Them Intertubes Process

The Interwebs Process:

On the posting of any idea, concept, or invention, the web reaction will be as follows:

1)  There's no problem.  There's no need for this.  This is just the reaction of (insert group you hate here) trying to (insert nefarious intent here).  You're an idiot for disagreeing with (insert group you respect here)

2)  Okay, there is an issue, but it won't work.  You don't understand the (science, cost, politics, mechanics, will of the divine) regarding this.  Who's gonna pay for this?  You're an idiot for disagreeing with (insert group you respect here).  You don't have the (money, skills, education, credits, cajones) to do this.  If this would have worked, someone else better than you would have already done it.

3)  Okay, it might work, but They (the government, the corporations, the police, the illuminati, the bankers, the reptilians, the minorities, the people with hamsters taped to their foreheads) won't let you do it.

4)  It'll work just fine.  It's brilliant!  I've always said so. You and me, buddy!

Mungo's Epistle to the Preppers

Okay, so this has been coming a long time.  I apologize in advance, this is going to seem like an attack. It honestly isn't meant as one, but I think it's something that needs to be said.

The world has it's problems, I'll freely admit.  Governments are corrupt or stupid, corporations are out of control, the climate is out of whack, the seas are polluted, everywhere, it seems, there is crime, want, violence, disease, and general weirdness.  I get that.

Your response is entirely logical.  You want to create a safe space for you and your family, fill it with food and medicine and guns and whatever else you think you'll need to deal with what is out there, and survive.

The question, in my opinion, that you don't seem to be asking is:  And then what?

And then what?

Then do you crawl out of your shelter with your camouflage and assault rifle and eke out some miserable existence in what is left of the world?  Do you see yourself, somehow, and the leader of some Mad Max future by virtue of having the foresight to "prep" for it?  Have you thought about it at all, about what happens when the freeze dried food gives out and the Kero for the lanterns is gone?  And then what?

Let me make a suggestion.  You may not like it.  It's not romantic, it's not macho, it's rather pedestrian and lame, but here it is.  Why not use your capital, your considerable talents, and your inventiveness to help fix the world in which we're living, to help make it a better place?  I know you probably won't be able to do it alone, but if you do and I do and a bunch of us do, then maybe, just maybe, we can avert the horrible future for which you are "prepping".  Maybe we can image a world as we would like it, set our sights on that, and work toward it.

I know our visions would not match, but some parts of them surely would, and those are the ones most likely to come true.  We could make a future, you and I and everyone else, for ourselves and our kids and the planet.  We could do that.

Just a suggestion.

M

Of a Trip to the Grocery, Lurking Police, Ferguson, Lord of the Rings, and the Ghost of Robert Peel

Sir Robert Peel was one of the powerhouses of 19th Century England.  He was Home Secretary, twice Prime Minister, legislator, and was all round hip deep in the issues of his age.  I mention him because, among other things, he was responsible for the reform of the London police force and was the father of what is often called "Policing by Consent".  If you've ever wondered about why London police are called "Bobbies" or "Peelers", he's your answer.

Sir Robert Peel.  If you don't know him, you should.

What brought Sir. Robert to mind at all was a walk this morning to my local grocery store.  It's a walk I make a lot, down a couple of back streets, then down a busy highway.  This time I noted, lurking behind a building some distance from the road, a patrol car, radar at the ready, laying in wait for speeders.  They do this all the time along this strip, but today, something about it irked me, got under my skin, got me thinking about American Policing, about things like Ferguson Missouri, and about Robert Peel.

Here's the thing:  Speeding is bad, and it happens a lot around here.  If you don't drive on the East Coast, you may never have experienced this sort of mix of aggression and inattention we seem to have out here.  Speeding is stupid, it's dangerous, it's a public safety concern.  Where I grew up in Ft. Walton, Florida, in summer when the tourists were in, the city used to park a disused police car--I'm not even sure the thing ran--in the median strip with a dummy in the driver's seat.  It worked.  The touri took one look at it and dropped their speed before hitting the main drag of town.  The public safety aspects were met, simply and inexpensively.

But this officer behind my grocer was far too far off the street for anyone to see.  There was no deterrence.  Instead, he was there to "catch" a speeder.  To apprehend and ticket a law breaker.  As opposed to preventing a law from being broken.  One of Peel's "principles" (gleaned and collected from his writings by others, I should note) was: "that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them."  In other words, a police department with a lot of fines, tickets, arrests, convictions. . . .that police department was one that had failed, because they had failed to prevent the crimes from happening in the first place.  I realized that it had been YEARS since I'd seen an officer of the law parked in such a manner to deter speeding.  All of them had been lurking like trolls under bridges and overpasses, just past the crests of hills or around bends, waiting to "catch" someone.  Why?

Perhaps the term, "troll" I just used has some information here.  Mythologically, a Troll was a powerful, dangerous, often stupid supernatural creature that lurked under bridges and the like and extracted fees for passage from the unwary, 'troll' and 'toll' sharing some of the same linguistic roots.  That "fee" concept may lurk at the heart of this.

With the release of information from Ferguson, Missouri, a lot of people were shocked to discover that the second largest source of the City's budget was fines.  That amount was high, but by no means remarkable in the area.   The Police Department Emails from Ferguson made it clear that they were being pressured and judged on their ability to rake in funds. 

To look for who is responsible for this, one only has to look at the current crop of chest thumping politicians who proudly proclaim that they will "never raise your taxes."  They won't.  Taxes tend to come from property holders, large businesses, and folks with large incomes.  You know, the guys who write big checks to political campaigns come election time.  What they WILL do is crank every usage fee, license fee, and fine on the books to make up for the shortfall.  So the $25 fee to apply for a variance for your back yard fence is now $150.  The $50 speeding ticket is now a $250 fine, plus $150 in court fees, plus a requirement that you take a privately offered traffic safety course for $500 (and the company that offers them is a major political contributor to the mayor, you can bet, as are companies who do now mandatory drug tests and background checks).  This transforms every Policeman, Safety inspector, Code inspector, and Clerk from being a public servant seeking the public safety and public good into being a part of a shakedown squad, and these fees and fines fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class.  The working poor are often ground up and spit out by this system, left with massive ongoing fees and payments, arrest records, and destroyed lives.

The second and equally pernicious problem is the increasingly macho and aggressive nature of policing.  I'm reminded of the line in "Bladerunner"(or "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" for you literary types) in which the Chief tells an unwilling Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford in the film)"There's two kinds of people in this world:  Police and Little People.  Which do you want to be?"  I lived in Los Angeles when Chief Darryl Gates (for my money one of the authors of this mess) declared LAPD to be "the biggest, best armed gang in the city," and ran things that way.  The attitude is as diseased as it is contagious.  In my distant youth, police looked like well groomed citizens in uniforms, very much along the lines of what Peel had in mind.  They approached policing with an attitude that said "I'm here now, you're safe now, how can we help?"  Now, shave-headed and tattooed, they more resemble a marine combat unit, and come swaggering in carrying enough firepower to take on the NAZI hoards and a "comply or die" attitude that says "mess with me and I'll kill every fu*king thing in this building."  I should be noted that Peel even insisted that the London  Police have special pockets in their uniforms for truncheons so they were not visible and threatening to the public.  Ironically, armored and very heavily armed, the excuse used by most police when using deadly force was that "they felt threatened."  Apparently, there is very little that doesn't threaten them lately, including unarmed, nonviolent offenders walking away.

It's a mess.

So here, dear reader, are my ideas on how to address this.  How to clean up America's Police Forces and restore to them their good name and rightful place in society.

First of all:  Robert Peel.  Before we go any further, stop over and read about Peel's ideas of policing, particularly the "peelian principles" of policing.  I'll post that list at the bottom of this, but if you have the time, drop over to Wikipedia and read the full entry.  You may be amazed how far we have drifted from these ideals.

Then, in terms of practical legislation:

At the Federal Level:

1) Support legislation making it illegal for any municipality, county, or state to acquire more than 15% of it's income from fees, fines, and licenses.  If you want community services, man up, tell the public how much it will cost, and what it will accordingly do to their taxes.  You want lousy roads? Fine.  Vote for them.  This will give the public a far more accurate idea of the expense of civic projects and governance, a better idea of where the money comes from, and it will stop governments from using police as the equivalent of schoolyard bullies shaking kids down for their lunch money.

2)  Direct the Department of Justice set forth a universal set of national standards for the use of physical restraint, pain compliance including tasers, and deadly force.  Make the guidelines conservative and clear, and make it clear that violations will be investigated by DOJ at the Federal level and vigorously prosecuted.

3)  Make sure that all Federal funding for local policing is responsible, including an emphasis on crime prevention and peace keeping; making sure the police departments are not too dissimilar in racial makeup from the public they serve and setting careful standards for programs for police training that have a component of taxpayer funding at the Federal Level.

4)  Stop the unfettered transfer of military equipment from the Federal Government to Law Enforcement agencies, making such equipment available only to special units within law enforcement and including periodic review of the recipients to make sure the use is appropriate and controlled.

5)  Require that instances of deadly force or complaints of violence against police be investigated by citizen panels independent of the Police Department, Prosecutor's Office, or Local Government.  This assures confidence in the integrity of such investigations, and makes their findings far more palatable to the public at large. Make sure that the collection of accurate data on police use of force is possible  and readily available, so that we will know when departments are developing problems.

On a local Level:

1) Insist that your local politicians hold Police--since they have a position of high public trust--to a higher standard of competence, honesty, and performance.  Hold supervisors and office holders responsible for police with a history of violence and complaints remaining on the force.

2)  Make sure that the police in your community LOOK like your community, and not just in racial makeup.  Police should look like the people they serve, not like hired killers or shock troops.  An effort should be made to recruit police from all walks of life, not just from the ranks of the military.

3)  Develop non-policing alternatives as an adjunct to traditional law enforcement.  New York's Guardian Angel movement or the Burning Man Festival's Black Rock City Rangers, (full disclosure, I was a Ranger for a time at Playa Del Fuego, one of the regional "burns") while not perfect, may serve as a model for a controllable, non intrusive way to increase public safety and security without further stressing already overstretched Police departments.

And on a Personal Level:

Step up.  Film bad policing, call your mayor, the chief of police, the press. . . .refuse to tolerate bad police, bad police policy, and those who place our Law Enforcement officers in no-win positions where the honest performance of their duties are at odds with official policy, political convenience, or monied interests.

Police should be deserving of our respect and admiration, a trusted and reliable resource for the entire community.  If we're willing to all get busy, raise our voices, and do the work necessary, we can restore them to their deserved and lofty place in the pantheon of those that make a civil society work.

M

The Peelian Principles

Nine Principles of Policing

The following nine principles of the role of police were set out in the 'General Instructions' issued to every new police officer in the London Metropolitan Police from 1829.

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
   

Conservatives and Liberals

Just a bit of musing late last night:

Conservatism:

"Daddy, can I have a cookie?"

"No, you have not EARNED a cookie

but

if you will wash my car, you will have earned one and I will give you a cookie and you may do as you like with it."

Liberalism:

"Mommy, can I have a cookie?"

"Of course you may, sweetheart, we're family and I love you and what's mine is yours

but

you must share it with your little brother."


Pater Severus, Alma Mater: The strict father, the compassionate mother: Both teach a kind of discipline and self-restraint, with one you get self-reliant individuals, with the other, you get functioning, compassionate societies

but

get the balance wrong, and you get neither.

On the Nature of Steampunk

On the nature and elements of Steampunk:  A Manifesto of Sorts.

Several things of late have caused me to ask myself “what exactly is this Steampunk beast?” Certainly, the genre began as a branch of Science Fiction, and certainly, it continues to be so, but it has, just as certainly, blossomed into something far more than that.  So today I sat down with laptop in lap to try to fathom this, to explore the world of Steam as movement and metaphor.  I chose to do an enumeration of sorts--though in no set or particular order-- collecting ideas and observations of the movement over the last few years.  Would love your comments, additions, and suggestions.

1) Steampunk as a movement is a yearning for self definition, much as the Renfaire, Burning Man, and other such communities are.  In a world where so much is “on your permanent record,” such movements allow one to say “THIS is who I am,” to re-define and reinvent one’s self to fit your potential, self image, and objectives and to be defined in some way by your own actions from this point forward, not to be locked in your own past circumstances, actions, or upbringings. It is world in which who you are is defined, not by what you did yesterday, but by the very next thing you do.

2) Steampunk is about the durable as opposed to disposable, about quality as opposed to quantity, and about the unique as opposed to the mass produced, As such, and in much the same way as in the Burning Man community, it is firmly a part of Maker culture, honoring those who build and do, and taking pride in the fruits of their efforts.  In other words, in the Steampunk ethos, artisans still hold a place of high regard, and anyone marketing junk for mere profit is likely to find themselves excoriated for it....and out of business.

3) Steampunk honors knowledge and experimentation:  Again, a part of Maker culture.  A huge percentage of the monikers taken by Steampunk affecianados include things like "Doctor" or "Professor" in the name.  Steampunk heroes and villains tend far more toward Captain Nemo, Sherlock Holmes, Professor Augustus S. H. X. Van Dusen, and others.  There are few purely machismo archetypes in the genre, and the strong and stupid tend to be portrayed as thugs rather than as role models.

4) Steampunk honors achievement over wealth, and the bold over the complacent.  If you can explore the Arctic and still run an investment company, so much the better, but it is likely the former that will be attached to your name, not the latter.  No one in Steampunk whines that explorations should be stopped because "who will pay for it when they have to be rescued?" as I've oft heard recently.  Steampunks know that the cost of NOT exploring, not adventuring and learning and risking, far outweigh the expense of sending an occasional rescue team after an errant airship (which itself becomes a bold adventure).  The glitterati, the bored, privileged and useless, do appear in the genre, but seldom, as it were, in starring roles.

5)  Steampunk is about civility.  It's that simple.  Even in disagreement, Steampunk adopts the formalisms of Victorian speech to bring civil address to what is increasingly becoming a mean and Uncivil society.  It is a projection of a gentler, less angry time onto our present world, and sadly needed. 

6)  Steampunk is the world we might have gotten had not greed and cheap energy intervened.  It is oft depicted as an outcome of the Victorian age in which the nasty bits of Victoriana:  Poverty, pollution, racism, Imperialism, sexism, and class privilege, have been transmuted into a world of mutual respect.  It is a world in which, at the very least, a pleasant life is obtainable by virtually everyone, and in which the fortunate feel compelled by society to accept a greater level of obligation to the society that made their success possible.

7)  Ironically, Steampunk, by its explorations of abandoned 19th century technology, its use of steam and of Tesla's theories, is far "greener" than our current solutions to our needs in many cases.  In some ways, the genre allows us to abandon the convenient but costly in favor of older, slower, more responsible methods of doing things.

8)  Steampunk is about freedom:  a decoupling from consumer society, from governmental overreach, from corporate hegemony.  It, like Maker and Burner culture, is about doing things for ourselves.  It is about a life at a human scale, often a very large one, but still one controlled by makers and users, not by investors and bankers.

9)  Steampunk is about beauty:  Everything must be beautiful, either through design or ornamentation.  Beauty is as important as function, it is key to the good and pleasant life.  Music should be beautiful, sewing machines should be beautiful, guns and gardens and airships and dinnerware, all should be a feast for the senses.

10)  Steampunk is insidious.  It is a revolution hiding in whimsey, an iron fist in a scented lace glove.  It is an ebony cane with a brass head backed by six years of Bartitsu training.  They'll never see it coming.

The above rant was first published by me in thesteampunkempire.com's discussion forums, and I thought I would share it here as well.

Kindly visit our other blogs:  The saga of the shantyboat "Floating Empire", Our onboard culinary blog Onboard Cooking, and Morgainne's excellent journal of an artist working on the water, Life, Art, Water

M

What World of Warcraft taught me about Education

What World of Warcraft taught me about Education This article was prompted by three significant experiences: ones that have really rewritten how I feel as an educator about what we're doing. The first, as he title suggests, was getting sucked into playing World of Warcraft online. Don't get me wrong, I'm an inveterate nerd, and did the Dungeons and Dragons thing in college, but I'd resisted getting involved in WOW mostly because I knew it to be a HUGE time sink. The second was acting as a camp director for Guard Up's Wizards and Warriors LARP (Live Action Role Play) camp in Massachusetts one summer. The camp is basically a live-action version of games like D&D and WOW, with the kids living and playing the fantasy against monsters and going on quests. More on this later. The third was becoming aware of and ultimately involved in the "Democratic Schools" movement in the US. Based loosely on A.S. Neill's Summerhill School model, the schools are run by the students, generally lack traditional classes or objectives outcomes testing, and stack up strangely well against traditional schooling models. How those knit together is the subject of this article, and of the change in my thinking. If I were to summarize educational articles over the last five years it would run like this: "Why Isn't This Working?" Our answers have been to pour millions more into education, and to get punitive with it. We punish kids with our constant "this will go on your permanent record" testing, we punish failing teachers with termination, failing schools with budget cuts, failing parents with chastisement. It is as if we feel we will somehow punish our way to a perfect America, to a perfect educational model, and it just seems to get worse and worse. Teaching in traditional public schools, I look around me, and the place is utterly joyless. The students are bored and surly, and not a single student interaction I see is around anything they're learning. The administrators look angry. The teachers mostly look exhausted, their "teaching" having been reduced to getting students to spit back information on computer scored test sheets so that the district won't be penalized. I think back to the LARP camp. I think back to a little girl, about 7 or 8, who was too shy to speak to anyone. By the third day she was in the vanguard hacking away with a foam battle axe at an actor in an eight foot tall ogre costume. I saw breakthroughs like that all the time at the camp; in the solving of puzzles, in participation with the other campers, in learning to lead. . . .What was happening there? What was going on that I most distinctly was NOT seeing in our public schools? So here, dear reader, is what I've learned. Here are the things that gaming, LARPing, and non-coercive schooling have in common that DO work and that our schools do so badly. I'll leave it to you to sort out how they might be applied. 1) Neither gaming nor LARPing nor Democratic Schooling are punitive or coercive. When you "die" in World of Warcraft, you get resurrected. It's an inconvenience, nothing more. You are ALLOWED to fail, without any real penalty, and then to go back with what you learned by failing and complete the quest. Fail once, fail thirty times, its all the same. Punishments are incentives NOT to do something, the threat of penalty. Yet we have use punishments on our students, our teachers, our school districts as "incentives" to do better. It doesn't work. The great value of schools is the ability of students to fail, learn from it, and come back to succeed without dire consequences. 2) Gaming results in immediate rewards for success. In WOW you get gold and equipment and you get to "level up", increasing your abilities and strengths. In LARP you get the adulation of your peers, the pride of group success, and, at least at the camp in which I worked, gold tokens that could be spent on real items in the camp store. In Democratic schools, students set their own goals and achieve them, the completion of personal or group projects becomes the reward. Yet what is the reward in our schools? We tell our students: Do this and when you get out of college you'll get a good job. To a ten year old, "out of college" is over twice their lifetime away. It would be like someone telling me "replace the transmission in my Volvo and in 58 years I'll give you a new car." The disconnect is just too great, and too many things can happen in the interim to make the reward real. 3) Ask your kids (if they participate in online games): do you game for 40 minutes every day and then do other things? They'll laugh at you. Gamers game for three or four hours at a time (how many times did you have to tell them to turn off the computer and go to bed because it was 3AM and there's school tomorrow?) two or three days a week on average. They spend time with the game, working it, comprehending it, and then take time off to digest what they've learned. To our students, though, we don't seemingly CARE how much they're into solving the puzzles of geometry, or how interesting Poe's short stories might be. Ding! Bell has rung, you're studying Civics now. It's rude, it breaks the train of thought. Worse, it breaks the train of investigation and concentration. 4) Human beings find things to do, things that interest them. We are driven to it by boredom and by our inherently curious natures. If a student in a "free school" tires of a subject, they'll find another project to interest them. If a gamer tires of WOW they'll do something else. No one wants to "just sit around" unless that "just sitting around" is actually contemplation, digesting thoughts and experiences, which is something we almost never allow our children to do. 5) "To get a Good Job" is not the be all and end all of human existence. I'm now seeing moves to start what is effectively job placement training as early as age 6. To make the objective of all education the student's assumption of the yoke as a corporate drone is unlikely to excite a love a learning in our kids. The objective of our education system should not be jobs, test scores, or (as it was in my era) "beating the commies". Our objective, as loving parents, should be to enable our kids to have good and happy lives, whatever those lives might be. George Santayana once defined a "fanatic" as one who had doubled their effort after completely forgetting their purpose. So it is, I feel, with our education system. 6) Looking at the LARP camp, some of the campers were always in the forefront, hacking away. Some stood to the sidelines and observed, learning, biding their time before participating. A few didn't "get it" at all and spent most of their time back at the Inn chatting with the counselors and their friends. Kids have different learning styles and different learning rates. Similarly some of the counselors were always up front, theatrically urging on the campers (that would be me), others moved among them, working one on one, quietly advising, comforting, supporting....teachers have different styles as well. Yet we have evolved an industrial model of education. One Size Must Fit All, both for the students and the instructors. The horror is that a student would "fall behind" the goals we have arbitrarily set for their age. Yet what is the disaster if a student wishes to get ahead in History right now and to address mathematics later when they are ready and better able to apprehend the information? Is that "falling behind" and something for which the student, the instructor, and the school district must be punished? Or is it, rather, the student taking initiative and utilizing their own development and learning style to further their own knowledge in a way of their own choosing? It is, after all, THEIR education, and their life we are discussing. 7) "Outcomes Testing" is really lousy at testing for things that really matter. Play any role based fantasy game and you'll be constantly faced with challenges of reason, problem solving, and memory. The situations, however fantastical, will mirror and inform situations in your real life, and your success within the game may give you deeper insights into your own problem solving process in the real world. One success mirrors the other. However: Old Yeller was: A) A dog. B) A goat C) The Chinese Gardener D) A & C Tells you nothing about the story, how it felt, what it meant to the readers, how it related to their lives.....yet this is increasingly all we demand from our students: simple tests of memory that we can wave at accountants to prove the success of our "teaching" to avoid the punitive reactions we have built into the system. Our current factory model of education was invented by the Prussians after getting clobbered by Napoleon in the 19th century. They wanted to create a population to feed a new army, one obedient and capable of comprehending the things necessary for the practice of modern warfare. In the process, they abandoned the centuries-old practice of "classical education," of students studying directly with gifted teachers to pursue their own betterment as human beings, without time or grades or place constraints. Other nations in Europe, fearful of being militarily overwhelmed, adopted the same system, and thence to America. But unless your only educational objective is to produce scads of obedient cannon fodder, the system does not and has never worked particularly well. Nor does thinking of students as "products", "consumers" or anything other than fellow human beings. I do not know how to fix education, and I despair of it. The system has become too entrenched and too powerful to amend easily. I know individuals who are and have been brilliant teachers who have bailed from the system out of frustration and anger at the piling on of meaningless requirements and the arrogance that only an entrenched bureaucracy can acquire. I can tell you what advice I would give you, the parent; what I would wish for my own children: I would send my kids, if i didn't school them myself, to a democratic school where their love of learning wouldn't be ground under the wheel of the system and where they could learn problem solving, democratic process, and to think and speak for themselves. I would encourage them to game, because it challenges logic and memory, and would encourage them to read and experience other thoughts, other ideas, other ways of being. If at all possible, I would travel with them, far and frequently. Not just to sites like the Grand Canyon, but to other communities, other cultures, other ways of life. And finally, when the time came for them to strike off on their own, I would make it clear to them that failure was not a consideration, that their happiness was my joy, that learning was lifelong, and that their place at my table would always be set and that they would always be welcomed back home with open arms and an open heart. I can wish nothing better for our children.