A proposed application of The Previous H.T.I Theory applied to Speech Communication in Grades 6-12

 Integratation of that which is inherent is about.....education....an example of the previous theory...

Another aspect of learning environment awareness I want to explore in my class is illustrated in the following You Tube short:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayKqTypQH80

 

Heroes and the Media Lesson Plan/Hamlet Online

Adapted for 9-12 from Joan Harrison's Visual Arts Lesson in Media Literacy Kit and Previous Lesson.

A.    Big Concept:

Various Media presents many types of heroes for very different reasons.

1.    Agenda: Students will continue to Investigate Media and Heroes. For this Adaptation, The class will access Cable Resource for Learning Website www.ciconline.org/Shakespeare#How

    Then Create a Written Profile of their version of who they think Hamlet is or was.

B.    Create a Rough Draft Storyboard of one thing they want their Hero/version of Hamlet to do.

C.    Either work as a class or individually to assemble a 2-3 minute imovie or Windows Media presentation for submission to Shakespeare subject To Change http://www.ciconline.org/broadband.

D.    In-class assignments. An Ongoing assignment is for all students to keep track of daily activities in their Journals

1.    Journals also tell me how many extra points I should assign when the units is completed

2.    Your Journals tell me how you participated in working with the group towards finishing your project

E.    Activities Although Students will work individually, in small groups of 4-5, Students will accomplish the following:

1.    Sharing available Resources

2.    Be fair but critical consumers of each other's work

3.    Help each other throughout the process.

F.    Homework: Keep up on Media Critiques, especially as they relate to class.

1.    Reflect and Review: Where do you sit at this point?

Date: Completion. Showtime and Marking period.   

Before and During Reading

Rubric for Presented Argument Proposal. Sample Assessment Rubric

Criteria	Inadequate	Adequate	Very Good	Excellent	Points
	1	2	3	4
Correct Identification of elements	Elements are not correctly identified	Elements need further development	Argument lacks some consistency.	Argument is strong and consistent.
Organization of Essay clear and easy to follow	Organization lacks focus; wanders from the main point; errors make difficult to read	Organization has focus, but some errors make essay difficult to follow.	Argument is clear and organized, but some errors cloud the meaning.	The Argument is clear and readable; good organization.
Supporting Evidence is sound.	Supporting evidence does not match claims; structure is not consistent.	Supporting evidence is not developed into the argument enough.	Argument is focused, but could develop thesis a little more.	Supporting evidence is well developed; strong connection to the thesis.
All Claims are Justified	No definite conclusion.	Conclusion is too abrupt.	Argument ties its claims together well.	Argument ties its claims together with very little bias.
Total Points

Rating Scale for Journals

Periodically throughout the course of the unit and again at the end, after the second Panel Presentation/culminating activity, the Journals will be examined by the instructor. This rating scale is meant to be a guide. The scale is adapted from page 251 McMillan (2007).


  Proposed Rubric

The journal is complete and reflects The student's journal is not

the student's understanding of complete. It does not appear

the class discussions. 5 4 3 2 1 to be useful or helpful to the

student.

The student journal

is well organized. 5 4 3 2 1 The student's journal is very

hard to follow.

The student's journal 5 4 3 2 1 The student's journal indicates

is challenging, honest she/he is having difficulty.

and authentic.



MediaOgraphy. 

Definitions and applications of Media Literacy Kit.

http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/rr2def.php

http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article134.html

http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/rr4_lessonplan.php

http://www.ciconline.org/broadband

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans/programs/greatbooks-donquixote

Proposed Speech Communication Class, grades 6-12 recognizing current needs in curriculum reform

regarding Social Media and Communication Education. Further Illustration of H.T.I Theory as applied to Speech Education in current high school Curricula. Follows Patricia Avery's Argument regarding "Authentic Education."

 

Perspective of Ilusion and Hunger.

I  am late. I was late that day as well: the first day I knew what being homeless was all about. The first day I learned how to spell "hunger."  I think I made exuses back then too. But I have learned how to better forgive myself since then, or at least, I would like to think so.

When I remember hunger and homelessness,  I remember always wondering why I never "fit" in anywhere. In another story for another time,  I'm going to look at that, again. For now,  I'm thinking about Royal Oak, somewhere in the early eighties. This was a time long before my diagnosis of Autism: long before  a lot of things actually.

I had just left Ferris State College: back then, it was a college, nowadays, they are a state university. I was mad at everyone and everything at that  time. Everyone from my Mom and Dad who had recently divorced to the Israeli treatment of the Palestine. I need to say that I didn't graduate from Ferris State. When Christmas break came around and all us kids were told to go home, "have fun, enjoy yourselves," I had every intention of January of the coming New Year being the next time I would see the place. Yet, as I sat in Greg Barrett's Firebird, that long ride home from Big Rapids gave me time to think about and wonder just who was I going home to.

So began  a series of adventures and lessons about lonlieness, homelessness and hunger. But not everything that happened was necessarily bad, nor was anything that happened back then, a good enough reason to hold a grudge today. I did stay with my brother and sister-in-law for a time until I told the wrong person to kiss my ass. Then I stayed with my Father, his new wife and her kids for a brief time: until I smoked a joint in the house when I thought no one was looking. Someone was, and I was taken to and dropped off a The Palms Motel.

Everyone at the time knew I couldn't stay with my Mom. She and my sister had recently moved to Oklahoma and no one was willing to put up the money for bus fare. During this time of course, Christmas Break was pretty much over and for some reason, it never occurred to anyone, including and especially myself, that just maybe I should go back to school. Looking back, this was doubly ironic because I originally had gone to Ferris with a full athletic scholarship. The most important person this should have mattered to was me, I can't remember thinking too much about it and to this day, I still can't explain why I did what I guess, I chose to do.

From the Palms Hotel, then, I guess it was sometime just after New Years Day, I started looking for a job and found one: but not before running out of money and food and obviously, a home.

So, the first time I was hungry, I was homeless, lost and thoroughly confused as how and why all this happened in so short a space of time. I wish I could say this was the first and last time I would ever be hungry and homeless. I wish I could say that I ultimately found a calling or at least some close friends  I could count on.

Unfortunately, I can't say any of those things yet.

The funny thing is, the day the Palms Motel "kicked" me out,  I had found a job as a dishwasher at the Clawson Troy Elks on what used to be Big Beaver Road on the boarder between two neighborhoods: one rich and the other, working class. But even though it was among other things, a restaurant,  I remember there being something like a two week "break in" period where you might get some food "if" someone had the time to make it for you and you had the time to eat it. Getting those two schedules to match up was always difficult, especially for a new guy like me.

Consequently, there was almost a week and half when I went hungry. I would eat a few extra biscuits here and there: usually a meal no one else wanted. And after work, I would go across the street behind a warehouse where there was this ditch and in that ditch there was a slab of concrete overhanging a slowly moving drainage sewer.

Some nights I had day old cheese sandwiches I had found at work, but most nights after work, I would just cross the street, hunker down and wait for the sun to go down and the stars to come out.

In retrospect, I was fortunate it only rained twice in those two weeks and that it was early fall. I was also fortunate when Betty, an accountant working at the Elks Club, followed me one day and discovered what I was doing. I think the first thing she did was to get me some food, yet the only thing I honestly remember, was looking up from that ditch that early evening in October and seeing that ruddy faced blonde woman, climbing out of her car and  walking over.

"What are you doing down here?" she asked.
I didn't say anything at first. I remembered being nervous and afraid that she would call the police. After looking at the muddy green water flowing beneath me for a moment, I looked back at her. "This is where I live," I said. "This is where I stay."
"Not anymore," she said while gesturing me to come up to her. " Are you hungry?"
I nodded.  Although I had leaned how to push that constant grumbling that always comes from a perpetually empty stomach, out of my head, I remember thinking I was indeed really hungry.

And I was.

These days when I see someone on the street who I know, as if by instinct, that person has not eaten, I can't wait to get home and look in my cupboards, put together whatever I can and take that down to The Peoples' Food Coop here in town. There, as you come through the door on the left is a barrel that patrons are encouraged to place whatever foodstuff, canned goods, boxed meals: whatever they can.

Whenever I pass that barrel and look in, I always see my reflection: just like my reflection in that flowing sewer behind that warehouse across from the Clawson-Troy Elks all those years ago.

I look and I remember.

A Few Thoughts from
Tom

Why AIDS makes people cry.

Why AIDS Makes People Cry.



I am someone who does not have AIDS. I have, however, tested for and placed on the Autistic Spectrum Disorder scale. I mention these two different facts because I have had four friends with AIDS. Three have died and one has effectively pushed everyone who he has loved, successfully out of his life. Moreover, I am just now beginning to understand why it is that people cry when people they love die, especially from AIDS. Yet, these are not the only people who cry because of AIDS.



They say that people like me who, although having the same emotions as everyone else, nevertheless must contend with how those feelings will generally take a more roundabout route to expression. Therefore, until January 2009, I always knew there was something about me that was just a little bit off. I always knew I had more trouble than most when it came to saying what I meant "right now" instead of eventually. Even to this day, my ability to focus my thought and behavior into a sequential phrasing of easily recognizable patterns remains a struggle I sometimes do not win.



Ric, for instance was a friend of mine with whom I worked as an actor in a children's theater troupe, almost 27 years ago. When he first told us about his diagnosis of AIDS, the whole troupe began to cry. I was sad, but couldn't cry. I thought I understood why everyone else did, but in retrospect, I have to confess I didn't.



On the other hand, maybe I did: I actually can't say for sure, and that fact sticks in the back of my throat as the most frustrating part, even after all this time.



Nowadays, I honestly can't say if it is the Autism or merely a characteristic of personality, but when I first found out about Ric, having AIDS, I kept asking myself: why isn't there a cure? Why isn't there an effective treatment? I don't know why, but I persisted in believing that tears were useless. "Find and effective treatment, find a cure," I continually repeated to myself.



And even when, for the last time, I saw Ric on the inbound #4 bus from Ypsilanti into Ann Arbor and his body looked like it had dissolved into its bones, I kept arguing inside my head: "This does not have to happen, why can't someone understand?"



I am not so Autistic, so locked inside my world of interpretive imagination, that I didn't know what empathy or compassion were. Nevertheless, that indeed was the last time I saw Ric. He even made a pass at me. I smiled and calmly said good-bye. When I heard from his sister that he had passed, I immediately convinced myself that the tears his sister shed as she informed us were natural, but I didn't have to let myself feel them



I thought to myself "I'm not crying. There is a cure for this thing and I am only going to think about that." However, Nowadays, I know now that, although I may not have been wrong, I was way off about the most important part of who Ric was and what he meant to those he loved and loved him. Contrary to what I believed I knew then, I did not understand why AIDS makes people cry. I know now it is much more than a disease in need of a cure.



Am I so aloof, so haughty and removed from the world of human feeling that I see crying in general as something that "I" just don't do? Possibly. But if that were the case, would I have taken time to ask that question? This is not my first time at self-questioning I do wonder however about self-doubt.





The second person I have known to die from AIDS directed me in a play about John Coltrane here in town at the old Performance Network. I consider Vince a friend; frankly, because he cast me as the young John Coltrane and at the time remember thinking how "cool." Nevertheless, when I first met Vince, I had no way of knowing that three weeks later, he would be dead from complications due to AIDS. Again, I did not let myself feel what others felt. I don't think I hid my feelings. But from what I know now about Autistic Spectrum Disorders, I did let my feelings wander about: perhaps even more so than usual.



Then I met a cross dresser named Tina with whom I worked in another play. Ironically, this play called Drag, written by a playwright who had recently died due to AIDS related complications wasn't about AIDS as much as it was about love, another thing about people I have never quit understood. In retrospect, Tina may have had a crush on me, but she was one of the stars of the show and at the time, I had a hang up about mixing with other actors who had lead roles. Self Doubt no doubt.



In the play, I portrayed the role of Mistress of Ceremonies, Chalandra. Yet, what I remember most was how Tina took me under (her) wing. I even appeared with her on stage during one her shows at what used to be the Nectarine Ballroom. I was "her man." However, Tina, like so many people back then, had AIDS. And not too long after "Drag" ran I learned from the director Jim Posante, that Tina had died due to an AIDS related illness.



The single thing that amazes me about those days was how I appeared to float through it all: all the friends, acquaintances, and people in general whom their families, friends and lovers cried for as they passed became an integral part of how I felt I grew to understand the world. So much so, that I remember thinking at the time "I may not have known before, but now I know why AIDS makes people cry."



Yet, I have to back away from that memory, because in retrospect, I didn't understand a damn thing about why AIDS makes people cry especially those who are left behind in its wake.



It is not without some irony that as all these people around me were dying, I continued to view their deaths as if I could understand them without actually taking part in remembering their lives. I don't think this is due to a personality characteristic. Instead, I believe I constructed it from something much deeper than personality.



I believed back then that I thought, behaved and acted from instinct first and personality second. Thus, I thought I constructed a perspective based on what I felt was an instinctive awareness of the lives these people led, without actually experiencing the profound loss of their passing. In other words, I thought I didn't have to cry in order to understand why AIDS hurt those who remain as much as those claimed by the disease.



I cannot remember there being a single event over the past two decades that helped evolve my thinking from a self-centered position to whatever it is today. And yet, on the day I was told I placed on the Autistic Spectrum of Disorder I do recall something happening I don't think I've found the words for.
 

When the two University of Michigan psychologists who tested and evaluated me, brought me into their office and told me the news, I didn't feel much one way or the other. That was January of this year. Since then I have entered and gone through a couple of phases about what do with this information now that I am a 48-year-old African American male with a lot of education.

I am at a place right now where I at least am beginning to understand some things I thought I knew about being with people and why things like AIDS makes people cry.

   

The range between Asperger's Syndrome and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) is an unchartered territory, according to most of the current thinking. For me what the jargon translates into are years of isolation in public; always feeling one-step behind of a crowd where you never quite fit; mostly feeling abandoned and never actually knowing why.



It's that word, abandoned that, as I write this, takes me back to the eighties when Vince, Tina, Ric lived and died. The word also conjures memories of Ted, who also has AIDS and yet, the last I heard, was still alive. I'm not saying that my experience is anything like what any of these people lived and in most cases, died with.



Nevertheless, I do know the feeling of not being able to find a friend, of always being alone especially in a crowded room. I know the of feeling of being trapped inside a plastic bubble, floating in a pool of water, slowly sinking while all those around you nod their heads and wish you well. I know what it is like when you try to call for help and can't because there is no air



I also know that when I do cry, it is always because the feelings of always being alone every now and then catch up with and surprise me. I cannot begin to imagine what it was like for my friends who died from AIDS or for Ted who has had AIDS since I knew him at the Y.M.C.A here in Ann Arbor back when it was on 5^th Street years ago.



However, I do know what it feels like to feel ostracized like an alien from another planet, whispered about or more often than not, completely ignored. Although I don't know what it is to feel sick all the time and so weak you can barely stand, I do know what it is feel the constant knot of anger I the pit of your stomach: anger at God, family and all those who pass judgment as quickly as a fart fowls a passing breeze.



As I said, I do know what it feels like to feel as though everyone you ever loved, everything you ever knew and trusted, abandons you and leaves you completely and utterly, alone. I know that feeling well. Moreover, if my friends who are still here with AIDS feel this way, then I wonder if they have ever for a moment thought that: "Hell on Earth is a stillness where the sounds of life are no longer a friend?"



Nowadays, here in the age of our first African American President and so many "effective" treatments for AIDS, I feel as though it is excessively easy to believe that AIDS is no longer a problem of great concern. I even heard a rumor recently that more than a few high school boys and girls no longer bother with condoms when having sex.



Afterall, it's "so yesterday."





I remember "yesterday." But you know what else is easy: looking at AIDS as if today only poor uneducated African men get it because they aren't smart enough. AIDS is as much a problem today as it has ever been.



I could quote a boatload of statistics from the CDC (Center for Disease Control), but I do not think that is necessary. The fact remains that AIDS along with a few other diseases remain those kinds of viruses that do and will continue to change in much the same way they did when they made the leap from infecting animal to human blood.



I did not write this article to preach a doomsday litany of fire and brimstone 2009 style. The title, "I Know Why AIDS Makes People Cry" of course refers to the parallel reasoning I have already developed and illustrated. However, implicit in the development of this article is the unspoken argument that those who turned their backs and or made lucrative careers out of condemning the different and the damned, did so not out of hatred but fear.



For those of us who consider themselves normal, not homosexual, not sinful: whole and decent folk who go to church every Sunday and pay their fair share of taxes, AIDS scares and repulses because it reminds us of our old yet still constant fear of death. In other words, AIDS makes the "normal" of us cry because our definition of what "normal" is, remains just as outdated and inherently inhuman today as it was throughout the eighties, and much of the nineties.

AIDS makes all of us cry. AIDS still concerns all of us.
 

Along with the Ebola Virus and a few other potential mass murderers, AIDS makes us cry because it makes a perpetual promise both it and all of us instinctively know it will keep if by our ignorance and indifference, we give it a chance.

"Ignore me, go on, I dare you. Ignore me and I will dance on your grave."

AIDS can never be ignored.

A Few Thoughts from,

Tom

http://yourblogzone.com/language365/

New Link for future reference.

Tom

from this side (personal narrative as illustration of H.T.I. Theory.

Thomas Krawford (dedicated to Dr. Dennis Beagen)

ENG 408

C. Fleischer FA 2007

10/22/07

 

"A Moment of Comfort in Uncomfortable Things."

This is how the life of writing for me began like an experiment in thought. It started with my question: how does one find comfort in uncomfortable things? I have found there is no single answer to that question, but there are transformations: transitions where you believe in something without knowing what that something is and in the next moment, realizing something is missing or forgotten, you find yourself in an unknown place, neither comfortable nor certain. Transformed from rote acceptance of the greatest common general circumstance to looking beneath the least common face value of a given subject, the truth of things becomes more than just a one way perspective . My theory is that this liminality, this uncomfortable place is why I write. For me that's the comfort I have found in uncomfortable things.

Thinking about the single moment when I knew I was a writer, I have to admit two things: one, what a writer was for me was mainly a guess, a hunch if you will and two, that moment was and is a non-linear event. I guess by that I mean I am still working on what I think a writer does and how the discovery-by-doing connects to my thinking as a teacher and a man. This is where the idea of transformation comes in, a shift in my perspective of circumstance and subject: the melding of many faces into one: a haunting voice echoing from the back of my mind:

"None of this concerns you, and don't tell anybody."

 

Sister Patricia David was my science teacher when I was an eighth grader at St. Hugo of the Hills. St Hugo was a normal school in Bloomfield Hills: a Catholic school where quite a few kids came from well–to-do families and they knew it. My mom and dad had wanted my sister and myself to go to a school like this because we were supposed to make connections. This place with its incense and ritual originally engendered the motivation of my writing: this comfortable place; the feel and taste of comfortable things.

I liked Sister Patricia David, no, I admired her because she would often stand up to the rich boys and their parents for what she felt was right even if that meant disregarding the important things that people in Bloomfield Hills considered sacrosanct: like money, power and prestige. She made the principal Sister Marie nervous. At least that's the impression I always got whenever the two conferred in the hallway after Sister Patricia had disciplined an unruly student who had cussed out one of the three black kids in the class. Back then with some of the boys, the "N" word was cool, so for me, my place was a multiple layered comfort amongst uncomfortable things.

Standing up at her podium, Sister Patricia stopped what she was doing and looked at me with those piercing blue-grey eyes of hers. From behind her clear framed horn rimmed glasses, her eyes went right through you. If Leonardo DaVinci did indeed put his smile on the Mona Lisa, he must've been thinking about Sister Patricia: her sardonic standing saunter threw you off balance if you weren't ready for it and with Sister Patricia, you could never be ready for anything.

"What am I doing standing up here?" she quipped all the while looking directly at me. "Why don't you come up here and tell them what I mean?" She put the chalk on my desk and walked to the back of the room.

Something like this had happened before I thought. I gave Mrs. Thomas a laughing fit in seventh grade English. When she read a story I wrote to the class, all the kids thought I was crazy. I wrote a story about Portugal the following year I half believed caused the Marxist Revolution of 1974. My writing, in fact all my school work at this time was an exhibit that left no room for what I felt or thought.

"Go on, get up there," Sister Patricia urged.

"Yes Sister." I could never say no to her. But as I looked out at my classmates like Cathy Cowden a girl I always stuttered trying to talk to or Jim Smith, who told me once during recess he wished he had pulled the trigger on Martin Luther King Jr., I suddenly remembered something I had until that moment, pushed from my mind. The face of a boy at night that past summer at Ozanam Summer Camp flashed behind my eyes like a jump cut in a bad movie. This, I thought, was the price of comfort amoung uncomfortable things.

"The law of Conservation of Energy and Matter," I began, stumbling for the right words. "Creation and destruction are transformations of energy without loss or gain."

Jim Smith, who sat on the opposite side of the room squirming in his seat suddenly, raised his hand. "No! That's all wrong! It says in the book, energy cannot be created or destroyed, simply transformed, right there." He thumped his book for emphasis. "You don't know what you're talking about."

I didn't answer him. I felt a heat on the sides of my neck as a few beads of sweat formed on my upper lip. I looked down at my science book and my mind flashed back to Ozanam that summer night four months before and that same haunting voice:

"None of this concerns you, and don't tell anybody."

The face of that boy four months earlier turned my heart inside out. I remembered the pleading urgency in his eyes as my mind's eye blinked and focused on that night. I didn't care about that boy when he came to me and asked me to switch bunks with him. When he repeated his request, I finally agreed, still not really thinking anything strange was going on. Later that night I barely noticed but didn't care about the counselor who came and nudged the bunk I was sleeping in, thinking I was the boy whose bunk I had switched with. I woke up and almost decked him until I figured out where I was.

"Sorry," he apologized moving from the bunk I was in over to where the boy with whom I had switched earlier slept. I tuned that out too. But something else got my attention. I looked down at the end of the cabin where the counselor's rooms were and saw several boys being awoken and led or dragged inside: the light from within casting a drunken glow throughout the cabin. I climbed out of the bunk I was in and looked around. They were all still wearing their underwear and rubbing their eyes.

Then something crept into my mind: a picture that I couldn't tune out: of the counselors and those boys in that room late at night.

"You go on and get in your bunk," the counselor who awoke me said leading the boy with whom I had changed bunks by the hand to that room. "None of this concerns you, and don't tell anybody."

I just stood there in the middle of the stone floor and stared as the door to that room shut and the rest of the cabin went dark. I could hear the rest of boys in the cabin rustling in their beds but no one said anything.

All the other boys in the room just sort of shrugged, rolled over and went back to sleep. I stood there in the middle of the cabin, the cold stone floor creeping into the bones of my feet and silently went back to my bunk. I got in and under the covers and tuned everything out. I tried to shut the image of those boys in that room out of my mind: I think we all did. We all just went back to sleep like nothing in the world had happened. I don't think any of us ever told anybody a thing about that night. We all had our comfortable things: our blankets, our truths, and the things no parent or teacher would ever believe. I closed my eyes and heard the counselor's words: "None of this concerns you, and don't tell anybody." On the surface, I actually believed nothing happened.

How do you find comfort in uncomfortable things? In that moment at the podium of Sister Patricia's class, Jim Smith's face became the face of that boy I ignored and ultimately didn't help. I remember feeling lost and defeated looking at him as if I had just taken a test and failed miserably. I wanted to run away somewhere and hide and then I thought: "What if this were my story? What if I were in control" I looked up from my science book and caught Jim Smith's eye. "Yeah, you're right," I said finally. "That is what the book says, but can we question it somehow?" The words just fell out of my mouth almost as if by accident and I stood there for a moment surprised.

 

 

"All right Tom that will do. Thank you." Sister Patricia unfolded her arms and strode over to where Smith sat. "And as for you Mr. Smith, maybe if you would speak up more in class, I'd ask you to go the podium and speak," she taunted. He just sat there and looked at his hands.

How does anyone ever find comfort in uncomfortable things? I don't know.

I've looked and discovered how dreams can be populated with questions with more than one answer. At that podium that day in Sister Patricia's class, I didn't want to write or speak to please my parents or my teachers anymore because in that moment none of that made sense. As Jim Smith's face and the faces of my classmates became the faces of those boys that night back at Ozanam, I felt a sudden emptiness inside reach out from me like a floating balloon trapped by a stucco ceiling. I hypothesized that if writing could help me figure out why that kid chose me to switch bunks with and why I did nothing to help him, then one day I would know God and the Devil a lot better and they would in turn know me: maybe I wouldn't feel so helpless. The experiment I suddenly wanted to see, the only kind of science or law I wanted to investigate were the words I still haven't found yet, but believe exist. Is that kind of faith transformational? I don't know.

"You know Tom," Sister Patricia said as she walked past my desk loud enough so the whole class could hear. "The next time you need help from someone, don't be afraid to ask. Even the good Lord had to have help every now and then."

"Yes Sister," I replied, cold comfort on my mind and the words of that camp counselor haunting my thoughts: "None of this concerns you, and don't tell anybody."

I'm still looking, still changing, still writing. The experiment isn't over yet.

 

 

 

An Experiment in Thought...

 

P.T. Quinn

Author Notes.

"When I stop and seriously look at things, I have to admit my path up until now has been one long thought experiment," teacher, writer and performer Thomas Krawford observed in a recent interview. The Ann Arbor resident and Michigan native has written and work shopped a number of plays over the years (Word, The Accused Stands Ready and Rhyme of Raven Thyme Dancer, to name a few) all of which have been read at various playwriting groups in the area. He has also tried his hand at video production with two twenty minute essays, Before the First Breath and For Its Own Sake, produced and edited at the Community Television Network in 1998 as well as a full length screenplay loosely based on a family myth told him by his grandfather from Oklahoma. However, when asked to explain his Thought Experiment idea, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders.

"Well, it kind of explains why I haven't published anything yet really or competed for any prizes. You see, years ago, I wondered if something like a transactional imperative could guide one's life and actions and that's what I set out to discover."

For the reader who is not familiar, Krawford attempts to clarify. He explains that he originally began with some of the teachings of Immanuel Kant and later added Nietzsche and a few other writers and made the word up to describe his view of communication, language and knowledge. When asked about what he has found he is quick to add "Teaching, whether it's this stuff or the basic connection between the written word and the visual image: teaching is what really brings all the far flung wanderings home."

A Compilation of Krawford's work along with a foreword from the author concerning the implications of his transactional imperative model on education, science and industry, are due to be published in the fall.

Stay tuned for further details.

 

 

 

 

 

from this side (personal narrative as illustration of H.T.I. Theory)

some years ago

 

…a very small child in Chicago when

I first saw it.

…dark outside, winter perhaps. A

wind whistled hush: dancing stickmen sculptures of

leafless trees bowing in the night as we

left Uncle Sam's and Aunt Felicia's house. We

being myself, literally a baby, my brother Robert, half mine from

a previous marriage, my

Mom and my Dad: on our way home. Then,

all of the sudden as my Mom held me in

a blue blanket I

looked up and saw

the Mercury orange glowing spheres of grayish

yellow light street lamps outside our car

as we picked

up speed, my Dad easing the Ford into gear. Each sphere

succeeding the other. Faster and faster until we slowed

down and the hanging balls of light hovered there in air,

fixed in the sky:

a series of rising and setting suns

until we

started again and the single image blurred into a tear in

the cold dark night where light leaked through from

a cascade

crying down a mountain while

everything around it remained as it was,

not concerned with what

I saw. And as I squirmed my way from

my blanket up my Mom's breast for

a better view I

saw there the overhang of similar waterfalls reaching out over the road

ahead and behind lined up ripples in

a tub of windy water.

This

was the first time I saw the difference between darkness and light

and I remember thinking:

"Everywhere…it's all the same!"

 

 

 

 

EMU

Winter 2008

Thomas Krawford.

from this side

 

Further Literary Application of H.T.I. Theory

 

 

"You Are My Only Son." Three Narrative Boundaries

in James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk.

 

Thomas E Krawford Jr.

 

 

DR. L Burlingame Literature

361 Native American Novel

 

 

 

 

Thomas E Krawford Jr.

Dr. L Burlingame

Literature 361 Native American Novel

28 November 2007

 

"You Are My Only Son." Three Narrative Boundaries in James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk.

 

Language defines and reaffirms our sense of reality as men and women in this society and culture. In James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk, the inverse narrative of dislocation where the Native American world and the Judeo-Christian Western world collide, leaving in their wake fragments of identity are the shards from which Charging Elk, Welch's protagonist, must find a new language to redefine his existence. However, I will argue that Charging Elk's narrative of cross cultural mediation moves between communal and spiritual boundaries as well and from these locations James Welch illustrates how the bond between dreams and the physical reality of an intercultural language is not weakened because of the negative, but strengthened.

For example, on page 235 of the text, Charging Elk has a vision in which he sees the bodies of his people lying in a heap at the bottom of a cliff. He tries to join them but is pushed back by the wind and a voice that echoes like the thunder of buffaloes killed by opportunistic hunters. The voice speaks to him in his native tongue: "You are my only son" (Welch). In this vision, the spiritual element of the author's narrative centers the interconnectedness I spoke of in a previous paper in the sameness Mary Jane Lupton discussed in her 2001 interview with James Welch (Lupton).

In that interview, Ms. Lupton asked Welch about a Renaissance in Native American writing. He agreed, making note of N Scott Momaday's work as well as Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie (Lupton 201-2). What I found most interesting about the interview was how an existential hero like Jim Loney for instance, although similar to Bigger Thomas in Native Son, could not actually describe the alienation of Charging Elk. The displacement itself is the key to what I argue is the interconnectedness of the spiritual boundaries of the cross-cultural world where Charging Elk ultimately chooses to survive. In fact, displacement as both an inversion of the Western vanishing American Indian myth and a relocation of Native American subjectivity as an interrogation of the exotic (Opitz; Donahue) places the bonds between spiritual and physical realities directly within the boundaries of cultural and racialized identity.

This occupied "new" space is an articulated joint interrelation where barriers of difference are simultaneously bridges of sameness. I assert that James Welch's protagonist, Charging Elk embodies what Andrea Opitz suggests is a reimagining of the racially violent language of the fetish (Opitz 99-102). Yet, to leave our discussion here would leave to chance a cultural identity Donahue suggests: that although worlds away from one's people, the universal conflicts Charging Elk faces in turn forge a third identity. One removed from the tribe in the material sense while connected to them in the dream sense: the sense that Charging Elk believes is the most real (Donahue; Lupton).

 

This repeated interconnectedness is characteristic of the novel, but one scene in particular stands out as an illustration of how the language of an intercultural connectedness similar to the connectedness of Charging Elk to his people is strengthened even in the context of negative circumstances.

In late August, the Prunes were ripe. in a small ritual that the Grazier

family had practiced for generations, Vincent, Lucienne and Nathalie

along with Charging Elk, walked out to the Orchards and stood under

a large old tree that had been a bellwether for at last five generations

of Graziers. They each picked a prune, smelled it, until the juice ran out

the stem end, then bit into it (Welch 376).

 

This is passage is significant on many levels. First what we do not see here is any hint of objectification or fetishization of Charging Elk. In fact, the circle suggests he is not just attending a family ceremony generations old; he is actually part of its proceedings. He is jointly related to something communal. Secondly, Lucienne, Vincent's wife and Nathalie's mother is very sick here. Later she dies, but in this scene, her sickness and Charging Elk's alienation create an interrelation of counter opposition.

In other words, as Lucienne is passing into history much like the harvest, Charging Elk is coming into history not from the perspective of assimilation but as part of his environment. In fact, not only does he not cross himself as the others do in this scene, he later marries Nathalie with Vincent's blessing. Within the two counter related narrative boundaries of joint communal and the direct spiritual, the language of intercultural relation is not only possible, in Welch's

novel and perhaps for Native America as well, it is inevitable. However, the concept of counter opposition as that constancy in the occurrence of opposing histories also describes the fetishization of cultural identity that displaces Charging Elk and Native America.

For example, the context Welch uses in the Wild West show represents how complicit cultural narratives see the Native American as a product removed from any kind of active citizenship in a nation where they were supposedly celebrated as First Citizens (Opitz).

Displacing the racialized, other as part of the nation's past…the Wild West

Show plays its part in the drama in which the modernist narrative of the nation

relies on cultural practices and productions to imagine the Indian as the country's

first citizen..whose perceived primitivism allows the nation's civilization to emerge

as a chronological development (Opitz 101).

 

In terms of counter opposition where that which is negative opposes yet supports that which is positive the language of an intercultural interconnectedness although almost existential and not quite assimilation is indeed a language of survival from the greatest common general circumstance to the least individual result of subject or object occurrence. As the racialized, other exists as a displacement of identity, it and those of us who live on that reservation don't need to be heroes like Jim Loney or Bigger Thomas (Lupton 205-8), we just need to survive.

Yet, in Charging Elk's case, part of his path takes him to a place where he meets what becomes for him, a Siyoko, or evil spirit. He kills the Siyoko because in the Welch's words:

J.W: What he's doing is ridding the world of an evil presence. It goes to culture

it goes to a tabooed act, plus I think it's something that even sophisticated

readers, contemporary readers would be shocked by. I felt really great

about that.

MJL: I had a feeling it was a little impish, that there was a little bit of the

Coyote there (Lupton 208).

 

Although Welch doesn't literally use a Trickster figure in the novel, when Charging Elk kills Breteuil, the trickster motif as catalyst firmly brings the spiritual reality which for Charging Elk is real together with the Judeo Christian western sensibility where reality is more material than spiritual. Here is yet, one more example of why Welch's protagonist is not engaged in assimilation. Charging Elk is actively self- rehistorizing: replacing his displaced cultural identity with the combined physicality and spirituality of his narrative: a construction of subjectivity that simtaneously interrogates essentialism and racism by its very existence (Lupton; Opitz; Donahue; Krawford Three Faces of Earth).

In a previous paper, I made note of Linda Hogan's description of Belle Graycloud as a Grandmother Mountain with a Raven Crown while she and an intercultural community of people stood together against Sheriff Gold and his men (Krawford 3-4). I mention that moment here because in James Welch's novel, we start at a time where the world is multicultural: the Native Americans, the soldiers at the fort, possibly profiteers hanging on, all would appear to an 11 year old Charging Elk in much the same as our world may appear to many of us at first glance. But then, Charging Elk wakes up, years later in a French hospital, not by choice and yet not by force either: a circumstance that could happen to any one of us and did in fact happen to Native and African America as late as yesterday (Krawford; Lupton).

Welch's protagonist is separated from is people. Thus begins his journey and ours as well as we see the world we live in through his eyes and feel what some parts of that world try to do to his heart. The three narrative boundaries within which Charging Elk's narrative moves and breathes are the three images we have of him creating a language that reclaims his displaced cultural identity as a de-objectified subject in relation and not in essence (Opitz 100). Along these lines then, we have the image of the summer plum tree around which Charging Elk's life counter opposes Lucienne's death. This is the joint communal relation of how his language comes to shape his interpretation of his experience. There is the innocence and practicality of his spiritual self-counter opposed by Breteuil's material fetishization of Charging Elk as an individual that also shapes Charging Elk's perception of his intercultural reality. Yet this image is an inversion of the image Charging Elk sees in his vision where the bodies of his people lay dead at the foot of a cliff and he cannot join them: a voice speaks to him in his native tongue and tells him "You are my only son."

These interrelated boundaries constantly occur throughout Welch's novel, but they do not cancel out each other: they give each other the reason to exist. And they Ultimately give Charging Elk the ability to choose survival, sure: but also community. Thus, as the story ends and he walks back home to his wife Nathalie, whom herself is sick but perhaps for a different reason, Charging Elk goes to a world Welch didn't create as much as he described a place we all have to live in and we have to do it together, whether we like it or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Donahue, James J. ""A World Away from his People"." Studies in American Indian Literatures 18.2 (2006).

Krawford, Thomas. "Three Faces of Earth: Representations of Communal Diversity in Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit." Unpublished. Dr. L Burlingame. Modern American Literature Eastern Michigan University.Spring (2007).

Lupton, Mary Jane. "Interview with James Welch [1940-2003].: November 17, 2001." The American Indian Quarterly. 29.1&2 (2005).

Opitz, Andrea. ""The Primitive Has Escaped Control": Narrating The Nation in The Heartsong of Charfging Elk." Studies in American Indian Literatures 18.3 (2006).

 

Welch, James. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. First Anchor Books. Random House. New York N.Y.: Anchor Books, 2001. 235.

from this side

Three Faces of Earth: Representations of Communal Diversity in Linda Hogan's

Mean Spirit

In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, three representations of diversity interact to interrogate the Eurocentric ideal of Manifest Destiny regarding Native and Non-white Americans in the badlands of Oklahoma during the time of the story. The first two "faces" constitute two specific channels of opposing power (Foucault 205). There is the face of joint communal diversity characterized by the Earth Spirit, and illustrated by Belle Graycloud's stand at Sorrow Cave. There is the "mean spirit" face of mostly white men who seek to invert the Earth Spirit with the violence of their ideology. The third "face" is that of the Cold Spirit of indifference; the general channels of power, such as the status quo of arranged marriages, land auctions and Christianity (205a). Overall, these three opposing faces of diversity as depicted in the novel in particular, may have implications for Native and African American contemporary experiences in general. In other words, the three faces of Earth as represented in Mean Spirit, are in many respects, the three faces of human society.

Kathryn Shanley (1999), would suggest that on the surface, ethnic minority writing regarding American racism, has often overlooked the struggles of Native American people. Consequently, the power of multicultural criticism to articulate a unified voice against systematic oppression detracts from itself because it does not do enough to centralize the interconnectedness of all oppressed peoples in its overall

framework (33). However, in Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, that interconnectedness of oppressed people extends to include the oppressor, the oppressed and the indifferent in a competition of interests. In this way, the novel reflects the nature of contemporary culture. For instance, in the story, the perspective of privilege as defined by language divorced from a sense of the Earth, often conflicts with the everyday perspective of those who acknowledge the Earth as their identity (Foucault 204; Rainwater 3; Brice 3). This oppositional dichotomy illustrates itself throughout the text. On the one hand, there is the language of privilege which defines Indians as incompetent children without a nickel's worth of intelligence (Hogan 61). On the other hand, this theme converges into the concept of Manifest Destiny expressed through the testimony of Mardy, a henchman of the main antagonist, John Hale.

He simplified the war against the dark skinned people: they were

in the way of progress. Everyone needed the land, the oil, the…

grass, and the water. And all was fair, he told them. "We have

to go on as a race…They shoot dear don't they? Well here…it's

just survival." (327).

 

In this case, Linda Hogan's characterization of "entitlement" based on the language of race is evident. In addition, that sense of entitlement supports a language that redefines and justifies murder and thievery by calling it survival. Furthermore, the author extends this illustration to a multicultural level by stating through her character's eyes, how Manifest Destiny simplified the war against "dark skinned people" (327a). On the surface, the author refers to a Native American context. However, when Hogan describes an incident in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where Lettie Graycloud is given a room by a hotel clerk while Stace Red Hawk is turned away because he is too dark (346), there appears to be a deeper, more multicultural implication. A possible response then to Kathryn Shanley's argument (Shanley 33-35), is that the world Linda Hogan creates in Mean Spirit does in fact suggest the language of a functional public knowledge that is Native and Multiculturally American. In addition, although language supports a sense of entitlement that justifies murder by renaming it survival, Hogan uses the language of resistance to oppose that entitlement. Moreover, she situates that resistance in a context where its effect is strongest; namely, Belle Graycloud's Stand at Sorrow Cave.

Jennifer Brice points out that Belle Graycloud's stand at Sorrow Cave is like a transformation where her body and spirit merge with the spirit of the Earth as she defies the will of Jess Gold and the men who want to kill the Bats within (8). Linda Hogan would not dispute that observation, however, as Belle defies the sheriff, Hogan describes how, not only the Hill People, but Joe and Martha Billy, Father Dunne, Stace Red Hawk and Jim Josh, all stood with her, and so did Deputy Willis (280). On the one hand, Belle succeeded in standing up to the sheriff. On the other hand, Hogan implies that Belle's stand, like a mountain with a raven crown (279), represented the multicultural face of the community that stood beside her.

This image of a unified diversity is powerful and Hogan repeatedly challenges her suggestion of multicultural cooperation with scenes depicting the divisiveness of racism, an inverse diversity. An illustration of how the author uses these two opposing faces of diversity as opposing positions of power without either canceling out the other starts on page 293 of Mean Spirit.

The scene starts as a July 4th picnic. The Indians and the whites are sitting apart from one another. Right away, the overriding atmosphere of segregation would make this scene an illustration of inverse diversity. However, Sam Lee, who runs a foot race between the Indians and the whites complicates the illustration, while later, the barriers between Indian, white and Non-white are made even more ambiguous.

When the band returned from their break, the atmosphere loosened up.

Sam Lee, the Chinese runner, danced with an Indian woman who hardly

moved at all. An Indian man did the Charleston with a scrawny black woman

in a pea green hat. A white woman danced with an Indian man and looked

into his eyes as though he were the tree of knowledge itself, holding up the

noisy night sky above them (Hogan 297).

 

This is one example in the story where the opposing faces of diversity, joint and inverse,

meet in a place that is almost outside the time of Oklahoma in 1923. In this instance, as Indian, white, black and Chinese men and women dance together, the ground they finally have in common, if only for a brief moment, to paraphrase Jennifer Brice, arises from an experience of dispossession (1). Hogan implies a multicultural subtext in this case. However, she also implies that Sam Lee, the scrawny black woman with the pea green hat and the rest of the non-white/non-native Americans, although dispossessed as neither white nor Indian, represent the general elements of the townsfolk; a town that calls itself Watona, on the one hand, and Talbert, on the other. This distinction is important because it suggests two types of dispossession at work in the story: one that ultimately leads to resistance and one that leads to assimilation. Linda Hogan pairs these two versions of dispossession in much the same way the faces of diversity oppose each other at the 4^th of July picnic: like a dance or a race.

Hogan does not dispute Brice's assertion regarding dispossession, but in

Mean Spirit, the subversive face of diversity becomes the face of Belle Graycloud just as the face of an inverse diversity becomes that of John Hale. The cold face of indifference and non-productive assimilation, however, is the face of the townspeople, which the author Hogan suggests is multicultural and working class. Subsequently, the contexts in which they interweave throughout the story, indicate her subtle criticism of the townspeople's lack of engagement in social justice. Yet, as a face of Earth, Hogan is also saying that the arranged marriages, land auctions, carnivals and Christianity of the status quo, represent a general power which mediates the space between communal and inverse diversities (Foucault 207; Hogan). In this regard, the three faces of earth are the social structure of human society in Mean Spirit. On the other hand, superseding this interpretation, Linda Hogan's novel is nonetheless, about the survival of a Native America who draws his and her strength from the Earth in a political act of resistance as survival in direct opposition to its inverse (Brice; Hogan; Rainwater; Shanley).

In the final scene as Stace Red Cloud leaves Levee and accompanies the Grayclouds from the burning wreckage of their place in the white world, political wisdom as a return to the Earth in this case is a return to identity (Shanley 33). However, the final scene is also a critique of the general status quo, which, on the one hand supports the overall social structure, yet remains mute on matters of social justice or responsibility

This is ironic because both American realities have a history of marginalization based on similar inversions of their cultural identities. Black people caught in Africa and brought to Jamestown, lost their families repeatedly in much the same way as Native Americans lost their land and self-respect.

If Multicultural discourse is a body of criticism that seeks to liberate the meaning of American Heritage from history, I believe the interconnectedness of all the historically marginalized, needs to figure more prominent in that discourse. I feel the perspective of social justice for all does not exist enough in contemporary Multicultural America and if Mean Spirit is any indication, I maintain, it is high time that it should.

 

Works Cited

Brice, Jennifer. "Earth as Mother, Earth as Other in Novels by Silko and Hogan." Critique (Atlanta Ga.) 39 (1998): 127-38.

Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." Trans. Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison. Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison. Second ed. New York: Vintage Books Random House, 1995. 195-228. Gallimard 1975.

Hogan, Linda. Mean Spirit. New York: Ballantine/Del Rey/ Fawcett/ Ivy. Division of Random House, 1990.

Rainwater, Catharine. "Intertextual Twins and Their Relations: Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms." Modern Fiction Studies 45.1 (1999): 93-113.

Shanley, Kathryn W. "Talking to the Animals and Taking out the Trash: The Functions of American Indian Literature." Wicazo Sa Review 1.2 (1999): 32-45.

 

 

Teaching Tolerance: A Personal Argument for Tolerance Today.

Teaching Tolerance

 In the above website, tolerance is defined as the harmony of difference. Yet, I argue we as intelligent, thinking human beings need to take the meaning of this definition much further and deeper into the unknown landscape of the problems that we and our neighbors  face on a daily basis. To be more specific: we need to take a moment and step back from our understanding of the meanings of "things" that make up our world, and refocus our energies  on the first knowledge we knew long before we knew how to walk: the formal and informal science of written and spoken words. (H. Coppee' 1887).

As far back as the 19th century, Coppee' among others implied that "logic" was indeed the first knowledge we experience in a systematic way.  All of our subsequent understandings of  math and science and order, begin as "child's play."

Quite often when one of us judges another for not seeing God in the same way, or not being black enough or rich enough or otherwise un-American,  we make language subservient to the convenience afforded us by class, race or gender. Or more often than not, when we are faced with a problem such as Affordable Health Care in America, The War in Afghanistan, or the Arab-Israeli conflict, our ability to use language as a science becomes subservient to our lack of faith in the power of language to effect lasting social change.

I argue language as the  human system where knowledge is first created remains the first place from which tolerance of ourselves and each other must continue to evolve.

For example, on the issue of Health Care Insurance reform in America, from a tolerance centered perspective, I assert the existing rules need to be changed allowing Congress the power to enact a short and long term fiscal  instrument called a General  Joint State and Federal Health and Human Services Municipal Fund based  Public Derivative.

At 3-8% adjustable rate of  a State or Regional Municipal Fund  Pooled Outlay, Congressional and SEC oversight will insure this instrument supplements Section 307 of  H.R. 3962 by specifically "anchoring"  a General Health Insurance Exchange Fund  and Public Trust to the State or Regional Health Insurance Exchange System. In English, this kind of arrangement creates the kind of infrastructure where a Public Option partially administered by the states will, in short order pay for itself: basically, because participating States' Treasuries would continually reinvest the underlying back into the original pool.

When we think in terms of  a "tolerance perspective" then, no matter how impossible the idea may sound at first, the science of words here  is the place we can always depend on when we use "logic" as as a science of the meaning in the service of peace.

Another example of how the logic of a tolerance perspective can apply to peace, is the war in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, the essential quality of both the Taliban and and Al queda can be traced back to Al Ghazali, an 11th and 12th century  Arab philosopher whom many historians credit with the discovery of the kind of systematic skepticism, later philosophers such as Rene Descartes and David Hume would adapt in their theories of subjectivity and the will of the state. The point being: to a large military force like the U.S. or Pakistan, these facts are useless. But if we use a perspective of tolerance, we can clearly see that both the Taliban and Al quaeda are in point of fact, rogue intelligence organizations not tied to one particular nation  but held together by many of the same mechanisms that hold most, if not all intelligence organizations together.

In plain language,  the Taliban and Al Quaeda are "spies" who are in business for themselves. In order to deal with them effectively and eventually in a peaceful manner, we need to first give them much more credit than we currently do. We also need to let the conflict in that region resolve itself primarily as an outcome of "intelligence resolutions" rather than needless and costly direct military confrontations.

Admittedly, when we talk of tolerance and world peace, a discussion of trading one serpent in the garden for another does require some explaining. However, since tolerance is the harmony of differences, by using a strategy that does not involve any more excessive loss of American or Pakistani life and has a greater likelihood at an overall peace sooner than later, redefining the conflict along the suggested lines represents a just and peaceful path which is, ultimately what tolerance is all about.

By the same token then,  the conflict in the Middle East  between Israel and Palestine also basically involves a conflict between "intelligence" organizations. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are classified as "terrorist"organizations.  But in terms of a "tolerance perspective" these  "terrorist organizations" are more  religious fundamentally based rogue intelligence communities who use terrorist tactics to achieve their strategy of  regional destabilization, than "evil" men and women bent on destruction of Israel and the West.

In this case, a perspective of tolerance keeps us from judging other human beings while providing all sides the common advantage and joint economic security of a regional  tolerance resulting from a harmony of differences as opposed to a constant "blare" of competing fears.

Is world peace possible? I argue, yes it is. But if we are going to rely on Tolerance as a guiding light to how we settle disputes in a just and peaceful way whether at home or abroad, we are going to have become much more vigorous, much more creative and much more compassionate in what we set, and if necessary reset,

as cornerstones in a better world where all people can live and flourish.

Speaking for myself, I know that neither compassion nor creativity are easy: in fact in many situations some may call this perspective "foolhardy" Many may say that such and such can't be done and to try is to invite failure and chaos. Some others will claim that such and such an idea will threaten the very fabric of society.

These are all the old "tapes" I am sure all of you have heard before.

But the one word these nay sayers always ignore  is courage. Tolerance, if nothing else, demands from all of us, the courage to see disputes settled in a peaceful and just way: the courage to know and admit when we are wrong and to work to point forward from that setback.

Tolerance is the ultimate "child's play." It comes from the first knowledge we have of ourselves and our world and it remains, the heart of how we define ourselves and each other as human being.

Tom