Chris Voisard – Applied Creativity

Tag: #CovidTimes

Learning Loss Part 2

After spending that dreamy school year in the outdoor barn surrounded by ponies and chickens and mostly maskless children playing in the hay, I could not imagine going back into The System, or whatever was left of it after most of the kids had not been in school for a year and a half. I’d heard stories from the outside. I’d seen pictures, like masked kindergarteners walking in lines with their arms straight in front of them to maintain the proper distance, or sitting outside in circles drawn on the asphalt to eat their lunches alone in silence. I wanted no part in that.

While I was lolling at Lazy H Ranch, reading Roald Dahl to my pod of kindergarten through fifth graders with a backdrop of golden hills dotted with horses, the rest of the school-world was tangled in a fierce debate of bureaucracy and fear, wrapped in the colored ribbons of the Tier System, purple being bad, very bad, then red, orange, and yellow. There was no green tier, no, no one was ever completely safe from the covid boogeyman, unlike George Bush’s Terror Tiers, where at least there was blue and green; maybe you had a slight chance of letting down your guard and not worrying about being attacked by ISIS. Red was the highest tier in Bush’s system, but California’s covid tiers had purple. I wondered why at the time, was it like a face being so angry it turns from red to purple? I didn’t know, and still don’t. A district had to stay in an orange or yellow tier for 14 days to even consider opening. At first, I checked daily with our tier status, but after a while, gave up, knowing it was as much of a sham as Bush’s Terror Tiers, based on nothing. Sometimes our county would turn red for a few days, or a week, only to revert back to purple which meant we had to start all over again.

I screamed my protests into the abyss at first, writing profanity laced emails to Governor Newsom or our public health director, Scott Morrow, pointing out how little sense this all made, how the goal posts kept moving, how bad it was for kids, and how arbitrary it all was. That’s when I still thought that they might actually care about the kids welfare. Or ours for that matter.

But in September of ’21 Newsom finally said the kids could all be back in school! This was after months of the teacher’s union still fighting the reopening, arguing at first, that it would be impossible to keep the kids 6 feet apart with the size of the classes and classrooms, so those in power quickly recalculated to say, ok, only four feet apart would work, or just “do your best.” There were further demands that had to be met. Teachers would be first in line to get the vaccines. Masking, testing, ventilation systems, extra cleaning. The teachers union got everything they wanted, to the tune of millions of dollars.

There was a big distinction between the unions and the teachers wants. My daughter Reyna went on TV to be interviewed as to how she was a teacher, and didn’t agree with the unions, and no union representative had ever contacted her to ask her opinion as to whether she felt ‘safe’ enough to go back to school. Teachers were split. While many felt like Reyna and me, that “remote learning” was mostly fiction, and morally wrong, many teachers I talked to loved it, or pretended to hate it but secretly love it, like a teacher who told me she cried every day, but went to live with her daughter and grandbaby for the school year, and had the students watch movies she recorded for science lessons. Teachers told me of going on hikes every afternoon, or having a beer or two while teaching. There was no accountability, no low grades were allowed, and no discipline problems to deal with. Sure, a few teachers insisted that the kids get out of bed and sit up during class, but mostly the kids were allowed to keep their camera off on Zoom calls, because of “equity”. Some students might have been embarrassed to show their living conditions the unions argued.

I walked into my daughter Reyna’s house during the lockdown and she was in the middle of teaching her Home Arts (used to be Home Ec) class a cooking lesson in her kitchen. She was teaching her heart out, talking animatedly into her laptop, bringing it over so that the camera showed her taking the cookies out of her oven. “How are your cookies looking? Show me some of them!” she said into the computer. I walked around and looked at her Zoom screen, and only saw about five faces, the rest of the boxes that represented her class were black. “Where is everyone?” I whispered to her out of screenshot. She explained to me how they weren’t required to turn their cameras on. “I don’t think they’re even there,” I said. She nodded her head in agreement. She went on trying her hardest anyway. It made me sad.

So, like I said, I wanted no part of the public-school craziness. Some of the parents tried to keep the Ranch School open another year, but it was not to be. After a couple of false-hopeful jobs with my old district and my old principal, I half-heartedly looked around for a job that could be palatable in the teaching realm, but had just about given up, and resigned myself to collecting unemployment for the first half of the school year. But then I had lunch with some colleagues from the middle school I worked at for many years, I told some of them my plight. Within a couple of days, I got a call from the principal of that middle school, telling me she was moving to the Belmont school district, and would like to hire me at Ralston Middle School. “What subject would I teach?” I asked, thinking I did not want the job. “Art,” she said. She had been tipped off by my old friends that art was my thing. “And a couple of periods of study skills.”

This gave me pause. Teaching art had been my dream job. Although I incorporated art into all my teaching jobs, I had never taught it officially. I had finished all the requirements for the art credential, passing the required art CSET (California subject exam for teachers) except for one pesky pedagogy class that they stopped offering at SF State during covid. I explained all of this to the woman on the phone, Sabrina Adler was her name. She seemed unfazed. She spoke in a nasally, almost robotic voice, void of any emotion. I asked if I could get back to her, and she said yes, but she needed to know by that afternoon. Wow, they really wanted me. This was a switch from usually having to beg for jobs. I hung up the phone, and paced around the house, thinking. I didn’t want to teach in a mask, and so far, had not taken the vaccine. But an art job? And a couple of periods of study skills, whatever that was, it sounded easy. How bad could it be? They wouldn’t be on a computer. Then looked up the salary schedule for Belmont, and I was stunned to see that they hired at a high experience step, and that I would be making more money than I had ever made for a school year by a long shot. It seemed like a Sign. Art and money. I paced and fretted a little more, and then called Sabrina back and accepted the job.

Little did I know what I was letting myself in for. Little did I know how much things had changed during covid. The teaching had changed, the kids had changed, the teachers had changed, the culture had changed, the expectations had changed, the attitudes had changed. Everything had changed in only a year and a half. That’s all it took. A year and a half of everyone staring at the internet and getting brainwashed, not by the classes they were supposed to be taking, but by the TikToks they had going up in the corner.

I only had one little clue of what had happened during my year of oblivion at the pony farm. A friend of the family of the farm, wanted their daughter to work with me as an aid. She had been a freshman in college at a University in Florida, but had dropped out, due to covid pressures, she couldn’t handle it. So, she was hired at the ranch. She was constantly looking at her phone, instead of paying attention to the kids, and when she wasn’t, I’d see her nodding off in class, her head jerking back, and her eyes looked funny. Finally, I asked her if she was on drugs, and she told me yes, she was on four different psychiatric drugs, none of which I had ever heard of. “Does your mother know this?” I demanded of her. She said yes, and the reason she was tired is that she often stayed up all night. This girl also told me that she that her generation was different, because they didn’t all go by the strict rules of being boys or girls. The girl would have the kids go on their computers during recess when I forbade it, thinking they had enough computer time during their Zoom calls, but going behind my back. I finally called her out on it. She said, “Why should I have to work as hard as you? You get paid way more money than me.” I was shocked by her attitude, and explained that I had been teaching for decades, and that the first few years of student teaching I had to work for free. She said that was my fault.

I thought this girl was a one-off, a bad hire, a bad seed. Little did I know that all the kids were watching the same TikToks, all the kids had been indoctrinated, all the kids had changed, just like the adults had changed.

June 19, 2025
Learning Loss Part 1

Learning Loss:

No one ever imagined that we would still be locked down in September.

September means back to school. New backpacks and shoes for the kids, and we teachers sigh to say good bye to the summer, but there are fresh bulletin boards and ‘Welcome’ signs, new rosters, and classrooms that had the floors polished in the summer. September meant new beginnings, new kids, a renewed sense of purpose after resting all summer.

Not that year. The schools had been shuttered since the March before when they told us all to go home. ‘I thought it was Easter, not Christmas, I heard a teacher whisper when the principal told us our spring break would be extended another week, to two weeks, to you know, ‘flatten the curve’. We all know the story now, yadda yadda, the kids of California never went back to the classroom that year. Nor the next.

I spent the last half of the 2020 school year sitting on the school yard asphalt by myself, surrounded with buckets of paint. Most teachers had to start Zooming, but since I taught ESL that year, they told me I could just go home and collect my paycheck. The thought of getting free money for doing nothing was unfathomable to me (but I guess a lot of stuff that happened that year was) but also immoral, so I asked the principal what else I could do to help. She gave me the perfect job of painting a giant map of the United States on the playground.

I sat, day after day, month after month alone, painting each individual state in a color palette of my choosing, my headphones on my head tuned in to Adam Carolla, the comedian I had listened to in the morning for years. He was a voice of sanity to me, my friend.

School officially ended that June along with my temporary job. Painting the map of the states had inspired me to drive across this country of ours. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening everywhere else. I was prepared to drive alone, anything to get away from the irrational craziness I saw when I wasn’t in the refuge of my asphalt canvas. I couldn’t bear to continue to witness the lines of masked people bracing themselves against the wind to get into the grocery stores, or physically fighting over toilet paper once they got in. I had to get the hell out of Dodge. The fact that the unelected health officer, Scott Marrow, told us to stay within five miles of our homes made the trip even more enticing. It couldn’t be like this everywhere. My friend Merry ended up going with me. ‘What if we die?’ she asked me before we left. After all, we were going into the eye of the storm, the scary states that didn’t lock down, where covid floated in the air like a thick invisible blanket, they told us, where faces were obscenely seen because of the lack of masks. “Then we die,” I said.

We didn’t die, and I was right. The rest of the country wasn’t like us. They all went back to school in September, rightly seeing the insanity of keeping kids at home staring into a computer. Not California. The 2020-2021 school year was upon us, and Newsom told us the schools were not opening, we had to continue to stay home to save lives. Remote learning they called it. It was a joke.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but like the school year before, providence handed me the perfect job during that second Pandemic Lockdown School Year. A one-room school house out in the country, as though my classroom was a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Charlotte’s Web, in a rough-hewn wooden barn.

One wall had a white board where I kept track of the fourteen kids complicated Zoom schedules, another wall had horseshoes nailed into it in such a way that the students could hang up their backpacks and coats, another wall I covered with the kids artwork, and the fourth wall was non-existent. Like, there wasn’t one, the barn had three walls. That meant that I had an unobstructed, open-air view of the rolling hills, dotted with horses separated by white ranch style fences, and the smell of fresh hay and manure wafted around my classroom. The en plein air classroom was a draw for some of the parents of the students that ended up being in my ‘learning pod’ one of the pandemic concepts already fading from our collective memory, where it was said that a random number of kids, say a dozen or so, could be together and it was ‘safe’ especially if air was circulating, and boy did the air circulate there! Most pods had to buy HVAC systems, but ours was natural. As beautiful as a semi-outdoor classroom was, it also meant that many mornings were freezing cold, and getting the propane going on the one heater we had wasn’t always easy. Also, since we were on a dirt road, clouds of dust would float in and settle on everything whenever a car or horse went by.

I’d gaze out at the hills and horses and tell the kids that ranged from kindergarteners through fourth grade, that they were the luckiest students in the whole state. ‘Whoever gets their math done can go on the hayride!’ was my daily refrain meaning that some lucky kids got to ride around the ranch in the quad with Breen, my stepson, and owner of the Lazy H Ranch, and throw flakes of alfalfa in the feeding troughs.

One corner of the barn had eggs in an incubator at the beginning of the year, and as the months went by, we watched the chicks hatch and eventually turn into four rust-colored teenage hens. The chickens were like our kids that we had raised. They wandered freely around the classroom clucking softly, and some of the kids liked to hold one of them in their lap grounding them to reality while they watched their teachers trying to explain math on their laptops. The two barn dogs guarded us, but one always was licking his chops around the chickens, and the kids would scream at him to get away, until one day the dog came in the barn and I literally saw feathers come out of his mouth, like a cartoon. We didn’t tell the kids for days that he ate one of the hens, and I privately cried.

After ‘school’, we’d all go up to the hay loft and watch movies on a TV, and some of the kids would jump out the opening holding a rope, and land in the pile of soft hay below. Two giant tire swings hung in the trees further up the hill, a thrilling ride where up to four kids could comfortably sit and spin dizzily around holding on to the thick chains. The kids all got riding lessons on ponies in the coral for their afterschool program.

I was in an idyllic world, far from the ugliness of the lockdowns and people’s reaction to them. No television blaring propaganda, no radio to tell us to be scared. All it took was a mile or two to get out of town and completely change my reality into that of country living in the old days.

The Zoom teaching made me sad though. The Chromebook laptops were the worst part. I remember the sight of one kindergarten girl named Steele diligently doing jumping jacks solo out in the courtyard behind the barn for ‘P.E.’ while staring at the computer. A long-awaited annual fourth grade field trip to the Sanchez Adobe was watched by the kids on the computer while they pretended that they were making the mud bricks they usually got to make with their hands. Breen’s son, Chinny, in his senior year, wandered in and out of the barn. He usually stayed in bed until noon, watching his high school classes on his phone in bed. He missed most of his long-awaited football season, his prom, and his graduation, although the moms tried the best they could to make facsimiles, it wasn’t of course the same, the sadness was obvious in his eyes.

I was privy to see how more than a dozen teachers interpreted ‘teaching’ during the lockdown. I saw some teachers showing up over the Zoom every day, well, actually only four days a week, because they called Wednesdays ‘asynchronous learning’ a euphemism in the New Speak that meant ‘you’re on your own kid, and yahoo, the teachers get a day off’. Other teachers just directed their kids to watch videos, and sent home thick packets of busy work. I heard one kindergarten teacher tell the kids to go outside and observe nature for their science lesson.

That school year went by like I was in a dream. At the beginning, in September, we survived the ‘black day’ when the smoke from the fires was so thick the sun never came out, by hiking up to the ridge with flashlights, and watched the traffic below, the headlights barely visible. We made applesauce and carved pumpkins, and Santa and the Grinch made surprise appearances at Christmas. In the spring we planted flowers in decorated pots for Mother’s Day, and at the end we held a formal graduation, complete with graduation caps that the kids made themselves.

The horror of what the lockdowns did to most the kids didn’t hit me until the following school year.

March 23, 2025
Goodbye Pumpkin Fest!

All good things must come to an end, and somewhat sadly, the party is . . . over.

The Pumpkin Festival as we knew it, has, in my opinion, officially died. R.I.P. P-Fest! Bye-bye, so long, farewell! But as some people believe, the Spirit stays alive long after the body dies.

The cause of death has been under dispute. Mr. Eblovi stated in The Review that “the unvaccinated” were responsible, a claim so ridiculously ludicrous, (as well as divisive and mean-spirited) that I won’t even bother trying to refute it. Another longtime local and occasional contributor to this independent journal tried, citing facts and studies, but his piece was ignored.

To some, it might look like Pumpkin Festival died of natural causes. After all, it was getting old, big, and crowded, and it could be said that the festival was on its way to imploding. With the proper interventions, the festival may have overcome these problems and gone on to live a long and happy life, but unfortunately The City killed the festival a couple of years ago, in the name of public safety.

Many may not understand the soul of The Fest, a phenomenon that grew out of the spirit of the people of the coast back then. The Coastside was a tight community of rowdy, feisty, and sometimes bawdy individuals who looked out for their own. ‘Our own’ meaning our community, all members, regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation. When Bev had the idea to fix up Main Street, everyone chipped in, and it was a party with live music and the Coast turned out en masse to literally paint the town with the proceeds of Fest.

I was at every single P-Fest. The first Festival, in the basement of my friend Marcia’s house, the Old Montara School, some don’t count as official, but I was there as a kid, painting rocks and selling them for a quarter. The next one, that counts as the first, was in the grounds of the IDES only, and I went to see my dad, Ray Voisard, and his friend Dick Hazel, who had set up their paintings and were enjoying a casual afternoon showing the local artwork and drinking cocktails.

From there, the P-Fest grew, and during those young, heady, expanding years I had so much fun celebrating our town, back in the days when ‘living life’ was more valued than safety. All of us locals would watch in amazement as the line of cars snaked their way over 92. All these tourists were coming here? To our little town? It was an anomaly, a once-a-year inconvenience that we loved, after all, we were hospital folk, and welcomed these occasional visitors with open arms.

One year, early on, I sold my dad’s famous “Italian Sandwiches” salami and cheese, wrapped in red gingham cloth, for a dollar, and my friends and I had people lined up from the IDES building out to Johnston Street. I had “LOCAL” printed up on the back of the official Festival tee-shirt and skipped through the streets meeting up where only the locals knew to go: to the costumed Fireman’s Ball in the IDES hall, in the back of the Bakery, behind the beer booth, or up in the graveyard. We would watch the bands play for a bit at the grounds in the morning, but then end the day at The Inn or San Benito, people sitting in the windowsills, overflowing to the street, live music still going, tipsy people in costume, dancing, kissing, and cheering the tourists trying to leave town. We wouldn’t bother trying to go home until the town was once again quiet.

But then.

Well, I guess you have to start adding some rules, but once all that regulation and signage arrives, the spirit starts leaving. The yellow tape and temporary fences, the cops in the street directing people when to cross, and rules, and more safety, and eventually the Festival was becoming a large, unmanageable vessel. I was sad when some locals started leaving town that weekend to avoid the madness.

Two years ago, is when one more intervention, one more stab at control by the City, was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and the Festival was killed. Because of a shooting that had happened in Gilroy a few months prior, The City thought it would be a good idea to have the sheriffs dress up in army camouflage and stand on the roof of City Hall with automatic rifles during the beloved Parade full of kids in Halloween costumes, which the City abbreviated to five minutes. The faux military with body armor stood around the streets afterwards with a giant SWAT kind of tank vessel thing. Not exactly welcoming.

And so, the Pumpkin Festival died.

They tried to hide the death last year, and lucky for those now in charge, the pandemic restrictions gave The City good cover. Then this year, after having given the go-ahead to a one-day event, The City once again rubber stamped a big red ‘No’ on the Festival because of what they said were safety concerns, a common thing the government is doing lately, exerting power under the guise of health.

It is common knowledge that there is little to no evidence that this virus is spread outdoors. Large outdoor gatherings are once again happening all over the Bay Area, the most restricted area in the country when it comes to rules based on the pandemic. It’s probably a good thing they put a kibosh on the planning, because the The City, who knows how to make rules but not how to throw a party, wanted gates put up, and proof of vaccine to enter, which would have been a buzz kill on par with the cops with AR15’s.

So, our large and unruly Pumpkin Festival was killed in the name of Saftyism. I don’t believe our City Council were sad to stop the party, as they claimed, since they have shown very little support to local businesses during the past year and a half.

But the undying Spirit of the true Coast lives on!

Last year, like the citizens of Whoville when the Grinch tried to steal their Christmas, some of us carried on as usual. I had my traditional breakfast at my house, another home hosted the bakery tri-tip sandwiches, and another house hired truck full of pumpkins to come for the kids and fired up a juke box and a bubble machine. We hiked to the graveyard at night and told stories of Pumpkin Festivals Past. In some ways, it was more fun than what the P-Fest had become.

I’m going to count last year as the First year of a new Pumpkin Festival that has grassroots and will grow from the ashes. This year, coming full circle, and the locals are having the fest in the grounds of the IDES, despite the City, just like the first year, a long time ago. Long live the Pumpkin Festival

October 15, 2021
China #2

Don’t be like… China.

A couple of months ago I wrote a little blog about the trip I took to China twenty years ago. Actually it turns out it was only twelve years ago. I’m not too good with Time, but I am good with remembering my gut feelings. I figured out the year I went when someone told me that the Swine Flu pandemic was in 2009. And since I had caught that flu in China, I looked up the videos I took of that trip on my computer, and sure enough, I was there 2009, because my MacBook told me so.

Me in China, 2009

I do remember the date I left for China, only because it was the 4th of July. I got a ride to the airport right after the pancake breakfast, and the red, white and blue Americana hometown-hokey parade. As soon as I was on the plane I missed America. I never felt much patriotism for my country until I spent a couple of weeks in China.

China gave me the creeps. I’ve had the creeps since I was a kid, so it wasn’t all China’s fault; part of it was past conditioning that China triggered. What activates my inner fear? When something is fake, someone is lying, something is inauthentic, and I’m not able to speak my Truth about what I know I see for fear of repercussion. My family system was organized around a big lie, and I prophetically dreamed I found my tongue on the tile floor in the hallway when I was four. Orwell’s 1984 affected me so deeply in 8th grade that I threw the book across my room late at night and huddled under the covers shivering in fear.

And now, during these Covid Times, I wake up with that creepy feeling every day. Maybe those childhood emotions were some kind of premonition that I would be living, right here, right now, in a time where the public narrative is controlled, manipulated, and censored. Not just by the government, but by the news, social media, and worst of all, by each other.

I remember a rare night I was alone while visiting China, with no one around, no one watching my every move. I was in my private cabin on a cruise ship that was floating me down the Yangtze River. It was a relief to be alone for a night, with no roommate, so that I could separate my thoughts from the barrage of information that was being thrown at us teachers who were on the tour. The Three Gorges had given us some spectacular scenery that day, but the brown polluted water and the yellow sky nauseated me. When the tour guides proudly showed us the massive hydroelectric dam the country had built for billions of dollars, and cheerfully explained to us how the government had relocated over a million people in order to flood the river to harness its power, I was further sickened. They explained that the government had built new apartments on higher ground for these displaced farmers, families who had lived for generations on the banks of the river, and the guides pointed out a few of the new structures out to us. I was sure, as I gazed up at the tall, gray, non-descript apartment buildings, void of any character, that these buildings had killed what was left of the river-farming souls of these people. Beyond the polluted sky and water, I was further sickened by the country’s cavalier attitude toward human rights.

Rollin’ down the Yangtze River

My cabin on this luxury cruise ship had a TV, and when I clicked on the remote I found CNN, the only channel that was in English. I felt like family had entered the room. CNN, my trusted friend, the voice of reason, the voice of Truth in this lying god-forsaken country; I was so relieved. God bless the USA where we can breathe and know the real news I thought.

I was finally able to hear about the riots that were going on in the Hubei province of China. The riots had broken out the day that I landed, July 5, 2009, and the only reason I knew about any dissentience going down at all, was because my friends and family had been emailing me, asking if I was all right, if I was anywhere near the violence. I already knew that the Chinese practically invented censorship; I taught that in my 6th grade social studies classes, telling my students that Emperor Qin introduced the concept way back when, with the burning of books and the killing of scholars, the same guy who built all the terra cotta warriors I had gone to China to see.

CNN didn’t censor the riots, in fact they highlighted them in their broadcast, and I was able to see first hand footage of the Uyghur’s protests. Just like in our country’s recent riots, people disagreed as to what turned the protests violent. The Chinese government said the riots were planned, and the Uyghur exile groups said it was because of excessive police force. Laying in my comfy bed, I was grateful to finally be able hear about an event that was going on so close to me, an unbiased account giving multiple points of view, as was what I expected by a news source that I had trusted for years.

Now CNN has turned into some kind of a Propaganda Theater, much like the rhetoric I heard nonstop during my visit to China. I remember the moment I realized CNN had changed, and that day was last year, when Bernie was clearly dominating that first Super Tuesday in practically every state in the running. Even though he was winning, and winning big, Anderson and Don kept dismissing it, saying it was early, it was early, and everyone knew he wasn’t going to ultimately win. Don Lemon said his mama was a black southern Democrat, and she was voting for Biden. I was like, huh? Bernie is crushing it, what are you talking about? Then there was Chris Cuomo dramatically coming upstairs, Live! to reunite with his family after his bout with Covid. I can only stomach watching it for a few minutes now, watching Chris and Don claim their love for each other, and then go on to dramatically denigrate Republicans, or put the fear porn in overdrive regarding the pandemic.

What happened to that news outlet? It’s more like what happened to all news outlets? I’m not going to try to explain the dizzying array of corporate takeovers, anti-trust lawsuits, financial ties and interests, mega-monopolies like Warner Media, China Media Capital, and ATT, merging, divesting, and merging again and all the billion dollar shenanigans mixed with political interests that have gone down in the past few years. Try reading about who owns what in the media and why. I went down an Internet rabbit hole trying to figure it out, and it is so complicated, I don’t want to waste my time trying to understand it anymore. What I have started researching are independent, unbiased news sources that I can trust and follow, and make up my own mind about things.

I didn’t know about all these takeovers and big money behind the scenes, or I didn’t pay attention. All I know is that I felt it on a gut level. Something had changed. Then I saw it in my beloved Chronicle, and heard it on NPR, the background radio of my life for decades. The tone of voice in both of these news sources was fear mongering and sad, even the little bits of music between stories on NPR now has a melancholy sound. I realized that we, the American people, are being manipulated and censored by the media, because of interests that are gigantic, and have absolutely nothing to do with us, down here in Anytown, USA, flipping the remote, or surfing the web.

Back to my China trip, the surrealistic creepy feeling was intensified when we were being given the tour of Tiananmen Square. Like I said last time, no mention was made of the 1989 movement when some brave students protested for democracy and the Chinese government murdered thousands of them. Our cute, young, diminutive tour guide, with her colorful parasol held high so that we could find her among the crowds, made no mention about this incident. As we waited in line to see Mao’s tomb, and the guide spouted off a litany of facts about the square, Mao, Lenin and Marx and the building, I asked her where she gets all her information. She laughingly told me that she looked a lot of it up on Google. I told her that Google tells us about the Tiananmen Square massacre when we look it up, and she told me what she saw made no mention of such a thing.

I remember thinking at the time: Ew! Google censored information for the Chinese government? How could they? I loved Google back then, even the colorful little logo made me happy, like the Disneyland font, and I was proud that my very own Bay Area had started such a cool hip search engine. For someone like me who loves to research, Google was a dream, after years of playing around with microfiche in college libraries trying to find reliable sources for my school papers and theses.

Update, a dozen years later, on those Uyghur people who were rioting back in
2009. Up to a million of them are now living in over 400 giant “re-education”, (more like prison camps), in Xinjiang where these Muslims are having their “thoughts transformed” by the Chinese government. There are close to 400 of these compounds, with over a million people inside.

While listening to the mainstream media news lately, I heard someone mention the word “reprogramming”. The first time, I was cooking dinner, and it was background noise, but my antennae stood at alert. Did I hear that right? Since then I’ve heard this term used at least four other times, and it is in reference to Trump supporters, which is half the country. No, I am not a Trump supporter, but I’m sure they’d find their reasons to reprogram me too. Then I read my beloved Barbara Boxer had registered as a foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance firm called Hikvision, a company that helps with those reprogramming prisons those Uyghurs are interred in. Her job was to provide “strategic consulting services” to the company’s subsidiary here in the US. She later withdrew, but only because people found out. We should all pay attention and ask what is going on.

Let’s be like… what the United States originally stood for. Let’s not be like China.

January 30, 2021