June 26, 2020
My Beloved Ryan---
I continue to be full of gratitude that you, from the tone of your voice, nature of text communications, and substance of words spoken and written seem to be living life with great joy.
One of my personal quirks, for in my observation so it seems but would like to think otherwise, is to never say “I love you” frivolously nor to ask someone “How’s life?” without meaning what I speak or wanting to hear and understand the reply. When I ask, “How’s life?” these days and I get a favorable reply, my own response is,
“That’s a blessing. Not to be taken lightly these days is it?”
I’m not entirely satisfied with the counter-replies I get to that one, but I do have the sense that I have at least induced the person to consider that each day and each breath is to be treasured, never more that in these tempestuous times in which we live.
And so it is with my noting signals that you and Sydney are doing well, trodding joyfully over your bridges above troubled waters.
Long may you trod.
And I shall never take your joyful trodding lightly.
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What an unfortunate time this is to live in a nation of ignoramuses, in particular as to natural science and as to history:
When one sees the graphs as to how Germany, Italy, and Spain have at least at this juncture seemingly gotten control of their fortunes amidst the COVID-19 challenge and then bears witness to our erratic own “let’s-open-up-no-that-wasn’t-
As to history, now don’t get me started.
Oh, go ahead, get me started:
Perpend:
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison produced the most cogent syntheses of the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke (author among other works of Second Treatise on Government) and Montesquieu (Spirit of the Laws). Jefferson imbibed the works of Locke and worked his innovation on Locke’s emphasis on the fundamental freedoms of life, liberty, and property, changing the latter to the “pursuit of happiness.” Montesquieu most clearly articulated the division of a national government into three equal branches that especially in separating the judiciary from the executive and the legislative thrust a seminal notion into the ether of political theory. Madison’s synthesis of Enlightenment ideas as principal author of the United States Constitution represented an enormous advance in the production of a political framework for the establishment of nationhood.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their colleague George Washington, the latter both as head general in the American Revolution and first president of the new nation, created a political entity that rivaled, with the potential to exceed, Great Britain as the world’s paragon of democracy. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, were imperfect, as was the nation that they created:
Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all expressed misgivings about the institution of slavery while amassing fortunes on the basis of that very institution; and the new nation was established on the basis of a citizenry limited as to gender and ethnicity.
The great democratic treatise that is the United States Constitution tacitly gave the vote only to white male owners of considerable property, counted Native Americans not at all and those in bondage as three-fifths-persons for the purpose of determining representation in the United States House of Representatives. Seventh president Andrew Jackson has been considered by many historians as the chief executive most responsible for expanding the electorate to include those white men who did not own property; he had also led military battles against Native Americans, proposed removal from land sought by white settlers, and was a vigorous proponent of slavery.
Thus, the architects of the nation that would in time, on the basis of constitutional amendments and the capacity for legislative innovation, tend toward increasing democratization, were all proponents of slavery who launched a nation upon racist assumptions and a limited notion of “the people.”
Those are the facts.
What do we do with the contradictions?
Do we jerk down all sculptured monuments and all nomenclature on edifices honoring those most responsible for establishing the foundation of the United States as an imperfect experiment in Enlightenment values, founders who could be construed as racist and sexist believers in democracy and republican governance?
Perhaps we should dismantle those monuments and remove those names; but as we do, we should be aware of the ironies that should instill in us enormous feelings of cognitive dissonance.
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We might consider as we judge slave-holders at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century that slavery was widely practiced and accepted in various forms throughout the world by the late 18th and early 19th centuries and that the long tenure of that institution on the international stage waned as the 19th century unfolded. For citizens of the United States, the greatest shame is not having embraced the institution of slavery during a time of the institution’s historical entrenchment, but in promoting post-manumission forms of that same institution, with ever more virulent racism. In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 ending Reconstruction and the 1896 Supreme Court decision for segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, conditions abided wherein the Jim Crow system and vigilante violence induced African Americans to flee from the rural South to the urban North, where they were typically residentially confined to certain areas at the urban core.
Nearly 100 years ensued between 1877 and the legislative initiatives of the 1960s that ended most legal forms of discrimination. White and African American middle class flight left behind an increasingly impoverished population at the urban core, including areas such as North Minneapolis and those areas of South Minneapolis extending from East Lake Street. And at that historical moment an approach to education, transmitted increasingly from the 1920s until taking firm hold by the 1970s, denied a knowledge-intensive education to those most in need of knowledge and skills necessary for highly remunerative employment and civic participation.
The citizenry is produced mainly by the institutions of family and public education. Public education is the main conveyor of attitudes and information shared by the populace as a whole. The shortcomings in ethical values and subject area knowledge in the curriculum of locally centralized systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools produce the level of immorality and ignorance that we now witness in our society.
Thus, the United States is now mired in a predicament produced by an intellectually corrupt approach to education that has inflicted us with a populace bereft of knowledge of natural science and history; and no consensus as to shared public values.
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But my curious blend of skepticism and optimism leads me back to oft-tread verbal ground of Ryan and Gary:
I remain optimistic that at this critical juncture the K-12 Revolution can instill the necessary knowledge and ethics, and that the future need not be the present.
I assert that tearing down those statues is optional and ideally would be done only with full historical knowledge--- but that tearing down and then overhauling the current system of K-12 education is mandatory, because only by doing so does the citizenry gain the requisite knowledge.
What say you, Beloved Son?
Or what will you say in that ever-looming conversation?
I love you so very much, My Dear Son---
Gary
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