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Stealing the souls of children


“People pay for what they do,and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

James Baldwin 

My hand, the bay’s gift, returned

In the end, it’s the ground that will save us, if we are, or even want, to be saved.

We’re of the mud, of the air, of the water, of the sun. We diminish the folks before us on this once fine land when we “honor” these as metaphors.

We diminish our ancestors from our homelands who spoke of the spirits and the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead as autumn darkness presses on our souls.


Cliffs of Moher, County Clare (Aaron Logan via Wikimedia)

These are not simply metaphors or myths or models. They are ways to understand the world, the world beyond the digital.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through a screen.
Our hands were made for more than pushing keys.

We are stripping the souls from our children.

We become who we deserve to become.
But we should let our children decide whether a soul is worth keeping.

Winter is coming, again.

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Apple vs. wheat: an economic parable

(Photo of wheat grown by a student in my classroom.)

The market rate for wheat today is $9.08 per bushel. A bushel of wheat weighs 60 pounds. That’s just over 15 cents a pound.

Where did the “stuff” of the wheat come from? Water, mostly rainfall, and carbon dioxide, which well, we have more than plenty to spare. Water molecules are split, the oxygen drifts off, and the remaining pieces are knit with carbon dioxide to form the stuff that keeps all of us alive.

Truly miraculous.

A pair of AirPod Pros weighs 0.19 ounces, and checks in at $249, a bit over $20,000 per pound, and it won’t do any good to water it. 

For the price  of a pair of earbuds, you can get 3/4 tons of wheat.

The “miracle of the five loaves and two fish” is, of course, a parable, the only miracle story found in all four Gospels, and most folks in these parts know more about the story of Apple than the story of wheat. Farmers do the work of Jesus every fookin’ day.

I get about 50 loaves of bread for every bushel of wheat I buy. One AirPod Pro gets you enough wheat for 80,000 loaves of bread.

There’s a parable there somewhere.

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Gearing down

I took a walk along an abandoned Norfolk Southern rail that runs through our town. A few decades ago I would pull my little ones in a red wagon to greet our neighbors as they came off the train.

These gears moved the gates that blocked the road, a job once done by humans when the railroad first ripped its way through our neighborhoods.

If you run a small current through the rails, a train’s axles will short the current, and the system will “know” something is up.

The newer signals no doubt rely on computers. Our kids pay a price for this. Knowing how to manipulate an Arduino UNO is fun, but not a whole lot of thought goes into figuring out how the “machinery” works because there is none.

Coding is literally symbolic. It’s clean, it’s cool, it’s profitable.

No gears, no grease. (Yes, I know plastic gear kits are available for Arduino kits. Why not just use a servo?)

Still not all kids are living virtually. Just a few yards from the dead gears and torn wires is an art show seen by few humans, and maybe only one from the 1950s.

The mechanics of an aerosol can are be more easily understood. The kids are alright.