On My Mind

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When Rebel Girl was a child, a teenager and then a young adult, there was no place she felt safer than at school. School was where she went to see how the broken world could come together. She still feels that way, that what we all do together is ultimately world-mending – but it's different now and it was, she realizes different even then, back when she felt so safe; maybe she was just lucky.

Earlier this week, in Oxnard, a 15-year-old student was shot by another student, an 8th grader. The victim was reportedly openly gay and lived at a group home for abused and neglected children. This morning's newspaper reports that shooter's home life may have also been troubled, with his father's record of domestic abuse and drunk driving. No reports yet on the origin of the gun. The victim is now officially brain-dead, on a ventilator and the 14-year-old shooter is facing 50 years to life.

Then yesterday, in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student who had stopped taking his medication, opened fire, killing 5, wounding 15 before killing himself. According to this morning's NY Times, the shooter "bought two of the four guns used in the attack — a 12-gauge shotgun and a 9-millimeter Glock pistol — six days ago, and they were legally registered to him, authorities said. [He]carried the shotgun in a guitar case and the pistols and ammunition strapped to his body, concealed by a coat…He proceeded through a side door to the lecture hall’s stage, and immediately opened fire without speaking. Forty eight casings and 6 shotgun shells were found at the scene, indicating more shots than initially estimated by witnesses."

UPDATE: Click on Cold Spring Shops, a blog by Stephen Karlson, a professor at NIU, for a closer look at that campus community in the aftermath of the shooting.

“This is just like Pearl Harbor”

.....FROM this morning’s New York Times:
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?:

.....A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
.....Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”
.....Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall….
.....Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge….
.....But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.
.....Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
.....She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
.....Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
.....Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
..... “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
.....The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
..... “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
.....At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”….

Ugly, ignorant bullies

.....I've been ill—only now emerging from a haze—so maybe that's why I missed this story in yesterday's OC Reg about the Cypress City Council:

.....[The City of Cypress]... will be the county's second to display the nation's “In God We Trust” motto inside the Council Chambers after a 2-1 decision by the City Council late Monday night.
.....Councilman Leroy Mills introduced the item. There was opposition from three of the five council members, but two abstained from voting, saying they did not feel it was their place to give their views on religious beliefs.
........Councilman Phil Luebben voted no and urged fellow council members to not abstain and to instead vote no.
.....“We're here to represent all the people,” Luebben said. “I would hate to see the one in five (who don't) believe in God come in front of the podium and see that ‘In God We Trust' motto in back of us.”
.....Mayor Todd Seymore and Mills voted yes.
.....“It is our nation's motto and is displayed on government buildings all over the country,” said Mills, who is retired from the U.S. Air Force.
........At least 28 California cities have now approved placing the motto in a government building; the campaign was started by a Bakersfield councilwoman....

.....As you know, prayers are routine at board meetings in the South Orange County Community College District. They have been for a long time. Individuals periodically come up before the board of trustees to complain. "Some of us don't believe in god, you know," they say. Sometimes groups get behind them. "Be fair, be considerate," they say.
.....But the trustees don't even listen to them.
.....I'm not a believer. I don't like the prayers. But if, when all is taken into account, there's no good solution, and the prayers remain, then I can live with that.
.....It's the not even listening that bothers me.

.....I put up another video last night—something from nearly two years ago. Check it out. Once again, faculty come before the board to complain (it doesn't matter what they're complaining about). They're articulate, passionate. They're obviously good people, and they're making good points. But the trustees—not all of them, you know the ones I mean—aren't even listening.
.....Look and see!
.....Ugly, ignorant bullies.
.....If Jesus were alive, surely he'd go in there and wack 'em good with a stick.

Wascally WASC: wegent woles & wesponsibilities!

In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

The University of California is facing new criticism over governance—this time from its accreditor. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that while the Western Association of Schools and Colleges normally accredits individual UC campuses, it prepared a special report on system governance in the wake of several controversies over compensation for executives in the system. The report found confusion over the roles and responsibilities of regents, the system president and the chancellor, as well as a lack of a consistent system for evaluating top officials. University officials said that they are moving to address the issues. [My emphasis.]

Watch Ian Walton express despair and then go home

STARRING:

PJ Schramel: "Dave, your mike!"
Ana Maria Cobos: "members of this board manipulated the ALA institutional membership for personal purposes...."
Margot Lovett: "the Chancellor and board ... [attempt to] rewrite reality"!
Raghu Mathur: we must show "utmost respect and reverence" for the board!
Barbara Beno: "I'm seeing a lot of progress here"
Tom Fuentes: "an infusion of good cheer"
Ian Walton: "Why are we here?"

First prayer, then letters

Peter: "It was shortly after World War II. Do you remember World War II? Absolutely ghastly business. I was against the whole thing."

Dudley: "I think we all were."

Peter: "Yes, well, I wrote a letter."

—From an old Dudley Moore/Peter Cook comedy routine

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

Students at Ohio University played a key role Friday in preventing an employee from committing suicide. The Columbus Dispatch reported that about 15 students were gathered for a weekly prayer session when they heard about a threat by a man to jump from a fifth floor ledge in the student union. The students responded with prayer and were eventually joined by other students. One student proposed that they write letters to the man, encouraging him to live, and a crisis specialist read several of the letters to the man, who was persuaded not to kill himself.

And now, a McCain Video

Rebel Girl insisted that I view this, and now I see why. For those who've seen Yes we can, this will be hilarious.