Paul Haeder, Author

so many people want to write their autobiography, their memoirs, but it does take stick-to-it-ness, enlightement, engagement and a purpose for the actual written form . . . . but keep it up!

first appeared in 1/3, Newport News Times

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The entire process of revealing one’s past is an explosion of lamentations, regret, revelation, and reckoning. For the reader, hope is vulcanized in the act of captivating, creation, contemplation and allowing for a bit of the wild side.

Every so often, I tackle eight- or 12-week writing workshops around the genre of memoir. In February, Iwill be hosting this Oregon Coast Community College community ed course titled, “Putting Your WritingPuzzle Together.”

In essence, we are talking about any type of literary writing, but we do find emphasizing one’s memoir as the crux of why people wrangle gumption and stick-to-it attitudes in their attempts at carving out some portion of life that springs from a well of transition, into life lessons, all seeped in surviving life’s school of hard knocks.

This past Fall, students tackled some unbelievable significant emotional and life changing events to process through the memoir writing class we held at Waldport’s OCCC campus.

We’re talking about deep plumbing of family and life circumstances. Imagine, one fellow Zoomed from Wisconsin, and his life story was like a snow plow pushing iced-over snow banks all over the state. He was a young paperboy when he was sexually assaulted by a older man on his route. He was quintessential Wisconsin youth growing up in a town of drinking, bar hoping, beer worshipping, and churches – 55 bars to 42 churches. Booze is king in Wisconsin, and this fellow fought that demon.

Then, for ten years he was shuttled around jails and prisons throughout Wisconsin. The students reveled in his memoir essays dripping with an authentic voice of someone in prison. We had a woman dealing with her unwanted pregnancy being covered up when she was fifteen. In fact, her child was taken by her own mother. Here’s the premise in a nutshell: “Teenage mother gives birth to child in England and then returns to Southern California to call the boy ‘brother.’” Now in her 70’s, hers is a tale of reckoning, recall and family secrets coming out like poison flowing from pours in a sweat lodge.

Decades of drinking and struggling with depression and bi-polar syndrome were another writer’s subject matter. This septuagenarian is dealing with the good life on the Oregon Coast but only after decades of faking it in sales, drinking hard and flogging himself into fugues of almost daily perseverating suicide. This fellow is a poet to boot, so his memoir is quasi-experimental with his poems and others interspersed with his autobiographical stories.

Then we have a mother and daughter who left another state so her daughter could finish her transition. Now high school student, she was born a gendered male, but she had complicated and myriad psychological and hormonal drives to be a girl.

The autobiographical journey is the mother’s journey, with her daughter weighing in: A mother’s story of picking up and leaving other children and her husband behind. Much of this transition had to be secretive, including her own workplace not knowing the circumstance from going from the southwest to Oregon for the transition. The wild side is a state of grace and exploding one’s own myth making, in these workshops. People expose much of their own underbellies, and writer about their deepest fears and sometimes redemptions.

In a time of overblown celebrity – from actors, performers, athletes and rich folk – we need to valorize the people, we the people, the staff of life, regular Joe Blow and Jane Somebody. We need to flip the script, so to speak, and honor those of us who have journeyed paths less traveled.

That sometimes quiet life is undergirded with fantastic accomplishments. If I could bend Oprah’s or Mackenzie Scott Tuttle’s (Bezos’ ex) ear, I’d propose a deeply enriching Netflix series about people in regular circumstances who have survived untold crazy stuff life dishes out. I’d interview them, and then I and other memoir guides would workshop with them to crack open these stories.

Who’d read these incredible tales as paperbacks – sort of a 21st Century “Great Expectations,” without the big bucks and glory? I’ve talked to hundreds of people over the years as a journalist, college writing instructor, and social worker, and hands down, there are 1,001 stories to be told.

As Charles Dickens writes, “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”

Ahh, and even our own Henry Thoreau stated it plainly: “Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

Paul K. Haeder is a novelist, journalist, educator and author of “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” Cirque Press.

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Newspapers are dying dying gone. And Substack and podcasts just will NOT cut it for a community to come together to put feet of the officials and “the man” and businesses and “the government” under a fire.

Emblematic and sad: I ended up with two undergraduate degrees, in 1979, and that journalism one was already leaking big fucking time. Daily newspapers dying, so big, or mid sized cities leaking competitive am and pm rags — and so here we are now, monopolies, bitches and bastards censoring the news since they (billionaires and others with moolah) buy up truth.

The director of Netflix’s Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker movie wants you to stand up for the press

PORTLAND, Ore. – An Oregon weekly newspaper has had to lay off its entire staff and halt print after 40 years because its money was embezzled by a former employee, its editor said, in a devastating blow to a publication that serves as an important source of information in a community that, like many others nationwide, is struggling with growing gaps in local news coverage.

About a week before Christmas, the Eugene Weekly found inaccuracies in its bookkeeping, editor Camilla Mortensen said. It discovered that a former employee who was “heavily involved” with the paper’s finances had used its bank account to pay themselves $90,000 since at least 2022, she said.

The paper also became aware of at least $100,000 in unpaid bills – including to the paper’s printer – stretching back several months, she said.

Additionally, multiple employees, including Mortensen, realized that money from their paychecks that was supposed to be going into retirement accounts was never deposited.

When the paper realized it couldn’t make the next payroll, it was forced to lay off all of its 10 staff members and stop its print edition, Mortensen said. The alternative weekly, founded in 1982, printed 30,000 copies each week to distribute for free in Eugene, the third-largest city in the state and home to the University of Oregon.

“To lay off a whole family’s income three days before Christmas is the absolute worst,” Mortensen said, expressing her sense of devastation. “It was not on my radar that anything like this could have happened or was happening.”

The suspected employee had worked for the paper for about four years and has since been fired, Mortensen said.

The Eugene police department’s financial crimes unit is investigating, and the paper’s owners have hired forensic accountants to piece together what happened, she said.

Brent Walth, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon, said he was concerned about the loss of a paper that has had “an outsized impact in filling the widening gaps in news coverage” in Eugene. He described the paper as an independent watchdog and a compassionate voice for the community, citing its obituaries of homeless people as an example of how the paper has helped put a human face on some of the city’s biggest issues.

He also noted how the paper has made “an enormous difference” for journalism students seeking internships or launching their career. He said there were feature and investigative stories that “the community would not have had if not for the weekly’s commitment to make sure that journalism students have a place to publish in a professional outlet.”

A tidal wave of closures of local news outlets across the country in recent decades has left many Americans without access to vital information about their local governments and communities and has contributed to increasing polarization, said Tim Gleason, the former dean of the University of Oregon’s journalism school.

“The loss of local news across the country is profound,” he said. “Instead of having the healthy kind of community connections that local journalism helps create, we’re losing that and becoming communities of strangers. And the result of that is that we fall into these partisan camps.”

An average of 2.5 newspapers closed per week in the U.S. in 2023, according to researchers at Northwestern University. More than 200 counties have no local news outlet at all, they found, and more than half of all U.S. counties have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper. (source = Embezzlement of Oregon weekly newspaper’s money forces it to lay off entire staff and halt print — AP [and AP is a shadow of itself!!] )

News Deserts and At-Risk Communities

Speaking of attention deficit and ADD and ADHD and ODD and nervous ticks and lobotomies vis-a-vis Chromebooks . . . . !

More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets!

by Paul Haeder / February 1st, 2023

Yah, I am training to be a school bus driver. I’ve written about it in previous pieces, and that’s First Student, a foreign outfit in 49 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and it’s an equity firm out of Belgium. Bidding on school district transportation contracts far and wide, and alas, this Belgium company is getting paid by guess who?

USA and Canadian taxpayers footing the bill and reaping the poor services. This is what they call the public-private arrangement, again, what is a low level form of socialized payola for private companies while the taxpayer is screwed. As if the public and our governments and our states and our  national funding can’t take care of OUR own children’s food, education, and transportation needs: we have to go to a private equity fund to handle schools shuttling. How long will I last is a crap shoot, since this is it for Lincoln County — no luck getting past interviews for county, city and state jobs as a case manager or services coordinator, even though there is that great 10 million shortfall of men dropping out of the workforce.

Oh, shit, I’m almost 66, with too many college degrees and a resume way too long to get very far.

Ahh, I’m also a social worker, educator, writer, journalist and even someone in urban and regional planning, but I can’t get past the interview stage. Missing men, well, there are many reasons for this new phenomenon. In the uncritical thinking USA, we will not get much deep analyses, though, just plain black and white rationales.

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The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond: a loss of enrollment revenue, less viewpoint diversity on campus, and fewer men in jobs that require some college education. Some academics want to make clear that just because women outnumber men in college it doesn’t mean that gender-equity issues no longer remain.

This collection of Chronicle articles features news stories, analysis, advice, and opinion essays, including several articles that sounded a warning years ago. It also looks at how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there.

Section 1: Why Don’t Men Go to College?

Section 2: How Can Colleges Draw More Men?

Section 3: Deconstructing the Gender Gap

Don’t get me started on the nanny state, the reverse sexism, the anti-feminism bullshit female empowerment. Don’t get me started on the battle of the sexes, and don’t get me started on the sheeple aspect of education, social work, and nonprofit work. Don’t get me started, man.

I can go down a thousand rabbit holes or warrens, but the thing is I come back out, revitalized, smarter, and, sure more pissed off. This is the state of the world, under capitalism. A Belgium company in the USA and Canada is monopolizing on school transportation. No union shop, $19 an hour here in Lincoln county where home prices and gasoline and food are outrageous and where other districts might pay more per hour.

Again, it’s a bunch of older folk, mostly women, driving buses at age 67, 71, 78. What the hell is that about?

I have also been a substitute teacher in this district, and I’ve written about that too: “Take Down this Blog, or Else! No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans.” Of course, I was and still am mad as hell at my banishment teaching, and can’t accept it, or take it. Even writing this will get me scrutinized by those overlords of the HR subhuman species who spend countless millions of dollars a year on software applications that do snazzy background checks, credit checks, employment checks, reference checks, drug checks, and of course, in my case, Google Scans/Checks, looking for any anti-this or anti-that diatribes or even plain old inverted triangle journalism.

Let’s scoot over to the issue of the failing male, the males in the womb, those just out of the womb, and then the developing baby, child, kid, teen and we end up with 355 million Americanos and a shit load of chronic illnesses for EVERYONE, including the poor child, babes in the woods. The top ten:

What are the 7 main types of learning disabilities? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that developmental disabilities occur among all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Children from ages 3 through 17 frequently have one or more developmental disabilities, such as:

• ADHD
• Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Cerebral Palsy
• Hearing Loss
• Intellectual Disability
• Learning Disability
• Vision Impairment
• Developmental Delays

In particular, psychology professionals should study these seven learning disabilities:

• Auditory processing disorder. …
• Language processing disorder. …
• Nonverbal learning disabilities. …
• Visual perceptual/visual motor deficit.
• Types of Learning Disabilities

• Dyscalculia A specific learning disability that affects a person’s ability to understand numbers and learn math facts.

• Dysgraphia A specific learning disability that affects a person’s handwriting ability and fine motor skills.

• Dyslexia A specific learning disability that affects reading and related language-based processing skills.

• Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities Has trouble interpreting nonverbal cues like facial expressions or body language and may have poor coordination.

• Oral / Written Language Disorder and Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit Learning disabilities that affect an individual’s understanding of what they read or of spoken language. The ability to express one’s self with oral language may also be impacted.

Related Disorders—

• ADHD A disorder that includes difficulty staying focused and paying attention, controlling behavior and hyperactivity.

• Dyspraxia A disorder which causes problems with movement and coordination, language and speech.

So here we are at, now, in a society with so many epigentic, developmental, gestational, chromosomal and neuro disabilities. So many youth are faced with a lifetime of struggle, even before crawling, and then in pre-K and then K12, and then as adults. If this were a socially just society, there would be trillions spent on finding out the causes and effects and then the effects as new causes for new effects on the individual gestating, and what it is that makes this such a prevalent issue in our Western Society. Schools are warehouses, for sure, and the school to prison pipeline is not some goof-ball concept. We’d be looking hard at the chemicals, the stressors, the mother and father and their own stressors. All the toxins in air, water, food, drugs, including EMFs, and just the lack of nutrition, the fatty liver disease in 1/3 of folk, and the failing sperm counts in men since 1950, and, well, the discussion of who is that village that takes to raise a child.

Everything in capitalism is ANTI-health, ANTI-human, ANTI-Learning, ANTI-community engagement. More and more children, and yes, mostly boys, are monitored in the classroom, those prisons, and the effect or affect is that there is little significant learning and developing going on inside the school and their brains. They are a nerved up/out or nervous wreck, and they are watched and graded and sent home with behavior reports.

Now is the time to pity the child. Our children, and of course, all those children hit with the wagers of war, the wagers of sanctions, the wagers of economic and health and food sanctions. Depleted uranium or lead in the pipes. All of those realities also tie into the flagging mental health, the growing pressures put upon mother, father, child, grandparents, the lot of them in education, et al.

This is the sickness of America:

In solidarity with Cuba, leaders and activists of all Left and democratic parties of India welcomed Aleida Guevara in Surjeet Bhavan.

To a packed hall, Aleida said that it is one thing to talk about an economic blockade and quite another to live under that blockade.

She narrated how no country was ready to even give easily available medicine for a five-year-old child only because of the fear of America. In spite of not being a milk producing country, Cuba supplies one litre milk daily for all children and the aged, by importing it from New Zealand which is expensive because of the high transportation costs.

They were forced to buy milk from far away New Zealand, as their northern neighbour, US is not ready to trade with Cuba. The sixty years of illegal and inhumane US blockade has taught Cuba to spread humanism through sending doctors to wherever they were in need. Cuba is just 90 kilometres away from the mighty imperialist super power US. Even then it can’t be defeated since it believes in the scientific principle of people’s unity and those who are united can never be defeated. “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido” (The people united, shall always be victorious). She said Cuba took arms for peace and defending their motherland. She asserted that Cuba believes in standing up for equality against any kind of barbarism in the world. Thanking the people of India for always standing with Cuba, she said that the people of Cuba will always treasure this solidarity and value it immensely. (source)

Milk, man, and the United Snakes of America is so so powerful, going after children far and wide. You know, Cuba never attacked the USA, never went to war, and alas, this is the power of the dirty capitalists, war mongers and some sick psychopaths. Medicines, medical equipment, air conditioners, food, and energy. This is the way of the rat, the USA RATON.

The entire psychiatry and psychology and sociology of oppression is what runs modern Western society. There are no right ways now to raise children, to support families, and to build community. It’s all about the private sector sucking up as much as the public sector can regurgitate to this thieves. While the children suffer, and while the entire shooting match is toast as we in a culture of pollution and gestational crimes and constant bombardment of children with poisons —  from those in the plastics, chicken nuggets, lawn sprays, all the off gassing, all those artificial flavors — find it harder and harder to survive all the death traps that we know this society is unleashing at an earlier and earlier age.

We are in an age of behavior adjustment, brainwashing, mind control, sinister Stockholm Syndrome, general anxiety disorders created by social media and generalized hatefulness from the legislators and two-bit politicians. Checked out or challenged just looking at a book, we are in the new normal of trillion$ for the pigs of war, for SWAT teams, for the opposition to beat us down, to implode the family, to eradicate the human and humane family. These kiddos come onto the bus with behavior plans, with their little classroom check slips for the parents to mull over at home.

Oh, what is enlightenment? “Behavior charts and similar public shaming methods don’t teach self-regulation. They mainly harm vulnerable learners.” The following is pretty light weight compared to the scenes I have been enmeshed in as a substitute teacher in special education and blended classrooms. Believe me.

Mr. Hill stops reading aloud to his 4th grade students and turns to Anisa. “Anisa, you’re off task. Change your clip. I asked you once and you are still digging in your desk. Walk over and change it now.”

Anisa stands and walks across the classroom. Several of her peers make condescending comments under their breath. Anisa moves her clip from green to yellow and returns to her desk and puts her head down. Her nonverbal behaviors indicate that she’s angry, hurt, and frustrated.

A few minutes later, Josh raises his hand. Mr. Hill calls on him and Josh responds, “Anisa is off task again.”

Mr. Hill looks at Anisa and says, “Again? Please change your clip to red. One more problem and it will be another call home. You have to learn to pay attention.” (Source: Tear Down Your Behavior Chart! Lee Ann Jung Dominique Smith)

Read the book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freire gives the term “freedom” a specific meaning: it is the freedom to critically question and change the world. In other words, a person is free when they are able to understand and change their own conditions.

For Freire, education and oppression are connected, since education can be used either as a tool for oppression or as a method  of liberation from oppression. Freire distinguishes between a pedagogy (a way of practicing education) that serves oppressors, and one that helps oppressed people understand and change their society. According to Freire, “freedom” (the freedom to critically question and change the world) requires people to gain a new understanding of how reality works. Changing the dominant understanding of history is a key part of this process. Freire sees education as useful not just for individual growth, but also for achieving social change. To expand on this point, he discusses social change as a necessary tool to achieve freedom and overthrow oppression. Within Freire’s framework, systems of oppression try to prevent radical social change so that they do not lose power. Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire draws heavily on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—especially the concept of dialectics. A “dialectical” way of thinking starts with a “thesis” (an initial idea or proposition) and an “antithesis” (an idea that opposes or contradicts the thesis), and the interaction of these two ideas creates a “synthesis,” or a new idea that reconciles the conflict between the two original ideas. (some clipped notes)

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Feeling the burn yet, the absolute oppression instilled in the greatest country and system the world has ever seen?

Get a little primer on exactly what capitalism and inflation and the systems of Milton Friedman are all about here:

So when you say that inflation is only a monetary phenomenon, what Milton Friedman is saying is, “Don’t look at the power structure. Don’t look at how markets are structured. Don’t look at monopolies. Don’t look at how the wealthy corporations are inflating [prices]. Look at something that we can blame on labor.”

The inflation that Milton Friedman talks about — and you just mentioned my old boss’s boss Paul Volcker — is wages. So when the Federal Reserve talks about inflation, they say, “It’s really wages rising.” Well, we know that wages have not risen anywhere near as fast as the cost of living, so that can’t be the reason — that wages are rising.

But if you can claim that inflation is only caused by labor making too much money and hurting other workers as consumers, then you have the Federal Reserve able to come in and say, “We’ve got to have a depression. We’ve got to have unemployment. We’re going to raise interest rates because we want more unemployment to increase the reserve army of the unemployed so that wage earners will be so desperate for a job that they’ll work for less. And if only they worked for less, then prices will come down, if somehow the companies are going to lower their prices because they can pay their labor less.”

The pretense is that it’s all labor’s fault.

We are all on this behavior and consequence chart. We, that is, the 80 Percenters who have 8 percent of wealth in the USA, compared to the Point Zero Zero One Percent, the One Percent and 19 Percent holding 92 percent of the money-power-possession chart. We mustn’t act up, mustn’t question the boss, mustn’t wonder why the oppressors are our neighbors, the ones our taxpaying work funds, or why so many Americanos believe this is it for Nirvana — the USA, greatest invention in human kind since the wheel.

Oh, those progressives are capitalists to their bones:

Liz Warren shifted from supporting Medicare for All to advocating a two-phased approach intended to build support for a single-payer model (in which the federal government would provide health insurance for every person in the U.S.), by first creating a federally based plan to compete with private insurers and expanding access to Medicare. Elizabeth Warren Says She’s ‘a Capitalist To My Bones’ And Positions Herself as FDR’s Heir

And that is THAT capitalism —

“Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Rupa Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Raj Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.” (“Inflamed”: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness)

Imagine that, all those children, and I am not talking about those with allergies, with multiple chronic illnesses, including diabetes and asthma, caught in this vice which is CAPITALISM.

Daily, we are oppressed, and as the digital oppressors get more powerful, everything about us will be transhumanist, and we will be abiding by retinal scans, saliva analyses, galvanic skin response tests, and then the body will be the internet of physiology, the absolute bot world of nano things controlling the entire human experience, and that’s not just heart rate and BP, but thoughts.

Below, I find these on the bus floors much of the time. The children leave them in their desks at school. They are on the playgrounds with orange peels wrapped inside. Oh, the behaviorists. The mind benders. The psyops, the dead-end Americans, paying for the tools of Nazi War, and now, how many teachers are talking about the Doomsday Clock to their high schoolers, just to broach the issue?

Hell, people do not talk about Ukraine and the pimping of weapons of child-killing in public or at the workplace. These bosses, like the Belgium First Student honchos, send memos out on what can and cannot be said during election A or election B at the workplace.

And we wonder why so many neuro-normal (sic) people are checked out. Trauma: The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank, baby, trauma!

This is Startup to Storefront, and on today’s episode, we are unpacking the science of how to get unstuck. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the title of the book written by our guest today: author, psychotherapist, and trauma specialist, Britt Frank. Britt knows a thing or two about getting unstuck, as she has battled everything from meth addiction to sexual abuse. She emerged from that trauma with a new outlook on life, a Master of Social Work degree, and a desire to help others overcome their own hurdles. These hurdles vary from individual to individual, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s not uncommon for someone to put up a mental blockade that prevents them from moving forward. Getting over this mental blockade that inhibits you from progressing forward is what we are dissecting today.

In today’s episode we discuss:

– Why you don’t need every friend to be a best friend

– How Covid didn’t create a mental health crisis, it just exposed the one we already had

– The power behind changing your why’s to whats. So roll up your sleeves and let’s start the process of getting unstuck.

The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank,

Ahh, my friend in Wisconsin, Mister Fish or Toothless in North Arkansas, well, he sent me this. God we hate judges (sic) and DA’s and PB’s and lawyers of any kind. We will all be on Zoom or in cages facing the criminal injustice system.