Drinking tons of water is a lot of work. Not the drinking part. That’s easy. It’s the pissing part that takes so much time.

The human body loves water. My new scale says every day that I’m something like 66.6% water. I’m not going to analyze the fact that there are three “sixes” in a row in that number. Water cannot be the sign of Satan. Beezelbug cannot swim. Everyone knows that. Otherwise, why would the River Styx be protecting the gates of hell? Satan is afraid of open water swimming.

Which puts you and me in good company if we overcome our fears and learn to swim across big bodies of water all on our own power. But then we have to consider why Jesus thought it was so important to walk on water. Was he afraid of open water swimming as well?

These are theological conundrums of the highest order. Right up there with how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. If both Jesus and Satan do not like open water swimming, that means the rest of us live in a weird sort of multisport purgatory in which we flounder around between heaven and hell.

And that pretty much describes swimming for me.

But you know, I also refuse to pee in the pool. Which means, to get back to the original direction of this post, that every time I have to pee during swim training, it means hauling my sorry ass out of the pool, walking over to the bathroom which is often located by a very cold section of the natatorium, flipping down the seat and sitting down to do my business.

Yes, when I’m at the pool I sit down to pee. When you get out of the cold water and have to pee, there is no guarantee how that male unit between your legs is going to appear. It might be in full George Costanza mode, rife with “shrinkage,” and therefore unable (or unwilling) to perform its duties with full-on enthusiasm.

Which means dribbling or worse, the dreaded “double-spray” penis that shoots whizz in two directions. Before you know it, there is pee all over both sides of the toilet seat and that means wiping the thing down with toilet paper as a bare minimum. But when your hands are already wet from swimming, and you grab a strand of that single-ply toilet paper that exists in virtually every public restroom known to the human race, it soaks throw and you’re left with a handful of uselessly dark paper and can’t wipe up a thing.

Thus it is much easier to sit your ass down, nudge your male crank into some sort of downward pissition, and let ‘er rip. Easy Peezy.

Still, you have to wipe the seat down after that because your ass and upper thighs are already dripping from the pool. By appearance, even clear asswater is no better than piss in the mind of the next person who crawls out of the pool and comes in to sit down.

Fortunately, your hands drip a little drier by the time you’ve whizzed. Then you can manage to wipe down the toilet seat without creating what looks like the Toilet Murder Scene from some seven-character crime show. They’re all the same, these shows. Blood and scattered toilet paper make great prime time visuals.

Even when I’m not swimming, drinking extra water means more trips to the bathroom than I’d perhaps like. While doing a painting the other day, I was drinking lots of water and the sudden urge to pee snuck up on me, and I really had to go. My hands were covered with acrylic paint and I had to somehow sideways get the zipper open to avoid getting paint on my pants. Yet when I went to fold my unit back into its place I had to laugh. There was a bright blue tip of paint on the end of my crank. That. Was. Funny.

Dropping weight

Interestingly, this campaign of increased water intake has had the curious effect of actually dropping my evening weight measurement. I’d lost two pounds of some sort after drinking six sixteen ounce bottles of water during the day. Thus far, I’ve been treating myself to the zero calories sort of waters such as San Pellegrino, Perrier and La Croix. But also some good old bottled waters too.

The next step is to hunt down a big-ass but still manageable-to-carry Personal Water Bottle. A fellow Board Member showed up at Batavia Main Street this morning with an elegant looking water bottle. It had nice designs on the side and a wooden top with a little rope sticking out so you can carry it anywhere. I had instant water bottle envy.

The goals are manifold. 1) : stop drinking other liquids rife with sugars and 2) stay more hydrated, which is healthier for me.

Mr. and Mrs. Hydration

So far, so good. And other than having to piss all the time, the results already feel good. It doesn’t mean I’m ready to become Mr. Hydration on the run. If I take a few sips before a 10K run or race, I’m plenty fine. My stomach hates ingesting liquids during hard efforts. Always has. But my fiance loves staying hydrated. She senses the difference in her running if she doesn’t carry water. And both of us hydrate plenty on the ride.

Admittedly, I’m a little Old School on the run and drink thing. If I’m going out for more than an hour run I’ll find a drinking fountain for a sip, but usually not more than that.  but Recently talked with Tom Burridge, the former US national record holder for the half-marathon, and asked him if he used to hydrate during his peak years. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “None of us did that stuff.”

I think the truth about drinking water is somewhere in-between the Old School Suffering we used to abide and the New School Hydration Theory that says you should be absolutely sipping water while you’re peeing because, you know, you have to replace that percentage of liquid in your body as it flows out your urinary system.

Heroic kidneys

I guess peeing is a lot on my mind given the difficulties our cat Benny has had to sustain this past week. Watching him strain to dribble gave me new respect for the issue. Then I got a call from Craig Virgin, two-time world cross country champion, who from childhood had to battle congenital kidney problems.

His new biography will chronicle those issues and how along with the tough demands of growing up on a rural Illinois farm helped him develop the mental toughness necessary to excel in every phase of distance running from track and field to cross country to marathons. Even with congenital kidney disease to battle his entire life, Craig had the world’s best 10K time going into the 1980 Olympics, which were canceled for US athletes for political reasons. And wouldn’t that piss you off? All that work and risk of personal health and sacrifice. Then, denied a chance to participate and compete in the Olympics.

Piss off

In a bit of historic irony, that action by President Jimmy Carter was done in protest of the Soviet Union and Russian invading Afghanistan. Of course, the United States invaded that same country thirty years later, with no more success in taming its tribal nature. Now Russia has invaded our nation by hacking our democratic process. Yet those who question such intrusion are basically being told to “piss off.” Do people not see the irony in all this?

So I’m pissed, in the rhetorical sense, on behalf of all those people for whom opportunities have been denied. We’re already hearing about pompous plans for oppression of arts, culture and the environment. The National Endowment for the Arts will likely be cut and National Public Radio, privatized. Who knows what approach will be taken with our national Olympic teams, or any other federally supported sports programs. Will those go on the chopping block too?

Or will the jingoistic value of such endeavors fuel more funding? Athletics on the world stage often falsely feed that national pride for brief, marketable moments that Make America Great Again. Often this involves thrusting black athletes into positions of triumph even as respect for the personhood and rights of black citizens back home are denuded, neglected or oppressed by the very police charged with protecting communities all over America.

Not just me

So it’s not just me that’s pissed for some personal agenda or perceived need. This is not just “my opinion” about what’s going on in America. The facts about many of these issues of cultural and political discrimination are there. People just choose to deny them because it profits and protects their cozy worldview and the advantages it confers on them.

Last night we watched a  documentary on the life of musician Michael Jackson. It illustrated how his album Off the Wall served as a transitional force in the ultimate crossover of black music to the mainstream. Recall that when MTV first launched, black musicians were not welcome. This is only 1981 we’re talking about. Not that long ago.

The Grammy Awards the year that MJ issued his Off the Wall album handed out his award during a commercial break to avoid acknowledging a black artist in prime time. And long before that, it was black musicians who led the world of popular music. Despite massive layers of prejudice that persist to this day, black artists invented blues and soul music, Rock and Roll, Jazz and many other forms as well. But such genius was forced to hide behind a white wall of cultural fear and jealousy, theft of material and purpose.

Being a dick about race

These prejudicial truths are facts of recent history. And while strides have been made over the years in race relations among those enlightened enough to break down stereotypes, the seemingly “positive” stereotypes so many whites project on blacks have centered on things such as giant penis size and sexual performance. And wouldn’t you be pissed if that was one of the only compliments you heard about your culture over the years?

The point here is simple: All these biological challenges and needs are human problems. I joke about having to pee too much because I’m human. Flawed and clueless at times. Susceptible to the foibles of diet and water. Made of the same stuff as everyone else. We’re all human. Every race and nationality and religion on earth. Human. We all pee and we all poop because we have to. And when things go wrong, we can laugh about the humbling troubles we face in the process.

Addendum: Today in history

I make some bits of fun of myself in blogs such as this to make a point that while I do   point out the foibles in others at times, I’m also willing to admit the flaws so evident and obvious in myself. I’m human.

People who can’t or refuse to do that do indeed piss me off. And when the culture at large takes on his arrogant brand of shallowness, it is a sign that something has gone wrong in our culture.

I realize that a ton of people in America voted for Donald Trump because on a basic level, he refuses to apologize for who he is. That seems to empower others to feel the same. This approach tends to be paired with the idea that the nation got a raw deal somehow under President Barack Obama.

By any measure, this combination is stunningly shallow. Somehow the humble and difficult work of bringing the nation back from a bitterly painful economic recession was not enough for them. They wanted prosperity handed to them perhaps?

The problem seems to be that people expected President Obama to wave his hand and reverse decades of American corporate, industrial and international practices that have essentially gutted the middle class? Obama couldn’t do that. At one point he tried to encourage collaboration between government and business by pointing out the benefits of infrastructure. In addressing the need to invest in American roads, bridges and other infrastructure he told businesspeople, “You didn’t build that.”

But the message was twisted around by conservative media. Pundits insisted that Obama meant to tell people they did not build their own business. That’s how fucked up the messaging and meaning can get when people are so determined to disrespect someone.

But most of all, Obama’s political opponents seemed to blame him for being an intelligent black man who would not cow to their demands. That was his principal crime in the face of so many white Republican men in Congress.

And I see the legitimate parallels between how blacks have been treated over centuries in our country and how so much of our nation responded to the first black President of the United States. Many claim that it wasn’t about race, and that it was about “policies.” Even some black Americans complain that Obama did not do enough for “his own people.”

Cynically, some pundits jumped on opportunities such as that to blame President Obama for the racial divide in America. This political ploy was stolen directly from the playbooks of men like the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who understood that the best method of combatting strength is to turn the strength of that person against them.

This was all done in a growing atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and distrust of academic as fomented by a conservative information machine the likes of which the world has actually never known. So we’ll leave this day’s blog with a quote from Joseph Goebbels, that illustrates how pervasive and effective it can be to overcome the intellect with unthinking ideology if need be. “Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character” — Joseph Goebbels

If you believe that intellectualism and science and liberalism are the real problems in America––and that is the heartbeat of neoconservatism as a rule and a practice––then consider yourself in interesting company. History knows what you’re thinking already.

As an endurance athlete since the age of 12, I’ve had the opportunity to do some difficult things. That three-hour run we did in the cold rain at forty-five degrees comes to mind. So does the Horribly Hill Ride, a cycling tour that concludes with a 2000-foot climb on the top of Blue Mounds State Park. And now that I’m in the pool, every day challenges my ability to physically and mentally exceed my capabilities.

For all those years of training and racing as a multisport athlete, there is still one activity that serves as a challenging comparison to all others. Teaching.

Classrooms of all sorts

Perhaps you’ve stood in front of a classroom of children or adults with everyone depending on you to provide a stimulating learning environment. And if so, you are to be congratulated. It takes personal assurance to teach any subject to others. One must be confident in the material, capable in its presentation and compelling in its delivery. Otherwise, you lose your audience.

As any standup comedian can tell you, losing your audience is one of the worst feelings known to the human race. A disinterested sea of faces is as deflating as a bad dream. And just like those dreams where you’re trying to run away but can’t move your legs, it is an enormous challenge to win back an audience.

Musicians know the pain of this distance between performers and audience as well. One story about rock balladeer Gordon Lightfoot says it best. The singer was onstage but having some challenges due to some substance abuse problems. And when he asked, “Does anyone have any requests?” an audience member shouted back. “Yeah! Try to remember the words!”

Harsh. There’s nothing like a heckler to gut your ego and confidence in some circumstances. Imagine if you were finishing the last leg of a triathlon and all the spectators along the course, rather than yelling encouraging words shouted out insults instead, such as, “You look like hell! Give up, this isn’t worth it. Why do you even try!”

That’s how wilting it can be to serve as a teacher and lose rapport with your audience.

Good teachers

Good teachers know how to hold the attention of any audience. In my own experience, I’ve been in hundreds of classrooms over the years. While I’m not a teacher by profession, I was married to a public school and preschool teacher for nearly thirty years. My mother was also a public school teacher for twenty years. My oldest brother retired from teaching English after thirty years at a private high school. His students still keep in touch and write him news of their challenges and success in life. He earned their trust because he invested himself fully in the process of teaching.

At his invitation, I once stood before his classroom of high school students to talk about art. The first session felt like it went pretty well. The kids seemed engaged and attentive. I unleashed a veritable barrage of information in that fifty minutes. Then the period ended and another wave of twenty-five students entered the room. “Oh no,” I realized. “I have to do it all over again.”

A teaching marathon

And that’s the challenge. Teaching is not a sprint, as they say, it is a marathon. You can’t sprint the first half mile and expect to finish the race. But given the situation, I plowed into my material. This time it didn’t feel so fresh or exciting. After ten minutes, I could feel a strange exhaustion rolling over me. My brother, who had been standing in the back of the room, calmly made his way up the side aisle and walked over next to me. From there, he slid into leading the classroom, and in doing so, started in with a question that drew the students into discussion and questions.

And that, my friends, is just one of the arts of teaching. There are many, many more. Preparing lesson plans is a key element of the profession. So is knowing how to direct and gauge the pace of learning. That’s all before you get into the realm of inspiring people to learn. In many respects, preparing to teach is like preparing for competition. It takes planning, preparation and implementation.

Teaching as a practice

It also takes practice. Just as becoming a faithful practitioner of yoga takes ‘practice,’ so does becoming a capable teacher. The process typically does not happen overnight.

It matters not so much what age students you are addressing as it does how you are trying to teach. There is far more to teaching than most people appreciate. We’ve all had teachers who are good and bad. Sometimes teachers are both, like the Bad Teacher in the Cameron Diaz movies.

Not everyone that goes into the profession is a gifted teacher. At least not at the start. Those who do excel at teaching, such as the lead character in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, are known to leave a lasting impression on the students they encounter.

One can, unfortunately, say the same thing about bad teachers as well.

Teachers as coaches

A few of the teachers I had in high school and college also served as coaches in track and field, basketball or cross country. It was always a unique experience to be coached in athletics and also tested in the classroom by the same person. Suffice to say I always wanted to impress my teacher/coaches even more with what I could do in the classroom. Because I didn’t want to be just a ‘dumb jock.’

Thus I can clearly recall with pride getting a paper back in the Earth Science classroom from my cross country coach Rich Born at Kaneland High School. The grade at the top of the paper said “A.” I’d answered all the questions correctly. That meant a ton, because while the results of a running race are quite empiric, being based on time, so are the results of taking a test where there are right and wrong answers. Learning what you can do is a great sense of satisfaction in either case.

Teacher pride

Imagine the pride a teacher feels when they see students achieving results that they did not think they could accomplish! As a person that has taught in many circumstances outside the true profession, I can profess equal joy and satisfaction knowing that something you’ve taught your students has been absorbed. The same holds true for coaching, which is why so many good teachers also make good coaches. Getting better at a sport often requires instruction and guidance.

The same holds true for coaching, which is why so many good teachers also make good coaches.I’ve coached the sports of baseball, basketball, track and field, soccer and cross country.Getting better at a sport often requires instruction and guidance. Coaches are the teachers who try to make that happen.

High achievers

This is particularly true in the “skill events” in track and field. No one takes up pole vault and goes fourteen feet the first day. It takes weeks and months of practice on technique and learning the art of turning running speed and strength into height. Our little school out in the cornfields near Maple Park, Illinois, happened to have a big tradition in pole vaulting. State champions emerged from that windy field with the cheesy landing pits.  all the sports I’ve witnessed, pole vaulting may be the discipline that required the most teaching. The pole vault coaches were teachers that knew how to see what kids needed to do, and then communicate it. There is perhaps no better illustration of how teachers help students achieve greater heights.

Of all the sports I’ve witnessed, pole vaulting may be the discipline that required the most teaching. Our pole vault coaches were teachers that knew how to see what kids needed to do, and then communicate it. There is perhaps no better illustration of how teachers help students achieve greater heights. And here is my public confession: I sucked at pole vaulting. I could high jump 6 feet and triple jump forty, but was always too skinny in the upper body to manage a good pole hang.

Parents and kids

Like teaching, coaching is never easy, and often unappreciated by those who stand to gain the most from the time and energy coaches put into that endeavor. When I was coaching, I met many very successful parents along the way. Wealthy, important people. Some appreciated the time I spent coaching their kids and would ask questions about how they were doing. Other parents just picked their kids up from practice and hardly said a word. In either case, I always felt it was an obligation to give them honest feedback about their child. Teach your children well, or let someone else do it?

Teaching relationships

The teaching props from my Feather That Nest storytelling program. 

Last night I spent a couple hours doing a storytelling session for a rolling group of fifty students and their parents. It was teaching in its most relaxed form. No curriculum to dispense other than a cute children’s story I wrote a few years back. The story involves a pair of robins who start building a nest, but the male keeps getting distracted and brings backs feathers to stick in the nest rather than the straw and twigs his robin wife asked him to gather. The story concludes when an owl, attracted by the sight of all those feathers waving in the breeze, makes a pass at the nest and snatches a feather away. That’s proof enough for the mother robin to call her husband to task.

The story is about learning how to focus as much as anything else. We all need that, and we’re all prone to distraction. But Mr. Robin gets into his gig of collecting feathers instead of grass for the nest because he thinks he’s doing something pretty cool for Mrs. Robin. Some of our intentions are plenty good. They just have unintended consequences sometimes.

During the storytelling process, the kids got to venture around the classroom playing the role of the father robin gathering feathers. I purchased the gaudiest colored feathers I could find at the craft store, and build a “nest” out of Sculpey clay that I painted as if it were the mud nest in the story. It all worked wonderfully as an interactive storytelling focus.

Drawing together

Then I led the classes in a live drawing exercise where they copied what I drew on a piece of paper under the Elmo projector. I was frankly shocked how well these “students” including skeptical parents did when following along to draw an owl.

But by the end of those two hours, I was pretty cooked. It takes a lot of personal energy to keep things moving. I thought to myself, “My God, if I was an actual teacher, I’d still have four or five hours to go.”

And that’s the deal with teaching. It’s your job to win the day, every day, for days on end. That’s your mission and your calling.

It’s frequently exhausting work. Add in the fact that teachers often come in early and stay late, coach athletes after the school day or run bands or other extracurricular activities, and it’s no ‘nine to five’ profession. Far from it. =========

Teaching excellence

Two friends that taught in public schools for more than thirty years recently retired. During their careers, one earned an award for the top teacher in Illinois. The other won a similar award as the top teacher in their school district. They were inventive, creative teachers who also trained dozens of student teachers over the years. They have taught college courses on teaching, handing their experience to new generations of teachers.

It turned into a long haul for them in the last few years. That’s because school policies and national politics such as the federally mandated No Child Left Behind turned their profession into “teaching to the test.” This conservative effort to deliver accountability in early education may have been well-intentioned, but it was a failure in terms of enabling the talents of true teachers to direct and school students in real learning.

My friends are still teaching, however. Even in retirement, they continue in the belief that teaching is one of the most important things you can do in life. Whenever I read about or hear people criticizing teachers or complaining that they earn too much, have too much time off, or think they’re entitled to pensions, I think of all my teacher friends that have given so much of their lives and talents to people like you and me.

Anti-intellectualism

Perhaps you don’t think education is that important? If so, I ask you: Is intellectualism, academica and higher education really the enemy?  These were some of the disciplines consistently maligned in the runup to the recent presidential election.

“I know people with Master’s Degrees that can’t hold a job,” one commenter barked on a Linkedin thread. The topic was Donald Trump, and why he constitutes the advent of a new era of frank talk and “common sense.”

But the comment criticizing someone with a Master’s Degree that can’t hold a job seems to make a number of assumptions about why that person had trouble staying employed. Why make the supposition that the degree equated directly to the inability to stay employed?

To turn the question around, could it be the sameheld prejudice against learning and the pursuant market value of that Master’s degree that has something to do with the reasons why that person was dismissed, or could not get hired because the degree raised their salary requirements? A Master’s Degree is not cheap, yet sometimes the companies who want that grade of experience are not willing to pay for it. That’s the real problem sometimes, along with ageism of many and all types.

There is another level of consideration here as well.  Could it be that in a world where being right seems so goddamned important to so many people… that a person who is actually able to point out errors of fact or fatal principles in corporate actions might be an unpopular personality? Instead, it may be the ignorant Yes Men and Yes Women who remain most employable in such a culture.

Just as importantly, in the realm of religion and politics, that’s how false dogma and fascism come to rule the day.

Teach your children well

In this image released by Universal Pictures, Mark Wahlberg , from left, the character Ted, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, and Amanda Seyfried appear in a scene from “Ted 2.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

We’re all teachers of one sort or another. As the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song says, it is our job to teach our children well. Sometimes we even have to teach our parents a thing or two. I know my children do.

But to malign all teachers (as some people seem wont to do) as lazy or lacking value in our culture is the worst mistake the world can make. Such rude assumptions betray the arrogance and ignorance underneath. That doesn’t mean people can’t become a success despite such attitudes. As Mark Twain once said, “All it takes is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure.”

Some people will never get that bit of insightful humor. They refuse to see themselves in the lesson Mark Twain conveys in that biting bit of humor. It’s a common problem, this persistent, arrogant lack of self-awareness.

We’ve all been present in the classroom when someone fails to “get the joke” about their woefully wrongheaded answer. Life can be cruel, and at times, so can teachers. If need be. There is an instructive value in that. There is only so much publicly professed ignorance a teacher is required to tolerate. 

Cold, hard truths 

I recall standing in my dorm room after a long run on a cold winter afternoon. Staring out the window toward the Oneota Valley in the distance, I remarked that the hills looked purple. A diffident athlete from another sport strolled over next to me and barked, “They’re not purple. They’re black.”

No amount of discussion or corroboration from other people in the room could convince this hulking guy that the hills were purple. So I asked, “Are you colorblind?”

He took that as an insult. “Fuck you!” he said, raising a fist as if ready to punch me.

Some people just refuse to consider that their own observations, worldview or viewpoint could be wrong. Even when a crowd of otherwise rational believers joins in, the stalwart and stiff-necked refuse to be convinced.

Those are the people that teachers have the most difficulty in reaching. It is also true that those types of people tend to be the crowd most willing to criticize teachers or other leaders as lazy or undeserving of the pay or benefits they work so hard and long to earn.

The Bible records what the Lord God thinks of such folks. “I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people” (Exodus 32:9).

Stiff-necked people

Yes, the Bible recognizes that dealing with stiff-necked people is the biggest challenge of all. Convincing a stiff-necked person, or people, that they might be wrong or need to repent is sometimes an impossible task.

Even as great a teacher as Jesus Christ had a tough time convincing people there was a better way to engage the world than to possess, covet, dictate or demand that everyone else go along with the legalistic ways of authoritarian religion and politics. Truth be told, Jesus wanted to set us all free from that. But stiff-necked people stood in his way. That segment of society persists in our culture to this day. Bloviators and accusers. Stiff-necked believers.

So the task of reaching (or teaching) stiff-necked people remains one of the world’s greatest challenges. We see it even in the top levels of sport, where “uncoachable athletes,” resist the call to discipline, whine and complain and make it difficult for everyone else around them to achieve.

Encouraging such arrogant people to repent is one of the longest and most difficult tasks in all of history. It can exhaust the spirit and tax the soul. It also cost the Lord Jesus Christ his life. He taught with all his heart and wisdom, but in the end, the stiff-necked believers and authoritarian zealots betrayed him and turned him over to even more brutal authoritarians who tortured and killed him. Meanwhile, Jesus’ detractors stood below and jeered him on a cross for daring to teach something other than what they told him to do.

Stumbling blocks 

It’s still quite difficult to get the stiff-necked world to recognize these traits among the ranks in the present day. So here’s a little list shared from the website Crosswalk.com in a post from Dr. Ray Pritchard. It cites the eight hallmarks of stiff-necked people. These are the traits that keep people like you and me from learning. They throw up stumbling blocks between great teachers and ourselves.

1. Certainty that you are right.
2. Refusal to listen to anyone else.
3. Defensive when criticized.
4. Making excuses for your shortcomings.
5. Lashing out at others.
6. No desire to examine your own life.
7. Repeated pattern of misbehavior.
8. Prayer without repentance.

Perhaps you’ve seen some of that on social media. And perhaps, like me, you’ve committed some or all of these errors in judgment. But if you ultimately repent and soften your heart, even after great conflict, you are not lost. You can still learn. You can still lead. You can still teach. You can still advocate for social justice, promote the merits of honesty, express hope for the future and show respect for great teachers.

You become, in other words, your own best teacher. This holds great value for you as a multisport and endurance athlete as well. Because with an open heart you also learn best from the experiences of others. I’ve written about that trait of openheartedness in the face of challenges in my book The Right Kind of Pride: Character, Caregiving and Community. 

A teacher-in-chief

Our outgoing President Obama tried to set an example of teaching and temperance. He also stood fast on issues of civil and racial justice, and against gun violence by and against police. He did all this while serving as a model of graceful fatherhood in the face of great responsibility. He was a great model and teacher for us all, especially black Americans so long maligned for a supposed lack of core values in family, faith and virtue.

Yet what has that earned him from the stalwarts of a stiff-necked nation? Largely, a patent ingratitude and forgetfulness in how far we’ve come from that period when the economy was in shambles and our nation was steeped in ideological, endless wars of choice. Add in a dose of racially-driven disrespect and discourteous accusations and hateful comments toward his wife Michelle, and somehow it seems the picture should be clear enough. If some people had their way, there would have been a public crucifixion of Barack Obama, the man whom many accused of being a ‘false Christian,’ or a ‘Muslim.’ As if the word itself constituted an insult. There are still martyrs of spirit among us today.

Triumph of the unteachable

What we’ll be gaining has yet to be revealed, but that list of stiff-necked traits above certainly has a set of checkmarks next to it when you consider the supposed “teacher” of such great intelligence that he claims no need of counsel from anyone else, especially America’s intelligence community. He was proven dumb wrong on that issue, and many others. But even when he’s wrong, he insults those who point it out and refuses to accept what he’s learned even when he’s already admitted it.

That would get you a failing grade in any Middle School classroom in America. There’s not a teacher on the planet who would put up with that kind of performance from a student. Yet as our nation’s often blind republic(an) would have it,  we’re now about to install that fellow as the head of our collective classroom.

Let Stupidity Reign!

So I’ve come to accept that it may take all the endurance this country can muster to make it through this stiff-necked reign of bluster, Tweeting and political terrorism passed off as normal politics. This will be a test for all of us as individuals. Even those who support Trump have been finding it difficult to account (e.g. Twitter?) for his nuclear threats, apparent collusion and love for Russia, and his continuing lack of consistency on any issue under the sun.

Because sooner or later, as citizens, and as a nation, we will find ourselves uniting under completely different banners in order to deal with the consequences of Middle School politics writ large. I predict that liberals and conservatives will find surprising new common ground on issues of education, environment and business on which to collaborate.

It’s true in every classroom: sometimes it takes a total idiot to bring to light the importance of the classroom environment, and how people actually enjoying learning together when necessity demands it.

Such was the case in American during World War II. And in some respects, the Civil War when class idiots insisted their racial superiority guaranteed them more rights than most. Such divisions ultimately drew the country back together. And before that it was the American Revolution when mutually liberal resistance to the conservative authority of Great Britain drew people together to form a more perfect union.

So in the meantime, let us say a prayer: God help us. Be our everlasting and enduring teacher. Amen to that.

Addendum: Godspeed, President Obama

What you read next, you may not fully agree, and you have that right. But in America today I think we’re losing a President who was in many ways a great teacher. Many stiff-necked people refused to listen to his example. They considered him too academic for their tastes, or criticized his demeanor as too officious, or arrogant. But that ignores the facts of his terms in office.

The man has shown great patience while facing one of the most raucous, divisive classrooms the world has ever known. For starters, he taught us perseverance in the face of a crushing economic recession brought on by a previous administration. Some disagreed with his methods, but the fact of the matter holds true: they worked. 

Then our President showed patience in the face of often unjust criticism. He demonstrated willingness and consideration for the ideas of others, but was slapped down and ridiculed by his political opponents, especially Mitch McConnell, who swore that he’d force Obama to fail. 

President Obama continued all this in his teaching style, and many people hated that. He was a law professor and Constitutional scholar before taking office. In this mode, he admittedly tested the limits of law with executive orders. But he knew what he was doing because he actually understood the law more than his peers or even more than his predecessors, who advocated the concept of the Unitary Executive. But truth be told, his executive actions were necessary given the complete and publicly stated opposition from his political opponents. And ask yourself an honest question. If you were in his position, what would you have done? 

Modeling vision and courage

Pushing forward with vision, Obama succeeded in proposing ways to confront our nation’s great challenges in healthcare. The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress and verified constitutional by the Supreme Court, took the courageous stance of protecting millions of people from discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. The law also extended vital women’s health care provisions, among many other benefits.

And yet again, his political opponents refused to learn anything from these vital changes and protections for the American people. Instead, they engaged in stiff-necked obfuscation and resistance by  voting fifty times (or so) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

The job of Congress is to propose and build laws. And those who opposed the ACA and arranged 50 votes against it should instead have been working to build legislation as an alternative if the time ever came.  And at this moment in time, years after the issue was first debated, there is no such plan available. This is a massive failure of both public conscience and political responsibility. 

And so, the longheld and harsh criticism of our outgoing president seem to have no basis in fact or action. On every indicator from job growth to stock market performance, independence from foreign oil to basic gas prices, America is in far better shape now than it was eight years ago. 

Obama himself admits that his tenure was not perfect. That is the hallmark of a true leader. For that example alone, I am thankful to have seen this man and his wonderful family do the best they could while serving the country. You may disagree, or continue to hate the man for any number of reasons. But I ask you to as the hard questions as to whether those feelings are genuinely based on principle or through habit of mind and tribal allegiance. Because that is also what God, or you are not a believer, human conscience asks you to do.