I was a \u201cmath block\u201d kid. I\u2019m not sure why, but I just didn\u2019t get math easily. Maybe it was my seventh grade math teacher, who threw me up against a locker for reading a history book in her class. I can still feel the dial of the combination lock digging into the middle of my back. She was a mean old woman, in an era when teachers could do pretty much anything they wanted. And she thought she would teach me a lesson, not paying attention in her math class. She made me hand write the Constitution of the United States and turn it into her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was one of the best assignments I ever did, but old Mrs. Hibberd would have been better making me do one hundred math problems.\u00a0\u00a0I needed that work more than indulging the subject I already loved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My eighth grade teacher, Coach Weikert, did his best to revive my math skills, and since he was my track coach, I responded. But freshman year Algebra put me back into denial, and a sophomore Geometry teacher who licked chalk from the chalk tray (really) put the nail in the coffin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Algebra II, I was doomed. Then our teacher left in October, and we had a series of eight substitutes for the remainder of the year. I think everyone in the class got a B- or better; what else could the school do. But my math years were done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thank goodness my university considered the new \u201ccomputer\u201d class as a math class, programming the \u201cmainframe\u201d monster in the basement with punch cards in \u201cBasic\u201d. I enjoyed it, learned a lot about logic, and didn\u2019t have to explore mathematics again for twenty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Statistics class required for my Masters degree almost tripped me up. But I took it in the summer, all by itself, and spent hours and hours struggling to grasp the concepts. I managed to survive, getting an \u201cEducation Major A\u201d despite failing a quiz on standard deviation by subtracting 15 from 25 and getting 5 (25-15=5).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I guess it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that last night I had a dream about NOT succeeding at math.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the dream I wanted to explore higher mathematics.\u00a0\u00a0To do so, I was presented with the backside of a shield of metal, full of bumps caused by dents on the other side.\u00a0\u00a0My assignment was to analyze just the bumps and valleys, interpret what caused the marks, and find patterns to predict what would happen next.\u00a0\u00a0That was \u201chigher\u201d math I was told, and if I didn\u2019t get that instinctively, then I didn\u2019t belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s really what higher math is about, but the concept does apply to something I know a lot more about, history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our present time is the back of that shield, with bumps and ridges.\u00a0\u00a0We look at it, having a pretty good idea of what caused the marks.\u00a0\u00a0The bump of the Trump election, the ridge of the border wall crisis, the dip caused by our national division.\u00a0\u00a0And we hold it up against older, rusty shields from the past:\u00a0\u00a0the dusty shield from the Nixon era, the heavy worn and dented piece from the American Civil War.\u00a0\u00a0How does our new metal shield compare?\u00a0\u00a0Does the damage done by our current political crisis match up to the huge near-break of the Civil War?\u00a0\u00a0Does the height of the Nixon impeachment bump match the current Trump one?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps somewhere in the turkey-coma caused dream (it was Thanksgiving night) there was a message:\u00a0\u00a0that those shields didn\u2019t really represent higher math, but national unity.\u00a0\u00a0Can our current crisis break the shield in two? Will the fever-dreams of the alt-right, of toting AR-15\u2019s into a civil war to defend Trump, actually break holes in our national metal?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Out on the Internet, it says it takes steel \u00bd\u201d thick or more to stop the AR rounds; is our national unity now thinner than that? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we look at our current struggle, trying to read the \u201cbraille\u201d patterns to predict what comes next.\u00a0\u00a0Here\u2019s what I see.\u00a0\u00a0Our steel shield of national unity is thick in the middle.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0While it will be dinged and damaged, especially on the edges, the center remains strong.\u00a0\u00a0And that is the prediction, the sum of the pattern.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember sitting in seventh grade math class when they announced over the PA system that Richard Nixon was the new President of the United States.\u00a0\u00a0I remember being silent as most of my classmates at Van Buren Junior High in Kettering, Ohio, wildly cheered the news.\u00a0\u00a0My thought:\u00a0\u00a0how could our country make this mistake, and how would we survive?\u00a0\u00a0And it happened again in my junior year, though at Wyoming High School there was a lot less cheering.\u00a0\u00a0But our nation did survive Nixon:\u00a0\u00a0and we became stronger for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have survived the first three years of the Trump Administration. I dream that \u201cthis long national nightmare\u201d will be over in 2020, and I\u2019ll work to make that happen. But our nation is strong, strong enough even to withstand Donald Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Obama is fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr. One of his favorites: <\/p>\n\n\n\n