God in the Cloud?

It was 112 degrees and I was trying to cool off by floating in the Red Sea for an hour.  Because of high levels of evaporation, the Red Sea is one of the most saline bodies of water in the world.  Bad for the eyes, but good for buoyancy.  I had been in Yemen for about nine months and a heat rash was rampant on my body.  The salt levels irritated my rash, but the 80-degree water did cool me off a bit.  All in all, there was no way to be comfortable in Hodeidah, Yemen Arab Republic in the summer if you were a Peace Corps volunteer without access to air conditioning.  But I was trying.

I was floating on my back, bobbing in a small swell 100 feet off shore.  I had the strongest feeling that someone was watching me, but when I looked at the beach there was nobody there.  That was not surprising, since Hodeidis go inside for a siesta every summer day.  Between 12 and 4 in the afternoon it is just too stinkin’ hot to be up and active.  Shops close down, people move inside, and the city grows quiet.  The people who are out in the world move close to buildings, like furtive cats, trying to keep to the narrow bands of available shade.  Of course there was no one on the beach, watching me.

Yet I could not shake the idea that someone was staring at me.  And whoever it was was not just watching me, but scrutinizing me—drilling right down into my soul.  By this point in my life I was no longer a practicing Catholic, but I was not yet a practicing atheist.  In fact, it was at precisely this point that I became a practicing atheist.  I allowed myself to think that maybe it was God I was feeling staring at me.  And He wasn’t just watching from the outside; He was right there in my secret heart, watching from the inside and eavesdropping on my motives and wishes and fears as I felt them.  But in the next moment I allowed myself to take the next step and to consider that maybe it was really just me that was watching…that it had been just me all along…that God had never even noticed me.  Or, even more likely, that God did not even exist.

I was a bit breathless with the thought.  It felt quite transgressive to even think it.  I had gone to 13 years of Catholic school.  I had been an altar boy.  Christ, I had prayed for the stigmata.  What if God had heard my dismissal of His very being?

In the years since my reverse-baptism that day in the Red Sea, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists have started to tackle the question of just where religious belief comes from.  Jesse Bering, in his book The Belief Instinct, discusses some theories and concludes that the urge toward belief is a trick of our genes that has proven remarkably useful and stable.  For human society to function well it is helpful for members to have a strong sense of right and wrong.  If people can control their own basest instincts, society doesn’t have to expend a lot of resources policing itself.  The thought that someone is watching is adaptive.

Bering begins his book with a confession about breaking the prize faux-Faberge egg of a neighbor when he was a 7-year old.  He was fairly certain God saw him do it.  My illustrative confession would be of discovering where my dad kept the key to his fake Model-T coin bank and then breaking in every once in a while and stealing lots of quarters whenever I needed money.  I knew my father did not see me do it, but I knew just as certainly that my Father did see me.  As I kneeled up on the altar on Sundays I would bargain hard with God for forgiveness.  To this day I have not told my father about these thefts.

So here it is 25 years later and still I have the sense that someone is watching me.  Not just watching me, but judging me.  In spite of my devout atheism, it still feels like God sees me when I’m sleeping and when I am awake.  I have always assumed that everyone had this same sense built right in.  Reading Bering’s book has confirmed my feeling.  There is a lot of research that, taken together, supports the idea that humans as a species have an urge toward belief and that this urge is part of the glue that can hold people together in a society.  And a big part of this urge toward belief is that we have the feeling that someone is in our heads with us, watching and judging.  Nothing we do is truly secret.

NPR had a series on Morning Edition this past week that explored the shift away from organized religion in the United States—especially among people under 30.  While listening to the series I was reminded of my own declaration of faithlessness as I floated in the Red Sea all those years ago.  I had declared, in effect, my independence from God and the tyranny of his judgment.  Yet I still feel that seemingly-external gaze drilling down, assessing, weighing, and passing verdict.  To give just one somewhat embarrassing example: to this day when I want to fantasize about another woman, I have to first kill Erica off in my imagination.  Most often, I have her die in a tragic skydiving accident or I have her leave me for a young academic hotshot, leaving me free to be naked with another woman.  I engage in these crazy ethical gymnastics because a judge is watching.

My daughter has grown up without an organized faith.  She has a sense that there is a God, but she has inherited enough parental skepticism to call herself an agnostic.  She has also grown up surrounded by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, texting, and smartphones.  She is 13, so not yet a member of the Twenty-something generation featured in NPR’s series.  But listening to the interviews in the series and watching how she lives her life in the digital world have started me wondering:  has growing up digital had any effect on who it is we feel is inside our heads and hearts, eavesdropping on our deepest secrets? 

I always thought of that entity as God, (before I threw God out).  Even then, it still feels a lot like God to me.  Have digital denizens replaced God with the vast digital crowd of Friends and Followers?  Rather than assuming God is judging them for what they think and feel and say and do, (even when no one is watching), do they imagine how their Facebook friends and tangential digital acquaintances would comment on what they think and feel and say and do?  I grew up in the Church and went to Catholic schools until college.  This mass of experience shaped my theory about who that inner observer was.  Does growing up immersed in devices and apps that promote sharing every scrap of information about ourselves shape just who we think that inner observer is?  Have we replaced God with Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers?  And is that why it is so important for us to have hundreds of people “care” about us in this way?  And if so, how does that affect the things we do?

To GPS or Not to GPS?

On Christmas Eve I was driving to a hotel in Syracuse with Erica and Isabel; (I won’t say the name of the hotel, but it involved two trees).  I had printed out the directions from the hotel website and off we went.  Erica was in the front passenger seat, but she wasn’t much fun.  She had just gotten back from two weeks in Israel and to her it felt like 3 a.m.  As we neared our exit, I woke Erica and asked her to navigate from the paper I handed her.  The writing was small, it was dark in the car, and the directions were unclear.  Which is a long way of saying we missed our exit.  I knew within a mile or two that something was wrong, but it took another 25 minutes to actually get to the hotel.  It was frustrating for all of us.  After a few minutes, Erica turned on her phone and accessed her GPS app and it talked us in.

Whenever I am about to drive somewhere new, I get on Googlemaps and take a look at where I am headed.  I plan out my route and then, if it is complicated, I write it down on an old envelope or other handy scrap of junk mail and bring it in the car.  I don’t have a GPS unit in the car or on my phone, so if I make a wrong turn I have to think my way through the mental map and figure out how to get back to where I need to be.  Usually, I am able to do this.  Though there certainly are times when I am irretrievably lost, and I then I pull over at a gas station and ask for directions.

I have a fairly well pronounced sense of where I am in the physical world much of the time.  When my mind is quiet and allowed to float free, it sometimes creates an aerial view of the surrounding geography and places me in the view so that I have a concrete idea of where I am in the world.  I like this about myself.  I code it as a useful life skill that would have marked me as a survivor in the hunter-gatherer days.

Erica sees it as simply another manifestation of my Luddite tendencies and it drives her nuts that I won’t use a GPS as my first course of action.  She may be entirely right, seeing how self-diagnosis is notoriously tricky.  But I don’t think so.  I really value knowing where I am.  When I get to a new town where I will be spending a good amount of time, the first thing I like to do is walk the square mile around where I will be staying.  I spend lots of time looking at maps and seeing how roads connect and where important landmarks are.  The feeling I get when I do this is that the place exists independent of me.  My goal is to see how to move through the place as best I can. My existence is superimposed on the geography, but the place certainly does not need me to be.  By learning the place, I change it from an acquaintance to a friend. 

I feel like our reliance on GPS has taken something from us.  We are losing a geographic sense that serves to connect us to the places we are.  Just think about the way we see the world when we look at it through the devices in our cars and phones: What is it at the center of the map?  It is us.  And we become the center of the universe.  Landscapes exist only as we pass through them, and then they no longer matter. 

All of these thoughts are just half-formed, (at best), but they feel important to me.  I feel like I am on to something.  When I taught sixth graders last year I demanded they could label a blank United States map with all 50 states and all 50 capitals in the correct locations.  Again, Erica might say this is just another Luddite manifestation, since any kid could look this stuff up in milliseconds with the right device.  But it feels important to me that people know about the place they live.  At first, this means your block.  But then it means your town, your state, your country, and then your world.  

It drives me nuts when I hear people talk about Africa like it is one country.  I pull out my hair when people lump all Muslims together as a monolithic faith.  I cringe when someone from the East Coast says, (as I have heard someone say), “Idaho. Iowa. Whatever…” I don’t think that constant reliance on GPS leads to bigotry, but I do think the two can be connected.  The GPS worldview always has you in the middle, in the place of central importance.  In a global age, this sort of utter-provincialism might be dangerous.  If we don’t understand the broader world and our place in it, we might be left constantly recalculating.

Silencer on the ATF

The semiautomatic rifle used to execute 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT last week was a Bushmaster .223 AR-15 rifle.  If this model name and number sounds familiar, it may be because this same gun was the one used by Jacob Roberts at a mall in Oregon last week in his rampage.  Also, it was one of the several guns used by James Holmes when he killed 12 people and injured 58 others at a movie theater in Colorado this past summer.  This gun is popular with mass murderers because it can fire a lot of bullets really fast.  (Check out Bushmaster's awful ad campaign here.)

This same type of gun is hardly ever used in street robberies or drive-by shootings.  It’s just not very practical.  For those sorts of crimes, criminals tend to use pistols.  But, if you wanted to know what specific brands and models of guns are used most often by criminals in the United States, you can’t find out.   It’s not that this information isn’t collected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.  It is collected.  It’s just that the ATF is prevented by law from spending one penny of budgeted money to release the data.

You heard correctly.  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms gathers data from police forces across the nation on the make and model of every gun seized in the investigation of a crime.  It then tabulates this data by crime type and gun type.  And then if files this information away somewhere because it is against the law for them to release it.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission collects data like this on tires and toys and appliances.  As soon as they spot an anomaly, they investigate.  And then, if there is cause, they issue an advisory or a recall.  In this way, dangerous products are kept off the shelves.  Sometimes, people injured by these dangerous products sue the manufacturers.  If they can prove negligence, they sometimes win cash settlements.

In 2004 the NRA got Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas to attach a rider to the Justice Department appropriations legislation.  It quickly became known as the Tiahrt Amendment and it has three main provisions.  The following description of the three provisions is from The Brady Campaign to Prevent  Gun Violence.

• One Tiahrt provision severely limits the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to disclose crime gun trace data to the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and bars admissibility of such data when victims bring lawsuits against the gun industry.
• The second Tiahrt-sponsored appropriations provision codified the Bush Administration policy destroying certain National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) records after 24 hours.
• The third Tiahrt appropriations rider bars ATF from implementing its proposed regulation requiring gun dealers to conduct annual inventory audits to address the problem of guns “disappearing” from gun shops with no record of sale. 

So, the ATF cannot (by law!) respond to Freedom of Information requests and must not provide data for lawsuits against the gun industry, cannot save Criminal Background Checks for more than 24 hours, and cannot force gun dealers to conduct audits of their inventories once a year.  Police groups and big city mayors have complained about the Tiahrt Amendments since 2004.  Clearly Representative Tiahrt and the NRA’s waterboys in Congress are worried about what the data might reveal.  Is it possible certain makes and models are preferred by criminals or mass murderers?  And is it possible some gun sellers are not serious about keeping guns out of the black market?  Could a jury find that gun manufacturers share some of the blame for America’s 30,000+ gun deaths each year?

Until the Tiahrt Amendments are repealed, we will never know.

The C-Word

This week the Letter of the Week in my classroom is B.  I have written a large “B” on a poster-sized piece of paper, had everyone make the sound the letter B makes, and then asked students to say words that start with the B sound.  I then wrote the words they listed on the paper.  As we have played and sung songs this week we have noticed whenever a B-word is used.  If it is a word not already on our list, we add it with much fanfare.  At this point it is safe to say that almost all of my sixteen 3-year olds know what a printed capital B looks and sounds like.

            Some of my kids have attempted to paint or draw the letter B themselves at the Art Table using watercolors, markers, crayons or even purple gluesticks.  The classroom I teach in is play-based and has none of the overt pre-reading and writing curriculum of “academic” preschool programs—(yes, such things as academic preschools exist).  We do offer a word-rich environment and engage in many of the best practices activities that help children get ready to learn to read, but we do it in a way that disguises it as play.

            This week as some of my students have run over to me, thrilled at having discovered another B-word, I have been thinking about something else.  I have been thinking about the C-word:  CURSIVE.  I have not spent much time really thinking about cursive script and its place in modern literacy, but working with 3-year olds has raised the issue, at least in my own head.

            I am left wondering why we teach kids one series of letters to start with and then switch over and teach them an entirely different set a few years later.  It seems a bit much to me.  We don’t do this with numbers.  If you step back and think about it for even two seconds, you can see that it would be stupid to teach children how to write the digits from zero to nine and then, three or four years later, to teach them a different way to write those same digits.

I am going to say it out loud:  teaching cursive is a waste of time.  Once a child learns how to form the letters, they can do all they need to do to communicate their thoughts in writing.  The keyboard I am looking at right now has 26 upper case printed letters on it.  The keypad on my phone has printed upper case letters.  Is cursive used anywhere in the everyday world any more?  And if not, why do we waste time teaching it?

            I am generally a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to teaching things at school.  My sixth graders have had to memorize the states and capitals.  In the past, they had to memorize the American Presidents in order.  I have even taught them how to find a square root using a long-hand algorithm instead of a calculator.  I believe there is a value in knowing how to do hard things by hand or mentally.  I no longer see any academic value in teaching or learning cursive writing.

            The newly adopted Common Core State Standards for English do not require cursive, but states can choose to teach cursive if they want to.  Many states are opting out.  There are many arguments for the continued teaching of cursive; it connects us to our past, it teaches fine motor control, and it is faster than printing.  Using a slide rule would connect us to the past, too.  There are other tools to develop fine motor control. And studies show kids print just as fast as they write cursive.  In fact, fourth and fifth graders write much slower in cursive.

            A hundred years ago students were taught calligraphy and I imagine some parents were concerned when schools stopped instruction in that beautiful-but-unnecessary art form.  The same will be true today as schools decide it is a waste of time to teach children how to write twice.  But as I teach my three-year olds what the letters look like, I come down firmly on the side of dumping cursive.  It just makes sense.

Now What?

Yesterday I had a very good day at work.  My kids were nice to each other, they shared their toys willingly, they cleaned up when they were done, and I left feeling very good about working with small children.  Some days are just like that.

Then I turned on the radio and heard the first reports coming out of Newtown, Connecticut.  They mentioned 18 dead school children and it hit me like a hammer blow.  I started crying and couldn’t stop for a long time.  I pictured someone coming into my school and intentionally shooting my kids and I was dumbstruck.  How could anyone put bullets in innocent children?  This man didn’t just spray bullets randomly.  He executed those poor children.

My first instinct was to call my wife, but she is in Israel and out of phone contact, so I e-mailed her instead and continued to cry as I listened to radio coverage of the massacre.  My next instinct was to get on Facebook and rail against guns.  Whenever this sort of mass killing happens, it is just about always with a gun.  You rarely see massacres carried out by a knife-wielding killer or a machete-carrying madman.  Semi-automatic handguns and rifles make it easy to shoot a lot of people in a short time without having to get close to them.  If these guns were rare and difficult to procure legally, there would be fewer mass shootings.  That is a fact.

About an hour after I heard the news, Erica managed to borrow a phone in Israel and she called me, distraught and teary.  Our conversation soon got to the question on my mind: “what can we do to stop this shit?”  I know deeply in my heart that America is a society with an unhealthy fascination with both guns and violence.  We ban buttocks on tv but allow grisly scenes of violence.  You can’t say “shit” over the airwaves but you can show blood-soaked victims lying on the floor of any weeknight drama or police procedural. 

I also know deeply in my heart that the Founding Fathers really did intend for citizens to be able to own guns as a defense against tyranny.  However, I also feel pretty certain they did not mean for this right to bear arms to be unregulated.  The most advanced killing technology at the time of the writing of the US Constitution was all single-shot.  There were cannon, howitzers, mortars, and muskets and all had to be reloaded after each shot fired.  Second Amendment radicals today argue that any regulation of firepower or magazines is unconstitutional.  This argument is ridiculous.  If you take it to its most absurd length you end up arguing for the right of citizens to own anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-launched missiles.  Is that REALLY what the Second Amendment protects?

One thing I can do in response to the tragic waste of life in Newtown is to contact local, state, and national lawmakers and push for meaningful regulation of gun purchases and magazine capacities available to civilians. If you add together all of the gun murders in the 23 wealthiest countries of the world, fully 87% of the children killed are in the United States.  What does this say about us?  I do not have much faith in the politicians of this country to take any sort of meaningful legislative stance against the gun lobby, but I feel like I need to express myself to them anyway.  Maybe THIS time the horror of what happened will be enough to give lawmakers the spine needed to buck the NRA?  I doubt it, but remaining silent will make it that much less likely.

I am realizing this morning that the most effective and, in the short term, least satisfying action I can take is to respond to the people around me with love and respect.  The common traits these shooters seem to share are an overpowering wish to be seen and a desire to feel powerful.  With a gun in hand, they feel like God.  And with the wall-to-wall coverage, they are certainly seen.  I do not believe anyone I know right now is a potential mass murderer.  But people who knew Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Dylan Klebold, or other shooters probably would have said the same thing.  It is not an easy thing to do, but I can work hard to respond to the people I meet each day with love and kindness.

In the end, that is really all most of us can do.  As President Obama mentioned in his short statement yesterday, we can hug our children, tell them we love them, and then put politics aside and work to make further tragedies like this less likely.   The work I feel that I can do is simply to be more compassionate with people I meet every day.  Beyond that, I feel lucky to have a job that allows me to help 3-year olds learn how to deal with anger and frustration every day.  It is part of my job description to love small children and listen to them, and, while listening. to help them deal with the frustrations that arise from living in a world where you don’t always get your way. 

Maybe that makes me lucky.  I have a way to respond to this tragedy that feels real and immediate and effective.  When I get to work Monday morning you can bet I will have a bit more patience and a much deeper appreciation for each of the young lives I touch.  My hope is that those with different jobs, like Representatives, Senators, and the President, will also step up and do what their jobs allow them to do.  They are elected to carry out the will of the People, and the People want to live in a society where massive firepower is harder to acquire and our children are safe at school.