Many of the nation’s 57 million K-12 students will spend at least part of the 2020-2021 school year either dealing with distance learning or a hybrid model that keeps them out of classrooms several days a week. They’ll spend lots of time using teleconferencing software, with teachers either convening classes live or pre-recording lessons.

Getting children to excel won’t be easy. Zoom and similar programs can be challenging for teachers and boring for “digital natives” accustomed to watching more entertaining stuff on their devices.

Based on my experience both as a writer and a producer of films and TV shows in Hollywood and a lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh – where WQED, the nation’s first educational television station got started – I recommend four creative ways to overcome this problem. While challenging, this disruption in education can be a a unique opportunity for innovation. The made-for-TV French class produced by WQED was an early attempt at accessible distance learning. (Watch for the end for when one Fred Rogers’ first Daniel Tiger puppets pops out)

1. Tap star power

What if the producers, directors and writers who are skilled at explaining ideas visually over digital platforms – many of whom are currently sidelined because of the coronavirus pandemic – teamed up with teachers to make education more entertaining and engaging?

Having worked in both worlds, I can attest to how some TV and movie producers have no idea what a curriculum is, while even the best teachers and professors struggle to engage their own students with distance learning. But imagine a ground-up collaborative process, where educators who know the material they need to convey partner with the best storytellers who know how to get information across in the most compelling way?

Admittedly, it’s unclear where the funding might come from. But a burst of collaboration between educators, entertainment professionals and perhaps parents and students could create high-quality educational programs that could be accessed everywhere. The resulting online lessons could assist hundreds of thousands of educators and reach millions of students. Imagine the potential, especially if one or more networks or studios took part.

There have been some notable experiments along these lines such as Khan Academy enlisting basketball star Lebron James to illustrate probability. But what’s needed with the swift pivot to online education is a wide-scale collaboration to give teachers and students engaging educational materials.

Why not have comedian Dave Chappelle explain the theory of “Human Computation” developed by Luis Von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who co-founded the Duolingo foreign language learning app Or how about a physics class with Billie Eilish singing a Schoolhouse Rock-style song about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity https://www.youtube.com/embed/iMqCSgqzmiQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Khan Academy enlisted LeBron James for a lesson about probability.

2. Unleash student creativity

The advertising company J. Walter Thompson and Snapchat together issued a report in 2019 called Into Z Future. It documented how the digitally adept generation born approximately between 1995 and 2012 is the most creative the world has ever seen.

Because I see the same kind of promise in today’s young people, I believe that schools should help unleash their creativity and encourage them to become active participants in making and sharing media as part of their learning experience.

I witnessed just how much students are capable of while producing a film about the development of the polio vaccine, “A Shot To Save The World.” It featured an interview with the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, talking about that important scientific breakthrough and today’s efforts to combat infectious diseases.

The film aired on the Smithsonian Channel and the BBC. We also used it as a prompt for a viral video competition called “Take A Shot At Changing The World.”

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Students from middle and high schools across Western Pennsylvania were challenged to make their own short films about the development of vaccines. The winners and their schools got cash prizes and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website featured their videos. In visually explaining how vaccines work, eighth-graders suddenly learned a lot about in virology and immunology.

The lesson for teachers thinking about remote assignments is the value of having students make their own movies. Those assignments, done right, immerse students in research. While gaining expertise, they acquire and sharpen creative skills that come naturally to their generation.

Steeltown, a nonprofit I co-founded, has been partnering with middle schools, high schools and nonprofits for more than a decade doing similar projects. Through hands-on, project-based learning, students have deepened their knowledge about the environment, history, hunger, social justice and other subjects aligned with their school assignments.

‘A Shot to Save the World,’ a documentary, told the story of the polio vaccine.

3. Tailor education to meet students’ needs

U.S. Math Olympiad coach Po-Shen Loh, another Carnegie Mellon professor, created a new learning platform called Expii. It customizes the way students learn by showing them various videos and tracking which ones they learn best from.

Several years ago, Loh and I enlisted high school students from across the Pittsburgh region to help make a video that would illustrate the Pythagorean Theorem. The students came up with a video of a kid who misses a bus and with a quick calculation involving a hypotenuse makes it to the next stop in plenty of time. It’s an example of how students are not only able to work through complex problems, but also help their peers learn – once they feel empowered.

Because people can learn differently, virtual instruction should be an opportunity to find what works best for each student.

Teen-produced videos can make mastering math more enjoyable.

4. Expand access to tech

Curiosity is increasingly important, as award-winning video game designer Jesse Schell has explained. “We have the entire field of human knowledge available at the touch of a button,” Schell said. It “gives the curious children an insane advantage because anything they would like to learn about they can learn, just like that.”

But Schell worries about what he calls a “curiosity gap”: When a child’s curiosity isn’t stimulated and they lack access to this digital universe, they can fall behind.

Providing all students with access to Wi-Fi and top-notch devices is starting to happen because of this pandemic, but this crisis could become a great equalizer. Even after COVID-19 is under control, I believe that every child who goes to school, whether in a brick-and-mortar building or from their own home, deserves access to the internet and their own iPad, laptop or desktop computer.

Just as TV stations are required by the Children’s Television Act to broadcast educational programs like “Bill Nye: The Science Guy” in exchange for their licenses, in my opinion, internet providers and other tech companies should also have to do more to help close the digital divide.

Carl Kurlander, Senior Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The fear and uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic may feel new to many of us. But it is strangely familiar to those who lived through the polio epidemic of the last century.

Like a horror movie, throughout the first half of the 20th century, the polio virus arrived each summer, striking without warning. No one knew how polio was transmitted or what caused it. There were wild theories that the virus spread from imported bananas or stray cats. There was no known cure or vaccine.

For the next four decades, swimming pools and movie theaters closed during polio season for fear of this invisible enemy. Parents stopped sending their children to playgrounds or birthday parties for fear they would “catch polio.”

In the outbreak of 1916, health workers in New York City would physically remove children from their homes or playgrounds if they suspected they might be infected. Kids, who seemed to be targeted by the disease, were taken from their families and isolated in sanitariums.

In 1952, the number of polio cases in the U.S. peaked at 57,879, resulting in 3,145 deaths. Those who survived this highly infectious disease could end up with some form of paralysis, forcing them to use crutches, wheelchairs or to be put into an iron lung, a large tank respirator that would pull air in and out of the lungs, allowing them to breathe.

Ultimately, poliomyelitis was conquered in 1955 by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh.

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebration of the polio vaccine, I produced a documentary, “The Shot Felt ‘Round the World,” that told the stories of the many people who worked alongside Salk in the lab and participated in vaccine trials. As a filmmaker and senior lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, I believe these stories provide hope in the fight to combat another unseen enemy, coronavirus.

Pulling together as a nation

Before a vaccine was available, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year in the U.S. It was the most feared disease of the 20th century. With the success of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, 39, became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world.

He refused a patent for his work, saying the vaccine belonged to the people and that to patent it would be like “patenting the Sun.” Leading drug manufacturers made the vaccine available, and more than 400 million doses were distributed between 1955 and 1962, reducing the cases of polio by 90%. By the end of the century, the polio scare had become a faint memory.

Developing the vaccine was a collective effort, from national leadership by President Franklin Roosevelt to those who worked alongside Salk in the lab and the volunteers who rolled up their sleeves to be experimentally inoculated.

Sidney Busis, a young physician at the time, performed tracheotomies on two-year-old children, making an incision in their necks and enclosing them in iron lung to artificially sustain their breathing. His wife Sylvia was terrified that he would transmit polio to their two young sons when he came home at night.

In the Salk lab, a graduate student, Ethyl “Mickey” Bailey, pipetted by mouth – pulling liquid up thin glass tubes – live polio virus as part of the research process.

My own neighbor, Martha Hunter, was in grade school when her parents volunteered her for “the shot,” the experimental Salk vaccine that no one knew if it would work.

President Roosevelt, who kept his own paralysis from polio hidden from the public, organized the nonprofit National Institute of Infant Paralysis, later known as the March of Dimes. He encouraged every American to send dimes to the White House to support treating polio victims and researching a cure. In the process, he changed American philanthropy, which had been largely the domain of the wealthy.

That was a time, said Salk’s oldest son, Dr. Peter Salk, in an interview for our film, when the public trusted the medical community and believed in each other. I believe that’s an idea we need to resurrect today.

What it took to end polio

Jonas Salk was 33 when he began his medical research in a basement lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He had wanted to work on influenza but switched to polio, an area where research funding was more available. Three floors above his lab was a polio ward filled to capacity with adults and children in iron lungs and rocking beds to help them breathe.

There were many false leads and dead ends in pursuing remedies. Even President Roosevelt traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, believing that the water there might have curative effects. While most in the scientific community believed that a live polio virus vaccine was the answer, Salk went against medical orthodoxy.

He pursued a killed virus vaccine, trying it first on cells in the lab, then monkeys and, next, young people who already had polio. There were no guarantees this would work. Ten years earlier, a different polio vaccine had inadvertently given kids polio, killing nine of them.

In 1953, Salk was given permission to test the vaccine on healthy children and began with his three sons, followed by a vaccination pilot study of 7,500 children in local Pittsburgh schools. While the results were positive, the vaccine still needed to be tested more widely to gain approval.

In 1954, the March of Dimes organized a national field trial of 1.8 million schoolchildren, the largest medical study in history. The data was processed and on April 12, 1955, six years from when Salk began his research, the Salk polio vaccine was declared “safe and effective.” Church bells rang and newspapers across the world claimed “Victory Over Polio.”

Vaccinations and global health security

In adapting our documentary for broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel, we interviewed Bill Gates, who explained why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had made eradicating polio worldwide a top priority. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jp9V2p40kKw?wmode=transparent&start=0 The polio vaccine was developed through the painstaking work of Jonas Salk and public efforts to fund research.

Vaccines, he said, have saved millions of lives. He joined the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Rotary International and others to help finish the job started by the Salk vaccine, eradicating polio in the world. This accomplishment will free up resources that will no longer have to be spent on the disease.

Up until now, smallpox is the only infectious disease we have ever eliminated. But the global infrastructure that the polio eradication effort has put in place is helping to fight other infectious diseases also, such as Ebola, malaria and now coronavirus. On Feb. 5, 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it would provide US$100 million to improve detection, isolation and treatment efforts and accelerate the development of a vaccine for the coronavirus.

These are frightening times as the coronavirus spreads in ways reminiscent of poliomyelitis. It’s instructive to remember what it took to nearly eradicate polio and a reminder of what we can do when faced with a common enemy. On Oct. 24, 2019, World Polio Day, WHO announced there were only 94 cases of wild polio in the world. The success of the polio vaccine launched a series of vaccines that negated many of the effects of infectious disease for the second half of the 20th century.

At the end of our film, Salk’s youngest son, Dr. Jonathan Salk, recounted how his father wondered every day why we couldn’t apply the spirit of what happened with the development of the polio vaccine to other problems, such as disease or poverty. In fighting coronavirus, perhaps the citizens and governments of the world will rise to the occasion and demonstrate what is possible when we work together.

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Carl Kurlander, Senior Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In 1955, after a field trial involving 1.8 million Americans, the world’s first successful polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective, and potent.”

It was arguably the most significant biomedical advance of the past century. Despite the polio vaccine’s long-term success, manufacturers, government leaders and the nonprofit that funded the vaccine’s development made several missteps.

Having produced a documentary about the polio vaccine’s field trials, we believe the lessons learned during that chapter in medical history are worth considering as the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines proceeds. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jp9V2p40kKw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Trailer from ‘The Shot Felt ‘Round the World,’ a documentary about the polio vaccine.

Sabin and Salk

Today, many competing efforts are underway to create a coronavirus vaccine, each employing different methods to generate the production of universally needed antibodies. Likewise, in the 1950s there were different approaches to making a polio vaccine.

The prevailing medical orthodoxy, led by Dr. Albert Sabin, held that only a live-virus vaccine, which involved using a weakened form of the polio virus to stimulate antibodies, could work. That theory stemmed from work by the physician Edward Jenner, who in the 1700s determined that milkmaids exposed to the cowpox virus-laden pus of cowpox-infected cattle did not catch smallpox. Smallpox was the deadly pandemic of the era, and this discovery led to a vaccine that brought about the disease’s eradication.

Jonas Salk, a doctor and scientist based at the University of Pittsburgh, on the other hand, believed a killed virus, which would completely lose its infectious qualities, could still trick the body into creating protective antibodies against the polio virus.

A nonprofit organization, the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation, funded and thus directed the polio vaccine quest. Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former law partner, Basil O’ Connor, it raised money for polio research and treatment. As part of this fundraising effort, Americans were called upon to send dimes to the White House in what became known as the March of Dimes.

O’Connor gambled on Salk rather than Sabin.

Clinical trials

By 1953, Salk and his team had shown their experimental vaccine worked – first on monkeys in their lab, then on children who already had polio at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, and then on a small group of healthy children in Pittsburgh. One of the largest field trials in medical history soon followed.

It began on April 23, 1954. Some 650,000 children got the Salk polio vaccine or a placebo, and 1.2 million other kids received no injection but were monitored as an untreated control group.

Salk’s mentor, University of Michigan virologist Thomas Francis, independently monitored the study. After months of meticulously analyzing data, Francis revealed the results on April 12, 1955 – exactly 10 years after FDR’s death and nearly a year after the trial began.

A manufacturing error

When asked who owned the patent to his vaccine, Jonas Salk famously replied that it belonged to the people and that patenting it would be like “patenting the sun.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his belief that every child should receive the polio vaccine, without indicating how that would happen. Eisenhower charged Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Ovetta Culp Hobby to work out the details in coordination with Surgeon General Leonard Scheele.

Congressional Democrats advocated for a plan that would make the polio vaccine free to everyone, which Hobby rejected as a “back door to socialized medicine.”

Hobby also insisted that private companies should take care of producing Salk’s vaccine, licensing six of them to do so. However, she acknowledged that the government lacked a plan to meet the vast vaccination demand.

A black market arose. Price gouging jacked up the cost of a dose of the vaccine, which was supposed to be US$2, to $20. As a result, the well-to-do got special access to a vaccine the public had funded.

The hands-off approach changed once reports surfaced that children who had received Salk’s vaccine were in the hospital, with polio symptoms. At first, Scheele, the surgeon general, reacted with skepticism. He suggested that those kids might have been infected before vaccination.

But once six vaccinated children died, inoculations halted until more information about their safety could be gathered. In all, 10 kids who were vaccinated early on died after becoming infected with polio, and some 200 experienced some degree of paralysis.

The government soon determined that the cases in which children became sick or died could be traced back to one of the six companies: Cutter Labs. It had not followed Salk’s detailed protocol to manufacture the vaccine, failing to kill the virus. As a result, children were incorrectly injected with the live virus.

Inoculation resumed in mid-June with tighter government controls and a more nervous public. In July, Hobby stepped down, citing personal reasons.

Eisenhower then signed the Polio Vaccination Assistance Act of 1955, which slated $30 million to pay for vaccines – enough to fund wider public distribution. Within a year, 30 million American kids had been inoculated, and the number of polio cases had fallen almost by half.

Heeding a lesson learned

By 1962, there were fewer than 1,000 cases of polio in the U.S. And by 1979, the U.S. was declared polio-free.

Years after the vaccine’s development, Jonas Salk would recount that sometimes he would meet people who would not even know what polio was – which he found tremendously gratifying. But the events of this past year, with all the ups and downs of coronavirus vaccine research, have proved that the history of polio’s defeat is worth remembering.

Nine companies developing a coronavirus vaccine recently joined forces to jointly promise that they would not rush anything to market until and unless the clearly delineated standards for safety and efficacy are met.

But should a modern-day Cutter incident happen again with a coronavirus vaccine, the public’s already shaky faith in vaccines could easily crumble further, impeding the effort to get as many people quickly immunized against COVID-19 as possible.

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Bringing this pandemic to an end will require more than the government’s approval of one or more coronavirus vaccines that work. Coordinating a widespread vaccination campaign will also demand the navigation of logistics, economics and politics amid an equitable approach to the distribution of these new vaccines and the public’s willingness to be inoculated.

This final push will, in addition, require the often uneasy partnership among the government, the private sector and – as is true today with massive contributions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charitable sources – philanthropy.

Carl Kurlander, Senior Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh and Randy P. Juhl, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The contrast of the gentle loving Fred and his kindness and this horric event seems to remind us all that this should not be who we should be.

Someone who knew Fred Rogers well and worked with him for years once shared that Fred would say that you never get over loss, it just becomes part of who you are. Squirrel Hill may never be the same. But through this darkness, there is an opportunity make our neighborhood, our city, our country, and our world an even better place.

Ironically, my wife Natalie and I rst moved to Squirrel for what we thought would be a one year Hollywood sabbatical to teach at the UniverCsiatyrloKf Puitrtslabnurdgehrjust weeks before 9/11 happened.

In trying to make sense of that tragedy, I wrote a holiday letter entitled “Greetings From Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” trying to explain to my friends in L.A. how in that dark moment in our country’s history, we had found community in the real life “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” where my boss, the head of Pitt’s English department, had taught Fred Rogers soccer on his program (“do you really sock people?” Fred asked him) and where our daughter’s pre-school teacher was featured in the Mister Rogers’ “Moving Book” which our Beverly Hills pediatrician had prescribed us as the book we must read to our child as it honestly helped kids deal with the dicult emotions of moving. My out of town friends who did not know Pittsburgh were amazed that there was still place where young kids could ride their bikes alone up to the neighborhood shops with no one worrying about their safety, and where neighbors said “How are you (or yinz) doing?” to each other and genuinely seemed to mean it. This place was special, almost like our little secret bubble. But now in the wake of Saturday’s shootings which were blocks from our house and the temple where our daughter became a Bat Mitzvah, that bubble has burst and Squirrel Hill is on the front pages of papers around in the wake of this unfathomable tragedy.

But this time, unlike 9/11 which brought us all together, this horrifying event nds us a divided nation. My Facebook page lit up as President Trump announced he is coming to Pittsburgh to pay his respects and people passionately telling him to stay away who hold his rhetoric at least partly responsible for the shooter’s actions. I got a preview of this division a few months ago when I posted about Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers in a new movie lming in Pittsburgh a few months ago people I did not know posted angry comments on how a Hollywood liberal like Tom could play Fred Rogers, a lifelong Republican.

While Fred was a Republican, anyone who saw this summer’s documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” learned this ordained minister used his program to quietly send messages about tolerance and understanding about race, disabilities, and gender. Fred was also the godfather of the children of Senator John Heinz, a Republican who had great appeal to Democratic voters here and who championed polices which were good for workers and the elderly. Frequently in Pittsburgh, you will nd Republicans who are socially liberal and Democrats who are conservative. But these days, we long for a time when no matter what our beliefs, we would remember we are all neighbors.

Western Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the fragmented nation that we have become having played an essential role in the 2016 election as Donald Trump successfully argued to many voters in the region that he would be able to bring jobs back. That is a particularly potent argument here– for those factories which Fred showed us each program on “how things were made” are closed now and those Terrible Towels you see Steeler fans waving each Sunday in cities from San Francisco to Tampa are frequently held by ex-Pittsburghers who had to leave as the steel industry collapsed in the 1980s causing one of the largest urban migrations in U.S. history.

But often national reporters will swoop into an area outside of Pittsburgh in Butler or Altoona and prole “a Trump voter” who was once a Democratic mill worker who is now voting Republican without fully taking the time to understand the deeper complexity of the politics here. Conversely, when Donald Trump says he is visiting Pittsburgh— I wonder just which Pittsburgh he will be visiting. The city of Pittsburgh where Tree of Life is and which voted for Hillary and is largely blue, or the red suburbs and outlying areas where Trump has held his rallies in the past.

Concerned city leaders often talk about two Pittsburghs—one which has successfully reinvented itself with jobs in education, medicine, and technColaorgly,Kanudrlaannotdher which is often left behind which includes both the predominantly African American neighborhoods as well as the abandoned steel communities which both have largely missed the economic opportunities of the “new Pittsburgh.”

The truth is in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is not just one neighborhood, but many. And we seem to have forgotten what Fred so often talked about—that we have more in common than we have different.

I fully understand the passion of those who are trying to make something good out of the tragedy and encourage everyone to vote. And the anger of those who want Trump to stay away saying that his refusal to condemn white supremacists helped lead to the Temple shootings.

But I wonder if as horrifying of the events as they were, whether they will change many votes. Or instead will they just have us running back to our own camps.

As the tragic events unfolded Saturday, my wife, my daughter and I found ourselves watching The Hate U Give about the African American boy who was shot and the outrage that ensues when the police ocer who shot him is not punished. I was trying to tell my daughter about Freedom Summer when young people risked their lives and went South to register voters in Mississippi

And the fantasy I have now is that each our of neighbors could visit each other in our respective neighborhoods. We need desperately to understand each other—not those we already agree with, but those who we strongly disagree with.

It is not surprising to see Fred Rogers’ quote from his mother that when there is a crisis, we should “look for the helpers.” There is even an article in the Atlantic warning that the “look for the helpers” quote has too often been used for adults in tragedy about what the author calls the fetishism of Fred Rogers’ message which he says was intended to reassure children. Fred Rogers has far deeper meaning that applies to people of all ages, but I will give him this. It is not enough to quote Fred Rogers. We need to nd the Fred Rogers in all of us, look deeper into our neighbors, and decide what actions we will take— not just on election day, but every day, to help heal our world.

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I got to meet Ruth Bader Ginsberg once thanks to another remarkable individual. And if you are guessing this will connect to “Saved by The Bell”, you’d be correct. During my Hollywood days, I somehow ended up as a writer on SBTB: The New Class and most of the scripts I wrote were for the replacement Screech character, the nerdy Weasel was played by a charming, funny,  precious teenager named Isaac Lidsky. Issac who was a true wunderkind off-screen and went to Harvard/Harvard Law School and went on to clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sandra Day O’ Connor.  What made this even more remarkable was that Isaac had lost his eyesight due to a rare disease effecting his vision and when I went to visit him at the Supreme Court, he was remarkably doing all his case reading by a computer program which would allow him to listen to the cases at high speed.

Though without one of his senses, Isaac had the same spirit, humor, and intelligence of the young man I knew at 16.  While he was clearly at this point a brilliant and mature man, a bit of the “Saved By the Bell” prankster remained in him as while showing me around, he would navigate passed a cordoned off hallway nodding to the security guard protecting the passageway as if he did not see the “do not enter” sign or swing his cane almost comically wide when he wanted to show me an area that might be “restricted” to others.

He clearly knew exactly where he was going.  Somehow Isaac maneuvered me into a room where the diminutive Ruth Bader Ginsberg was speaking to high school students about the constitution.  She connected with them so easily, but without condescension. And she took out of her pocket the tiny Constitution she always kept with her, and spent time she probably did not have given her focused schedule telling them how that living document had changed and could continue to change the world.  

Ruth famously found ways to be civil to even to those she did not agree with like Anthony Scalia. But even she had limits which only seemed to come with the current occupant of the White House who she clearly felt stood against basic American values and decency
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It is up to us not to just mourn and post about RGB, but to find the RGB in each of us. We need to set a plan to fight for what she believed in and what we believe in and make sure no stone goes unturned, no perspective voter unreached, no house un-signed.  Let us not take false comfort in polls, or signs in our immediate neighborhood, or facebook newsfeeds.  There are others out there we still must reach– of all the great vastness and diversity that is the America we should and need to be. Not to evoke Hollywood tropes, but Obi Wan has gone and we all must be Luke Skywalkers and find the force within us.

By the way, Isaac has shown myself and many others what it truly takes to see. He wrote a book “Eyes Wide Open” which shows how we all can and must overcome.  And how somehow our darkest hours can lead us to new, even greater heights.

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I think it’s important people see themselves in film, but it’s even more important they see people they maybe don’t know as well.

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I think it’s important people see themselves in film, but it’s even more important they see people they maybe don’t know as well.

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I think it’s important people see themselves in film, but it’s even more important they see people they maybe don’t know as well.

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The post Let say it your way appeared first on carlkurlander.com.