that, she is an absolute reflection of the president.

The 2016 National Center for Education Statistics Report, “The Condition of Education notes

“[T]he 2015 average mathematics scores in grades 4 and 8 were 1 and 2 points lower, respectively, than the 2013 average mathematics scores. The 2015 average reading score for 4th-graders was not significantly different from the score in 2013, and the 2015 score for 8th-graders was 2 points lower than the score in 2013. At grade 12, the average mathematics score was lower in 2015 than in 2013, and the average reading score did not significantly differ between the two years. Of particular note is that in both mathematics and reading, the lowest performing 12th-grade students— those performing at the 10th and 25th percentiles—had lower scores in 2015 than in 2013.”

In short, we have not improved the outcomes of our youngest, or our most educationally-at-risk older students, and we have not really moved the needle toward excellence for the rest. No where is this more apparent than in Michigan schools…Ms. DeVos’s education backyard, where performance scoring in almost every category barely rates a C+.

Americans can debate for hours the relative merits of teachers’ unions, home-schooling, charter schools, vouchers, racial red-lining of inner city schools, the public’s willingness to fund school bonds, etc., but if there is no fire in the belly of a community to make the hard choices necessary to address the underlying deficit of core knowledge training—which I define as the development of logical thinking coupled with open-minded analysis followed by non-judgmental critical debate—we are not going to advance this nation toward a favorable goal. The person tasked with lighting that fire, the president, and the person responsible for carrying that fire to every school district, Betsy DeVos, have not even found the necessary tinder, much less the long-term fuel, for those necessary flames.

Communities and families simply cannot afford to let every upwelling spew of diversionary tactics or false equivalency trends set by political expediency, give communities the misguided impression fostered by confused leaders like Ms. DeVos that their kids are doing well. Beyond the fact that they are being shot and killed at random in our schools, a shameful condition not even close to being resolved, too many of our children are not doing well in the most important arena of all—the classroom.

We can take heart, though, that the young people of the country are not waiting for the adults to act. What we have seen in the upwelling movement sparked by the tragedy at Margaret Stoneman Douglas High School is the true grit, determination, and authenticity fueling the commitment of students to reclaim their sense of safety—physical and psychological—which will, in turn, allow them to focus on their primary mission: to learn in schools that are not only safe havens, but which are capable of lifting every student up to view the world from the mountaintop of a good education.

There is a beautiful, 100’ tall, gold-colored stainless steel spire on the Mall side of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The spire pierces a constellation of stars. The title of the sculpture by Richard Lippold is Ad Astra, meaning, "To the Stars." While this title is most apt for the sculpture, and the sculpture itself is inspiring, I prefer the longer Latin phrase, Per aspera ad astra, or, "Through hardships to the stars," because no journey of such significance can be begun without great effort supported by education at every level. Sad to say, Ms. DeVos, and her boss, are oblivious to the beauty of that goal.

Narrating A Short Story That Tugs At The Heart

The Harmonica, by Tony Johnston

Sometimes--oftentimes, truth be known--I enjoy narrating for Learning Ally more than I enjoy narrating for a high per-finished-hour (PFH ) audiobook for a major publisher or even one of my favorite public domain books for Spoken Realms. Learning Ally's audiobooks are designed to help people with "print disabilities, including blindness, visual impairment and dyslexia," get the most out of reading by pairing the spoken word with the written word.

This Sunday morning, I got a call from one of Learning Ally's directors, wanting to know if I had the time to narrate, edit, and produce a very short (under 10-minute) audiobook, "The Harmonica," by Tony Johnston. The target market for the audiobook/picture book is pre-teen, but the story itself, about a young boy taken from his parents during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, transcends age. It is a hauntingly beautiful story of love, music, and a gift. The turnaround time was a day, shorter if possible. For whatever reason the timeline was tight. I didn't hesitate to say yes, of course.

Within a few minutes, I had downloaded the PDF that was sent to me, and I fired up Studio One, Audition, and iZotope RX6, and got the Dungeon ready for the recording. As I pre-read the story, it pulled me in, touched me, and left me sad but hopeful as it concluded. The story is based on the author's experience as a boy, but written not as documentation, but as a love-letter to his parents and to Franz Schubert. The director asked me to give the story a voice the target audience of pre-teens would relate to--a bit of a stretch for an older narrator, but the challenge was a good one. The project was done within two hours and uploaded to Learning Ally.

A Stick, Chewing Gum, and a Mirror: Essential Social Media Tools

Keep your stick, chewing gum, and mirror handy

I took a beating the other night on Facebook. It wasn’t a big, nasty, knockdown sort of beating; it was more like a sucker punch in the gut beating. But, as one who was smacked by a pair of virtual brass knuckles, the butt of a gun argument, and one or two other saps and tire irons wielded by disgruntled haters who pretty much wore masks crafted to look like nice people, I was more than a little wounded in the heart and spirit. Once I admitted the pummeling to my FB friends, I was heartened by the outpouring of genuine kindness and advice I received within minutes of my confession. To my caring cadre of compañeros, I say thank you.

Most of us who have been using and/or watching Facebook for a few years can attest to a shift in how Facebook’s algorithms, news feed selections, friendship requests, and myriad technical and marketing things about which I know nothing, have taken the site from generally congenial to, in some sad instances, downright vicious and venal. It has become a portal for misinformation, disinformation, shouting, demonizing, plagiarizing, dehumanizing, and a dozen other “‘izings” that are not helpful or healthful to those in the community who still believe that posting kitten/puppy/pony/goats-in-coats/bird/heart-shaped clouds/misty morning pictures and birthday greeting GIFs and other celebratory shout-outs to the world are soporifics to an otherwise stressful world. Believe me, when I am in my blind taking bird pictures, I’m in a very good place. 

I think most of us have become sensitized to the need to look around the FB discussion corner with a mirror on a long stick—if you get my analogy (think Saving Private Ryan, a mirror and chewing gum)—before we poke our dialogue-seeking heads out to make a point about almost anything.

I’m one of those long-stick-and-mirror types; either what I see around the corner is safe enough to affirm that what awaits is open-mindedness toward the remarks I am thinking of sharing, or what I see in the mirror tells me all I need to know about the emotional violence that is awaiting me should I venture forth with my free speech. I don’t know how the rest of you gauge the possible outcome of the yes-I-will-no-I-won’t-step-around-the-corner decision, but for me, a touch of caution seems like a sane choice.

Unless you are willing to live in a cave, sans any form of media, or you simply have the enviable gumption to turn completely away from the news cycles spinning around like endless banks of laundromat dryers on crack, you have seen the descent of decency not only in social media, but in so many other quarters of our daily lives.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that life when I was growing up—with the Cleavers, the Nelsons, Gidget, and Father Knows Best living all on the same neatly-trimmed cul-de-sac—represented some sort of Halcyon days for Baby Boomers.

The televisions of the day were, compared to today’s HD monsters, laughably tiny, rough resolution, and mostly black and white. We had three, maybe four or five, channels we received with rabbit ear or rooftop antennae. We had news programs featuring real reporters, respected anchors (a relatively new term, by the way), and credible stories that lacked any bias or points of view that had the potential to set neighbor against neighbor.

There were, of course, radio and television commentators, and newspaper columnists who leaned left or right, and we knew that, but we didn’t let our personal affection for, or affiliation with, a news personality or a news company so blind us to the need for balance that we allowed wedges of disagreement to split us up as Americans. Oh, my father hated—railed against—the Washington Post—called it the Daily Pravda—and he preferred the Washington Star, a kinder, gentler paper, in his opinion.

But you know what? Both papers landed on our driveway every day, just as they did on the driveways of most of our neighbors. I have to say that there were media scoundrels and scourges…columnists with axes to grind, editorial cartoonists with sharp-tipped pens of poison…radio personalities who loved to hear the roar of their own nutty voices…and news organizations that were in one trench or the other during campaign seasons.

There were foes and fans of Huntley-Brinkley and Meet the Press. Same with Howard K. Smith and Sam Donaldson or, later, Peter Jennings. Barbara Walters took a huge beating for simply being a women brazen enough to earn a spot in front of a camera. And what about that National Enquirer and similar sensational rags?! Talk about fake news! But we knew it, and we did not have to tear each other apart to prove a point not even worth making.

When the daily lineup of television shows ended around eleven or midnight, some stations signed off with a “daily devotional” and then the National Anthem. I’m not being wistful here…I’m just saying that what was real for Americans back then was not corny or worthy of scorn or derision or some comparative analysis ending in the taking of unalterable sides. We also weren’t rubes about what was happening around us.

One only has to search through headlines of the major papers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s to see images of, and read stories about, racial violence, political corruption, social unrest, physical abuse (child and spousal), crude and demeaning objectification of women, drug abuse, school instability and segregation, inner-city blight, foreign entanglements, infrastructure woes, crime ranging from petty to mob-based, poverty, homelessness, veteran disenfranchisement, environmental pollution, corporate greed, and, of course, wars. We had the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, (Have you no sense of decency?”) for gosh’s sake, and the Charles Whitman University of Texas Tower shooting in 1966? All of these national ills were very much a part of my life and the lives of all my friends, without exception.

[A personal aside] For me and my Air Force family friends who lived in the Midwest on bomber bases surrounded by missile silos, or on Army posts in Germany near the Fulda Gap, or at Naval stations where submarine crews departed for months, we took life with a sort of gallows humor. During the Cold War, we knew that when the balloon went up (or the klaxons blared for real), our fathers would go away to do their jobs, and moms and kids might just as well step out on our lawns or balconies and wait for the bright flash that would end everything we knew. We didn’t worry about guns in school, and “duck and cover” wasn’t an option; we worried about life on earth as we knew it.

So where am I going with this backward-forward-sideways looking? I’m simply pointing out two things:

One. America has always had social, political, economic, and other systemic problems. From day one. We didn’t work them all out at once—it took a Declaration, a war, a Constitution, another war, a few bad presidents (one of whom whose goal was to eliminate an entire native-born population, and his picture is nonetheless hung right there in the Oval Office), a great president, a war, an assassination, a period of terrible decline and cultural and economic abuse, another war, several amendments, another war, more amendments, another war, and one more on top of that, then a colder war, an assassination, then a very hot war, then protests, then civil rights crises, more assassinations, a resignation, and on, and on, and on, with terrible tragedy at home, and more wars abroad. Democracy is messy, painful, frustrating, head-shaking, hurtful to some, unfair to others, ultimately unsatisfying in its details, but somehow satisfying in its totality, in its sheer persistence to not give up on the original idea.  

Two. Until the advent of social media and its apparent transformation into a digitized beast hammered out of an alloy of good intentions and hopeful technology, but now infected and tarnished by the detritus of the worst human motivations, Americans, for the most part, found a way to talk to each other about core issues without fear of shaming, without seeing posters of themselves spread large on public walls with hateful artwork and unspeakable words spattered across them.  We talked, we stated our positions, we disagreed, we argued, we discussed, we debated, we listened, and we either came together or we compromised. We rarely closed our minds and our hearts to honestly-held positions stated openly and innocently.

Our disagreements were often messy—no doubt. There was shouting, there was name-calling and there were hurtful things said and done. But we did not for a moment think to walk down the middle of a crowded street—the broad boulevard of American society—with a megaphone of hate, a bucket of poison, and a box of hate-smeared nails, and single out the person with whom we disagreed (and probably never met) and humiliate them, scourge them, crucify them on a cross of misbegotten electrons and then disappear into a coward’s world of anonymity and unaccountability.

“Oh really?” you counter. “What about the racism that permeated the American conversation for so many decades? What about segregated schools, ‘white-only’ signs, backs of busses, the Klan and the lynchings and Jim Crow and the deaths of civil rights marchers and bus riders? What about the Dreamers today; what about the millions of refugees fleeing the Hell of Syria; what about the homeless, the sick, the aged without care? Those all exist today. What have your platitudes and hand-wringings and scolding columns accomplished to end all of that?”

I know where you are going with this, and you have a long list of grievances that you think I have skimmed over or simply ignored. Your points are legitimate; your reading of history is correct; your assessment of our past and continued failings has merit.

Well, I can’t defend that list anymore than I can forget that when I was a boy I heard words used to describe Jews, Italians, the Irish, Mexicans, Poles, Central Europeans, Arabs, Japanese…that great population of the global community that didn’t look, act, pray, eat, or sound like “us.” And I did not stand up against that. I was too afraid to be honest with my shame. None of that was, is, or ever will be made right to the satisfaction of those so wounded or those who lost everything by such terribly inhumane deeds carried out by Americans. I cannot unring my own bell of inaction.

But I will tell you this, and I believe it to my very core: We must stop the shouting, the unyielding position-taking, the boastful lying, the wanton, blatant disregard for compromising negotiations, the winner-take-all STFU attitudes that permeate our social media and political atmosphere. If we cannot wipe the slate of hate clean and learn anew to speak in measured, respectful tones, using honest words, and attentive ears, we will never be able to address the great problems of our time, and the problems that will haunt our children and grandchildren.

I see Abraham Lincoln through his mystic chords of memory; I know what he was trying to tell us. And I hear the weeping of those better angels.