Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

Another writers strike catches us without a lot of season finales, daily shows like The Daily Show, and weeklies like Real Time. Ugh. We’re already deep in re-runs from the current television season and bored to death. Gonna be a long hot summer, made longer by the spring writers strike.

The issues, however, were bound to come up in the dawn of AI (alternative intelligence? No, artificial intelligence). Yeah, there’s something now to contend with called Artificial Intelligence, and it’s leaving everyone anxious about their careers, work, and value. Nothing projected but a bleak future for us all. High-tech Orwellian society come to pass … in our lifetime. Please, make it go away! No, this is the real Twilight Zone. This time, we get to see how life turns out after the big scare. We’ll be living through this ordeal for years. We Americans once were told: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, if humans can’t get a job to pay for housing, food, family, and health, what’s the use (of living)?

Wanna be sedated

It’s funny the many films about the future depicted this age when robots and computers would do everything, yet humans in these scenarios still exist and have jobs. Worth, I don’t know, but jobs usually dealing with computers: large as a room with lots of very wide tape. The funniest one was Woody Allen’s Sleeper. It takes place 200 years in the future from 1973. In the early 1970s, Allen as usual plays himself: neurotic hypochondriac Dixieland clarinet-playing, flirty, bawdy joking New Yorker who finds himself alive in the future. There are many scenarios that we now see coming to pass: robots, the biggest industry, which are somehow male or female, gay or straight, sassy or all-business and do the housecleaning, cooking, and mundane chores of humans past. All cars are bulbous and driverless. There’s an orb for getting high and, well, an empty water-heater shaped unit used for creating a self-gratification of sorts in mere seconds. Woody looks drunk after staying in it too long while hiding from the law who’s after him.

The police in Sleeper are depicted as incompetent, ready to shoot, and unable to capture Woody. But they do eventually. He’s placed in a morgue-like sliding bed instead of a hospital room and is assigned a friendly supervisor who introduces him to their great society, one that is more efficient and capable of providing all human needs.

Allen’s great society has a world leader resembling the pope. TVs are wall screens, and each night the great leader speaks to the people who in turn wave back as if he can see them. There is a rumor that a political underground has killed the great leader, leaving only his nose … which will be cloned to become the leader again. There is a funny slapstick scene in a garden of gigantic fruit and vegetables. Woody runs into a still-operable VW Beetle with a bumper sticker that reads: Register commies, not guns.

It is eerie how many of Allen’s predictions are coming true now only 50 years into the future of the making of Sleeper. A sleeper, by the way, is a person loitering often found sleeping on a park bench or a public spot where he does not belong.

Allen’s computer rooms now fit in the palm of our hands. Reels of computer tape are unnecessary thanks to the microchip. Driverless cars are here featuring hands-free driving and self-parking including parallel spots. And let’s face it, who can’t wait for robots that clean our homes and do all the cooking? We already don’t have to shop for food anymore and can order anything from anywhere anytime and have it delivered to our homes.

Back to the writers’ strike. Writers are artists. They use their imaginations for a living. They want the responsibility to develop their own series and movies, themes, jokes, characters, dialogue, conflicts, and endings. Their strike is a collective effort to put their foot down, by God, and stop producers (who hold the money) from going the cheap AI route. Just because AI can do everything a writer can do in seconds without a salary or human need or complaint doesn’t mean our society should allow it.

It reminds me of what was said about TV back in the 1960s: that there are scripts passed around with the same premise, and all the shows use them. That would explain the episodes from almost every show about beatniks or hippies. The Flintstones did it with ‘bug music.’ Gilligan’s Island with The Mosquitos rock band. My Three Sons with a friend of the boys who is unrecognizable after growing his hair long, wearing a wild hippie shirt and love beads, and flashing a peace sign. The hippie episode even infiltrates Green Acres and the Beatniks in The Munsters featuring The Standells—the Beatniks at the rock party accepting the Munsters for whatever they are, no fear or judgement.  All of these episodes are my favorites. But, yes, it was done to death. And these shows were written by humans.

I suppose writers may have written themselves into a corner. Management is all about the bottom line (money and cost), and layoffs are going to happen during this painful transition. Not sure how the latest yet righteous rift between artist and management will mend. But the truth is they’ve always needed each other. Perhaps that’s the past. The problem with AI is it may not be a novelty. Humans may be fooled by art, written or visual, produced by computers. Humans created AI and programmed everything it can do.

Humans are sort of in control of AI for now. But no one can predict the future, even the future of AI. Knowing humans, however, I’d bet on a lot of AI systems being literally manhandled, physically blown away. History has shown that humans tend to destroy things that threaten us. Not sure if management’s gotten the word.

Dear parents:

As an American, I am concerned about all the movements across this nation to ban books. My own state of Texas is going full ban with forthcoming laws that call on communities to play librarian and approve all books, especially for adolescents, that will be permitted in public school libraries. There are laws that throw school librarians in prison for six years if a banned book is found on the shelves.

There are proposals to ban books, some even American classics written long ago, that have been part of required reading in elementary, junior and senior high school classes for generations.

This time around, the reason for all the book bans (a pretend Christian populist craze that, like a brain virus, spreads across this nation every few decades) was initially due to sexually explicit material found in books written for today’s young people. First off, parents, I hear kids and teens use profanity and speak jokingly of genitalia and sex almost every day and have heard such talk starting when I was a kid and teen myself. Bawdy talk among kids and teens is a part of growing up. In other words, many young people already know a lot about sex. They gather information from blatant rap and some pop songs, music videos and cable TV where language and adult content are unrestricted. And let’s not forget what all they see on the internet.

What I know about book bans is that at some point, every book ever written eventually makes the list and is thrown into the community fire. The most ironic book called for banning is Fahrenheit 451 which is a novel about banned books. The title is supposedly the fire intensity necessary to thoroughly burn a book … out of existence.

Ban a book, ban a thought

Free thought is the ultimate ideal book banners want to control. Everyone thinking the same, feeling the same (hating gays, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, girls, women, Muslims, etc.), believing the same.

The human masses are never going to believe the same.

This is because every person has a different story to tell. Their stories are based on their life experiences. Everyone’s life experience is not beautiful and free of ugliness. But … everyone’s story is interesting.

Readers love to read in the first place to escape their own lives, the good and bad, wholesome and horrible, loving and hateful. Our society should be encouraging reading instead of banning it. And that’s what book bans do.

Don’t forget, kids are more influenced by what they see and hear than what they read or think. Seeing and hearing is real. Reading is cerebral, not their real experience. And kids/teens know the difference.

To point out how ludicrous the latest ever-expanding book bans have become, these are some of the listed books as of today:

Charlotte’s Web     The Dictionary      To Kill a Mockingbird     The Scarlet Letter

Beloved                 The Bluest Eye      The Catcher in the Rye    And Tango Makes Three

Of Mice and Men  The Hate U Give   The Color Purple            Brave New World

All Boys Aren’t Blue        The Call of the Wild        An American Tragedy

Speak                    Animal Farm        A Child Called “It”         The Kite Runner

Two Boys Kissing  Bless Me, Ultima   Lady Chatterley’s Lover  This One Summer

Beyond Magenta   Gender Queer: A Memoir         Flamer        Lawn Boy

Out of Darkness    Crank          Me and Earl and the Dying Girl          Sold

Soon there’s something offensive in every book ever printed. Why isn’t the Bible on the ban list? It’s full of nasty stuff. Stories about incest, male body fluids, nudity, lust, sex, marital affairs, homosexuality, virgins, beheadings, murder, war, crucifixions. Even a talking snake, and I mention that because ‘talking animals’ is one of the issues with which some people take issue in the children’s book my mother read to her 4^th-graders every year, Charlotte’s Web. Those offended by the book maintain only humans talk, not animals. These same families will let their children watch the Muppets, animated cartoons, and travel to Disney World to hug Mickey Mouse.

Like the ban on rock music recordings in the 1990s, which resulted in Parental Advisory stickers—ironically making the recordings even more desirable for kids and teens—the latest cry to ban books and save the children, in the end, is a moot point. Parents, how about reading the books your teens read and talking to them about it? Good parents watch shows and movies with their kids and discuss scenes and situations if not censoring them. If it’s too sexual (and so much these days is sexualized), you’re the parent; parent.

We adults need to realize (or remember) young people tend to be curious about things that are banned, restricted, prohibited & illegal. Book bans always create an opposite but equal reaction: attracting young people to find copies to read one way or another.

I object to book bans. It’s puritanical and unAmerican. I’m a reader of banned books because I prefer nonfiction. Many banned books have to do with real-life stories whether experienced by the author or other people. More importantly, reading about other people’s lives, whether fiction or nonfiction, makes us empathetic. We pause to imagine. We become better people. Isn’t that what we want for the next generation?

Sincerely yours,

T3

All I was doing was talking and laughing aloud in a line with my 2^nd grade classmates. Then a teacher with tight lips, sprayed hair and buttoned-down dress stomped toward me in an instant meaning to stop the noise. She grabbed my arm and paddled me a few times on the butt. Whack. Whack. Whack. WaaaAAAAaaa!, was my little girl response as I recall. Looking back, what the hell?

In my school days, paddling was the ultimate corporal punishment. And through the years, I’ve been surprised to find that in Texas, it’s still legal. In this Texas Legislative session, a bill to ban the old 20^th century practice was voted down. Texans, the wealthy ones that make all the rules every two years in Austin, like to think unruly kids need a good whack on their bee-hind. That’ll learn ’em.

[Shh. We’re not supposed to counter with studies that indicate corporal punishment only reinforces the behavior adults are trying to control—like, say, talking too much or smarting off.]

Ever since Dr. Spock’s post WWII book about taking care of babies and raising children, who were the Baby Boomers, modern American society has turned away from adult anger with kids that leads to cutting a switch from a tree, grabbing a belt or spatula or brush or paddle or trusty hand for spanking, hitting, whipping and hurting.

But now it appears to society most parents simply don’t have the stomach to discipline kids at all—not like our parents, teachers and principals of yesteryear. Is it loss of energy? Is it a consciousness of empathy? I hated it whenever a fellow kid got licks. Emotionally, I felt I was being hit, too. Still, today why aren’t more parents spanking or whipping their kids? Is it easy to ignore bad behavior? Do parents want their kids to be their friends? Kids who don’t know how to behave at home are going to get in trouble in school.

Society thinks kids are more and more out of line in public places. One little boy in a check-out line was inadvertently whipping me with a new belt. I tried to move away from his lashes but was trapped. He was hitting my bare legs in summer. I told him to stop, not wanting to make a scene. But he smiled, and I realized this was intentional. After another painful lash on my legs, I sternly used my adult chest voice at him to stop. That’s when his mother got involved and told me off. No reprimand for her son in a line of people using his belt as a whip. What the hell?  

The current Texas Legislature countered the proposal to ban licks in our schools by claiming kids these days are way outta line, you know, with all the mass school shootins’ and other evil doins’. What those boys need is a good red bottom whereby when they try to sit down, they’d think twice about what they did to get licks. Texas, our Texas. How far behind, pardon the pun.

Gee, fellas, I don’t know. A kid, usually a teen, who would bring a loaded rifle or two to school and shoot everybody may have been the product of a violent upbringing. The bottom line is teens who are that angry (and really, suicidal) are dealing with mental illness, something they are incapable of comprehending and perhaps stopping or controlling. Whether their parents or principals whacked them in order to punish disobedience is not the issue at the heart of teen-age mass shooters.

Have paddle, Will travel

Teachers and administrators for the most part do not support corporal punishment. We’re trained that inflicting pain on a child who broke the rules is inappropriate in a civil society. [Hear that Texas Legislature?]

The Legislature’s ‘get tough’ policy to support corporal punishment on school children is nothing short of sick. An adult would have to be sick to hurt a child for disobedience. But we can’t agree on discipline. Yes, bad behavior by a child or teen who knows better must be dealt with and given a consequence. Paddling a teen at some point isn’t going to work. Any man will tell us this. They learn to be tough. They’ve built a resolve to not cry or let on like licks hurt.

Our Legislature cites the old Bible scripture ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ and I’ve seen the point many times as a teacher. What I’ve seen are kids who know no meaningful consequence will come to them if they purposefully misbehave and break the rules. Detention is another consequence of the past. Parents have to be notified to arrange a day with the school when their child can do detention as a consequence for a string of misbehavior and disruption.

The issue of corporal punishment has been studied to death. It may work on some kids but not all, perhaps nowadays hardly any. And it’s pretty easy, Texas parents have found, to whip kids in anger and cross into child abuse. School teachers and administrators must report any marks, welts or injuries on students to Child Protective Services.

That, dear old Texas Legislature, is why our society has moved away from any physical discipline of children, even teen-agers. So, what to do with all the unruly, belligerent and incorrigible kids in our public schools? Mandatory parenting classes maybe, online, with refreshers every year? It is about time parents honor their responsibility to be consistent, instead of inconsistent, with their children, lay down the rules and administer fair consequences quickly. Love goes a long way in dealing with kids and teens. Still, some kids are going to want to be independent and push the envelope. They are each unique human beings.

Corporal punishment in the end reinforces the very behavior a disciplinarian wants to eradicate. Take me and all my childhood paddlings at school for talking too much. How did I end up? In the newspaper business for one—you know, the career where you blab to the world about everything? And column writing to boot. Which brings us to this here blog.  

The highlight of the 50-year retrospective that’s been going on about 1973 to me of course is the release of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. In 1973 this super cool highly polished British rock blues album—with its iconic black cover with nothing but a clear triangle prism converting a stream of white light into a rainbow—sounded futuristic, like a gift or warning from Outer Space, yet each song’s precisely crafted lyrics written by long-haired young human beings spoke to a lot of us coming of age in a world of cacophony and conflict. The year of our Lord 1973 is recalled in shadows, dark and cold, with little light save the one on the Pink Floyd album cover which became a popular teen bedroom poster.

The Vietnam War was officially over in 1973. But no one was happy. There would be no celebrating, not like our nation did in 1945. No ticker-tape parades for our guys finally coming home from a much longer war or police action in Southeast Asia. Instead in 1973 couples started divorcing in much higher numbers.

On TV tennis star Billie Jean King beat big-mouth sexist Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tournament, watched in the homes of American families across the country.

Gas lines were a common sight due to an oil embargo caused by leaders of the Middle East because that’s where all the oil was. That’s all we knew back then; we needed gas for our cars real bad. So we played the game, and drivers spent an hour or so waiting in long lines to get gasoline which was rationed and not available 24/7 like today.

Watergate became a household word as federal hearings were broadcast live all day long on the three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC). Ugh. What a long hot summer was ’73. My mom kept us kids busy at swimming pools, amusement parks, carnivals and family travels because her soap operas were cut in order to show the Watergate hearings every weekday. Ditto for summer of ’74. And everyone wondered if our president was indeed a crook.

Live and let die

The movies of 1973 reflected and reinforced American anger, numbness and cynicism—especially to kids: The Exorcist, The Way We Were, Serpico, Magnum Force, Badlands, American Graffiti, Soylent Green. Good God, what’s wrong y’all? Well, I was just a kid. But kids are impressionable. I got the picture, so to speak.

On a high note, composer John Williams’ big-time success creating memorable movie music began in 1973 with the dark jazzy noir The Long Goodbye. He’d go on to compose the music to Star Wars, Superman, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Harry Potter.

But in 1973, amid all the yell-a-thon TV shows like All in the Family and Maude, the most controversial issue to hit Americans was abortion on demand. Roe v Wade became law of the land—and by a conservative all-male Supreme Court who voted 7-2 in favor of a woman’s right to seek an abortion, judging it a right to privacy. If a girl or woman wanted to have an abortion, didn’t want to go through pregnancy (no matter how it happened), she was free to choose in this United States of America. For 50 years doctors (and everybody) could not only help guide females in such crisis … but they could actually say aloud the word abortion.

Not anymore in, what, half the country in 2023? In Texas lawsuits are just beginning to catch media attention, from women whose intended pregnancies turned devastatingly heartbreaking and even potentially deadly (for the mothers) to individuals suing ‘accomplices’ who help a woman get abortion pills. Texas offers anyone $10,000 for bringing to the state’s attention people who provide or assist in an abortion. It seems to me the biggest change in the past 50 years of American history is how vindictive the masses have become. Fifty years ago, people minded their own business.

Give me love

All this reminiscing about 1973 made me wonder how did any of us, kid or adult, manage to maintain sanity and carry on. Mine was easy: music! Rock music. I listened to music all the time after school, at the skating rink, at the swimming pool, and all summer long, top 40 radio which was mostly rock, pop, R&B and country crossovers. The titles alone bring back memories of what may be the happiest time of my childhood: Long Train Runnin’, We’re an American Band, Tie A Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree (the number one song of the year), Killing Me Softly With His Song, Diamond Girl, Natural High, Photograph, Angie, Keep on Truckin’, Drift Away, China Grove, Crocodile Rock, Half-Breed, Show and Tell, Saturday Night’s Alright, The Morning After, Shambala, Dancing in the Moonlight, Feelin’ Stronger Every Day, Free Bird.

And into this sparkling playlist fell singles from Dark Side of the Moon, like a meteor shower. The song Money from the album conveyed a bitter hateful tone, perfect for 1973. Maybe it was a love-hate ode. I mean, you gotta have money. Perhaps the point criticized was the love of money.

Dark Side of the Moon’s songs expound upon the human condition experienced by those of us living in the 1970s. The sound of helicopters at the beginning of the album—a spinning disc that actually begins in dead silence and very slowly builds to recognizable sound—represent what many soldiers from Vietnam still heard in their minds. The heartbeat the proof of life, time the ticking clock, then all the clocks stopped by a cluster of alarms loud, pure noise, painful and unrhythmic.

Pink Floyd knew how to get the attention of our generation. What they had to say was going to be important and meaningful: from lyrics to melodies to arcing guitar improvisations. Mesmerizing and profound … to this day.  Each song details modern human life: what’s important, what’s not, how most of us spend our days detesting boredom, and our collective fear of death. Then in the middle of all these thoughts voiced by the rough edges of male rock singers comes the sound of a wailing woman. As if in labor, she sing-hollers as the band’s swaying steel guitar and later cosmic organ counter in soothing harmony. All is right with the world. No words. It’s beautifully haunting … and I always thought sad. In a time when I understood pregnancy wasn’t always good news, I sensed the woman’s anguish. She was bringing forth a child into the world, our awful God-forsaken overpopulated polluted warring murderous lying cheating stinkin’ world. Or is she Mother God, crying for humanity? “Please save yourselves, my Children!” The album is a psychological trip through darkness to enlightenment we all experience while passing through this world. Its conclusion deals with mental illness as man is apt to go crazy now and then. The entire album is a work of art that remained on the charts into the late 1980s.

Rock music was at a social apex in 1973. Music was going to change. The disco years were in our near future. For a kid 50 years ago, music provided a carefree optimism. Songs like Natural High made me believe I would experience feelings of being in love with someone, too, someday. And though I wouldn’t have believed it 50 years ago, we’re still seekers on the road to Shambala.

I’ve always felt … that I belonged … in a slightly different, earlier era. For me, it’s the ’60s. I dig the whole crazy era: the music, the hippies, the lava lamps, the slang, the psychedelic graphics & clothes, the whole taking-it-to-the-streets energy and organization that literally changed our culture—into the one I grew up in. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, hair peace, contraceptive peace, and eventually as time melted into the ’70s ending the draft and lowering the voting age to 18.

Of course, I only know any of this from TV shows, movies, documentaries, talk shows like Donahue and schoolbooks and teachers.

But another career crisis brought up what at this point have been lifelong feelings deep in my psyche: I just don’t belong here in this time. My life would have been so much better if I had lived at a different time. Or just in my lifetime, if opportunities had arrived at earlier points, my careers in journalism and education would have been … smoother. ?

So, in this 21^st century age in which I live, I decided to research the internet on my iPhone and type in the search bar: Why do I feel like I do not belong in this time period—you know, just putting it out there into the cosmos that may or may not be cyberspace.

And from my lonely sincere question flowed a plethora of earlier posted comments by many other humans on earth … who feel exactly the same way.

Huh.

I read musings by people who in great detail pondered why they feel like the life they are living is just not working out as it should and that in reality they should be living in an earlier time. (One did write to say his real life is from the future and in this era, he has traveled back in time.) Several wrote about a desire to live in the antiquing age of 1920s or 1890s with many simply liking the 1950s and hippie ’60s like me. They brought up the fact that perhaps their longing for an earlier simpler time has to do with being influenced by TV (reruns) and movies of times in which we have not experienced given our age now.

If nothing else, I gained the knowledge that basically everyone on earth, well maybe Americans or Westerners or modernists, live with this overwhelming feeling that we just don’t belong in this time period and we’d rather live in an earlier time, perceived as happier, stable … a time period that, for lack of a better phrase, would put up with people like us. A few young adults went on about liking the clothes, movies and music of the ’80s—like they thought that was the era to live your youth. Well, honey, I was there throughout my 20s. The 1980s was the worst decade of my life. And the music at the time made me LONG for the folk rock of the 1960s. So, in the 1990s I started going to the Kerrville Folk Festival. Talk about belonging!

Out of place

If it is simply part of the human condition to long for a life in a previous era, even life in another country, then that’s just the way it is. Still, all my life I kept my deep lament to myself, never expressing it until very recently.

This feeling of ‘I don’t belong here’ or ‘I don’t belong here anymore’ is part self-pity and part depression. Life is just not going the happy-go-plucky way we think it should go, so it’s give up and lament about how much better our lives would have been in (fill in the time and place). I wonder about people who really experienced the worst times on earth like wars, like the folks in Ukraine or the Middle East or the Holocaust.

I think of my parents who thoroughly enjoyed their teen years and young adulthood in the 1950s. Best music, best cars, best clothes, best TV, best prices, best everything.

And I always thought of the flip side going on in the ’50s, which was not so carefree and wonderful for Blacks and gays and women, practically everyone who wasn’t white and male. And there was polio, too. And the worst cancer treatments.

But I don’t want to take away someone’s pleasant moment of nostalgia. In many ways, that’s all people have that makes them feel happy. The old photos, music, movies, books, clothes create a time we can experience vicariously if we didn’t live through it to begin with.

The irony of all this ‘why do I feel like I don’t belong in this time’ is answered if not resolved instantly by the internet. And I’ve always believed that each of us is meant to be here and now doing whatever we do, riding the ups and downs of life. We don’t like the bad times, but time and again we survive them. Besides, nothing lasts forever. We need to focus on the life we’re dealt, the Now in which we are living, even if there’s just so much about these times we can’t stand. Nothing our human predecessors didn’t feel and deal.

One time in the early 1980s when the Texas Lege decided to do a major overhaul of the state’s public school system, the elected officials zeroed in on the teachers. See, back then the whole country was in an uproar about kids graduating who could not read. How could that be? This sort of thing doesn’t happen in other modernized nations, just in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Obviously, kids were being passed on from grade to grade until handed a diploma and good riddance from our high schools. It was indeed a national disgrace. So the Texas Lege decided to do something about it once and for all.

Teachers were the only suspects. Every week, they were with the state’s kids more than their parents, supposedly teaching them subjects like literature, grammar, math, science, history, social studies. Texas was out to brand teachers with the letter F, I guess, for Failure. Anyway, teachers found themselves in the embarrassing position of having to pass a competency test or lose their jobs. Yes, teachers, every single one of them, including anyone like college professors who also wanted to maintain their Texas Teacher Certificates, had to take the test. Anyone who failed the reading and writing teacher tests would lose their certification and subsequently be fired and not allowed to teach without returning to college and acquiring proper certification again.

It was a certifiable Texas-size mess. Public school teachers, young or seasoned—teachers of kindergarten to high school, football coach to band director to elementary classroom—had to take the one-time teacher competency test. Many probably retired and scoffed at the idea, but most who wanted their jobs (paying around $17,000 in those days, and that was after Gov. Mark White increased teacher annual salaries by $5,000) studied up on their writing and reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. Who knew what the State was going to put on a teacher competency test?

But I am happy to report, at that time practically every single teacher in Texas passed the competency test, around 98 percent. Woo doggies! However, there were some who failed. A coach and a shop teacher come to mind as they spoke to the media about it, poor guys.

Among aspiring teachers in college in the 1980s, we thought this pathetic attempt to force teachers to take a ‘competency’ test had racist undertones. Regardless, our turn was coming for our set of competency tests in writing, reading and even math. And the pre-professional skills tests remained to test Texas college students who want to be certified teachers. Supposedly they had to pass all three tests before they could continue with the education coursework required for a certified Texas teacher.

One other thing the Texas Lege did in the 1980s to overhaul public education was to write into law exactly what teachers shall teach (‘shall’ a legal term meaning ‘must’). There’s even an app for it now. Each subject for every grade level had all its concepts divided into legalese like 5.1, 5.2, etc. And the breakdown goes further and more precise, like 5.1.a, 5.1.b, etc. Each line is a specific concept that teachers shall teach, document as having taught, and mark as student mastered.

While I was in college, older students took required courses for a degree and teacher certification. Then that route was changed. The tests came along and then state law called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, first published as a manuscript in the mid 1980s. Fortunately for me, everything I was taught to teach was in there, the new law. But before then, teachers were free to teach or concentrate on anything they wanted, any set of skills they felt were of more importance than others.

Also, new teachers of the 1980s were told the State considers every teacher a reading teacher. So if any student graduates who cannot read, we all are responsible and could face legal consequences along with our schools and districts. Read: lawsuit. Got it. Make sure every student can read, and do something about it if a student cannot read. Gladly.

Tinkering with Texas’ past, present & future

As this is an odd-number year, the Texas Lege is convening in Austin with a publicized priority to do something about the state’s public schools. The mass shootings, the trans students, the Black history, the Mexican history—this is just all too much for our aging Legislators and Governor. Their gray heads are ’bout to burst. And aren’t most of them still white men unwilling to see other perspectives in this shared experience called life?

According to The Texas Tribune article (link below), the good news is legislators from both sides of the aisle agree the big state surplus should be used to increase school safety, increase teacher salaries, change school finance, and require a mental health course for every student prior to graduation. The state has been losing teachers big time for decades. There are school districts where the majority of teachers aren’t certified. A lot of people don’t want to go to college to learn to be a teacher only to be scrutinized from the get-go with competency tests. Then there’s the salary compared to other careers requiring a college degree. And an assortment of newfangled education philosophies out there, like no one should make a career out of teaching, do it a few years and get out (forget the pension; the state would love for teachers to forget about it), or just get a degree and go teach ten years to have the college cost reduced or paid off. No education background necessary. Texas started allowing anyone, with any college degree, to be a teacher. And for a few, that career path turns out to be a lifelong worthwhile enjoyable challenge. But as everyone knows, especially Texas legislators, not everyone is cut out to be a teacher. That has always been true—why most teachers quit within five years.

But the Texas Lege this year also wants to tinker with students’ expressed sexual identity and mute talk about racism in the classroom. These are the hot-button issues of our time, as the Texas Lege sees it. No, they really aren’t. Families have been dealing with sexual identity issues forever; this is their private issue, not one the State of Texas insists being involved.

As for race discussions in the classrooms of subjects like history, today’s white students are way ahead of our Texas legislators when it comes to our state’s and country’s racial history. They get it. Black lives do matter to today’s white students. Whites do have privileges and advantages just because they’re white. Texas history and American history cannot be taught correctly and thoroughly without acknowledging how a bunch of white people got control of all this land, from sea to shining sea. Where are the Native people of this land, this state? Why were they kicked out of this territory and pushed all the way to southeast Oklahoma? Why did plantation owners have to have slave labor, every single one of them from Africa? How can any human being, so-called God-fearing Christians, own another human being?

Kids today want to know the answers to our history. But the good old boys in the Texas Legislature aren’t about to spill the beans. Too late! By now the truth of our collective multicultural history is very well known—every disgusting detail. Today’s students are the Texans who don’t have a problem with truth setting us free. They have what it takes to make the future better for everyone not just some.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/02/02/texas-legislature-public-education/

At age 80, Paul McCartney has lived a charmed life. Even he can’t believe his fame and fortune, first as a Beatle—the one John Lennon credited for 75 percent of the band’s repertoire— and then McCartney’s next very successful band Wings. Back in the day, Paul was not my favorite Beatle; mine was George Harrison with Lennon a close second. Oh who am I kidding? I LOVE all The Beatles including Ringo Starr (who’s already 82).

One of the greatest highlights of my life was getting to see Paul McCartney live during his tour in 1990, the first time he included Beatles’ songs in his concerts since the band broke up. He opened with Live & Let Die, and each time he came to the refrain, explosions went off. After the first one, the stage was engulfed in smoke … and I thought, of course, “Oh my God, they killed Paul McCartney!” The explosions continued every time he sang the word ‘die.’ When the smoke cleared, McCartney and the band were still standing, playing the familiar riff after the refrain. Wow!! The concert continued with Jet and most of the stadium audience standing throughout the entire concert. Later he told us he wanted to go back to the 1960s, and we cheered in anticipation as he commenced to singing many of the original greats from The Beatles. His wife, Linda, was right there on stage with him doing a great job on keyboards, and his bandmates were top musicians. After a big finale, they bowed and left together, and we all remained, like under a spell. We didn’t know what to expect, but we weren’t going nowhere. Then sheepishly Paul returned to the dark stage, a spotlight shining on him. He was wearing a long night shirt and pointy night cap, holding a lamp, telling us “Shhhhhh!” We laughed and laughed. This was so unexpected. He left the stage, and a minute or so later, the entire band returned, wearing Dallas Cowboy jerseys, and presented the anticipated encore which concluded with McCartney’s compilation from Abbey Road, the one that begins with Golden Slumbers and ends with the lyrics: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

I left the concert walking on a cloud. McCartney looked particularly attractive with his feathered hair just starting to gray. A lot of us waited above the tunnel where we knew his limousine would drive out soon. We were hoping to get to see him wave at us.

And when I go away

I have to admit, the music of Paul McCartney, his voice and songs, were the soundtrack of my youth in the 1970s. His voice was so distinctive, so pleasant, even my mother knew it was him on the radio. I didn’t have any of his records with Wings, but I had a lot of The Beatles. I read Beatles’ magazines, that still existed long after they broke up, and tacked their posters on my bedroom walls, even a set of early Beatles’ headshots in my high school locker. They were the epitome of cool even if they were history and slightly before my time. I was aware the Beatles were just a couple years younger than my parents. But the Beatles were way cooler.

Through the decades, Paul has remained highly productive every year of his life: writing songs, recording albums, and touring the world. He is a big ham, and his fans are all right with it. Given his age, his voice has lowered and has lost the golden tones we are used to hearing our whole lives every day on rock and pop radio. Still, he insists on getting out there and performing. I don’t know of many people who seem to live life to its fullest, but Paul McCartney is one. He’s probably a beautiful person, too. I’ve heard in interviews, he goes out of his way to meet and greet, shake hands and chit chat with all around. Wow. What a guy.

I guess I’m saying given the reality of his age, I realize sadly Paul McCartney at some point won’t be here anymore to grace us with his presence. And I’m gonna miss that. He’s given the world some of the greatest songs ever written and sung with one of the most versatile, mesmerizing yet distinctive voices in pop music history.

But in the end, it’s McCartney’s songs, his body of work, that will remain eternal—his gift to the world. The greatest lyric ever written, I think, is from his song Hey Jude: Take a sad song, and make it better. The song My Love is one of my absolute favorites, an all-time great love song, along with Maybe I’m Amazed. Wow! As a true fan, I could go on and on.

As a songwriter, he’s the master. Singable melodies, easy to remember just like Mozart. Lyrics that are pure poetry, his advice to anyone trying to write a song. Ah, how McCartney can turn a phrase; his wordsmith rivals Lennon’s. But most importantly, the messages and meanings of a McCartney song are profound:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

A theory is he wrote the song about Blacks in America, who had to fight to achieve civil rights—which is also how we and history will remember the 1960s along with The Beatles and the Vietnam War.

And let us not forget, Paul McCartney can play, like, any instrument. His first solo album McCartney was all him on instruments and original songs. That alone makes him a fine entertainer, someone who deserves to be in show business.

Some years ago when I was a newspaper reporter, occasionally I dreamt I was interviewing Paul McCartney. I dreamt this for years every so often: Paul and I would be walking outdoors around his country estate in England or wherever it is, and I’d be asking him questions—and then he offers me a marijuana joint which I gladly partake. In the dream I say to myself and to Sir Paul, “I can’t believe I’m standing here smoking marijuana with Paul McCartney!” Then I’d wake up, but throughout the day I would hum and sing McCartney songs with a happy carefree demeanor. Wonder what that was all about? I guess the dreams may have been simply a stress reliever.

There was a time, too, when I almost got to interview the man himself. He was on tour again in the U.S., and as entertainment editor of a newspaper, I got his tour manager’s phone number. I called and left a quick message asking for an interview. I had my questions written out on a legal-size notepad kept in the top drawer of my desk. I was really trying to make this interview happen. (Beatles’ shriek!) But, alas, ’tweren’t meant to be.

There are singers we’ll remember … because of their songs. Paul McCartney is one worth remembering. So listen up nursing homes of the future: We’ll want to hear Beatles not Sinatra. Meanwhile, just glad Paul—who answered fans’ questions in an online video—is still with us here among the living and so cool and kind. And just one more thing. I think I’m in love with Paul McCartney.