Step By Step: Engulfed by a Lack of Sensitivity

Marian Turski, Auschwitz survivor and Polish historian, made a ten minute speech in December 2021 that has become a more and more timely reminder to pay attention to how we think about harm to one another.

He explains the slow and slippery way a government can get us to accept evil in society. Here it is in full, and it just takes four minutes to read, but I've bolded some important bits:

Let's use our imagination and our thoughts to get to the early 1930s, to Berlin. We find ourselves in the Bavarian district. It's just three stops away from the tier garden, the zoo. There is a station of the metro there; there is park. And one day in those early 1930s, you can read an inscription on the benches: Jews must not sit on these benches. You could say it's unpleasant; it's not fair; it's not right, but after all there are so many benches around you can sit somewhere else. Of course you can. 

That district was inhabited by intellectuals, by the intelligentsia German of Jewish origin. Albert Einstein used to live there, Nelly Sachs the Nobel Prize winner, the politician and industrialist who was minister of foreign affairs. There was a swimming pool and over its door an inscription that read: Jews are forbidden to enter. You could say but there are so many places in Berlin where you can take a bath or swim, so many lakes, canals. It's nearly like Venice. At the same time, you can read somewhere else: Jews must not belong to German singing associations. So what. All right, they want to sing. They want to make music; let them just meet somewhere else. They will do their singing. all right.

What comes up later is an order, really, more of an order than of an inscription: Non-Aryan children must not play with Aryan children, with the German children. All right they'll play on their own. And then you read, we only sell bread and food to Jews after 5 p.m. Right. Less choice: this makes your life harder, but after all after 5 p.m you can still do your shopping. Now I warn you, I warn you, I'm getting used to that thought that someone may be excluded becomes mediated into our lives, the thought that somebody can be stigmatized, that someone may be alienated.

And that's how it is done: step by step, slowly. 

International Long Covid Awareness Day

Now we have a delegated day, today, to remind the world of the number of people who have lost their lives or livelihoods to this ever-mutating virus. Worldwide, about 1 in 1,000 have died so far, and almost 1 in 100 are living with long Covid. 

That's not 1% of the people who got Covid, or 1% of people who got long Covid, but 1% of all people in the world, or 65 million people. There is NO cure, so we have to focus on preventing cases of Covid.

Last month, a Wall Street reporter warned, that for months Federal Reserve officers insisted that the dwindling supply of workers from Covid was elevating inflation levels, then they suddenly decided to stop tracking it. She reported,

"It's premature to say that Covid is no longer an economic issue when long Covid has such a significant effect on America's workforce, economists and health care officials say. . . . The bottom line is that long Covid is why the labor force participation rate has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels"

On Gun Control

I've been observing many gun control arguments online and in the classroom (also online) recently. I've written about this before, once after Sandy Hook and then after a Stoneman Douglas shooting surviver put the onus on school staff to keep kids safe. This one's closer to home, so I finally got around to sorting out my views on a whole assortment of gun-supporters' typical claims (presented largely in my own words and entirely without indications of where they're from in case people don't want their views known here). I'll follow my own classroom rules for arguing: take the most charitable read of a person's point, indicate points of agreement, and only then indicate points of disagreement. It got ridiculously long, so here's the general trajectory of my position with links to each section, and there are bolded bits throughout for faster skimming:

     A Very Brief History of Gun Control in Canada
     It's Undemocratic!
     The Regulations are Nonsense
     Semi-Automatics Aren't Necessary
     Semi-Automatic Weapons are Unnecessary and Upsetting
     Semi-Automatics Can Get in the Wrong Hands
     The Buyback is One More Way to Decrease Gun Deaths
     Violence is a Bad Thing
     Random Assertions and Refutations

But first, full disclosure: I admit that I don't know all the ins and out of the types of guns being discussed, but I hope dear readers can keep to the larger issues being debated here. My one dig at gun supporters is that some, definitely not all, but it often seems that it's a significant number of them, love to dive into the minutiae of models and parts and origins until my eyes glaze over. And when that happens (but of course it doesn't always happen), when that happens, it always reminds me of Roger Ebert's dismissal of certain (but not all) Star Wars fans:

"A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. . . . Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. . . . If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to."

What Should Teachers Do to Prevent Gun Violence?

Lots of us have students who don't quite fit in and spend all their time alone, friendless. They might have been bullied for being different, and we can't always solve the problems they have trying to better communicate with other people. But the vast majority are completely harmless.

Lot of us have students who are really angry. These are teenagers. I was a really angry teenager, outraged at the many injustices I felt I faced in the world. Nothing is fair when you're at the centre of your own world. (I'm still pretty angry, but my focus has shifted to injustices around the globe instead.) Adolescence is a necessary time of self-obsession as people figure out their place in this life, and that can heighten every possible sleight against them, provoking an attitude of quick-tempered defensiveness. But the vast majority are completely harmless.

Lots of us have students who let slip some racist or sexist or bigoted comments in class, and we shut that down but then linger over the comment a bit later, mentally reviewing it and filing it away, and maybe mentioning it to a few colleagues looking for a pattern. But the vast majority are completely harmless.

And lots of us have students with a mean streak: students who are trying out their power, looking out for the boundaries that might be able to reign them in. If they get away with too much, they sometimes keep pushing until a consequence helps them turn a corner. We know it's important to stop cruelty in its tracks, but we can't catch everything. But the vast majority would never consider harm at this level of violence.

But I'm left wondering about all the signs we're told to monitor. Is it remotely useful to psychologically profile students?