I went on the easiest diet EVER in April 2004.  That’s me on the left over there…  all 348 pounds of me.  The one to the right is me in February 2005… but I had actually been at 170 pounds since November 2004… and it was soooooooo easy.

So how’d I do it?  It was a an 800 calorie liquid diet for seven months.  Every week I would buy dried packets of chocolate, vanilla, and “chicken” soup.  I got to have four of them a day.  I could also have one dill pickle, one box of sugar free jello, and one diet coke (all my other drinks had to be water.)

That was it.  I wasn’t allowed anything else.  Nothing.  So, I would go to a restaurant or a bar with my friends, order a glass or water, and make my shake.  You might ask, “Wasn’t that hard?”   The answer is “Absolutely, not.  It was the easiest thing ever.”  You know why that is?  Because the answer was black and white.  I didn’t have to think.  I didn’t have to consider.  I knew I COULDN’T have anything to eat, so all of the stress was taken away.

Yes, it was incredibly easy… but that’s not how life works.

I’m well aware I baited many of you into reading this because, let’s face it, weight loss is a lot more interesting to most people than philosophy…. so if you’re done reading at this point, I did it through Methodist Hospital in Houston.  I loved the program, and I’d likely do it again if I still lived there… but that’s not why I wrote this blog.  I wrote it to talk about why life can never be THAT easy… it can never be THAT black and white… and I hope you choose to continue reading.

What brought this to mind was a certain mom/activist whom I saw pop up on a friend’s Facebook feed one day.  Her name is Alice Linahan.  Feel free to look her up and see for yourself.  She is an extremely conservative mom from Argyle, Texas, and she is VERY concerned about the direction that education has taken in the last six years or so.

In education, in response to outcry from universities and businesses, we have moved away from disseminating knowledge to students to helping them think for themselves.  No longer do we want them to memorize and and repeat facts.  Instead, we want them to work on how to utilize facts to problem solve and come to decisions. There is an emphasis on student centered learning and collaboration.  The teacher as the “sage on the stage” should be a thing of the past, according to trends in education.

According to Alice Linahan, this is the government’s attempt to break down family values.  She says that by teaching students to critically think and evaluate that we are systematically and purposefully destroying religion.  She also says that it is the communistic/socialistic government’s plan to have students work together collaboratively so that they will reach consensus and be much more easily controlled. She is not alone in this thought.  In 2012 the Texas Republican platform specifically disavowed critical thinking.

Linahan is MUCH more comfortable with black and white thinking.  She was particularly bothered by a question posed in her daughter’s AP English III class that said “If God is all powerful and benevolent, why does he allow innocent babies to suffer.”

Wow!   That is a HEAVY question for a seventeen year old church girl to tackle, isn’t it?

Linahan  wrote a letter to her school board where she shared the quiz that her daughter took.  She testified before Texas congress.  She went on the radio.  She did everything that she could to make sure we don’t continue to make students think about things like this in school because that kind of challenge is HARD.

But it’s so important.In life, you don’t get to just drink four shakes a day and not make any decisions.  In life, sometimes you have to look at both sides to find a solution.  We, as a society and as educators, HAVE to teach kids to continue to do this.

I think about recently when Marco Rubio came out and said that he didn’t think that women with the Zika virus should be allowed to have abortions.  Abortion seems so easy on the surface.  “Don’t kill babies.”  It’s about as black and white as it gets, isn’t it?  Everyone believes in protecting innocent life…  But does Marco Rubio REALLY understand what he’s saying here?  He is telling a woman that she has to carry a child for nine months who she knows will have a life time ahead of physical and mental disabilities. He is telling this mom that she has to change her entire life because she had the misfortune of being bitten by a mosquito.

Sure… she still has a “choice.”  She now has the choice to give her baby up…  because there are people just LINING up to take care of disabled children, right?  And that’s such an easy choice anyway, right?  To carry a baby for nine months and then give your baby away?  No expenses involved either, right?  Taking care of mentally and physically deficient children is no problem, right?  And Marco Rubio has been through all this himself?

It’s complicated.

Don’t lie to yourself.  It’s complicated. Even if it’s not complicated for YOU, are you in that situation?  Do you know ALL the factors involved?

The black and white answer is so much easier, right?  It’s so much easier to cling to that.  “Don’t kill babies.”

Nothing is that simple.

Alice Linahan claims that critical thinking is used to force students thinking collaboratively to consensus.

The truth is far from that.  The idea is to get them thinking so that they can see all the facets of that diamond… so that they can see all possible scenarios …so that they’re not stuck in the world of black and white at all times.

In fact, if they DID reach consensus, I’d be failing as an educator.

And it’s interesting that she sees it as a threat to religion.  Because, I’ll be honest with you here, critical thinking WAS what caused me to decide that religion doesn’t make any sense TO ME… HOWEVER, I have a myriad of students who have walked out of my classroom MORE affirmed in their religion, MORE dedicated to Jesus and the Bible.  Through their critical thinking they found it imperative to go on mission trips and to enter the clergy and to spread compassion and love to the world.

I never once tried to deter them from any of this.  I only encouraged them to think about it.

Black and white is so very easy:  The sky is blue.  Columbus discovered America.  Pluto is the ninth planet.  It’s so easy to memorize a fact and move on…It’s so easy to drink four shakes a day and not think about food at all.

…but it’s almost never the right thing to do.

…or maybe it is.  You think about that critically and let me know.