Walter Mosley (2 page)

The great majority of Americans do not have enough in the richest country in the history of the world. Our labor, and our forebears' labor, has built a world that we don't own. Actually, this world is ours so long as we don't touch. It, that fabulously rich world, is our heritage but oddly not our inheritance. The only value we can lay claim to is contained in our decaying bodies. We can work until the strength and the will give out—and then we can die on the dole.

The dole: in a land where thousands of quite ordinary Joes are worth billions of dollars, each. The dole: in a land where the skim off the top of our labor made
those unremarkable men and women so rich. The dole: in a land where our children go to war not out of choice but because they'd like to get an education and can't afford it on their own.

The funds for the dole are tapped whenever the government needs to finance a war or when those ordinary Joes have stolen too much and need to be bailed out. These funds are tapped when our armies are needed to ensure those Joes' foreign investments or to fight against the drugs that no tax can be levied against. This dole (our so-called social security and welfare fund) is shrinking while our elderly and impoverished population is growing.

I'm not just talking about the Social Security system here. There are thousands of private organizations that hand out blankets, hot meals, and chits to be used in homeless shelters. None of these charities (at least none that I know of ) are revolutionary. They don't organize the People to demand what is their rightful inheritance. They enable the poor to survive one day at a time until they fall by the wayside and someone else takes up their tin cups.

Between the government and private charities we have been lulled into accepting poverty, disease, homelessness, illiteracy, substance abuse, and the loss of our claim to dignity. We have been reduced to monadic
particulates struggling to survive a game that was fixed before we were ever born.

 

So what we have are the fact of poverty and the prescribed moves we've been given to make that poverty somewhat palatable. We work and don't make enough to live on while residing next to and in the midst of opulence and plenty. We are allowed fast food, sex, cigarettes and alcohol, park benches, and mindless cinematic pabulum as legal, if partly proscribed, palliatives. We can also, with little resistance, take certain illegal drugs and involve ourselves in quasi-legal organizations and activities (such as gambling and prostitution) as long as we stay off the radar of those who are protecting the right of the Joes to accumulate their wealth in peace. We can be beautiful and lauded for that beauty. We can marry and set sail on the sludge of an endless sea that has slowly become a cesspool filled with the wastes of our aborted dreams. We can praise God as long as we don't take His word to heart.

The preceding paragraph is my admission, and partial definition, of the Problem. I see it as an economically based issue whereby the systems of wealth have subverted our political and human rights. We have been reduced from citizens to denizens and are
allowed certain self-destructive behaviors in order to deal with the pain we have no choice but to endure.

This situation is far beyond serious but, still, not hopeless. We have the structure (if not the reality) of a democracy within our grasp. We have the potential to act against the tide of wealth stolen from our own pockets. And, most of all, we have the ability to clearly state the problems we face—and the most important step toward solving a problem is defining it.

 

[Before going on to Number Two in the Twelve Steps I want to say something about the dual nature of this book. On the one hand, I am completely committed to the content and arguments presented here. I believe that we have been turned inside out and against each other by the Joes (just another appellation for the mindless rich) and their herd dogs (lawyers and courtrooms, the army and police, and the schools that teach us to demand less of ourselves). We, the People, have been shunted out of the sphere of our rights and our inheritance. Recognizing our unconscious sorrow, the system of wealth has offered to sell us addictive products, both physical and psychological, to console us on the long nights of isolation and, for the most part, unrecognized rage.

But, on the other hand, I see what I am presenting here as a kind of template that any nimble thinker can use to create another argument. One might think that the major problems we face are purely political, or that we need to begin with our morality and our faith. Even if I don't agree I won't argue against other interpretations of the issues we face. The only thing I need is for us to name and define the Problem(s). This has to be the first step. Without this knowledge the possibility of a road is lost.]

I
n order to conceive of a problem on a social and/or political level we all need to have access to the same language; in other words, we need to achieve linguistic parity just to have the potential to take actions in concert.

When the first African slaves were brought to this continent, many and most were separated from others who spoke the same mother tongue. This was done to stymie the potential for rebellion. If you can't speak to your fellow slave, then you cannot fully identify with
her. If you don't share words or identity with your workmates, your relationship to the master grows closer and the possibility of freedom fades—drastically. Without common language it is nearly impossible to plan an uprising or rebellion.

We, the People, are so separated: by dialects, religious teachings and iconography, education, age, and falsely perceived gender differences; by the opportunities given to some, by the Joes and their herd dogs, and taken from others; by laws and law enforcement, standardized testing, and a fabricated history that glorifies the few while silencing the many. We are turned against each other under the watch of officials elected by us but paid off by the Joes (the wealthy minority), by courts that have no commitment to the true balance of justice, by a system of profiling so sophisticated that most of us have no idea that potential allies are cut from the herd early so as to head off any possibility of resistance.

In order to heal our nation and move forward we have to start talking each other; we have to come out of our closets and dark alleys, we have to take off the blinders of semi-literacy and full-blown ignorance. This statement seems simple enough but is at the same time almost impossible to achieve: first, because we are convinced
of the truths we know and have been taught (i.e., the pledge of allegiance, the arc of the land); and second, because even if we suspect that there is a truth beyond the language we speak, we do not have the ready tools (words) to access that truth.

So in order to begin talking about talking to each other we must first reevaluate the ways that we have been educated. I say this in the spirit that
you can't cry over spilt milk but you can clean up the mess
.

 

American education, especially public education, is sorely lacking. There's not enough money or time in school to adequately educate our children. Nor is there a commitment to, or even a clear broadly held picture of, what an educated citizen in the modern world should look like. Our teachers are overwhelmed and undereducated, while many parents are overworked and disengaged. Students are almost completely unaware of the empowerment that true education and literacy offer, and it seems that no one has figured out how to get through to the teachers, or the students and their parents.

Here in the land of plenty many working-class young people have no notion of how to live a healthy productive life. They eat fast food and seek after the
distractions of sex, mass media, computer games, and worthless baubles. They live these lives simply because they don't know any better. It is not their imaginations that have failed them but their educations. They learn the little they know about life from the overstimulation provided by worldwide sports competitions, slack-jawed blockbuster film releases, ad men's impossible promises of youth and beauty, and the unattainable goals set by these public debacles.

The young people in America, whether they know it or not, are destined to carry the older generations on their backs. But they haven't been given tools to achieve this Herculean task. Without a proper education in the twenty-first century our descendents are bound to fail themselves and us.

 

To fulfill this aim—
a necessary education
—we need to concentrate on the positive space necessary to build the vital support structures of knowledge and communication. We know that our school system, teachers, and educational accessibility are lacking. But this, I believe, is due to lack of vision, not a lack of resources. If we cannot see the goal, how can we move toward it?

So what do we want to see in the education of our young people, and what does an educated young person look like in twenty-first-century America?

No one person can come up with the final answer to this question. There will be many different answers depending on the history, point of view, and aspirations of the school-system designers. What I propose here is a general outline that others can build upon, riff off of, and argue against.

Following is my suggestion for the universal education that all eighteen-year-old women and men of normal intelligence should have achieved at the end of a public school education.

1. They should be reading at a twelfth-grade level. This means that they should be able to read a challenging novel such as
Moby Dick
or a selection of
Leaves of Grass
and be able to understand the underlying themes, metaphors, and intentions of the work as well as the general meanings (i.e., story and plot).

2. They should be able to write a thousand-word essay explaining in cogent, systematic detail any feeling or piece of knowledge that they have.

3. Part and parcel of every American education should be the knowledge of history that includes
all
residents of, and immigrants to, these shores. Honest and unromanticized biographies of important historical figures, and as factual a
rendition as possible of the events of history, should be taught even though some acts may seem decidedly un-American.

4. All students, by the time they receive their diploma, should have a flexible grasp of the use of positive and negative space in the creation of at least one type of art. Whether this knowledge comes from an understanding of twodimensional, sculptural, musical, or linguistic arts, they must understand what goes into creating the image, song, or story. With this knowledge (hopefully presented without the needless hierarchy of quality) our children will be able to cross the borders of imagination, allowing them openness to cross-cultural communication.

5. Scientific literacy is of prime importance in the development of the child and adolescent minds of America. A moderate knowledge of calculus, cellular biology, modern physics, Newtonian versus
Einsteinian models of the universe, simple logic, and ecology is essential if our children are to be capable of reading a daily newspaper or blog, thereby connecting with the world around them. Our world works by technology and technique. If our youth do not know how it works, they will become the slaves of those who do.

6. Knowledge of their bodies has to be the one continuous subject throughout our young persons' early education. Rather than competition, their physical education classes should concentrate on how they can work together in coordinated efforts—how they can (must) depend on each others' strengths to achieve any goal.

7. Leadership training. As part of this element of an American education the population for most classes of children under the age of eighteen should be somewhere around a dozen students. Schools should be on the small side (three hundred or fewer students) and the highest expectations should be harbored for each member.
This said, I believe that a modified version of the Platonic ideal for government should be applied to every homeroom class. Student government should be both an elected body and a service duty that every student will be expected to participate in. What I mean by this is that certain key student-government positions should work on a rotating basis such that all students have an opportunity to experience the duty of decision-making for their classmates.

8. Lastly, every student should be conversant in a foreign language. I, alas, speak only English. This lack makes me acutely aware of how isolated I am from a world that my monetary system at least partly dominates.

Once we understand what it is that our children should know when obtaining a required American education, we will know what is expected of ourselves.

But there is more, much more, to it.

In seeing what is possible in a pre-college education we can also begin to understand where even a good
education fails. The acquisition of knowledge is a personal and therefore, in part, a unique experience. This individual aspect of the experience cannot be graded, nor should it be. A student who works only for a grade rather than for the joy and essential importance of knowledge will be limited by the expectations of others rather than exulting in self-growth.