I Grew, I Learned, I Showed Them All

I Grew, I Learned, I Showed Them All

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.

- Carl Sagan, American astronomer, astrophysicist, author (1934-1996)

I disappointed my father because I was poor at sports. As a result of brain and nerve damage at birth, doctors had predicted that I would never run and would not likely ever walk without a prosthetic device such as a cane or brace. The fact that I learned to walk and run without a limp did not impress him.

I learned through experience that I could not keep up with my peers in ice hockey (my father's best sport). Only after I quit hockey in my mid teens did I learn about problems at birth that would impair my abilities both physically and mentally. I learned that I never had a chance at equality in sports.

I disappointed my father because I was unable to become an avid fan of sports. It took decades for me to learn that a chemical problem in my brain caused me to endure devastating stress when I became excited while watching a game. He took my cousin (a quarterback on his high school football team, but a young man with a bad attitude) to a Grey Cup game (the Canadian equivalent of the US Superbowl) because he thought I wouldn't be interested. He didn't even ask me when he was given free tickets. My father had died in later years before I learned of my brain chemical problem and tried to learn strategies to combat it. My maternal grandfather had the same problem, but no one took notice.

I disappointed my mother because I was not good at school. I just got by. As many times as she read on my report cards that I was "not working to [my] potential", neither she nor any of my teachers ever twigged to the fact that my poor performance was because I could not read and a brain impairment meant that I had trouble remembering anything for exams. To them I was just "lazy."

I disappointed my mother, an excellent and entertaining pianist, when I studied piano for many years yet was unable to reach her level of competence because I was physically uncoordinated (small motor muscle problems) and could not read music. I learned to be a great appreciator of recorded and live music through my experience with them, but this did not impress. I could have become an orchestra director, except that I could not read music fast enough.

I disappointed my greatest supporter among my high school teachers. As head of the music department he guided me into leads in music activities and musical plays and delighted when I entered the Faculty of Music for my first year at University of Toronto. He would not speak to me when I left the faculty program after one year because I was physically and mentally unable to do the work. I learned that I had a head for directing music, which benefitted and excited many children over the years in choirs and musicals when I was a teacher.

I disappointed most of my immediate superiors in my jobs. They could not understand why I did not pick up on how to do the jobs easily, though none of them made the slightest attempt to show me what I needed to know, not even once. Years later I learned to teach others what I knew because I understood how helpless it felt to be given responsibilities to do something but not the tools to do them with.

I disappointed the principals of the schools where I taught. I directed my teaching attention in different ways from other teachers because I thought it important to raise a whole child--including social and emotional skills and development--rather than to just each to a curriculum. I was often in trouble for being "different" in my methods. As it happened, my methods tended to be five years ahead of their time, as five years after I got into trouble in several cases the school board began to insist on all teachers teaching the way I had--because the "new" methods were in use in California, not because I had succeeded with so many children.

I disappointed my first wife--a very good teacher and a reader--because I never read books. She didn't understand that I was functionally illiterate due to my childhood problems. She was not impressed that I got a master's degree from the University of Toronto although I was functionally illiterate and never read a book the whole way through. While I muddled my way through teaching and she was a resource teacher--a teacher whose sole purpose was to help other teachers--in a different part of the school board, she never offered to give me the slightest assistance. She divorced me because she thought I lacked potential.

I disappointed some of my staff in the small business I ran for several years. They resented my insistence on quality and consistency, while they wanted to do things the easiest way, and they begrudged my coaching them to do their jobs in the best ways possible. Most left my employment to take jobs in places where working conditions were far worse. I learned that quality standards mean a great deal to many people who want to get their money's worth when they buy something. In turn, I learned how to look for quality and durability in my purchases as well.

I disappointed my neighbours for many years before I moved a couple of years ago. One group wanted me to drink and take drugs on weekends, which I would not do. Another wanted me to ignore local and provincial laws to give them favours. I knew that these were wrong for me, so my wife and I researched to learn what we believe is the best community in our country in which to live. We were right. Life has never been better for us since we moved.

Along the way I learned that disappointment is part of life. People will always be disappointed in us when we don't do what they want us to do and when we refuse to do things the wrong way. I have even had my life threatened twice. I learned that I can easily avoid and ignore people who are just plain bad for me.

I learned that to gain the respect of many people you need to be good at something. It doesn't really matter what so long as it can impress them. Everybody can be good at something. If they learn at what they can be good with the help of others who care for and about them, it will come sooner than it did for me. We can all help by teaching that lesson to children.

I began my lifelong learning mission at the age of 15. Until I learned to read better at age 44, I listened a great deal. When I began to read, I read things that made me more knowledgeable. Eventually my "encyclopedic knowledge" frightened some people. I learned that I could teach the ones who cared about what I knew and ignore the ones who refused to learn.

In recent years I have learned that helping others (the Dalai Lama calls it "compassion"--I am not a Buddhist) is the secret to happiness and to finding our purpose in life. May you be blessed with this knowledge as well.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to give children what they need rather than just what the school curriculum offers or what they can learn from television and video games.

Learn more at http://billallin.com/  

How A 15 year old Scandalized A Nation

How A 15-year-old Scandalized A Nation

Miley Cyrus did the unthinkable. She had the unmitigated gall to grow from a child to a woman without going through a graceful transition period where the American public could approve.

The daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus (think Achy-Breaky Heart and television's Doc) is the runaway star of Disney's Hannah Montana, about an ordinary girl who makes it in the big time as a singer. With a fortune in Hannah toys and accessories in the marketplace, Miley had become the poster child for the clean and safe young American girl, a role model for all young girls with dreams.

But Miley crossed the line. She reached physical womanhood without becoming of legal age. With her parents at the photo shoot, she posed for Vanity Fair magazine's June issue. I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but she posed with one shoulder and part of her back bare. Actual skin showing in the photo.

The fact that Miley and anyone else in the world would bare more skin in a bathing suit on a beach was irrelevant to self righteous American bigots. In the magazine picture she clutched a silk sheet around her and her hair was slightly mussed. Obviously Miley would be teaching young American girls who looked to her as a role model, an ideal, that sex is the right thing to do, the bigots claimed.

Oh, the dreadful degradation that Miley would bestow on American girls would stagger the imagination. Girls as young as three years old would see their idol as a shameless hussy and want to be like that themselves. Why three year old girls would be reading Vanity Fair, where many other models would be seen wearing far less than Miley, remains a mystery.

So does the claim that a bare shoulder and part of her back is sexually stimulating. Unless the bigots themselves find it stimulating.

Why parents who would not want their daughters to read the magazine would read it themselves is another mystery. Or I should say, hypocrisy.

Parents who know next to nothing about children want someone to blame if their daughters descend into sluthood and Miley fit the bill perfectly. Miley's embarrassment and claim that the photo was not to her liking and the distance her parents (who had approved the shoot with controversial photographer Annie Leibovitz ) put from the photo's publication was just what the scandal-lovers wanted.

The photo looks suspiciously like an art picture from the 1950s. Yes, art, not Hustler. Only Miley wasn't nude. But art doesn't matter to the bigots. Bare shoulders are all that's important.
The hypocrisy of the bigots boggles the imagination of anyone who observed the situation without emotion. The politically correct bigots wanted someone to suffer. They found Miley. She's a sweet girl, she should do the trick nicely.

All parents of young girls should take the time to explain to their daughters the grief that Miley Cyrus and her parents will experience. Not because Miley did something wrong. Because fame brings shame in the United States of America.

That's how it works. Tell your daughters about how cruel the morality police bigots can be.
Don't bother telling them about the sins of the bigots themselves, the ones they keep hidden away. Those sins don't get published in Vanity Fair anyway.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to make their children aware of the cruelty that prejudice can do to people so they can avoid it where possible.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

My Country: Free But Not For Every Citizen

The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
- Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton), historian (1834-1902)

Canadians have viewed the claim by US President George W. Bush that the US is fighting the war in Iraq for "freedom" with skepticism. For one thing, Canadians are not certain what the measure of freedom would be when Mr. Bush achieves it.

However, we Canadians are confident that we live in a free country. Unless, of course, you happen to be of Middle Eastern origin.

Maher Arar, a naturalized Canadian citizen born in Syria, travelled to various countries as part of his business. With his Canadian passport, he felt confident that he could move freely, even into and out of his native country.

On one trip back to Canada from Syria, Arar was stopped at Canada Customs and held on suspicion of terrorist activities or connections. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the national police of Canada) and the Canadian Security and Investigation Service (spy agency) could get nothing of interest from Arar, they sent him to the USA.

When their equivalent agencies in the US could also not get any worthwhile information from Arar, they deported him to Syria where he spent a year in prison being tortured every day. The Syrian authorities also got nothing from him.

It had never occurred to these agencies that Arar had nothing to tell them because he had nothing to do with terrorism, terrorist cells or with arrnaging finances for terrorist organizations. He was born in Syria (an "Axis of Evil country), he visited Syria and he phoned people in Syria. That was enough for them.

Arar did, however, have a beard (as all Muslim men do), olive coloured skin and Syrian heritage, which seemed to be enough to make him guilty in the eyes of Canadian and US security agencies.

Neither Canadian nor US agencies had the legal right to send Arar to another country, least of all Canada because he was a Canadian citizen. The US deported him to Syria without even telling Canada about it.

Maher Arar survived, returned to Canada, suffered through successive thorough investigations and eventually was given about 10 million dollars to go away and shut up by the Canadian government. He was removed from the Canadian list of suspects relating to terrorism.

The Canadian government, pressured by the media who were now firm Arar supporters, asked the US to also remove Arar from its watch list. The US refused, declining to give any reason.

After all, that would be tantamount to admitting they broke their own and international laws.
Maher Arar continues to live in Canada with his wife and family, trying to cobble together a life after a year of torture and daily expectations of death in a Syrian prison. Nights, for him, are the worst time of the day.

Meanwhile, three other naturalized Canadian citizens in situations amazingly similar to that of Maher Arar want to be absolved of any accusation of association with terrorism, receive compensation and build new lives after their own extensive bouts with torture abroad.

These four men have a right to wonder where in the world they could live now where their lives and those of their families would not be at risk.

Certainly not in any country that is fighting in Iraq. Or in any country whose government knows how to find Iraq on a map of the world.

Free countries, yes. But how free when the national police break the law and destroy people's lives without fear of being held accountable?

Are we in the "free world" fighting for freedom for everyone or just for those with the same skin colour, religion and nationality as us?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make a complex world a little clearer to understand.
Learn more at http://billallin.com