Priests to be Excommunicated if They Follow the Law & MAGA wants to Blacklist Performers who Refuse to Perform for Them
May 13, 2025
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: The importance of education to individual happiness and a thriving society should not be underestimated.
Catholic Church To Excommunicate Priests for Following New US State Law: This is a complex issue involving the separation of Church and State and the greater good.
MAGA Kennedy Center Boss Demands Anti-Trump ‘Les Misérables’ Stars Get Blacklisted: After banning certain artists and performers from the Kennedy Center for being too liberal, the head wants to blacklist performers who ban the Kennedy Center.
Big US cities are sinking. This map shows where the problem is the worst.: Texas is facing the worst sinkage as the state’s government denies climate change.
This Makes Me Smile: Trump's Education Secretary mocked after critics spot embarrassing grammatical errors in threatening letter to Harvard: She wrote a letter that wouldn’t pass high school English, complaining of Harvard’s low educational standards. Should she be the one to judge this?
Kareem’s Video Break: This is the kind of older brother every kid needs.
Kareem’s Sports Moments: This badminton rally is exhausting—and inspiring.
Stevie Wonder Sings “Visions”: Stevie imagines a world I want to live in.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986), American journalist
Many great quotes about education celebrate its importance to our children and society’s future. What I like about this one is its use of the mirrors versus windows metaphor that reveals the sinister challenge to education.
Right now, the Trump administration has its foot on the neck of higher education, trying to threaten it into compliance with its regressive, anti-democratic vision of America. At the same time, his GOP lackeys are going after K-12 education by restricting teaching accurate history, banning books, and injecting religion (only Christianity) into classes.
This is part of his four-pronged “Dumbing Down of America” attack on all the accurate sources of information and critical thinking: the legal system (he’s going after law firms who represented people suing him and judges who rule against him), the free press (he’s suing news platforms that disagree while making at least half a dozen Fox News people part of his administration), the arts (he’s taken over The Kennedy Center and is now trying to interfere with Hollywood studios), and education.
No image reveals this narcissism better than that of a mirror because it symbolizes the need for the unimaginative, the insecure, and the petty tyrants to remake the world in their own image. What they see in the mirror isn’t strength and determination, it’s fear. They are afraid of a world that evolves into something other than what they know and hold precious, not because it is good or right, but because it is familiar and comforting. The changes they initiate are rarely forward-thinking, but almost always a plea to return to a time when they and their kind felt powerful and important.
They may engage in hi-tech business and cryptocurrency and whatever else will make them money, but the social and political values they force onto everyone else are what they see when they look in the mirror: the teachings of their parents, their religion, and their traditions. The world is a Hallmark version of a Thanksgiving dinner, and they are always at the head of the table, slicing the turkey. To them, education is a means to train the lower classes to do a job, pay taxes, and obey authority. Independent thinking is discouraged.
Instead, education is restricted to recreating their experience to produce clones of themselves. Their mantra is, “I turned out okay, so it’s good enough for others.” This statement actually reveals that they did not turn out okay as far as education goes, because someone properly educated would know that they are not always the best judge of how they turned out. They’re using circular logic, another indication they didn’t turn out okay.
But, oh, the loveliness of windows. Even in school, when we stared out the windows during class, we imagined our soon-to-come adventures out there in the world. We saw ourselves as changing, maturing, becoming famous or admired people. But the more we learned about the world, the more educated we became—the better we were able to differentiate between childish fantasies of self-aggrandizement and finding fulfillment, not in being a figure of envy, but in being a loving part of the community.
In this world of windows, education teaches us a profession, sure, but it also teaches us empathy, compassion, curiosity, self-discipline, and the necessity of questioning everything before arriving at opinions.
In 1973, Drake High School in North Dakota school board members burned 32 copies of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five because they found some of the language “obscene.” Drake Public School Board President Charles McCarthy said he didn't think the book was fit for children. Vonnegut wrote to the school board to express his disappointment:
November 16, 1973
Dear Mr. McCarthy:
I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.
Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.
I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?
He did not receive a reply. More than 50 years later, we’re still fighting the same issues about education because the least creative, innovative, and rational thinkers among us think they know something about education when they clearly don’t. No windows for them, only mirrors.