Yes, today is a Day for Fools — but there’s no joking around that I now have a brand new Boles Book for the Playwright in Society — available for purchase from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing! This Boles Book for… is a thoughtful compilation of a lot of my writing on how the Playwright derives power and structure from the fabric of belonging.
Continue reading → A Brand New Boles Book for the Playwright in Society
Utopia is a new, $50 million, reality television series from Fox that is supposed to run for a year — but I don’t think the show will make it to the end of October because of horrible casting decisions and even more miserable ratings. The producers get some things right and most everything else wrong.
The technical aspects of the show, the live feed, the landscape, and the idea, are all right — but the casting is completely and horrifyingly wrong — as is the creepy-pervy peeping-tom-ish host who ruins the television show with his “stalkeristic” vibe and prissy mustache and bizarro hat and glasses.
As well, when you choose a convicted felon to be the center of your show from the git-go, and he’s also the initial online presence for your show and live feeds portal, something terrible and awful has gone wrong on a deep DNA level that cannot be cured by God, a false baptism, or human infusion.
Continue reading → Felons, Fascists, Freeloaders and Fools: Not My Utopia!
[Publisher’s Note: Boles Blogs author Howard Stein died on October 14, 2012 at 90 years of age. In an ongoing effort to preserve his legacy and memory, David Boles is sharing articles and preserving other works from his private Prairie Voice archive. The following article was likely written by Dr. Stein in the early 1980’s — and his point still rings true, and still bites us with a bitter hardness of the flat truth — three decades later.]
Public education in the minds of the parents, schoolboards, teachers, and local politicians seems to have as its purpose either the preparing of the young for higher education (preferably private education), or the preparing of the young for a variety of jobs and trades.
Continue reading → The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good
Life has changed for modern children. When I was growing up in the Midwest, you sought freedom — and if it wasn’t granted with a bicycle, then you found other, more nefarious ways, to run away and play far away from your doorstep.
It isn’t that way any longer. Today, kids are protected and driven and supervised in organized sports and cultural events. There’s no spontaneity now because there’s fear of the unknown and danger in the creative. No sandlot baseball. No football games with self-set boundaries and special scoring. Everything is regulation. There can be no divergence from the norm.
We’re creating a society of young people who are risk-averse and too frightened to set their own agendas and follow their own, unblazed, pathway. Fun is the new mysterious stranger. “Do what you want” is the new monster under the bed.
Continue reading → The Eggshell Generation: No Freedom for Danger Children
Taking turns is one of the most important — yet underused and underappreciated — totems of social living. I’m not talking about, “It’s My Turn!” as in the clarion call of a self-centered existence when it comes to job promotion or marriage tying; I’m talking about public moments in society when we are confronted against each other and there’s a moment of wondering if I should go or if you should go — and it seems we have an ever-deepening problem with being strong enough, and confident enough, to let the other person go first and subsume our own personal entitlements for the goodness of making things actually work between people with warring wants.
Continue reading → Why Taking Turns Creates a Strong Society
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