Rich -- I Just Read This Thoughtful Essay

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

It's not just "immigration" for breakfast anymore. With Limbaugh and Beck and WLW's Bill McConnell, Fox's Sean Hannity, all day, every day, ...

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"Phil in the mountains of Kyushu Japan"
May 2nd, 2010 6:40 am

Yes, nativist white hysteria isn't new to American life.

But it's getting much worse insofar as too many are losing grip on decent humanity for other reasons.

If Americans knew how to see, acknowledge, and connect with "others" as human beings, there wouldn't be so much fear. But Americans have been learning a strange new form of "humanity" which denies nuance, which allows tendencies to stereotyping and to full-blown ignorance.

Consumerism does this most clearly. All advertising says all the most-desired human qualities come simply by buying the stuff marketed to your group. At some level everyone knows this is, to be kindest, a cute joke. But it comes incessantly. As in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," all go to sleep for it to some degrees.

All accept consumerism's beguilements for another reason -- that when the schools practice impersonality, they major-digress away from the engagement with skills for seeing, acknowledging, and connecting with really complicated and ever-elusive real people. Elusive because we all lack cores to ourselves. We all change -- to some degrees. We're all capable of better -- and worse.

I won't list here the ways that schools avoid engagements with the human -- the really human. Well, yes I will: 1) silos of specialization, 2) standardized tests, 3) teachers' own needs to appear de-personalized super-elevated.

And I'll also conclude that this white-hysteria-fear index is getting worse -- by looking again at the perverted form of "humanity" that the Supreme Court has elevated for the corporate form of it in Citizens United.

It's all bad. It's getting worse. But I'm not going to quote Pink Floyd to say "Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone." I'm quoting Pink Floyd to urge teachers and schools to do the opposite: engage more with the human in all its forms and interconnections in all disciplines and all their interconnections.