Weep With Those Who Weep

Many of my friends have been posting “facts.”
 
We all deeply long for certainties, especially when we want comfort, protection from uncertainties, and expressly when those worries are about our own deeply held but fearful frailties and perhaps, guilt.
 
This is my twenty-second year of teaching. Wow, does that make me feel old, but nevertheless, it’s true. I’m a grizzled veteran in the teaching profession. And one of the things all us old-timer teachers have experienced is a never-ending cycle of new-fangled and “data-driven” silver bullets.
 
(Incidentally, I come from a family of teachers – my parents were both teachers; so was my 100+ MaMa – they all echo this reality – it is old).
 
And while it is true that some specialists, book authors, administrators, state education bureaucrats and standardized test creating CEOs swear by the conclusiveness of their “facts”, most teachers recognize in their souls and behold in the eyes of their individual young students that such concrete boxes fail to provide any foregone conclusions.
 
I’m working, ever so slowly, on the outline of a book on teaching. Its working title is “Don’t Forget They Have Souls: The Inadequacy of Data-Driven Education.” Lord willing, I’ll finish my rebuttal against the Standardized Testing Industrial Complex.
 
The reliance on data infiltrates every part of our lives, even entertainment. How about this - ask a Philadelphia Eagles or Phillies fan what they think about the data-driven coaching of Chip Kelly or Gabe Kapler. (Good luck, SoCal)
 
Atheists and other anti-believers hold fast to science and its facts, and regard faith as foolishness.
 
All of you out there who hold to some kind of faith are simpletons, they say. Blind, because you don’t have the facts. You cannot prove in a universal way (of course we all have personal anecdotes) that your faith system is real, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
 
The scribes and teachers of the law that encountered Jesus were able to site their facts, too. They called him false Messiah, because his actions defied their understanding (facts?) of scripture.
 
Today, religious fundamentalists tell us we must act a certain way, speak a certain way, must engage in some activities and must refrain from others. If not, we have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. They have their facts, too.

​Doubt is scary.
 
Variables, unknowns, left-outs (sometimes those who compile data have something to hide) – there is a lot that goes into a complete picture. I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever have an exact understanding of anything at all during my lifetime.
 
So, when we see mass mourning and protest (some of it violent/I believe the majority of the violence is that of opportunists and criminals using the protest as cover) about a cycle of destruction that traces its roots to the 1600s-a cycle of systematic degradation of enslaved people become freedmen become segregated and second-class-and-barely citizens who could be lynched at the whim of local and powerful racist leaders, who had to become peaceful marchers beaten and attacked by dogs and sprayed with fire hoses and teargas, who finally became theoretically integrated but still barred from the boardroom people, who at last got to send forth a token, but only if he (and much later she) would say and champion agreed upon topics, become in recent years tolerated folk, and when we finally see almost every single blessed black brother and sister that we know speak in unity and sorrow, it fills us with dread, because our souls know something heavy and desolate has gone down here in America.
 
So, some of us start searching for “facts” we can use to obscure and minimize the pain in the other, certainly, but also, in our own souls. We are, indeed, one human race. We are all God’s children. And when any child of God suffers, I believe the Lord grieves.
 
We should, too.

Terrence Floyd, weeping at the site of his brother's murder.