back to that other book

Well that whole jeans controversy is a lot more nuanced than I thought.  So who composed this student council?  Was it like one student from each grade, each classroom?  How were they chosen?  Did each classroom or grade vote their own representative?  How did you get nominated?  What was your platform? 

Was this a binding vote or just a resolution with no teeth?  What were the circumstances of the vote?  Was their clearly a majority after the ayes had expressed their opinion?  How can you know that other council members opposed the issue?  You know politicians, they will always act like they agree with you.  What was the nature of your being out of order all through the meeting?  Maybe you're lucky you didn't have to stand in a corner for the rest of the semester.

And don't tell me what Ezekiel had to say about voice votes.  I don't think I talk that much about religion.  I talk about morality a lot, but it's mostly in philosophic manner.  I talk about the institutions of religion sometimes, and I certainly want to talk about the St Nicholas, but I don't see much biblical relevance to any of that.  Well i don't know, it just seems to me that we are talking about something philosophical and the next thing I know we are deep in biblical weeds and I am at a loss to understand how this has anything more to do with what we are talking about than the latest Cubs box score.

Remember Madalyn Murray O'Hare?  She won a case in the supreme court to eliminate bible reading in public schools in 1963, and founded something called American Atheists, and just generally raised hell against religion for about thirty years.  She was a wretched person, I saw her on tv a couple times and it seems like mainly she liked to argue, and in that Donald Trump manner where she just called everybody who disagreed with her idiots and never really responded to questions she didn't want to answer.  She never wrote much, but sometimes I wish she had so that I could go on and on talking about her writings whenever somebody started talking the bible to me.

So anyway I keep wanting to get back to 1957 in Gage Park, and how it seemed like there was a powerful force to not be different, to not make trouble.  We were all well-fed, well-housed, and though a lot of our education sounded like propaganda they did teach us math and reading well enough.  You know I hated all that authority that the school held over us, but anymore I don't mind it so much.  We were really too young to do much thinking, and probably it's best to do your thinking when you get out of school when you can choose your own books and you're not dependent on getting some grade.

You know the author, Ehrenhalt, expresses nostalgia for that time, and even though I would hate to go back there, I feel it a little bit.  Maybe we were better off somehow believing in something, even if it was wrong, then the way it is now.

Well that's all pretty vague, but I am going to ask you what do you think?