Helping college students be careful readers and careful listeners

I finished the book Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. It was recommended by one of my doctors. I kept it in the car and read it while waiting, like at a doctor’s office. The book is about the best way to breathe and some of the good things that can happen when we do it right. We all know how to breathe. We’ve been doing it as long as we’ve been alive. The chest goes out and in and the diaphragm goes up and down. It happens even we don’t even think about it. Until recently doctors figured if air got into the lungs it didn’t matter how it got there and all was good. But it does matter. Nestor and a colleague spent ten days with their noses plugged, breathing through their mouths. Their health deteriorated. During the next ten days they taped their mouths shut (except when eating), breathing through their noses. Their health dramatically improved. Breathing through the nose has a large beneficial impact on our health. And this is a lot more than the nose providing filtering. For more details than that read the book. Nestor then reviewed various practices that involve breathing. For example, many religious and spiritual traditions involve repeatedly chanting a phrase. Nestor saw that most of those phrases took five to six seconds to say. Which meant one took a breath about every ten to twelve seconds. It is the slowed breathing that produces the calming effect of these spiritual practices. Through the book Nestor reviewed the literature of various people who had great success in treating breathing disorders such as emphysema. Alas, these people usually didn’t have a medical degree and were criticized and ignored by the medical community. But then the medical community didn’t do actual scientific studies that verified or refuted what these breathing pioneers were able to do. These practices were lost or left to the fringe. We exhale carbon dioxide. In high concentrations CO2 is indeed bad – just ask any astronaut who has to repair a CO2 scrubber. However, Nestor learned that well below the danger threshold CO2 actually has benefits that we don’t see because normal breathing expels it before it can rise to beneficial levels. And our bodies strongly resist doing what is necessary to raise CO2 levels. Again, read the book. Starting about 300 years ago our species became really bad at breathing. Large numbers of us had and have facial and tooth deformities that impeded breathing. Nestor went looking for what happened for humans worldwide to have breathing problems. The answer is industrialized food. I mentioned it to my friend and debate partner at lunch and he thought of mechanized processing of food, which happened more recently than 300 years ago. But in checking the book Nestor means shifting from hunting and gathering to agriculture. I can hear my friend say but that happened much longer ago than 300 years. While true, agriculture didn’t become a worldwide thing until about 300 years ago. And what’s wrong with industrialized food? It is softer and needs less chewing. Exercising our jaw muscles keeps our facial bones in good shape and can even restore bone long after doctors thought bones stopped growing. That means the worst way to imbibe a meal is through a smoothee, where all the ingredients are pureed and there is no chewing involved. A way out of this is chewing gum (though your dentist will want it to be sugar free). Nestor also suggests Turkish Falim (sugarless mint is good) or mastic (which has a nasty taste). Both give the jaw muscles a good workout. As for how and why this works, read the book. I keep a book in the car, usually one that is good for reading in small spurts over months. For the rate I discuss books I’ve read I also have a book in the house that I read while eating and in bed. It is also a story that benefits in reading it in weeks rather than months. I mention all that because I also finished my house book. It is the novel Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. Mungo, now a boy of 15, was named after a patron saint of Glasgow, where the story is set. He would have preferred to be named for St. David or St. John. He lives in a Protestant housing scheme with his sister Jodie, two years older, who essentially takes care of him. His mother is an alcoholic and frequently absent. His brother Hamish, four years older, lives with the girl he got pregnant, their daughter, and her family. Hamish is essentially a gang leader and prone to violence. Mungo’s father was killed several years before. At the start of the story Mungo’s mother sends him off on a fishing weekend with two men she met at AA meetings (attendance has not yet affected her drinking). The purpose is to make a man of Mungo. We gay guys know that that’s code for. The two men are too involved in their drink to adequately prepare for and lead the trip. From the start we know this trip won’t end well. Then the story backs up a few months to explain why Mungo was sent off with the men and we jump between the two stories. That explanation is simple: Mungo falls in love with James. Not only do they have to deal with homophobia they have to deal with James being Catholic. James is without a mother and his father works at an oil rig and is home only two weeks out of four, so James is essentially raising himself and saving money to escape Glasgow, where he sees no future for himself. When Hamish finds out Mungo’s new pal is Catholic he demands Mungo join him a Friday night fight against the Catholic boys or he’ll hurt James. When James learns of this demand he tells Mungo if you go battle Catholic boys don’t come back to me. Stuart is an excellent writer and I learned a lot of what living in Glasgow’s housing schemes are like. At times it was a struggle to read dialog representing the Scottish accent and to figure out what Scottish slang meant. Alas, with all the violence the book isn’t an easy book to enjoy. Hunter of Daily Kos discussed a recent episode of Mike Huckabee’s TV show. Ol’ Huck had been a candidate for president and a former national moral scold. The episode includes this bit:

Here's the problem, if these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning, or even running in 2024, it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.

Yeah, that Mafia don threat again. Hunter agrees:

Again, it's the stuff of the militia movements. Every fascist couches their predicted revolution in this same "look what you made us do" language. If Trump does not win his election because prosecutors had the audacity to indict him, then it will be evidence that President Joe F--king Biden, who to everybody's knowledge has been staying as far away as possible from every Trump investigation, must be defeated with "bullets." And this is why the Republican base has turned fascist so quickly. It's because they've had two decades of people like Huckabee hitting all of fascism's notes—the paranoia, propaganda, and demonization of enemies and insistence that the time for violence is coming up Real Soon Now. Of course, the base believes it. Of course, the base believes their Dear Leaders should be able to do crimes and face no consequences.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos almost four weeks ago discusses how a group of thirteen American universities are partnering to elevate free speech and counter threats to democracy. The campaign was created by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars with funding from the Knight Foundation. The nation is in deep political polarization and higher education should show a better way for people to speak across differences in civil ways. The efforts includes such things as Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University, will lead a freshman course to examine the meaning of democracy and ask students to help design a program for the university to improve civic education. The nonprofit PEN America offers training, including showing why protections for free speech matter. Lucas Morel is a professor of politics at Washington and Lee University and chair of the Academic Fredom Alliance wants more colleges to embrace this mission and help students become engaged citizens. He said:

If we don’t do a good job of helping them be careful readers and careful listeners, it stands to reason that as citizens they won’t be careful listeners and careful expressors of their own thought. And it will be difficult for us to function as a self-governing society.