Upstander Reflections

One thing that I have learned in my career as a high school teacher is that I should never try too hard to catch someone doing something wrong. I find that when I do, I tend to miss everything else that’s going on. For example, let’s say a student is on her phone in my classroom but she is concealing it in her bag. I know she is on her phone but I also know that this is a difficult crime to prove. If I accuse her of being on her phone, all she has to say is, “no, I was looking for my pencil.” What do I do then? Empty her bag? Check her phone and hope that something she was doing had a timestamp on it so I can prove she was using it at the exact time I accused her of using it? As the meme says, “ain’t nobody got time for that!”        If I concentrate too much on this infraction, my teaching suffers. Learning suffers. Or, maybe, I miss some blatant infraction that is occurring on the other side of the classroom. So, what do you do, Mr. Walsh? D...

A few weeks ago, a group of predominantly White, Catholic high school boys, many wearing Make America Great Again (MAGA) hats, attended a pro-life rally in Washington, DC. They were harassed by a group of Black adults that call themselves Hebrew Israelites. In turn, the Catholic boys had a bit of a stand-off with a Native American man beating a drum that had just attended an Indigenous Peoples march. This whole situation went viral and sides have been taken. Students from Covington Catholic in “stand-off” with Native American Nathan Williams I know what it’s like to chaperone a group of teenagers in Washington DC during tumultuous times. I chaperoned 24 mostly Hispanic students at President Trump's inauguration . I can relate. I am also Catholic and attended an all boys, predominantly White Catholic high school. My school was once on the cover of the Chicago Tribune for chanting Buckwheat to a Black basketball player of an opposing team. I can relate.   Need...

Dear American Leadership, Sorry it took a few days to formulate a rebuttal. I had to go to work. You see, when my co-workers and I have an issue or a disagreement, we have to work it out, compromise and move forward. There is no “shutdown” option.   Mr. President, I appreciate how you addressed the nation about a topic you feel strongly about. I admire your conviction and determination. Yet, I’m afraid that you are misguided. I’m not sure if you believe the things you say or if you have some ulterior motive. You have done a good job keeping us guessing. Congratulations on that, If that was even your plan. However, one thing is for certain: You have conjured up an immediate and pressing crisis on an issue that has been long standing. An analogy I would like to use is “water in the basement.” I’m not sure if you’ve ever dealt with this but to us regular Americans, this is a common occurrence. Basements take in water. Illegal immigration is much like “water in basement.” It...

As a high school history teacher, I have the luxury of spending time thinking about things that the average adult just doesn’t have time to think about. For example, I just spent several weeks looking at how propaganda was used to divide Americans into “us” and “them” groups throughout our history. It is clear from studying the primary sources that from the moment Columbus got off the boat, there was a concentrated effort to create an “us” group (Europeans) and a “them” (everyone else) group in North America. At first, the targets were the Natives and Africans slaves. As time passed, Catholics, Jews and the Chinese were added to the “them” group. Over time, Catholics had two advantages that allowed them to claw out of the “them” group. 1. Skin color 2. Sheer numbers. However, to this day Non-Whites and Jews are still the “other” in America.     The narrative since World War II has tried to tell a different story. America supported the development of Israel...

It’s a cold, grey and wet weekend in Chicago. This is normal. It’s October, what do you expect? My Dad used to walk around the house lamenting these kind of days when I was a kid. At random moments he would simply bellow out in a loud and deliberate voice “cold, grey, wet October!” Us kids would be like, “yeah, what’s your point?” He didn’t have one. I think he was just moved by certainty of Chicago autumn. It always came. It was always cold. It was alway grey. It was always wet. It was part of life in Chicago. Clearly, it still is. Cold, Grey, Wet October! In the 1980s and 90s I grew up with a lot of certainties. Some simple, like “the Cubs and Sox will never win the World Series” and “you don’t put ketchup on hotdogs.” Other certainties were more profound like “boys will be boys” and “snitches get stitches”. Well… the Cubs and the Sox have won the World Series and I don’t really eat hot dogs anymore. You can see where my loyalties lie... This week tho...

There are few phrases in America today that create more division than the phrase, “the police.” When I was growing up and I heard the phrase, “the police,” I thought about Officer Friendly, my friends’ dads and the people that would save me if the “bad guys” ever got to me. When I got a little older and started to interact more with people who were African Americans, I learned that many of them had a completely different view of “the police.” That phrase to them meant racial profiling, police brutality, and the guys that might lock them up, hurt them or kill them unjustly. As far as I could tell, it was a Black and White issue. White people admired “the police.” Black people feared them. This Norman Rockwell painting is a great depiction  of how I grew up viewing “the police”. Source However, over the course of the past several years and with the help of digital media technology, many White folks have abandon their traditional view of Officer Friendly. Liberal Whit...

It’s 4am and I can’t sleep. The cries of children woke me up. Not my children. Not the ones down the hall sleeping comfortably in separate spacious bedrooms in the safety of their own home. The cries that woke me up permeate out of a detention center about a thousand miles south of here. The cries for “papa and mama” float across the Great Plains and into the Midwest. They drift along the southern border and up the west coast. They skirt though the deep south and up into New England. Can you hear them? During the day, I cannot hear them. There is too much noise. We are busy. We have meetings to get to. We have jobs to get done. We have vacations to plan. Mom needs flowers on Mother’s Day. We have to call dad on Father’s Day. The kids need to get picked up. They need to get dropped off. Phones get lost. Grandma is in the hospital. Life is swirling all around us and we’re just trying to keep up. But at night, after I tuck my kids into bed and tell them I love them, af...