The Racist Robocop Syndrome

Watching fatal pedestrian train fatalities is like watching untrained, ignorant, racist cops indiscriminately kill black men.  It defies logic.  The more you watch it the more it does not make sense.  The more Americans overdose, especially in Ohio, it doesn't make sense.  I don't think Americans are killing themselves on purpose.  I do think that in this day and age death in some cases seems a better alternative.  I feel so lousy some days, I can't understand who someone can feel so bad.  Then I remember this is what depression is, an inexplicable oppression that hinders your thinking, your emotions, and your body.  Bacteria functions in a similar way.  I'll always remember the time I ate a packet of tainted peanut butter while working on the ship.  I was sitting in my bunk, and my body's reaction to the poison was immediate and severe.  What happened is your central nervous system shuts down.  I felt my bodily sensations, my senses, just shut down.  Your ability to feel something disappeared like you were lying in a little coffin of death.  I didn't necessarily feel bad, but I couldn't feel anything.  My tactile receptors in my skin shut off and I felt my body reject the bacteria straight up my gullet and out of my mouth.  In one fell swoop I up chucked the goo and felt immediately better.  It was a startling experience, feeling your central nervous system shut down.  I don't mean you ability to think but your ability to feel something.  Feeling today is over rated.  It as a way of life has been shelved, the reason why people are over dosing is because we as human being need to feel.  It is the core component of the human organism.  If were were meant not to feel things, then God would have made us computers.  If one looks back we will find that feeling always has been a central component of human existence.  The human beings ability to feel compassion, love, jealousy, or hate is what makes us human.  It could be said that we may function more efficiently without feeling.  It can get in the way.  I have discovered this truth living with my geriatric mother.  Often her feelings take control obstructing her ability to solve a problem.  When I separate her anxiety about a problem from the problem itself, often I can solve it quickly.  She likes to brood about problems, because in an abstract way it gives on incentive, motivation, and concentration.  Anger can do the same thing.  It can focus you very quickly into seeing the logic in a situation.  I don't enjoy anger.  I live my life with a minimum of duress, and usually I have few problems.  Living in the American South, again, its protocol is feeling.  People here live with their feelings on their sleeves, and it is not productive.  It gives you a purpose.  It actualizes your emotions, but I have found most often in a negative way.  You end up spinning around in circles, endless circles, looking for the light.  I have learned from time and experience your thoughts are what will save you.  That is difficult, because we are hard wired as human beings to need to feel.  Out emotions are part of our psyche, and without them we are wandering androids without a purpose.  When I did my student teaching in Lee County North Carolina in 1985, my cooperating teacher used emotion to control his charges.  He taught band at the junior high school.  If I had to learn one lesson in that short period of tutelage, it was when and how to get angry at the students.  When to blow your temper and make the kids understand you meant business.  It was a bit of a ruse like ?  I don't know what.  What I did know is that I could not devote the rest of my life to an anachronistic way of disciplining school children.  I all ready use my emotions to perform expressive music.  I all ready use my emotions to actualize my own soul.  Use my emotions to bring order to an unruly classroom?  I must be in the American South.  Consequently never have I taught public school in the state, and never have I wanted to.  Rather I would like to be active in the field of music without the bother of discipline.  Discipline.  What does teaching music have to do with discipline?  I don't care, because without teaching public school it is not necessary.  I would think in retrospect that teaching forms of discipline would be necessary in a quality collegiate educational system.  I knew when I went to UNC-Chapel Hill, it was not a good education school.  Most aspiring music educators went to ECU or Appalachian State.  I was accepted at UNC-Chapel Hill, so I felt it was my bounden duty to show my respect for the institution and go.  I paid the price.  I did become a much better musician.  I became a poorer trumpeter, because in as much as my professor was a brilliant musician he did not know how to teach trumpet.  I learned how to play trumpet years later while working on cruise ships.  I talked with other professional brass players, and from them learned the differing methodologies of brass playing.  These were things never I had heard in my college education at UNC-Chapel Hill.  I don't have sour grapes, but I do understand that college teaching positions are multifaceted.  Professors do more than one thing, and often their main instrument is not related to their primary teaching responsibilities.  This has been my experience throughout college, and I remember when trying to become viable in the teaching community many talents were better than one.  As such my piano playing skills should have augmented my qualifications as an educator.  They didn't.  At UNC my trumpet teacher desired I focus all of my attention on the trumpet, and yet I graduated a lesser trumpeter than when I went it.  It was because his pedagogy was confused.  There was more frustration involved then success.  The successes I had I figure out myself with no help from him.  Is this the way it should be?  College is self-discovery?  Many college professors use this method, and it is a crutch.  It is a way not to have to teach.  If you can't teach or don't want to teach, teach teachers.  Playing the trumpet like most anything is easy if you know how.  This is how I solve my mother's emotionally-laden problems.  I separate out the frustration, futility, and history of failure and simply take the time to figure out how to solve the problem.  Most of the information is readily available on the internet.  Teaching should not be abstract.  I always have appreciated the educators who were willing to give me the information.  At UNC they did not do this.  They told jokes in their ivory tower, and made it crystal clear that there was no way in hell you ever could know as much as them.  They did not champion students, they patronized them.  This is not an effective system of education, and hence I do not have a high opinion of my music education in Chapel Hill.  It was the most difficult thing I ever have achieved, graduating.  Possibly in some abstract way all of that rhetorical lecturing was useful.  It was not until I entered the D.M.A. program at OSU that I discovered unpretentious, selfless, altruistic teaching.  The major responsibility of professors at UNC was to seem Godlike.  There were awards, publications, and societies.  These all look good on the resume.  They are the resume for most intents and purposes.  Real teaching happens in the classroom, not on paper.  I am happy to have continued my musical career without an academic position, and such my musical output is more pure an honest than America will allow.  As far a the racist Robocop Syndrome, cops are shooting black men because they want to.  It has nothing to do with training, conscience, or professionalism.  These policemen think that America will be a better place without these black men on the streets.  What they don't understand is that for what is becoming the majority of Americans, the streets are our lives.  Possibly that is the difference between white and black America.  Blacks choose to live in the streets in a visceral, fast-moving, consequential environment, and whites choose to live lives of security, security created by Big Brother.  It's a thought.  Robocops representing Big Brother have no clue how to relate to a black man riding a bicycle on the street.  They are guilty before being pulled over, and it is a travesty the American extermination is beginning this way.  Ethic cleansing has begun  in the streets, and it will be the streets that will stop it.  Try carrying loaded shotguns around the streets of Washington under the leadership of Huey Newton today, and it will be mass murder.  "If they come for one of us [sic] they are coming for all of us."  That is they way they should feel.