Checkmate or Stalemate
By Charles Peek
The Sunday March 26 edition of CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” carried a report on some elementary school kids in Mississippi. These particular kids were fortunate enough to have had a dedicated guy move to town and start a chess club. In the process of teaching kids to play chess, he and others involved also teach them a good deal of history, geography, and of course logic. The story, however, only concerns chess as a means, a vehicle that has transformed the kids’ outlooks on themselves and their futures.
There were at least three gratifying elements in the report.
- One was the mother of one of the kids. She runs a lunch room but is so proud of her child, and proud that the child will end up amounting to more than the parent in terms of jobs, prospects, and outlook. That’s a good Mom.
- Another was the palpable increase in self-esteem and the ability of the students to articulate ideas. That’s real education.
- And, as you might expect but almost now incidentally, the third was the chess team’s showing at the Nashville competition in which they made it into the top ten, out of hundreds of kids competing. The report showed one of them toppling his opponent’s King in a checkmate. That’s a rare form of success.
[blatantly purloined from Chess Daily’s online images]
The most poignant moment for me, however, was one comment from one of the kids to the CBS interviewer. The youngster said that one of the most rewarding features for him was that, outside of where he lived, he knew most people thought he and his friends were too stupid to achieve anything of value, to learn anything like chess. They’d showed all those who doubted them.
Maybe in private the interviewer was able to “correct” the boy’s perception. I wish I could.
I would say to the boy, I’ve known lots of people who know something about Mississippi and I don’t know a single person who thinks Mississippi’s kids are too stupid to learn or achieve or master complex skills.
It is true that most of us would not have predicted that they WOULD do that, but not because we would assume that they COULD NOT do that. Our failure to predict their success would have been based on a very realistic view of the vast array of forces surround them, forces that most often combine to see that they DON’T do that!
Most formidable of all, of course, is that, unlike the proud parent interviewed (and to be fair, apparently, lots of other parents as well), there will be the tendency of many parents to hold their kids back for fear they will outshine the parents or leave the community or question the values their parents believe in.
Such a push followed by pull force is by no means found only in Mississippi; it is a common denominator of marginalized tribes of people who have many legitimate reasons to see the education of their children as a threat to their status quo, to their hanging on to the little they have of material goods and human dignity. Where I live, one sees it often in the reservation schools in which the good parental instinct to get their kids an education comes up against the tribal fear of where getting an education might take them. The fear kicks in about the time the kids really start to learn.
But unconscious or conscious, parental fears of “losing” their children and thus their way of life are abetted by less understandable and less sympathetic forces. One will be their state government, which will not invest heavily in what will “liberate” these kids from their impoverished backgrounds. If the state were doing so, there would have been no need for an “outsider” to come in and start a chess club to educate children through the “back door.”
To be sure, there are lots of good, enlightened, progressive citizens in Mississippi, and where they can, they do a lot of good, despite having to expend their energies as a “counter culture.” And again, to be sure this is not the only state where things fall out this way. Just check out, for instance, Oklahoma and what is happening to its school budgets and therefore its schools and therefore its most marginalized students.
That is now exactly what is just ahead on the road for Kansas and just around the corner for Nebraska where the short-sighted “Grover Norquist no taxes” sentiments of a majority of voters have put into power a wrecking crew of governors and legislators whose policies threaten generations of our forebears’ investments in education, environmental preservation, and health care, and even now deny access to the little that’s left of those investments to the neediest of our citizens. No wonder the Mississippi kids needed a chess club!
Now, to be fair, states are often under budgetary restraints as well. They may be making the wrong choices, but one has to admit that the choices are often hard.
Which brings us to the most heinous of the forces arrayed against such kids as “60 Minutes” highlighted: the tribe of bigoted billionaires who profit from a fear-invoking, divide-and-conquer war on American values in an effort to benefit the billionaires at the expense of the least able to bear the burden…at the expense of the kids of Mississippi, these kids, the kids saved by a chess club.
This is the blot on the nation released by the Trump campaign and presidency, as though those who engineered and financed Trump weren’t already rich enough, did not already keep enough people in poverty of mind and body. Sad to say, these are the billionaires that the “churches” of the prosperity gospel valorize. And this is the glib club of billionaires that make their money off of oil and tar sands and carbon and assure us that 97% of the world’s scientists are wrong about climate change and global warming. These are the boastful braggarts who feel no call to promote anyone’s good but their own. These are folks about whom we learn something shameful almost daily now. These are the folks who enjoy the accolades of 85+% of white male evangelicals in America!
Some blame, of course, accrues to the gullibility of those they exploit! As Edward R. Murrow said, “No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” [quote taken from Anu Garg’s Wordsmith site]
It would be a kindness to the children if, while congratulating the kids on their new sense of their abilities, the new dignity that has come to their sense of self, someone would assure them that we did not ever think they were stupid.
[photo from CBS online images]
It would be a kindness to explain to them that there are social and economic forces around them of which no one expects a child to be aware but which, without some intervening liberating force, seeks to circumscribe their lives forever for the enrichment of a few whose riches have already destroyed their owners’ souls. Chess, and its checking of kings, may just be the right venue for learning about outwitting and overcoming tyranny!
And then, at some point as they grow up, it might be a kindness, too, to warn them and the bright young man that opened the way for them, that their would-be exploiters and oppressors will not be happy with the news of their liberation, that there will be a price to pay someday for not staying in their place and remaining blissfully ignorant of their possibilities.
They will have allies, but they will need to learn who they are and how to find them, and then learn, too, how much allies help even up the enormous odds now arrayed against us all.
Kearney, Nebraska
April 25, 2017
Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist
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Chuck Peek’s award winning poetry has been published in several journals, as well as in the chapbook, Where We’ve Managed Somehow to Be (Wayne State College Press, 2014) and Breezes on Their Way to Being Winds (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Breezes was selected for Talking Books and won the 2016 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Another poem appeared in the March 6, 2017, “This American Life in Poetry.” Parson’s Porch recently published a book of his sermons preached over two decades at Cather events in Grace Church (Episcopal), Red Cloud: Speaking Aloud at Grace Church. He is currently working on his first book of fiction. Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska Kearney, Fulbright Scholar (China 2005, 2008), and winner of Nebraska Center for the Book’s Mildred Bennett Award for fostering the literary arts, Peek has made invited presentations for the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference and the Willa Cather Foundation, both nationally and internationally, as well as keeping up his interests in Hemingway and the Harlem Renaissance. He co-edited A William Faulkner Encyclopedia (now available in Chinese and Japanese as well as English) and edited A Critical Companion to Faulkner Studies), directed the Heartland Emmy Award winning program “Prayers for the People: Carl Sandburg’s Poetry and Songs,” and continues to teach for Senior College of Central Nebraska, UNL’s OLLI, the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry, and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, as well as serving on the Cather Foundation Board. Chuck and his wife Nancy divide their time between Kearney, Nebraska, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin