The Upward Slope or the Dark Abyss

by Jeff Bloom

Jose Clememte Orozco (1934) “The Gods of the Modern World: The Epic of American Civilization.”

This morning while I was sitting in my recliner petting one of my cats and “trying” to drink coffee, parts of a story started bouncing around in my head. Characters’ voices, their emotions, and dark, dark cloud descending upon them. I could feel my heart beating faster and harder as bits and pieces of the story arose and subsided. After about 15 minutes of this situation, I had to leave the house to run an errand. While driving off, I realized I couldn’t write the story. It would have taken me on a deep dive into a world of hate, deception, greed, demolition, abandonment, and wide-spread ignorance and forced stupidity, where women’s rights were the least of their problems, where skin color and ethnic background could be a “cause” of celebrated death. It would have been a world, where people got paid less than our current minimum wage, and then not be able to afford housing. There would be mass homelessness. Healthcare would only be for the wealthiest 1%, no one else could afford it. People who worked hard their whole lives and were now retired would lose their own saved money, in the form of Social Security. For most, Social Security would be their only savings for retirement. And, these societal elders would be on the streets with everyone else. Food would not only be expensive, but since all of the safeguards, and food standards and regulations would have been removed, eating would not only be expensive, it would be dangerous. The jobs people would have would pay them less than before, since all regulations on businesses would be removed. There would be no minimum wage. And, working, especially in factories or other hard labor contexts, would be incredibly dangerous. Again, safety standards or regulations would no longer exist. Work would be a risk to one’s own health and survival. Schools would be some sort of fusion of prisons and cattle yards. Teachers would no longer have to be trained and certified. The focus of “learning” would only be on the minimal development of reading and arithmetic skills. Beyond that it was learning how to be a slave-worker, how to be submissive to all authority. Basically, schools would be holding pens for cattle-kids, while their parents worked. School shootings would increase even to the point of teachers shooting kids and other teachers. And, everyone would groan and send their prayers. Emergency services — fire, police, EMT’s — would be slimmed down. Police would be used mostly for imposing the will of the authoritarian overlords, not for protecting people or preventing or investigating crime. Fire departments and EMT services would be reserved only for the wealthiest people and the biggest of corporations. Everyone would be in servitude to the corporate overlords.

The odd kind of twist is that the day after the “transition” would feel pretty much like every other day. You’d get up, go to work, come home, just like every other day. The initial changes would feel distant and disconnected, if you even hear about them. The Constitution would be dismantled. Political “enemies” – perceived or real – along with other irritants, such as journalists, bloggers, and others will start to be arrested or killed. But, before too long, these distant changes will start to affect everyone. As described above, the changes start to hit home and they will hit hard. Things you used to be able to do will become harder or impossible to do… take a vacation, pay your mortgage, buy a car. But, the power structure will find a way to make smart phones available to everyone. They are the great pacifiers, they are the great zombifiers, and they are essential components of the system that keeps everyone in line. They will be the streamers of propaganda, hate, distrust of everyone but the overlord “saviors.” They will be the pocket brainwashers.

Enough of this! You get the gist.

Writing these two paragraphs was difficult and emotionally taxing. It’s a bleak look at a very possible future.

We certainly don’t have a perfect system. We’ve never had a perfect system. But, we have more or less managed to plod along and develop over time. In fact, I do think our particular system is fundamentally dysfunctional. But, it could be improved, if politicians would just get some sensibility, intelligence, empathy, and just grow up. But, the motivation for power and money is quite toxic. It takes exceptional people to withstand the pressures. However, dysfunctional system could be reworked, if politicians had enough maturity and integrity to do so.

But, I’m not even sure that democracy is the best system, but I can’t think of any other system that would be better. Some friends of mine are advocates of anarchy… not chaos, but a system that is not hierarchical. I suppose I am more of a holarchical advocate, which I conceive of as a flat system of layers, where one layer is not more important or more powerful than any other layer. The layers are just layers in the degree of participation in which people engage. And, it is fluid. People can move in and out of various levels of participation. It’s not fixed or solidified. I’ve seen such holarchic systems in a few school classrooms, where the children and teachers move back forth across layers of participating in running the classroom community. As much as I like this sort of “community system,” I cannot see how it can be scaled up and still maintain both its character—integrity and its functionality. The whole thing starts to collapse as you scale up. But, maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there is a way, if people would just stop playing their stupid, dangerous, self-centered games, and just talk to one another as human beings.

I just don’t see that happening.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with what we’ve got, along with a major oppositional binary to contend with this November or whenever people vote. Life after this election either will be a continuation of some semblance of normalcy with a great deal of hope for some steps toward progress in creating a better society; or it will be a cessation of everything we’ve come to expect to awaken to everyday. It could be ugly, horrifying, and miserable. And, no mater how bad our lives are now, it will be much, much worse after an election for a psychopathic narcissist and his gang of psychopathic narcissists and suck-ups.

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I love to write. Well, that’s not entirely true. I suspect that my relationship to writing is much like relationships with technology, driving, and golf. I suppose these relationships are more of a love–hate binary. Although many binaries tend to be quite destructive, others seem to provide the energy for things to happen, the creative energy. But, how I feel about writing all depends on the circumstances, contexts, and my immediate experiences.

Most of my writing has been more technical, although I have dabbled with poetry, non-fiction stories, and blog-ish writing. My two books, one of which has two editions, are educational in nature. One deals with teaching science in the elementary school: Creating Classroom Communities of Young Scientists. And, the other one provides an overview of science concepts elementary and middle school teachers are likely to encounter: The Really Useful Elementary Science Book. Writing the first book started out with the typical experience that felt like pulling teeth. But, the experience quickly became like driving with the windows open along an empty country road in the spring. Purring along on a bright sunny day. The first chapter I wrote — the chapters were not written in any particular order — took three weeks. The second one took two weeks. After four chapters, the rest of them took three or four days each. The whole book, all 450 pages or so, took about three and a half months to write.

The second book, which was less than half the length of the first one, took almost four and a half years to write. Writing this one was like pulling teeth for almost the entire time. The first book I wrote during a sabbatical and worked on it almost every day. The second was written while working, but I still tried to put in time on the book for two or three hours every day. While the first book flowed, the second was mired in a great deal of research. Probably 80% of the time was devoted to research on the second book, while only 5% was devoted to research on the first one.

However, I learned a great deal more from writing the second book. I had to question everything I thought I knew and every assumption I held about science knowledge. My publisher was not particularly happy with the time it took me to write this book, but I felt that the time was well spent. I not only learned science concepts more thoroughly, but I learned a lot about the nature of my own knowledge and assumptions.

Throughout schooling, I never liked taking tests, and rarely did well on them. And, I always felt like I learned more writing a paper than taking a test. Tests were exercises in memorizing and figuring out what the instructor was expecting. My memorizing ability was never very good. I usually started out trying to memorize, like all of my fellow students, but always found that I was getting “bogged down” wanting to really understand concepts and not just memorize some disconnected bits of information.

And, this point about learning by writing is where writing is powerful. When working on non-fiction, if we really want to produce a reasonably good piece of writing, we have to organize our ideas and how they fit together and relate to one another. We have to write in a way that makes sense. And, we have to create some sort of argument for the points we are trying to make. These points might involve providing new insights, new patterns, new relationships, or new perspectives about some particular issue or topic. When writing poetry or fiction, we still have many of these same concerns, but the ways in which we go about achieving these “goals” are usually quite different. In such cases, we may get at these concerns through imagery, through the tensions created by the way we play with words, or through the contexts, plots, and narratives in stories.

In junior high school, our writing classes required that we take notes on note-cards, which were turned in and graded. Then, we used the note-cards to make an outline, which was turned in and graded. And, then we used the outline to write a paper. It was a gruesome experience for most of us. I never liked the process, and as a result my grades in English classes were mediocre. Of course, part of the mediocre grades involved my inability to memorize much of anything.

However, as I proceeded through schooling, my relationships to writing and my writing abilities changed dramatically. I dropped the note-cards approach, but did continue to take notes. Outlines changed from the very structured to somewhere between lists of major ideas in a document to more fluid streams of ideas in my head. And, the more I read, especially of bad writing, the better my writing became. I still can’t remember most of the technical terms for parts of speech, sentence structure, and so forth, but I have gotten a better “feel” for the language. As I began teaching and then having to read student papers, and then, reading and reviewing papers submitted to journals, my knowledge of and feeling for writing took another leap forward. I discovered that bad writing was much more common than good writing. It became increasing painful to read bad writing. And, I did not want to be one of those writers who was painful to read. We certainly have way more pain than we need in this world, and I did not want to contribute any further pain. Fifty years ago, I would never have thought that I would become a strict traditionalist about writing. However, as many writers do, I try to purposefully break the rules at certain times. After all we can play with language. We can make up words, drop verbs from sentences, and do all sorts of things when trying to create a feeling, an atmosphere, a reaction, and so on. But, we should knowingly and purposefully break the rules properly.

It’s good to reflect on one’s own writing experiences and on the writing and experiences of others. We can improve our own writing, change our relationships to and feelings about reading and writing, and open up new worlds to explore. A nice way to expand some of our perspectives on writing can include reading about the writing experiences of well-known writers.

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Category: learning

The Story I Couldn’t Write

The Upward Slope or the Dark Abyss

The Writing Experience