Me, you, and our differences

 

Me and my children
I post this to demonstrate how different they are.
Each is their own person, 
and you cannot describe them adequately as Judy's kids

Tonight, a random thought struck me. I wasn’t going to blog—again, two nights in a row! Was I losing my touch? But it seemed not much was going on. Then there came this thought: my grandson is taking STAAR tests (or whatever tests a high school sophomore takes) tomorrow. He’s a great kid, smart as can be, but he isn’t particularly interested in academics, and what occurred to me was that those standardized tests might be a poor picture of his academic—and non-academic--achievements in life. (He is a star on the varsity golf team and a genuinely nice kid!).

Take that one step farther, and it leads to what I’ve always thought about standardized testing, though I have not investigated it. I think that mindset is part of the problem. Was it Ross Perot who made standardized testing mandatory and a requirement for participation in extracurricular activities? Anyway, fie on whoever did that. It forces teachers to teach to the test and not to the student, and it assumes all students are alike and progress at the same level. And just as the size and height of sixteen year-olds can vary wildly, so can their scholastic ability. Teachers lose the ability to wander from the prescribed curriculum and use their own creativity and experience in exciting students about learning.

Take that yet another step farther, and it points to a serious problem in our culture today—the lack of consideration, and respect for the individual. Human beings come in many color, sizes, abilities, interests, personalities—you name all the ways we can differ. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the respect for that. We expect everyone to measure up to (or fail) one standard of perfection. As far as I can tell right now, that standard is white, male, Christian, Republican.

Abortion is such a hot topic currently that I hate to even touch it, but perhaps nowhere else is this standardization more evident. The various states who either have already enacted strict laws (Texas, O My Texas!) or have trigger laws on the books make no exception for rape, incest, or medical emergency. Old white men in their wisdom assume that all pregnancies go along smoothly and result in happy babies. They refuse to consider ectopic pregnancies, which can kill a woman; deformed or dead embryos, which can kill a woman; any other of myriad medical emergencies that endanger both child and embryo. In their righteous authoritarianism, they are blind to the fact that almost all abortions are done in the first trimester; those done after that are almost always for compelling medical reasons. It’s the compelling medical reasons that have me reeling tonight. I cannot imagine letting a woman die of a complication of pregnancy that could easily be controlled medically because it is against the law. What kind of Orwellian world have we wandered into?

Now some states are even making spontaneous miscarriages a crime. What gives them the medical knowledge to do that? I read today of a woman who went to a doctor, not knowing she was pregnant, because she was cramping and bleeding. Turned out she had already miscarried, but she said the tone of the doctor changed dramatically when that fact was confirmed. Of course it did—he/she was afraid of being complicit in an abortion. Having once miscarried myself before I knew I was pregnant, I can fully sympathize with this young woman. Eventually her doctor concluded she really didn’t know, and all was well. But what about a less humane doctor?

My whole point here is less about abortion than it is about life. We have somehow lost respect for each human being as an individual. Think about fingerprints. No two of us have identical fingerprints—not even, I believe, identical twins. No two of us are alike, and we must stop treating people that way. We must re-learn the art of appreciating the individual, with all of his or her own glory. It goes beyond stereotyping or profiling. Such respect means really looking at, listening to each person as they tell their story.

May those who lead us stop thinking of people as herds of cattle (even they are not all alike) and start seeing a crowd of many individuals—in the US, in Ukraine, in Russia, anywhere there is oppression of groups or classes of people. Not in the US, you think? Guess again.