Governance: the real problem with voting in the United States

It doesn’t matter how many of us vote or how much we talk about the power of a single ballot until we make sure that every single person has the ability to freely access and cast their ballot for a government that represents them. 

Voter suppression (and the ugly, racist, and classist motivations at its core) is a conversation we have to have before we change anything in America. You can’t have equality without equal access. And my state is currently so gerrymandered that I have a hard time believing that it can be fixed. It’s easy to see why voters get disenfranchised. 

But it must be fixed. It must. 

We simply cannot sit back and let our elected officials pretend that they are not pursuing racist policy, espousing racist ideas, and pantomime that they’ve been wronged.

Listen: Voting should be easy, convenient, and secure.

In the computing world, we’ve solved this problem. America’s economy is little more than a series of electronic bits and bytes that are (occasionally) secured by math and distributed by electrons.  America’s voting system is a physical piece of cardstock that, when scribbled on by the right kind of pencil, is converted into bits and bytes and secured by an octogenarian volunteer at a folding card table in the basement of the police station.  Secure voting from a computer or phone or through the mail is a solved problem -- it’s the governance of the voting that is the issue. It doesn’t matter how the votes are cast when the governance of the voting is insecure and done in secret. And we can’t fix that until we fix the racist policies that drive that governance. 

We must fix this problem. But we can’t fix it by refusing to play. We must be involved. 

Stand tall against racist policies and ideas. Play the game. Vote against racist policies and the politicians who support them -- take small steps and vote against the incumbency and for change. It is the only way. 

I used to think that it would take the end of the world to fix our broken republic. But that happened in March and April of this year; and, look at us, we’re still stuck. We’re stuck until voting is no longer a game and Scott Fitzgerald falls in a hole.

The long way around

View fullsize

At approximately 11 a.m. on August 16, I became (officially) a 1.0 FTE Cross Categorial Teacher for the School District of Fort Atkinson. It's been in the works for a while, but I wanted to wait until I signed a contract to make it public.

Today I signed the contract.

It's a quicker-than-expected step on my road to full licensure; I'm still enroled in WiscEDU's fabulous 10SPED program, which is part of a Master's Degree I'm working toward at St. Mary's University in Minnesota.

I wanted to share my "Personal Statement" with you guys. I wrote this as part of my application to St. Mary's Master's program and submitted it to several local school districts as part of my ongoing job hunt.

I came to teaching the long way around.

In 1992, I enrolled at The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater with the intention of majoring in special education. I started reading the news on the college radio station, and I became enamored with the journalism school. I graduated, became a newspaper reporter, editor; I won some journalism awards. I left journalism for marketing; I became a PR spokesperson, and eventually the director of a marketing department with a $2 million annual budget. After 26 of years of success as a storyteller, both in journalism and business, I ended up back in special education-- working as a substitute teacher in my hometown.

View fullsize

It’s something of a calling. I’ve worked hard and gathered enough wisdom that I’m ready for it now. I used to tell myself that if I can help one marginalized kid find success at school, it will have all been worth it. I’ve helped more than one marginalized kid. I help marginalized kids all the time. My current students are better readers and better people than they were six months ago. This is important work.

It is, hands down, the most important work I have ever done.

I covered a small town’s reaction to the Sept. 11th attacks in 2001. I won awards for helping a community of seniors secure funding for their bus trips. I advocated and helped tell the stories of people with eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and developmental and intellectual disabilities.  

But when one of my students smiles because he got his first passing grade in science, that is a magic moment. Not for me, but for him. He knows the taste of success, and the warm feeling of pride for a job well done. Sometimes, for the first time.

I am humbled and proud to have been a part of that student’s journey. Admission to your program would help me to continue to help students make more of these magic moments for themselves.   

With the appropriate training and licensure, there is no limit to the way I can help students help themselves.

This school year, I'll be teaching at Fort Atkinson High School, where I'll be a team teacher with 10th - 11th graders and managing a caseload of kids. I can't wait to get started.

Remembering Shadow

My ferret, ShadowAnne, died today. I found her body in her snuggle sack. It was not surprising. We knew she was not long for the world. She was almost 11 and was in declining heath. 

We burried her with her business mates, a couple of white ferrets who passed within the last few years, Unagi and Snow Princess. They are together now. Under the evergreen. 

I made this recording off the cuff, kind of thinking about her. 

She was a great friend, and a wonderful pet. I will miss her. 

OUT OF OFFICE.

I haven't been too busy to blog; I've been out of the office. 

This is a very small a sample of the 3000 or so photos from this trip. 

Truth is, after I got done with my work at the orgnaization that I shall not discuss publically (hereafter refered to as the OTISHDP), I took a vacation with my family.

We did that thing. You did it with your familiy. I did it with mine when I was little. Now Gaia's done it with hers. We drove to Devil's Tower and back.

It was a crazy trip. And I'm busy writing about it. I love traveling with my family. I have stories and pictures and drawings. But in the itnerim, here's some great videos that Google Photos made automatically.

Becuase, as much as I rage against robots, sometimes they do cool things for you.

I'll post a few more to hold you over while I write my travelogue.

Our last day in the madhouse

I made this little video at work yesterday to celebrate my final day there.

Please enjoy it.

This.  Forever yes.   

Think with your fingers

I used the phrase "thinking with my fingers" today.

Twice.

What I meant when I said that was that I find that I use my "editing" brain best when I have some text in front of me, and a can move it around and format it easily. I enjoy taking someone else's written ideas and working with it as plaintext. Mashing it and moving it around, rewriting bits and copy-pasting it. Fold, spindle and mutilate.

Because at the end of the day, its easy to believe that all you are is words. An expression of a jumbled pile of ideas brought into reality based on the arrangement of phonemic representations.

To that end, I think I understand my hostility toward overbearing word processors now.

Hell, many varieties of Christian have trouble differentiating the word of God from God Himself... You know what, I'm going to back away slowly from that. Nevermind. Forget I said anything.

Anyway, my best ideas come to me while my fingers are flipping around on the keyboard. When I have to stop to mouse, I lose focus and move along to other things. That's what I mean by "thinking with my fingers."

The Parable is Me: Reflections on "The Stanley Parable"

I played a game called "The Stanley Parable" last night. It was pretty amazing. The graphics were nothing special, (although they were fine) but the game – the game was like playing an episode of the Twilight Zone.

<!-- These are not actually spoilers, but skip over the italics if you're spoiler sensitive:

You play the part of Stanley, a boring office worker with a boring job that he loves. And suddenly one day, Stanley looks up from his computer as he realizes that his work cue is not filling. And lo—all his coworkers are gone. And so he roams around the office building looking for clues.

But here's the twist. Stanley's story is being narrated by a third person as he goes along. "Stanley walked along and wondered where all his coworkers are," says the narrator. And eventually, Stanley end up in a hallway where you have to make a choice. Do you go through the left door or the right door?

"Stanley goes through the left door," the narrator says.

Do you?

<!-- End of what are not actually spoilers

That's it. That's the whole game. You either obey or disobey the narrator, and the interactions get deeper, weirder, and more meta. There are many endings. There are many surprises. There are strange little delights. In the version I played, you end up exploring a museum dedicated to how the game was made. It's won many awards.

This nihilistic, mind-bending take on the first person explorer genre was exactly the right fit for my mood at this time, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. The game has won a lot of awards, so it's probably not just me.

But, for the most part, The Stanley Parable is a great experience that anyone with a touch of dark humor and ironic playfulness will enjoy. It is also that rare jewel of a game that is genuinely comedic. Intentionally. On purpose.

It’s the kind of an experience that can only be delivered by the language and convention of computer games. I don't even think this game would really work on a console. A novelization would not work.It would make a terrible movie. But because it's a game, where the player has agency and interacts with the fiction around them, the meta storytelling works. As a result, creators Galactic Café have made an artful expression that could not have been made in any other medium.

I think this debate has been over for a long time, but playing "The Stanley Parable" is one of the rare times I've experienced a game that is undeniably art.

** <!--This gallery, however, contains all kinds of spoilers. 

Comments in the code: Make them Chuckle

I wanting to show you guys a little bit of code I inserted into an online job application I filled out this morning:

<style="font-size:0px"  Hey, if you see this text, you should 
 know that I'm a pretty special candidate. Can you make sure 
 you let the hiring manager know? Anyway, shoot me an email if
 you see this, ok?>

I was surprised that I could edit the source code of the system's paste-in resume block-- but when I reloaded the page, the text was still in there. I'm hopeful that someone will at least see it and get a good chuckle.

Or, and more importantly, I also hope it will make the site's administrator aware of the potential security concern this creates. A few choice SQL commands dropped into this form would really mess up his day. And probably a lot of other people's. I did't do that because I'm not a jerk. But trust me, there are a lot of jerks out there.

I'll let update this post if I get an email from anyone about this. But I know I won't. Trust me, I've been on corporate teams that built this kind of garbage, and even if (and that's usually a pretty big if) someone on the team was well aware of the potential security risk, the rest of the team either downplayed it, didn't believe it, or blew it off.