Author Archives: jparquette

The ancient Greek legends surrounding Prince Theseus have lessons for today.  Periodically, the king of Athens had agreed to send seven boys and seven girls to Crete to be fed to the Minotaur to appease King Minos.  The Athenian king’s son Theseus volunteered to be one of them, but said he would slay the creature to end the sacrifices.  The Princess Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, fell in love with Theseus and betrayed to him the secret of killing the Minotaur, a fearsome monster, which was half man with the head of a bull.  She smuggled Theseus a sword and a ball of twisted threads.  The Minotaur lived deep in an impossible labyrinth; the challenge for Theseus was to find his way out should he prevail over the monster.  He needed both a sword and then the twine to leave a trail back.

We have labyrinths today and seem to be losing the thread to find our way back.  A few anecdotes portray some of the twists in the maze.  Some of these seem trivial, but illustrate that we are becoming lost in some fundamental way and are confused about our priorities.    These are mostly unrelated, but seem somehow of a piece.

•  In Belmont, Massachusetts recently, the animal control officer found a badly injured coyote.  Coyotes have become increasing vexing to suburban Boston communities, and Belmont is among the most affluent.  Twice in the last year, they have attacked children in Massachusetts, and routinely pet cats and small dogs disappear to coyote packs.  The town official didn’t dispatch the coyote to end its suffering.  No, she brought it to an animal rescue hospital in Grafton, MA, which at a cost to the taxpayers in excess of $2,000 nursed it back to health over three months.  The coyote was a fertile, young female, which they did not spay.  Then, of course, they brought it out to release in a remote part of Western Massachusetts, right?  No, it was released with great celebration to the “wilds” of Belmont to reunite with its pack mates.  Does this seem misguided to anyone else?
• The Federal government has initiated a suit to set prices on e books because they are too high.  The Federal government apparently has solved all the problems of deficit spending, foreign wars, health care, poverty, education, religious freedom, Social Security and contraception, and has the time to turn their eye and insinuate their considerable power into the market place to “correct” the alleged malfeasance of publishers and book sellers.  What happened to a consumer shopping for a book, whether print or electronic, and if they could afford the price, buying it?
• The Federal government subsidizes with tax credits the manufacture, construction and operating costs of windmill power.  Recently, the Bonneville Power Authority in the Pacific Northwest, another Federal agency, asked the local wind power producers to shut down their windmills seasonally.  Since the existing hydroelectric plants on the rivers produce all the power needed when the rivers are flowing strongly, the windmills were redundant, and their power had no place to flow.  The rivers flowing and the wind blowing tend to peak at the same time of the year. The dams, which are far less expensive per kilowatt hour to run, don’t kill birds and are equally renewable.  Dam generators need to run when the rivers are high because, if they don’t, the salmon run to spawn will be endangered.  The windmills have to stop and lie fallow, not unlike farm subsidies.  The BPA will pay the windmill owners up to $50 million per year to do nothing, and the wind will only howl.
• The Justice Department has embarked on yet another crusade, most recently in Texas and South Carolina, to stop states from requiring identification of voters.  According to the department filing, voter photo IDs, even if provided free by the state to all who don’t have driver’s licenses, will have a disparate impact on the poor and minorities.  Voter fraud is a problem in many of the large cities where the dead cast their ballots early and often.  Since inner city votes favor almost entirely Democrat candidates, one might suspect an ulterior motive from Eric Holder, the current Attorney General.  Not so, says he.  His enthusiasm even with Fast and Furious, Supreme Court challenges to the health care mandate and myriad other pressing issues extends well above and beyond duty.  He has the time to decide how each state should determine who votes and how voter’s citizenship, right to vote and even their existence above the ground are verified.  Such dedication should not go unrecognized.
• Finally, we drop all the way through the looking glass into Wonderland.  And the looking glass is a wavy fun mirror that distorts all reality.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) petitioned the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to stop the same voter photo ID laws in the U.S., even though Indiana’s ID laws were upheld by our Supreme Court in 2008.  It seems that the U.N. should have more authority over U.S. laws than our courts.  Among the member nations on the U.N. Human Rights Council are such human rights luminaries as Cuba, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, where women can’t vote at all.

We wander through the labyrinth running the thread through sweaty palms, just hoping to find our way back to the light.  Just a few of these cited twists and turns expose how tricky the journey is.

Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen.  Homer Simpson

Meg and her fiance Marty Gilbert

Mayor Bloomberg, complying with a court order under a Freedom of Information suit, recently released the test scores and rankings of 18,000 New York City teachers, publicly listing their names.  Rankings were based on their students’ performances in the standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind program begun during the Bush administration and continuing today.  The list purports to identify effective and ineffective teachers.  My daughter, Meg, now in her fourth year teaching in Harlem, posted a note on her Facebook page regarding this.  She was not damaged in this listing, but fine, dedicated colleagues she well knows to be hard working teachers were.   Here is an excerpt from her note addressed to Mayor Bloomberg:

“You do not consider the fact that many of these ‘ineffective’ teachers are attempting to teach children who enter their class severely deficient, are emotionally unstable, are living in shelters, are victims of domestic violence, have drug or alcohol addicted parents, are in the middle of child services cases or are even learning disabled, but are not yet labeled as such since the process to do so can take up to two years.

There are so many aspects that we, as teachers, deal with on a day to day basis.  I’d like to see you come into some of the underperforming neighborhoods of Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx and teach for one day.  You wouldn’t last an hour.

Why don’t you find out which children are failing these ridiculous tests that measures so little of their actual intelligence and ask their PARENTS why they continue to fail?  Every teacher knows that in order for a child to succeed, there needs to be a pyramid of effort.  The pyramid consists of the student, the teacher AND the parent.”

Since she took her job in NYC, Meg has related the horror stories to us of what her students face at home, if indeed, their domestic arrangements can be called a home.  And what she deals with daily with classroom disruptions, appalling student behavior and bureaucratic foolishness.  In her elementary school, NYPD police sit full time in the hallways – not security guards, but fully trained professional NYC cops.  Three major studies looked at why students fail or succeed in the United States and illuminate these issues.  These were cited in Dr. Charles Murray’s noteworthy book, “Real Education”.

The Coleman Report, resulting from a mandate of the 1964 Civil Right Act, was commissioned to determine the effects of inequality of educational opportunity.  Dr. James Coleman led the most exhaustive study before or since, involving 645,000 students nationwide.  Data were compiled about school history, parents’ socioeconomic statuses, neighborhoods, curricula, school facilities and teacher qualifications.  He fully expected the study to document that the quality of the schools would correlate strongly with the academic performance of the students.  What he found to his surprise was that teacher credentials, the newness and facilities of the schools, public money spent per student and the curricula were not critical to improving the learning of the students.  What consistently correlated with student performance was family background.  Not to say that great teachers and schools don’t make a profound difference in the lives of some individual children, because they do, but across wide populations, these do not consistently correlate with over all academic achievement.  Innate academic ability, family situations and family support do.

The Title 1 program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 spent and continues to spend billions of dollars each year to upgrade schools attended by children of low income families.  Numerous studies were done to track Title 1 results.  Irrespective of the fond expectations of those gathering these data, no significant effect in any analysis from the 1970s forward has demonstrated improvement in the academic achievement of students in the schools aided by this program.  The most recent comprehensive study in 2001 by the Department of Education  (Dr. Murray’s book was published in 2008) showed that from 1986 to 1999 (the period of the study), the gap between high poverty and low poverty schools actually widened.

Finally, there is the No Child Left Behind programs, passed with strong bipartisan support in January of 2002 and championed by strange bedfellows George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy.  Everyone involved had the best of intentions.  Despite deep changes in the country’s NCLB educational system and a firestorm around “teaching to the test”, the results have been inconclusive at best.  After nearly ten years of effort, math scores for fourth graders at the 25^th percentile (lowest 25% of tested academic ability) have risen three points; eight graders fell two points and seniors fell one point. The effective change in reading scores at all levels for the 25^th, 10^th, 50^th and even the 75^th percentile was zero.

There is far, far too much to cover in a blog.  I strongly recommend reading Dr. Murray’s book. I can’t even begin to discuss the deleterious effects of teachers unions and bloated school department administrations. Dr. Murray’s book emphasizes four main positions:

• Abilities vary.
• Half of the children are below average.
• Too many people are going to college (especially four year liberal arts colleges).
• America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.

Educational romanticism, which is sacrosanct today, keeps as dogma that all but intellectually disabled children are capable of greatly improving academic performance, if held to high standards by good schools and tough tests.  While this view is lovely to contemplate, common sense and almost all developed data show it to be untrue.   A false premise condemns good teachers fighting the battle every day and cruelly sets unattainable expectations for many, while neglecting in some cases those who would most benefit.  Job specific technical training beyond high school needs to be strengthened and encouraged.  The exceptional teachers persevering in their frustrating jobs should be recognized for the heroes and heroines they are.

“It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after twenty years of being educated, how I’m supposed to think.”  Clarence Thomas

Alone in the crowd

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal featured Alain de Botton’s new book “Religion for Atheists: A Non Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion”, which is to be published in March.  His writing is crisp; his observations about the alienation in our culture are astute.  Unfortunately, he attributes the missing sense of community, still found in religious groups, to the lack of the familiarity of rites and formulae, and, of course, utterly misses the point.

“Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success.  We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is, ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness.  Even if we believe very little about what they tell us… we can nonetheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers… and prevent(s) us from building connections with others.”

Botton especially values the “genius” of the Catholic Mass.  The congregation, according to him, draws together dissimilar people from all layers of society.  Within the rituals, music and rote of the Mass, they are comfortable with one another; they know when to sit and when to stand and when to kneel.  The words of the prayers are known to all.  In fact even if one finds oneself among complete strangers speaking a foreign tongue, a Catholic can still participate in the Mass with ease – can still easily fit in and feel at home. The setting of the church, the composition of the attendees, who are not usually of the same race, profession, educational or income levels, yet share a “commitment to certain values”, all contribute to the connections of community.  These “values” include acceptance irrespective of class or success.

“As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.”

How the Church succeeds in his purview presents a formulaic means of implementing “community” among the lonely, disaffected individuals that everywhere inhabit our population. He does regret the loss of the Agape Meal (Love Feast) of early Christian communities that transformed into the Eucharist of current practice, but still holds that there is some value in what remains.  It is good to know that an atheist has some better ideas to improve the liturgy.

He suggests a secular alternative to worship could be concocted and offered to all.  A “Temple to Perspective” would set the stage, complete with a “to scale” timeline monument to lift our eyes to the stars and put into perspective our tiny presence in geological and astronomical terms.

Temple to Relationships

His solution would include meals in an uplifting set-aside space, but meals with rules and rituals, such that the participants feel welcome, get to know each other in non judgmental ways and follow set patterns of conversation that do not judge others – sort of speed dating with memorized lines and without sex or wine.  Sterile, bleak and contrived come to mind.  From G.K. Chesterton: “When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

Personally, I’d prefer the bustling atmosphere of sidewalk tables outside a Federal Hill restaurant (Mediterraneo?) on a summer evening, perhaps bumping into Buddy Cianci, our personable and felonious ex-Mayor making his rounds.

St. Augustine wrote, “Therefore do not understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand.”  Mr. Botton’s perceptions about the existential loneliness, not just of modern man, but of man without God are entirely accurate.  The point that he misses is the whole one.  Such presumably willful and obstinate spiritual blindness in such an intelligent brain is a great sadness.  He wants the faith but resists with impressive agility the Author of it.  What faith filled Catholics and others hold in common are not merely “shared values” or acceptance of others, although those attributes are valuable, but a deep, personal faith and relationship with their God.  Not superstitious whistling past the graveyard dreams as assumed by those who do not believe, but the intimate relationship of creature and Creator that cannot be imagined or understood by those who have not experienced it and are close minded even to the search.

From St. Augustine’s Confessions

Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Our American culture is replete with rifts both significant and trivial: rich vs. poor; equal opportunity vs. equal results; liberal vs. conservative; government as a solution vs. government as an obstacle; Patriots vs. Giants; pro life vs. pro abortion or pro assisted suicide; traditional one man one woman marriage vs. all manner of gay and sad alternates; Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street; Red Sox vs. Yankees; Bud Light vs. microbreweries.

Charles Murray, the libertarian political scientist and author, recently published his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010”.  He limited his research to the white population and his employment statistics to pre 2008 to mitigate the variances due to race and recession.  The results are striking.  He proposes that the political divide (Tea Party) and economic split (OWS), while divisive, are far from the worst of our deepening separations.  His conclusion is that the accelerating values gap between the upper middle class and the working class is debilitating and threatens to end American culture as we have defined it for 250 years.  Some of it is economic, but most damaging are the cultural differences.

Some definitions will clarify the argument.  Dr. Murray studied in depth Belmont, a white affluent suburb of Boston, and Fishtown, a white working class neighborhood in Philadelphia.  His classifications are calibrated by education and employment.  Most of the people in the Belmont group had at least bachelor’s degrees and worked as doctors, lawyers, business owners, managers and academics.  In the Fishtown group, most had high school educations or less and worked in clerical, retail or blue collar jobs requiring little training.

While taking into account the admonition about “lies, damn lies and statistics”, some must be included in this discussion for it to make sense.  Dr. Murray’s evidence is convincing.  Both upper and lower classes have been affected by the cultural tsunami of the last fifty years, but the mores and habits of the working class have been even more drastically altered, thus increasing the gap.  In 1960, the average annual family income in inflation adjusted current dollars for the elite ‘zip codes’ was $84,000; today in relative terms it is $163,000.  During the same time period, married families in the elite group dropped from 94% to 83%; among our working class married households has fallen from 84% to 48%.   Children raised by single parents have risen from 1% to 6% among the Belmont families, and from 6% to 65% among those with a high school education or less.  Regular practice of religion went from 71% to 60% in the upper middle class, and from 62% to 41% in the working class.  Controlling for the recession, the gap between upper and working class industriousness (dropping out of the jobs market and working less than 40 hours) has also grown demonstrably.

The distressing reality is that the cultural commonality among the elites and the workers has fallen apart.  “The centre cannot hold.”  Elites live in enclaves increasingly isolated from the common folk.  They eat different food, take care of their bodies differently, watch different entertainment, go to different schools, take different vacations and share less and less with fellow citizens of lesser means.  While there has always been a gap, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted about American culture in the 1830’s, “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.  On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”  For most that is no longer the reality of our daily lives.

Forty years ago or less, the population of America understood each other better, embracing a common civic culture and “shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about (core) American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religion.”  As we grow farther apart, communicating on a meaningful level becomes ever more problematic.  We talk at and around each other, not with each other.

The good news for Dr. Murray is that there is a burgeoning recognition  of the new American Great Divide as a grievous problem.   He suggests that the remedy is not amenable to government mandates or educational curricula; the cure is one family at a time, one person at a time and is the responsibility of each of us and all of us: to simply, make the effort to know one another better across the cultural divide.

One of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books was “The Long Winter”.  The life threatening challenges to Charles Wilder’s family were terrifying.  Our family sometimes wrapped in blankets just reading aloud about the cold and weeklong prairie blizzards.  Charles tied a rope from the door of their cabin to the barn. Each day he fed and milked their cow.  During the seemingly endless, howling storms, he would take a lantern, keep his hand on the rope and do his barn chores.  The rope protected him from losing his way in the storm; the blizzards were so intense that a dead reckoning error of just a few degrees would strand him, hopelessly unable to find his way back – a fatal mistake; he wouldn’t be found until the spring thaw.

Our lesson in that is this:  hold on to the rope.  Each family, each person.  Hold on to the rope.

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.
Margaret J. Wheatley

One of the more attractive and hopeful aspects of the human personality is our capacity for wonder, curiosity and the joy of the “Eureka” moment discovering the solution to seemingly insurmountable, vexing challenges.  A story from the past week brought this marvel to mind.

Public Broadcasting’s NOVA series ran a program about Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge University engineering professor, and his inquiry into an early WWII bombing raid by Great Britain that temporarily shut down the heartland of the Third Reich’s war equipment industry in the Ruhr Valley.  In 1942 with the war against Hitler in grave danger a British engineer, Barnes Wallis, convinced the Royal Air Force that he could breach the immense Möhne and Eder dams, which would flood coal mines and deprive the steel plants of necessary water and hydroelectric power to disrupt the production of tanks, planes and munitions for the German war machine.  Fearsome anti aircraft emplacements and the inaccuracy of bombs of the early war (only 10% hit within 5 miles of their targets) thus far had kept the dams safe.  To prevent air dropped torpedoes from reaching the dams, large, steel submarine nets were installed below the waterline across the huge lakes.  Wallis designed the famous “bouncing bombs”, code named “Upkeep”, which could skip across the water and sink adjacent to the dams, detonating after they dropped thirty feet below the surface. Delivery necessitated low level, risky flying.

On the night of May 16, 1943 a 617 RAF Squadron of 19 Lancaster bombers attacked the dams with the “Upkeep” bombs suspended beneath their fuselages. The concussive wave from their explosives, magnified by the weight of the water above them, blew out large sections of the dams and flooded the valleys.  In addition to damaging the mines and power plants, 25 bridges were washed out.  Eight bombers and fifty three members of the “Dam Busters” squadron did not survive the raid, but their success was one of the most significant of the war.

In 2011, Hugh Hunt was intrigued by how Wallis managed to skip what looked like oil drums across the water.  Most of the 1940’s notes were lost in local floods in 1960, and no one had been able to duplicate Barnes Wallis’s achievement since.  After months of meticulous research, Hunt was ready to test his theories at a remote lake in Canada.  He assembled a team that included a dam engineer and contractor to build a 30’ high model of the original dam.  They poured hundreds of concrete 2’ x 2’ x 4’ blocks that interlocked like Lego blocks, overcoming numerous design, soil type and topography problems.  First they cut a deep channel from the lake then built the dam in the middle of it.  Once it was completed, the last barrier of soil separating the channel from the lake was dug out, filling the channel behind the dam. It took six intense weeks to complete.

Two weeks of field testing in the lake required Arnie Schreder, a bush pilot with thirty years of experience, to fly his two engine WWII vintage DC-4 over 200 MPH only 50 feet above the water to achieve the necessary angle and speed of entry for the barrel.  Flying that low put the plane at risk of being damaged or even broken up by the impact splash when the barrel hit the lake.  Experiments with cement filled barrels had proven that a backspin of over 700 RPM was necessary to make them skip.  In Wallis’s version, an engine had been fitted to the bomb release mechanism under the plane to achieve the necessary spin.  Hugh Hunt devised a low budget solution that required spinning up the barrel with a large commercial drill to 1,600 RPM on the ground, and then releasing it over the lake before it slowed below 700.

At the last minute, tests proved their commercial drop mechanism designed for forest fire fighting was inadequate for the task, putting the barrel into the water at an angle, instead of the perfect parallel it required.  Two days before the crucial final drop, Hunt rented a local machine shop to alter the arms on the mount, personally cutting and welding into the night.  The day before the critical drop, Jim Bellevance, the dam contractor, stopped the leaks and finished the dam.  As each difficult hurdle was cleared, the team celebrated with shouts and hugs all around.

On the day of the final test, explosives were lowered into the water adjacent to the dam. The Canadian government’s toleration of this motley team of scientists, flyers and builders did not extend to letting them fly over sovereign territory with live bombs.  Hugh Hunt’s promise to Arnie Schreder was that if he could manage to skip the 300 pound barrel five times down the lake, into the channel and against the dam, Hunt would detonate the charge beneath it.  The crew pulled back to a safe distance and tensely watched the dénouement of a year’s planning and effort.  Arnie flew tight on the right line and low.  The barrel released perfectly and bounced hard five times and into the top of the dam.  When the dam blew, Hunt danced like a child, hugged one of his engineers and pumped his fist into the air.  No one watching could see scientists as detached and undemonstrative.

I was reminded of my 3 year old granddaughter, Gianna.  She will spend a half hour painstakingly building a Lego structure with windows, towers, bridges, cars, stairs and doors. Her intense focus is a marvel.  When it is finally finished to her satisfaction, she will look at us and her creation with great satisfaction, then delight in smashing it to oblivion.  Absolute delight.  Exultation.  The joy of simply being human.

Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil.

Blessed Nicolas Steno.  Father of modern geology with significant contributions to anatomy and paleontology as well.  Danish Bishop. Born January 11, 1638. Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.