Getting Settled and Important Decisions

 As I write down thoughts for this week, I am at what seems like a major milestone since our involuntary displacement back in October, when losing our home in Hagerstown led me to eventually come here to Baltimore after receiving a job offer.  A lot of our things are still in storage over in Martinsburg, but this week I was able to get a significant portion of items - my record collection - and bring it back with me.  My record collection is greatly reduced now - about 1/3 the size it was - and thankfully I was able to get my large collections (the two Franklin Mints, the Singers collection, and several rare Reader's Digest boxed sets), and those were what were integral to starting anew.  Although the place I am in now constrains settling in too much, I was able to get those records and house them on a new special shelf I got a few weeks back, and they look great there now.  There are other aspects of settling in that are still being sorted out, but for the most part I am on track to starting to rebuild a life, and thankfully I have kept a core aspect of my life to give it a good start. 

As I am at school today, it is the work-study day for my students that they have once a week.  The school year is starting to wind down some, and I am mainly focused on getting the students prepped for their upcoming finals in a couple of weeks.  With the school year quickly wrapping up, it is only natural that some issues flare, and I had one of those yesterday.  A young man in my final class of the day decided to act like a jackass, and somehow he managed to procure some cheese and he was being messy and destructive with it, even trying to damage computer equipment of his classmates.  When confronted, he was also very disrespectful and rude and I had to throw him out of class.  I have a phone conversation with his mother later, and hopefully when he returns tomorrow he will have a better attitude.  At the risk of sounding controversial again, I am noticing this behavior primarily in the Black students - I don't know if it is their environment they live in, or what it is, but they tend to be some of my most difficult challenges.  Then, when I see how some adults in this city act, it is understood that they are modeling their own behaviors after bad behavior of the adults.  When I addressed this with a couple of other students the other day who were profusely using profanity in class, one tried to say it was "Black culture," at which point I countered that no culture encourages acting like a jackass, and I told the student flatly that his excuse was BS.  In talking with another teacher, I found out what I had suspected as well - the onerous COVID measures enacted a few years back also played a part in the bad behavior as well, given that many of the students I now teach were middle schoolers then and therefore they lost a lot of valuable learning time.  I am hoping that next year will be better, and I am also planning on being more prepared for the group I will be getting next year as well.

Dealing with some difficult students, in particular minority kids who are from low-income areas of town, can be a challenge.  You always wonder how much they actually respect and appreciate what you do, especially if you are a different ethnicity from them.  On many levels, I know these kids - having grown up poor and with a single parent myself, I can relate to them.  But, it has been over 40 years since I was their age, and they have some different mindsets than I did when I was their age too.  That perhaps is the greatest challenge of all.  One thing I feel should be mentioned though is that there are many similarities between the rural Appalachian roots I have and the backgrounds of many of these inner-city Black kids.  There are things I observe in their culture that I readily identify with, such as large mouthy women for one thing.  I have seen many large Black women who almost automatically make me think of my own late grandmother, as they have a similar attitude to hers.  This is another reason why racism is so wrong - at the end of the day, people of diverse cultures find out they share more in common than they have differences, and that is a good reflection point.  The problem with the rich White liberal yuppies a lot of the time is that they fail to understand either the Black culture of the city or the White rural culture of the Appalachians, and over the years those individuals have often displayed either patronizing behavior at best or outright contempt and mockery of us at worse.  That unfortunately exacerbates things such as racism, and it even makes cleaning up certain communities look like an exercise in discrimination.  Let's talk about that for a moment.

There is a word thrown around in recent years that has been a hot-button topic, and that word is gentrification.  What is it exactly?  The classic definition of it is when a blighted area of a city is targeted for renovation, and the downside of this is often it causes the cost of living to rise in said areas.  Its opposite is urban blight.  Many people who are on the DEI bandwagon view the concept of gentrification like the F bomb, and in doing so they actually cause more harm than good.  The harm they cause is specifically in how they define the terms - to some, any cleanup or restoration project in a given neighborhood gets the label "gentrification" when it may not be the case that it is.  Cleaning up urban blight is not "gentrification" - rather, it is trying to improve the standard of living for the people who live there.  There is no evil in tearing down dilapidated buildings which have the potential of becoming crack houses, and there is also no harm in picking up the trash and cleaning up the neighborhood a little bit - that is simply taking pride in one's community, not "gentrification."  Now, in order to diffuse the controversy, these efforts should be grassroots initiatives in which the residents make the call to clean up and improve their own communities, and that way no accusations of racism or anything else will hold water because efforts are on the part of the people that live there and not outsiders.  I have seen some positives to this end in some Baltimore neighborhoods - there are now many beautiful painted murals on some blocks, and I have also seen more community gardens and box libraries around, but there is still a lot of work to be done.  The city government has a lot to do with that too - for many years, the Baltimore government has been a source of corruption (after all, Nancy Pelosi's father was a corrupt mayor here back in the 1950s), and I am thinking more public revenue is going into the deep pockets of bureaucrats rather than being invested in improving the city.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a change in that on the horizon, and as a result, in recent years the population of Baltimore has begun to decline.  It remains to be seen where this goes, but hopefully and prayerfully a change in direction will come soon. 

Onto other matters, as I settle into my new place, I am slowly returning to a routine I have had interrupted over the past several months.  Being able to establish a new home takes time, but thankfully I have the salary and other means at this point to make that happen.  I have invested in new clothes for instance - the first time I have done that in several years - and I am also beginning to watch my health more.  That latter issue is becoming more evident, as lately my body has been feeling its age - I have a continual pain in my lower back, and there are days I am really stiff and it is hard to walk.  And, this despite the climbing and other things I need to do - I think I have climbed more steps in the past six months than I had the whole majority of my life previous.  Also, there are other parts of my life that have changed, some for the better and others not so much, but change is an inevitable fact of life because life marches on.  Change should never come at the expense of compromising principles though, and hopefully anyone reading this understands that too. 

The other big news of today is the Papal Conclave, in which the Cardinals of the Church will be gathering to deliberate on who will succeed Francis to the Barque of St. Peter.  I am hoping that orthodoxy and grounding will prevail, and that we don't end up with a worse disaster than Francis, but I am thinking I need a strategy just in case.  Near the campus here is Holy Cross Parish, a congregation of the Polish National Catholic Church that is around 112 years old.  The PNCC in recent years has adopted a more conservative approach to its doctrine and practice, and it is also still fully Catholic - they are actually currently in dialogue with the Anglican Catholic Church, my former communion.  If we end up with a controversial Pope, I am seriously thinking about changing my allegiance from Rome to a more orthodox form of Catholicism that is more compatible with Magisterial tradition, and the PNCC checks all the boxes for that.  At this point, I am maintaining a "wait and see" approach to see what happens, as thankfully the Church in the Third World is much more orthodox, and if a Pope were to come from those regions, it would be an answer to prayers.  I will continue to chronicle this until we see what happens, and then I will act accordingly.

Thanks again for allowing me to share this week, and will see you next time.