We Are The 99%

 

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. ~Gandhi

I've been wanting to write about the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City for several days now, but I've been afraid. I skirted around it a bit, testing the waters a few days ago, but I've been afraid to take the plunge, afraid that too many of you who come to this blog will be turned off, will consider Teacher Tom too radical, will feel somehow threatened or challenged. I've been worried that I'm not capable of making you understand that this has everything to do with our children and the world in which they are growing up, and that remaining silent simply means letting corporations speak for you.

Some people, especially those in the traditional media, have been trying to lazily frame this with the typical left v. right meme, but they are wrong. You will notice that there are no Democrats or Republicans speaking out in favor of the goals of this grassroots upraising against 30+ years of economic policies that overtly favor the wealthy. That's because both parties are culpable, both parties have been persuaded by legions of highly paid lobbyists to continue to deregulate business, to continue to cut their taxes, and to continue to allow the wealthy to use their wealth to overwhelm the promise of democracy. So far, it's a parade without leaders, which is how democracy is supposed to work. As more of us take a stand, more politicians will run around to get in front and pretend they are leading, but for now it's just us.

Last month the US Census Bureau released new data showing that nearly 50 million Americans now live in poverty, 16.4 million of whom are children. This is the highest rate of any industrialized nation, and it is a number that is growing by the day. Today, nearly 1 in 4 American children live in in poverty, nearly half of whom fall into the category of "extremely poor." It has not always been this way. The rate of childhood poverty was near its all-time low in 1979, yet spiked dramatically in 1980 when our federal government elected to try the radical experiment of so-call "supply side" economics. Today we have nearly 30 percent more poor children than we did in 1980 as a direct result of policies that favor the wealthy. Our middle class has withered to the point that we rank near the bottom on the list of industrialized nations when it comes to social mobility, and consumer product giants like Proctor & Gamble (you'll have to subscribe to read the entire article, but the first couple paragraphs say it all) aren't even bothering any more to market products designed for middle income audiences.

At the same time, we've seen corporate profits at an all-time high -- during a massive recession. Three of the four banks the taxpayer's bailed out are now making more than they did before the bailout, while paying out billions in bonuses to their executives, and continuing to illegally foreclose on struggling home owners. The wealthiest 400 families in America now control nearly 35 percent of all the wealth in the country, and they are paying virtually no taxes. We have the widest income gap in the western world. And as long as we allow these people to operate in an environment of low taxes, and low accountability, it will only continue to get worse.

This is the story of how 99 percent of Americans have been duped into allowing a tiny minority of super wealthy people to own our government while making us all poorer in the process. This is about our children's future and the kind of world we want to leave for them.

Many of the nation's billionaires are on the warpath -- they want more, more, more. Their greed has no end and apparently there is very little concern for our country or the people of this country if it gets in the way of the accumulation of more wealth and power. The middle class is struggling for existence. They're taking on some of the wealthiest and most powerful forces in the world, whose greed has no end. And if we don't begin to stand together and start representing those families, there will not be a middle class in this country. ~US Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont (I)

I could launch into my own rant about how this situation has perverted our educational system, but someone much smarter and funnier than me beat me to it (profanity alert):

I'm writing this post on Gandhi's birthday, the man who taught the world about the power of peaceful protest. And we must protest, if we have any hope left at all, we must stand up and say, "We are the 99 percent!" This will not take care of itself. The multinational corporations who have used their wealth to game the system to the point that they pay almost no taxes, who have taken taxpayer handouts, who are, in fact, in many cases actually subsidized by we the people, will not voluntarily give in. We must make them. The 400 wealthiest families in America who control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent combined, did not manage to redistribute the middle class' wealth into their own pockets by standing idly by. They, through their highly paid surrogates (lobbyists) are working 24/7 to tip the playing field even more dramatically in their favor.

It's not me who is the radical, but them. They are the ones who have worked tirelessly, often criminally, to take from the poor and give to the rich, to turn our democratic ideal on its head. We talk to our children about how to deal with bullies. It's time to show them how adults deal with bullies. This is a time to role model how to be a citizen in a democracy. We stand up, we hold our hands in front of us, and we say, "Stop!" And when they don't stop, we say it again, louder. And when they persist in abusing us, we come together, peacefully, but with the knowledge that we are right and shout, "Stop!" together. And we shout it until they hear us.

And they are finally starting to hear us. I know because they've started ridiculing us, the second stage in Gandhi's formula for democratic success, calling us names, joking about us, laughing at us from their Wall Street balconies while sipping champagne:



Some, however, have already started to take us seriously and are starting to fight. The police simply do not behave like this unless ordered to. They are using violence against us although we have remained peaceful:






They are even arresting our children:



I don't blame the police for this. Most of them are doing their job to the best of their ability, and by many accounts they are expressing sympathy with our cause, many protesters are reporting that cops are saying to them, "Don't give up." After all, their families are struggling too. They know that with their decimated 401Ks, non-existent pensions, and weakened safety net, they are only one round of layoffs away from poverty themselves, so they follow orders in the hope that they won't be the ones let go. They are also part of the 99 percent.

Some have complained that this "movement" seems to lack a focus and indeed if you read the laundry list of complaints in the declaration that emerged from the New York group's general assembly, it might seem that way, but as I see it, it boils down to five things: 1) a fair tax code that requires even the super wealthy to pay their fair share on all income, and that closes down loopholes, including those that allow them to hide their money offshore; 2) a reinstatement of the banking reforms originally instituted in 1933 under the Glass-Steagall Act which were designed to prevent banks from engaging in exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that tanked our economy; 3) policies that reward companies for actually creating jobs here in America; 4) elimination of the Federal Reserve which is really just a private club of bankers designed to enrich one another; and most importantly, 5) public financing of elections in order to eliminate undue corporate influence by getting their dirty money out of politics. This is how we level the playing field.

I am not against capitalism, I'm a capitalist myself, but I've been witness in my adult life to the destructive influence of the kind of uncontrolled monopoly capitalism that has resulted from the economic policies of the past 30 years.

For the second day in a row, I went down to Westlake Center where we are occupying Seattle in support of the protesters in New York. On Saturday, there were about 200 of us. We organized ourselves into leaderless work groups and planned what we were going to do. We exchanged emails and phone numbers, committing ourselves to work together, reminding one another to stay peaceful and inclusive. It will be educational to see how it goes. Sunday, there were fewer of us there, but there were at least 6 tents. People are starting to occupy the space around the clock.

Still, it was a little deflating to see so few people there, after witnessing the thousands in New York. I wandered around a bit and thought about heading home when I saw a girl, maybe 6 or 7, arrive with her mother. They were carrying a sign they'd made at home. I watched them shuffle about uncomfortably for a bit, then carry their sign to the curb where passing cars could see it. That's when I picked up a sign of my own that read, "We are the 99%," and said to the girl, "I picked up this sign because I saw you holding yours. Thank you." She beamed at me proudly.

I stood with my sign for about an hour, urging passersby to join us, "even if it's only for 5 minutes." Many of them took me up on it. No one disagreed with us. Maybe that's because there were no billionaires wandering around downtown on a Sunday afternoon. When I left, the girl was still there with her mom.

That experience, and that little girl, are why I had the courage to post this today. As I say to my own child, or the children in my care, when someone is hurting you or scaring you or taking something from you, hold up your hands and say, "Stop!" This is me saying, "Stop!"

I'm just one of the 99 percent, and so are you.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Nothing Normal Art

"Dad, why can't you be normal?"

"He is normal. The word you're looking for is average."  

~Utah Phillips

I first learned about using hair dryers to melt crayons from MaryLea over on her outstanding blog Pink and Green Mama, but according to her it had been making the rounds all summer in the form of using the process to make melted crayon rainbows.

The basic idea is to glue an entire box of fresh crayons in a tidy row across the top of a canvas, lean it against a wall, then power up a hair dryer, which causes the crayons to melt and run down the canvas in rainbow stripes. We actually do have a box of fresh crayons, but we have an even bigger box into which I've dumped literally thousands of "junker" crayons over the years and, as I do with all these cool things I find on the internet, I asked myself, "How can the kids do this themselves?"

As you can see, many of the kids almost right away rejected my idea of white tag board, 

opting instead for construction paper from our journal table.

The mental experiment convinced me that it was unlikely that many of them would have the patience to do all that gluing, nor did I want to make them take turns with one big, single canvas, so I figured we'd scale the thing down. What we'd lose in a dramatic final product, we'd gain in participation and ownership.

They were also not at all inspired by my "demo" on which I'd arranged

6 crayons in a tidy row across the top, choosing instead to treat

this stage in the process as a creative one as well.

The basic idea was for the kids to count out the number of crayons they wanted to use, afix them with glue guns to a piece of tag board (because we can't afford canvases for each of them, although I am kicking myself for not remembering the pad of canvas paper in the storage room), which was attached to a clipboard, then take a turn with one of the inexpensive hair dryers I picked up at Goodwill.

In my mental experiment, the kids were wild about the project from the get-go, but in reality they were more than a little trepidatious. Many seemed uncomfortable with the sound and fury of those hair dryers and not at all impressed with the first minute or so of the process during which nothing obvious was happening, but we persevered, despite tripping the safety shut off on our power strip, causing us to spread the dryers out over several outlets in different parts of the room. 

We experimented with how and how far away to hold the hair dryers and soon we were seeing the wax liquify. If MaryLea mentioned this, I somehow missed it, but some of us were a little put off at first by the fact that our hot wax wasn't just running down the paper, but spattering as well. 

And I don't mean just a little bit of spattering. We were scraping it off counter tops and walls.

Of course, this may be something that could have been corrected for by turning the dryers down to "low," but where's the fun in that? Instead we learned how to direct the spatter by how we aimed our hair dryers.

As the process continued, as we started to understand how this worked, everyone got more comfortable, and what had started as a handful of individuals working in their own little worlds of hot air, glue guns, and melting wax, evolved into a community project as we began to talk with one another about what was going on, about our own experiences, giving advice, pointing things out and generally discussing what we were noticing about a process in which none of us had ever before engaged.

We just can't seem to do anything "normal" at Woodland Park. But we do know how to have fun.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Infinite Wonder Of All That There Is

I write a lot here about the importance of giving children, even very young ones, the opportunity to explore tools:

Almost everything we make or do involves, at some level, a tool, the mastery of which requires practice. In preschool, we need ample opportunity to sort of mess around with a wide variety of tools like wire, scissors, hold punches, hammers, paint brushes, saws, glue guns, pencils, screwdrivers, knives, and paper clips. We need to get our hands on brooms, clothes pins, drills, shovels, rulers, pulleys, trowels, staplers, and rakes. As humans we have being alone, we have talking to other people, dancing with them, and singing with them; for everything else we use tools.

I find it important to remind myself of this here at the beginning of school year, when it's too easy to get lost in my own agenda, when I've forgotten that the answer to the question, "What are we doing at this station?" is to simply answer with a list of the tools and materials available, not a description of a finished product.

What are we doing at this station? Well, we have tag board, construction paper, glue, and scissors.

I'll confess that my idea was that the kids would cut up construction paper shapes and use glue to make collages on the tag board.

And that's what some of them did.

Although some ignored the cutting part, instead finding cast-off pieces from someone else's efforts.

While others worked those scissors to create specific, predetermined shapes like squares.

Others used the glue as a medium unto itself. In this piece, Parker made a picture of "waffles with 15 berries," all from glue on tag board. (Double click on any photo if you want to see it up close.)

Kiran started by making a long cut along the top of his green paper . . .

. . . then gluing it to a piece of tag board as he saw me doing with my piece, before going back and "finishing" his real work on on the green paper.

Most went to town, experimenting with everything on the list -- tag board, paper, glue, scissors -- discovering wonderful things at the end of their process.

What are we doing at this station? Well there are sponges cut into shapes, rolling pins with shapes stuck to them, pans of white paint and blue paint, and a large piece of black paper.

What are we doing at this station? Well, there are makers, paper, hole punches, tape and a stapler.

For some reason there's also a screwdriver in this picture. Where did that come from?

What are we doing at this station? Well, there is clay, clay working tools, sponges, water, and the rest of the outdoor classroom.

I love how there are adult hands visible in all of these pictures. This is our 

Pre-3's class and it's early in the year. Our parent-teachers are still 

accustomed to their "babies" needing a hand with things. As the 

year goes on, we'll see less and less of those wonderful, loving hands.

What are we doing at this station? Well, there is fabric, needle point hoops, yarn, and yarn needles.

Humans are driven to use tools to make their imprint on the world. To understand a tool and what it can do, what we can do with it, we must explore it with our hands and our minds, as freely as possible, without a lot of preconceptions, instructions or rules (we can always go back and learn that stuff later if necessary). That's how we learn to make that tool an extension of our creative selves.  And with each tool we master, the world opens up to us a little bit more, giving us another glimpse at the infinite wonder of all that there is, and what we are capable of doing in it.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!