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My Death as a Public High School Teacher: Part IV…… Meeting the Hero of My Life
For most of us human beings life is growth moving through a tunnel of woundings.
Not all of life’s wounds are equal.
Personally, I have been very foruntate. Although life’s tunnel by the Law of Nature, keeps slicing at me every day of my existence, I have experienced only two that have made their way deep into my mind and body. A third might be visiting me shortly while I am still alive, but, as it is said, ‘time will tell.”
To feed my family, my imagination, and ‘end’ my formal intellectual training, I became an educator…..the teacher ‘kind’……..the real kind, a classroom instructor of knowledge. Despite many shortcomings cultural and personal, I was quite good at it and I thoroughly enjoyed what I was doing.
After several years of teaching in a Minneapolis public high school, trouble was brewing in the community where I taught; trouble coming from the ’outside’ world beyond the walls and lives of the young at the high school where I was employed. I took battle to defend the students and their community against a powerful, often well meaning, city establishment, the Minneapolis School District, a bureaucracy causing and abetting a war against this very community.
At the time, although I was tenured, I lost the battle, my job, and my career as a public school teacher. I was in some ways wounded for the rest of my life. Through time although initially painful, the deep wound eventually healed over leaving a scar as such wounds do. I thought my Crusade was the right thing to do based on my cultural background.
I have never doubted that thought. I was a teacher fulfilling my civic duties despite the costs of losing. Yet, although I was chronologically an adult, a father with a wife and three children, I was still a teenage dreamer never thinking evil could overcome good.
My agony from my ’rightousness’ was temporarily soothed when both the Court and the School Board admonished the Administration to allow me to be reinstated, but without tenure, back into the school system to teach if I agreed to do so.
I knew I would be on trial. I knew my teaching would be attacked, for I was transferred to a predominantly black school which was advertised as a “Magnet School”. Despite major efforts by the school district and by most of the teachers, both the standard and the lefty loonies, the environment was made a powder keg by the viscious in the black community both in and beyond school enrollment.
Half of the victims assaulted and threatened by these black hoodlums were black, the others white. Assaults, occuring almost daily included the sexual, a shooting, robberies and beatings of whites, setting fires to clothing in lockers usually to send messages, and daily intimidations by these hoodlums against white teachers. Car tires were flattened. Objects including spit, were aimed at white targets when these teachers walked from car lot to the school each morning through the boiler room for our safety.
The administration, of course, denied all of these truths. The city newspapers and politicians protected the school district. All hoped the schools would successfully retain a civilized educational tradition and termed any criticisms of the ideal at any of its schools in black neighborhoods as ”WHITE RACISM”.
Black racism was endemic throughout the school system particularly in the ‘black’ high school to which I was transferred in the autumn of 1971. Hate whitey was at fever pitch. During the days before the opening of the school term for students, I got a phone call from a fellow teacher at the school. She was a white gal who taught English.
I had never met her in my life. She didn’t mention her name, but in the foulest language a female anywhere could produce, the crux of the message she passed on to me was ….”You f…ing, *****, racist pig. We’ll have you out of here by Christmas.”
She was so proud of her Crusade for she had informed some of her English class students of her noble deed calling me especially of the vocabulary she chose to use. She and some other white teachers were more enraged black racists, than any blacks. After all, some blacks were simply hoodlums who from no racial prejudice at all, picked on any victim closest by.
This English teacher sexually, was a married gal, so we should remember these were also the days of feminist insanity which competed with her racism in the flow of her vocabulary and swearing choices.
I lasted longer than Christmas. It was February 9th, 1972, as I remember, when I received notice in the middle of my last class of the day. The note read something like: “Please collect all of your belongings by the end of this day. Henceforth, you will report to Room xxx at the School District office for further assignment.”
One of the students in that class was Joey Lykken about 14 years old. He was the youngest among twenty others, almost all seniors about to graduate. A quiet, polite, articulate, confident kid who asked all the right questions a student would ask when seeking to expand ones knowledge, including mine. There were other choice students in other classes I taught at the school. “Choice” student in my thinking, was any student who sought to improve his or her understandings of the mysteries of life around them.
I admit, however, Joey, was exceptional. I knew nothing about him except for his youngness and behavior as a student of mine. I might have teased him about his Norwegian name. I did know of a ‘Lykken’ who was a teacher at a nearby public high school. I don’t think I mentioned it to Joey.
I also knew the Lykken name from the Minneapolis newspapers. This family’s home had been raided by the Minneapolis police about December of the previous year. They were seeking evidence that these “Lykkens” were subversives plotting something or another not particularly good for the Minneapolis community. I never associated the name, and it is possible that the name was not mentioned in the article which I read.
I had taught Russian at previous schools and on three occasions my own world had been ’visited upon’ by FBI agents checking out the degree of loyalty to my country. I admit I enjoyed the notoriety and the pleasure that the investigators would discover I was a model citizen…..which was reaffirmed each time both to me and the agency.
During the evening of the day of my exile from teaching I got a phone call from a Harriet Lykken. She introduced herself as Joey’s mother. She said some wonderful words about my teaching and how much her son had enjoyed my class. He was profoudly upset, she said.
I had read the firing notice directly to the students of that last class before my exile. The school principal’s secretary who personally had handed me the notice in front of the class, shouted at me that I had ”no right” to read the notice to the students. But, I did. Afterwards as I was cleaning out my desk, Joey approached and asked if I had been fired. “Yes” I replied.
And then he asked…..”Does that mean you won’t be back?” After I answered, he teared up and left the room. That was one of the most painful moments of my life….the ones you can never forget until the final moments of release.
Harriet asked if she could be direct with some questions. Joey was terribly upset. She wanted to know if there was anything behind the scenes I had done which instigated the firing. “Absolutely nothing. I have become an irritation to them, that is all.” We talked a bit and then she asked….”Would you mind if I did a little investigating into this business on my own.”
I was thrilled! “Please do! Search anywhere! Ask anyone anything! I have nothing to hide!”
“Is this person for real?” I asked myself.
About three weeks later she called back and asked if I could come over for dinner to meet her family. I did so about a week later. I met Harriet and her husband, David, and a son Jessie…..and was introduced to Joey as a human being rather than a just another public school teacher.
Looking over my life, and my distance from them, they were the finest people I had and have ever met. They, like I, were liberals and NOT Liberals. They displayed all of my values in practice and not just preachments.
I have always loved people from the time I began to understand the human struggle. I think we are all heroic enduring our daily pain yet seeking to know the unknown all the time knowing our future of ’dusty death’….’signifying nothing’. These four, from all that I was to learn about them, were the ideals of my American dreams.
Harriet and David asked all kinds of questions, many of them based on interviews Harriet had conducted with many who had worked with me, including some administrators. Outside of occasionally irritating people, (a talent I knew I had all of my older-than-teenage life and a weapon I often use in my style of teaching) Harriet told me that she was shocked at the school adminstration’s actions.
I had no legal recourse. The school board had voted 4-3 to fire me…..and had to do so to show their support for their Superintendent of Schools, John Davis and his assistant superintendents. (Outside of my personal case, I then, and in retrospect, have considered Superintendent Davis an outstanding person to occupy that office. He was caught in the same tsunami of racial politics as was I, a teacher. I am critical as a teacher of the anti-white racism associated with his administration, but that a common tyranny of that day.
I had but one trump card left…..only a deuce perhaps…..but still a trump card over the administration actions against me. I asked Harriet if she could represent me at the administrative hearing which I, by state law, was entitled to.
She happily agreed to do so.
Immediately the District School Administration fought the idea. I could have an attorney to represent me. The District’s legal team had expected me to bring along the Federation of Teachers Union attorney, for I was a member of the teachers’ union. They opposed allowing Harriet, a leading citizen in the Minneapolis school community to speak.
This union was, in the early 1970s toothless in defending education and its needs. It had heroically battled an illegal teachers’ strike against the school district two years earlier, was exhausted, and was nurturing obedience and kindness to the School Administration. I think it was also financially broke. Its leaders, both local and state, were outstanding guys and citizens who did what they could to push a cause and heal a pain.
The union had never shown much interest in anything beyond basic and usually inane labor issues. It was an old time union, an extension of Minnesota’s Democratic-FarmLabor Party in which I was sometimes active. On the issue of whom I asked for representing me at the administrative hearing, the union was tenacious. It was willing to pay for an attorney of my choice, offer the union’s attorney, or challenge the school administration if it denied me my choice, Harriet Lykken.
Who would have ever known that my hero in life turned out to be a woman. Not I. The School Administration was forced to back down and allow Harriet to represent this ousted teacher.
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A History of the Believing Conservative who’d “Rather go down in FLAMES, than Compromise Principles!
Comment: Remember readers, among the great truths of life are the following:
“Not all university professors are loony lefties”.
“Not all lefties are loonies”.
“Life’s churnings come from its variables and blendings. surrounding its core of habit”. These churnings are usually caused by mistakes in Nature’s habit. To ‘quote’ the ancient saying, These mistakes “are neither good nor bad. Only thinking makes it so.”
A few Americans read statistics, even those accurate and truthful, when seeking answers to their questions. Even the female animal is occasionally curious……Because English is a living language, its speakers, over time, will produce a variety of fresh definitions as to who is lefty and who is a loony.
How the GOP can snatch defeat from
the jaws of victory — a playbook
by Robert Hardaway at Fox News:
In 1964, the GOP nominated a conservative purist rather than a candidate who might actually have won the election against one of the most liberal presidents in American history.
Now in 2012, history seems poised to repeat itself even as polls show a sitting president with high disapproval ratings.
This might be explained in part by the fact that social conservatives were spoiled in 1980 when the charisma and likeability of the Great Communicator overcame the reservations of independents to win two presidential terms.
But with no GOP candidate showing these same qualities, it looks increasingly likely that the GOP will, with pathological zealotry, find a way to repeat1964 rather than 1980.
Here is a playbook for the GOP to snatch defeat from victory in 2012:
First, continue to cater to the demands of social conservatives and nominate a candidate who takes gratuitous positions on social issues that most Americans not only oppose but consider peripheral to the critical issues of the economy, unemployment, and national security.
Second, reward with primary votes those GOP candidates who violate the Great Communicator’s Eleventh Commandment, and selfishly seek short term advantage in the primaries by expending money and energy on political ads that can be used by their opponents in the general election.
If, for example, a candidate says he opposes ObamaCare because he thinks patients should be able to choose their own doctor, reward with primary votes an opposing candidate who spins this as “see, my opponent likes to fire people.”
Third, ignore polls that show which GOP candidate has the best chance of attracting the votes of the independents who will decide the winner of the general election.
Reward with GOP primary votes a candidate who claims that, even if polls show he is 12 to 15 points down in a match-up between him and the incumbent president, his glowing personality and bedrock social conservatism will win over independents and overcome that deficit in the general election.
Likewise, withhold primary votes from any GOP candidate who has actually shown executive success in both business and government, has firmly advocated balancing the budget by putting on the block any government program that cannot justify borrowing from the Chinese to keep itself in existence, and advocates fairness to legal immigrants by not letting illegal ones jump in front of them for residence and scarce jobs, and push down their wages to poverty levels by flooding the market with cheap foreign labor.
Oppose such a candidate on grounds that he is “not conservative enough.”
Fourth, continue to expend precious resources and energy on GOP primary battles by catering to conservative purists who either don’t think a leading candidate is sufficiently zealous on social issues, or who can’t stand the thought that his religion is different from theirs.
If such a candidate succeeds in gaining the nomination, insure that his victory is a Pyrrhic one, leaving him so injured that he cannot win the general election.
Finally, as in 1964, take the “principled stand” that, it would be far better to go down in flames with a social conservative purist than to win the general election with a candidate who will concentrate on reviving the economy and addressing unemployment.
Robert Hardaway is professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and the author of 18 books on law and public policy.
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Paul Krugman Writes: Obama’s GM a greater job creator than Steve Jobs was
Jobs, Jobs and Cars
By PAUL KRUGMAN opinion page at the New York Times:
“Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.
For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.
Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”
Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.
A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.
Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.
Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”
This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.
And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.
The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.
But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.
And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.
The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.
Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.
So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.
And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.”
Comment: There isn’t much honest reporting Professor of Economics at Princeton and the New York Times can write about that is encouraging for anyone but tyrants these days. Their Marxinst intrusions into Wall Street and the American and world economy in general have not created much good news for average Joe and Jane World anywhere.
I don’t know the statistics, the more honest ones, which might support or reject this or most of this Marxist professor’s claims. Yet, his opinions almost never have anything to do with honest or accurate statistics, this above article as an example.
Krugman writes as Barack Obama ‘teleprompters’, throw in a seriew of numbers and nouns to support an impression ‘facts’ are a dime a dozen in his brain, and therefore available at a second’s notice to prove his Marxist claims no matter what these claims might be. Historical knowledge is alleged. Surely professors ‘truth-tell’.
I do not know whether Jobs or Jobs Apple, or the Detroit Motor Company or whatever General Motors was called before it was General Motors, has been more beneficial to the American economy. But lets count the number of jobs General Motors AND Jobs or Jobs’ Apple, have created and lost in America and in the world directly and indirectly during the past decade or two.
When do these Marxists ever explain why American corporations send production outside of American borders? Why do YOU think they avoid asking such questions?
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