Nothin' overly important--Just wanna share...

On Sunday, February 7, of this year, I wrote in my personal log the following entry. Today I thought to bring it here, as to give an idea of what my close world is and how it plays in my mind. I hope somebody would find it interesting. If anything, it helps me to remind myself on the importance of the little details...


I had a few weeks of hard work helping my wife and her students to prepare a play for interscholastic competition. Regardless of the result, it is a toil that became the spring event of our last nine years. We look forward to it. It starts with a selection of a play. Hundreds of plays are read by the youngsters and my wife (I read more than a few myself) looking for that one which is going to fire our imaginations. This year the final two choices were:
The Eumenides (also known as The Furies) which is the final play of the Oresteia, in which Orestes, Apollo, and the Furies go before a jury of Athenians at the Areopagos (Rock of Ares, a flat rocky hill by the Athenian agora where the homicide court of Athens held its sessions), to decide whether Orestes' murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, makes him worthy of the torment they have inflicted upon him. The Eumenides, that magnificent drama of Aeschylus (525 BC—456 BC; Greek: Αἰσχύλος, a playwright of Ancient Greece who is the earliest of the three Greek tragedians whose plays are not entirely lost, the others being Sophocles and Euripides.)
centers on the genesis of justice as we know it nowadays. A worthy subject as most students of our system scarcely know anything about justice and the interrelation of it with the life of our communities.
The other choice was George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Another great subject, as it is based on the interrelation of language with our standing in our communities and the reality of the layering of them based on the material wealth (or no wealth) of its members. So language becomes the measure of the wholeness of such communities as well as the source of their fragmentation.
Of course, like the song in the My Fair Lady said, well, ...English, in America haven't been spoken in years… Therefore it is a good opportunity for the students to ponder about their native language (in Texas, for most, English is a second language, Tex-mex being the original language they learn as toddlers).
The choice wasn't easy to arrive to, and we ended up doing a full research on both, coupled with a couple reads of each original unabridged play. Finally Pygmalion won. The research was fully comprehensive in each case, as the students looked in the literary aspects of the plays, plus at the playwrights lives and works, the times, social environment, everyday life of their societies, philosophical and religious aspects of those societies, economic life of the countries at the time, interrelation of the civilization and the cultures merging in its mist as well as the evolution of their history as communities. Arts and crafts, costumes and clothing at every level of their societies, architecture, urban development, styles in household environments as well as in public places, everything was looked into, and research boards and presentations took a good part of a couple months.
Then the scavenging hunt began to get appropriated clothing and attachments like hats, umbrellas, you name it. Other groups went on furniture hunts. Still other groups began to build some pieces like bookcases with false fronts simulating books, little desks and tables, while those gifted with drafting skills were preparing perspectives of how the scenery would look. Meanwhile the selected actors (after exhaustive auditions) began the rehearsals under the direction of my wife, and the task of "cutting" the play to fit the time constrains for the competition got underway simultaneously.
Finally, after all the logistics were ironed out, the ensemble performed their play and got a very positive critique. The result of the competition doesn't matter. The lesson was about finding how to do it and carrying it to fruition. Each member had to learn to work as a team, and the importance of making a commitment to the group more than the sticking to a job. Any mistake's effect, affected all and everyone in the ensemble and the production. That was the main lesson. And to have the chance of looking at their own knowledge from a perspective of wholeness rather than partial sight of individual aspects. History, humanities, science, all converging into a whole vision of the world and themselves.

Well, it is over… until next year… when everything will start anew. A good part of the participants will graduate in May and go on their lives. Others are already enthusiastically talking about new plans for the next school year… and others yet, will go away and won't try drama again… that's the nature of things around Theatre in High School. I'm saying that this is my last time helping out in the process, but that's what I said each of the last four or five years. Eventually coming December we (included me) will start reading plays…

So I am finally back at home, my landscaping, some more remodeling inside the house, more research for my books, writing and editing over and over to get that happy sentence which would make the story entrapping and pleasant to read, and, of course, catching up with the world events around us, which I ignored for most, during these long weeks.

I spent a couple days reading everything that had piled up on my coffee table (there was a coffee table after all beneath all that paper as I just discovered). Much of what I read was about predictable subject, like there still is a war of sorts going on in Iraq, resurgence of another in Afghanistan, a slow slide to yet another in Iran perhaps, various and sunder posturing plays in Congress and conflicts about truth at the White House and in the capital of our not so great state of Texas (looking every day more like a third world country). What call my attention is the early campaign season for the next election cycle. We know from a long prior experience that the prospective candidates never talk tough talk on tough issues, unless it is a meaningless slogan. But let me tell you, waffling is a new level, all past campaigns were really poor amateur jobs compared with the new heights reached barely a couple months after inauguration day last January. Refusing to answer tough questions is becoming a legitimate science. How are we to find who we might choose for the leadership of our communities? Robert Seltzer says "there is not test-driving in politics, only listening and studying" in an op-ed piece. I agree with him. I rather have a prospective candidate who tells me unpleasant truths than having one who sugarcoats everything and polls the subjects to death trying to talk what they think I would expect them to say in order to gain my support. Seltzer says "if the candidates are commodities, what happened to truth in advertising? Focused on appealing to everyone, they may end up appealing to no one. An exaggeration? Sure, but there are still plenty of voters who prefer integrity over timidity. Really."
Yes, I am one of those Seltzer points to.
See, I believe that we need to toss into the trash bin all that concern with what's going on in our bedrooms. We need to forfeit talk on the morality or immorality of abortion until we clarify our commitment to preserve all life, including those trees which are helping to keep environmental disaster at bay, including those streams of water which nurture all life not only the human sort. Until we provide the resources to give a real healthcare to all our children, including those of a lesser god. Until we provide our schools with the materials needed to give a meaningful education and provide the funds to adequately reward the teachers and give them the professional recognition their vocation deserves. Their jobs aren't different from those of the medical profession. They are working to insure our future citizens will be healthy, mature, rounded up members of our community. Only after we had taken positive action in all these aspects, we need to can the argument on gays or abortion. To keep focusing on such arguments only proves that the culture is drifting into a neo-fascistic conservatism which will do nothing to prevent our fall and destruction as society. By the way, this is not a qualifier of the republicans only. Seems to me that it is so pervasive that no political operative is excepted.
We need to stop focusing on subjects like stopping "illegal" immigration. Rather we need to stop aiding "legal emigration" of jobs. We need to focus instead on making easier to provide jobs here than to export them overseas, making sure the last will be seen as unprofitable by the corporate experts. Instead discussing church and state separation, we need to focus on preventing urban sprawl which negates any efficient use of the communities' resources and adversely impacts our environment. Instead arguing about our duty to export democracy to other countries we need to focus on creating a social setting which will integrate every member of our communities in a whole which have a common purpose. We need a new covenant freely adhered to by all of us.
We need to support our science, not to tear it down because it might threaten a partisan aim.
And we need to recognize the ants, not the "american idols" in the scientific fields. We need to demystify false individual achievement helping to understand that any success depends on the convergence of efforts from the teams assembled to tackle the problems which challenge us.
Then perhaps we might turn around our descent into disintegration as community and reverse the tide.