Now that we have solemnly observed Memorial Day -- or did we celebrate Veteran's Day? Or was it sort of a combination of both, because we don't know the difference, any more than we know the difference between patriotism and jingoism? -- Anyway, now that the first official holiday of the warmer season has passed, it's time to get serious about spending a frivolous summer.
If that's confusing, how about the weather? We had hot weather in February and April, cold weather in early May, now it's hot again. The almanac says summer officially begins with the summer solstice on June 20, but I'll bet that not four in ten people can tell you what the summer solstice is. Which is why we have official dates set on the calendar to tell us summer has arrived.
When I was a kid, summer arrived the first day I didn't wear a jacket to school, and walking through the grass soaked my new tennis shoes with dew. May was not a month; it was a holding pattern, part of a conspiracy by adults to keep us bottled up for a few more days before we had the run of the town until the day after Labor Day.
Summer was the epitome of life itself. It defined all human endeavor. Sleep until you felt like getting up, stay up at night until you collapsed into bed, full of ice cream or watermelon.
On the hottest days, before the water ban police, we'd run through the sprinkler set up with the garden hose tied to the clothesline. For those not fully educated in history, a clothesline was one or more ropes or wires between posts in the back yard, where housewives, a prehistoric life form usually consisting of domesticated females, clipped wet laundry with clothespins (clever use of language) to dry in the sun.
You could tell well-to-do families, because their children donned swimsuits for the frolic in the icy spray. Poorer kids, and younger siblings, ran tippy-toed in their underwear, shrieking and laughing as if life was fair.
Most of us grew up thinking that only movie stars, insurance salesmen and other tycoons had swimming pools in the back yard.
A few community pools served vast geographic areas; there was Frock's Sunnybrook Farm in Westminster, Meadowbrook in Silver Run, and another pool fed by melting glaciers at Pleasant Hill, north of the Pennsylvania line on the road between Manchester and Hanover. There might have been pools in Hanover, or perhaps other communities in Carroll County, but for a kid growing up in Manchester, Westminster was the edge of the known world, and Hanover was where you went to buy your school shoes or go to air-conditioned movies, and wasn't considered good for much else.
Summer cookouts were invented sometime in the early 1950s. Before the first backyard charcoal grill was used to incinerate innocent chickens or sacrifice hot dogs and burgers to the gods of A Day Off, families might visit any one of many picnic groves on local farms, where you played games in the grassy meadows and running streams -- games like squish the cow pies between your toes.
The men would drink beer and smoke cigars and get louder as the sun got hotter, and the women would lay out their homemade fried chicken and potato salad. In the evening, the kids would capture lightning bugs and keep them in glass jars with grass for a mini habitat -- before the word was even invented -- with air holes punched in the lids. This ritual was full of wonder, one of which was, Why do lightning bugs die?
It was usually summer when it would dawn on a kid that girls were not just boys with different haircuts. It wasn't long after that revelation that the definition of summer was changed forever.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
It's a public government, not a church or cement plant
As the Carroll County Commissioners trudge through the budget process, it occurs to me that they have no shared vision.
Commissioner Robin Frazier apparently wants to use government for missionary work.
Commissioner David Roush wants to run it like an overgrown chamber of commerce, or a cement plant. What's good for business is all that counts.
Richard Rothschild seems to want to return to the United States Constitution -- before any of the amendments -- and let those with the means be like Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett, settling little multiple-acre homesteads where you don't have to see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney, and keep the savages at bay.
Doug Howard came into this thinking it's simple: Run government like a business, with a business plan, profit and loss statement, quarterly reports and balanced budgets and everything will be just fine.
What he didn't realize -- but seems to be awakening to -- is that unlike any other business, local government's customers are also the owners, and no board of directors on the Big Board has so many different expectations of where the "company" should go from here. Indeed, some want it to go out of business.
Haven Shoemaker's first goal was to get elected, and then it would be just like being mayor of a town, right? Wrong. A town needs property taxes for funding general services, and charges water and sewer fees for utilities, but is not expected to provide schools, health services, courts, and a long list of other things that cost a lot of money.
They had a goal of cutting spending, but that is not a vision. Calling cutting spending in the government context is like saying you're saving the cost of running a cruise ship by shutting down the engines.
It's right there in the way they are approaching the budget: They can't -- or won't -- look beyond the current year.
You can run a cement plant that way, if you're the plant manager. You don't need a vision -- a long term plan. Other, higher paid executives up the corporate ladder are in charge of the vision, and they tell you what they want out of the plant this year, and you get it. If that means being ruthless with employees, so be it. It's a business, not a public service.
But government is a public service.
People who like to stick to the basics, the fundamentals, the simple plans, don't understand the need for a vision.
These commissioners don't get why the department of management and budget works nine or 10 months on a six-year plan. They don't seem to see the need to have money planned for four years hence for replacement of aging air conditioning systems, failing plumbing, crumbling parking lots, the normal growth in government spending caused by simple population growth and aging infrastructure.
In a stunning display of hubris, Rothschild took the budget department's 10 months of work home and "fixed" it over lunch. He may have an agenda, but not a vision for county governance.
The commissioners need a vision, and only when they have one can they make a plan, and then, only then, will they be prepared to work out a budget not just for this year, but for the next several years.
And you can't move into the future by putting the engine of government in reverse, or park.
Commissioner Robin Frazier apparently wants to use government for missionary work.
Commissioner David Roush wants to run it like an overgrown chamber of commerce, or a cement plant. What's good for business is all that counts.
Richard Rothschild seems to want to return to the United States Constitution -- before any of the amendments -- and let those with the means be like Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett, settling little multiple-acre homesteads where you don't have to see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney, and keep the savages at bay.
Doug Howard came into this thinking it's simple: Run government like a business, with a business plan, profit and loss statement, quarterly reports and balanced budgets and everything will be just fine.
What he didn't realize -- but seems to be awakening to -- is that unlike any other business, local government's customers are also the owners, and no board of directors on the Big Board has so many different expectations of where the "company" should go from here. Indeed, some want it to go out of business.
Haven Shoemaker's first goal was to get elected, and then it would be just like being mayor of a town, right? Wrong. A town needs property taxes for funding general services, and charges water and sewer fees for utilities, but is not expected to provide schools, health services, courts, and a long list of other things that cost a lot of money.
They had a goal of cutting spending, but that is not a vision. Calling cutting spending in the government context is like saying you're saving the cost of running a cruise ship by shutting down the engines.
It's right there in the way they are approaching the budget: They can't -- or won't -- look beyond the current year.
You can run a cement plant that way, if you're the plant manager. You don't need a vision -- a long term plan. Other, higher paid executives up the corporate ladder are in charge of the vision, and they tell you what they want out of the plant this year, and you get it. If that means being ruthless with employees, so be it. It's a business, not a public service.
But government is a public service.
People who like to stick to the basics, the fundamentals, the simple plans, don't understand the need for a vision.
These commissioners don't get why the department of management and budget works nine or 10 months on a six-year plan. They don't seem to see the need to have money planned for four years hence for replacement of aging air conditioning systems, failing plumbing, crumbling parking lots, the normal growth in government spending caused by simple population growth and aging infrastructure.
In a stunning display of hubris, Rothschild took the budget department's 10 months of work home and "fixed" it over lunch. He may have an agenda, but not a vision for county governance.
The commissioners need a vision, and only when they have one can they make a plan, and then, only then, will they be prepared to work out a budget not just for this year, but for the next several years.
And you can't move into the future by putting the engine of government in reverse, or park.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Evolving on gay marriage in a devolving culture
I can only imagine the talk at the diner the morning after President Obama said he was in favor of marriage for gay couples.
But most of what I have heard in public is a little like the backstage rehearsals of Fiddler on the Roof, with Tevye muttering, "On the one hand....yet, on the other hand."
On the one hand, most Americans were raised to recognize marriage only between a man and a woman. On the other hand, even the most devoutly conservative families have someone in the reunion portrait that they whisper about -- a funny uncle or a different aunt.
On the one hand, we make fun of gay characters in our entertainment, find them amusing at best or disgusting at worst, but on the other hand, many of us know and work with homosexual people who are respected, successful, honorable, and, truth be told, envied for their self-defintion.
On the one hand, we think that marriage is sacred, sealed with vows, traditions, commitment. On the other hand, half of the marriages you read about on the wedding pages will end in divorce, a bigger percentage will be marked with unfaithfulness, dysfunction, anger, violence.
On the one hand, we insist on proper behavior in matters of sex. On the other hand, we take our kids for a walk down the boardwalk at the beach where they can see T-shirts using every vile word and graphic that we'd like to keep from tender young eyes.
On the one hand, public displays of affection between gays, or choices in clothing or accessories, make some of us uncomfortable, but on the other hand, we may say nothing about a boy and a girl making out in the mall, or the crude, rude, lewd and vulgar bumper stickers or the fake bull testicles on the trailer hitch of the vehicle in front of us as we wait in bay bridge traffic, captives of bad taste.
My thoughts are evolving. I'm ambivalent on many things, but I'm more open minded about people who others might shun, gay or otherwise, and my biggest shortcoming as a human is that I can't seem to accept hypocrites.
But most of what I have heard in public is a little like the backstage rehearsals of Fiddler on the Roof, with Tevye muttering, "On the one hand....yet, on the other hand."
On the one hand, most Americans were raised to recognize marriage only between a man and a woman. On the other hand, even the most devoutly conservative families have someone in the reunion portrait that they whisper about -- a funny uncle or a different aunt.
On the one hand, we make fun of gay characters in our entertainment, find them amusing at best or disgusting at worst, but on the other hand, many of us know and work with homosexual people who are respected, successful, honorable, and, truth be told, envied for their self-defintion.
On the one hand, we think that marriage is sacred, sealed with vows, traditions, commitment. On the other hand, half of the marriages you read about on the wedding pages will end in divorce, a bigger percentage will be marked with unfaithfulness, dysfunction, anger, violence.
On the one hand, we insist on proper behavior in matters of sex. On the other hand, we take our kids for a walk down the boardwalk at the beach where they can see T-shirts using every vile word and graphic that we'd like to keep from tender young eyes.
On the one hand, public displays of affection between gays, or choices in clothing or accessories, make some of us uncomfortable, but on the other hand, we may say nothing about a boy and a girl making out in the mall, or the crude, rude, lewd and vulgar bumper stickers or the fake bull testicles on the trailer hitch of the vehicle in front of us as we wait in bay bridge traffic, captives of bad taste.
My thoughts are evolving. I'm ambivalent on many things, but I'm more open minded about people who others might shun, gay or otherwise, and my biggest shortcoming as a human is that I can't seem to accept hypocrites.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Slow down and smell the exhaust
Put me down for being in favor of the speed cameras put up along 795 to snag drivers going more than 12 mph over the limit.
I know it makes True Patriots walk in tight little circles when Gov'mint gets between them and their rights, but 60 is fast enough on just about any highway, especially if it's one I happen to find myself compelled to travel from time to time.
So if you get busted and it costs you $40 for speeding along at 72, I have no sympathy for you. Do it again, please, and give up the privilege of driving for awhile. It's better without you on the road.
In fact, I'm the guy who's grinning at you when I pass you on any road where a trooper has you pulled over for driving stupid. I consider speeders, phone texters or talkers, lane dodgers and aggressive tailgaters more dangerous to me and the people I care about than any street thug. Drug dealers are less likely to put me or my loved ones in the grave -- or a wheelchair -- let alone weeks in rehab, than the speeder running late to preschool with the little darlings strapped into the back seat of her ton and a half road torpedo.
When I see one of the offenders get a ticket, I want to break into song; but I promise not to put it on YouTube, or whatever site it was that Commissioner Robin Frazier mistook for America Has Talent when she recently warbled that ditty about whatever it was.
I agree that a sense of humor is essential if you're going to be in public office, but the idea is to get the public laughing with you, not at you . . .
I know it makes True Patriots walk in tight little circles when Gov'mint gets between them and their rights, but 60 is fast enough on just about any highway, especially if it's one I happen to find myself compelled to travel from time to time.
So if you get busted and it costs you $40 for speeding along at 72, I have no sympathy for you. Do it again, please, and give up the privilege of driving for awhile. It's better without you on the road.
In fact, I'm the guy who's grinning at you when I pass you on any road where a trooper has you pulled over for driving stupid. I consider speeders, phone texters or talkers, lane dodgers and aggressive tailgaters more dangerous to me and the people I care about than any street thug. Drug dealers are less likely to put me or my loved ones in the grave -- or a wheelchair -- let alone weeks in rehab, than the speeder running late to preschool with the little darlings strapped into the back seat of her ton and a half road torpedo.
When I see one of the offenders get a ticket, I want to break into song; but I promise not to put it on YouTube, or whatever site it was that Commissioner Robin Frazier mistook for America Has Talent when she recently warbled that ditty about whatever it was.
I agree that a sense of humor is essential if you're going to be in public office, but the idea is to get the public laughing with you, not at you . . .
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
We need to get an education
The rising costs of going to college is getting a lot of attention these days. A story ran earlier this week about how it now costs $60,000 a year to attend Sarah Lawrence. But then, how many people do you know who went to Sarah Lawrence. I come from Manchester, where more people were familiar with Sara Lee.
What's interesting to me in the current debate is how many ways we find to miss the point.
Someone, please, point out that the cost of not being educated is higher than anything you spend in cash, whether you go to community college or Harvard.
And education is not about getting a job. Trade school is about getting a job, but American snobbery being what it is, let's not go there; let's just talk college, please. That's what high school counselors do, and if you want to talk trade schools, like vocational tech, we have to call it something else so it does not sound so middle class, blue collar.
Personally, I am a champion of (dare I say this?) the European structure of education, in which German students, for example, start out in elementary grades getting basics. But around Grade seven, there is a fork in the road, one leading to academia and what we think of University courses, and the other leading to more mechanically aligned schooling. Trades, we would call it, but engineering, to a certain level, might be one of these courses.
The difference is, Europeans seem to have a healthier respect for this work. There is no high road versus low road. The idea, the point, is to match the student's educational path to interests, talents, skills, and lastly, perhaps, intelligence.
Many years ago, my teacher wife came home from a continuing education class with great enthusiasm for a new way of looking at meeting needs of students. Instead of forcing students into some mold -- and the labels that the public tends to apply -- the idea was that intelligence is not just one thing. There are multiple intelligences, some having to do with mechanical ability, manual dexterity, spatial cognition -- like that.
In short, the guy who figures out how to fix something under a car has an intelligence that is just as valuable in many ways as the doctor who opens up a patient.
Somewhere after World War Two, we got the idea in America that people who went to college were better than those who don't, and therefore, the college grads should be paid more. In some cases, maybe so.
But the idea of a college degree as an end to higher pay, or prestige, has left us behind the rest of the world. We are not teaching our kids things they need for the future.
In a recent international science test, American students came in 17th, behind Finland (1st), Japan (2nd), Canada (5th), Poland (13th), Estonia, Slovenia and Hungary.
Americans kids come in 25th in math.
Must be something wrong with our approach.
Maybe we emphasize just getting through college so we can get that higher average paycheck. But the student debt is now reaching close to $60,000 per student on graduation. Advanced fields will leave you in debt of as much as a quarter million dollars.
We might be better off if we valued education for the sake of education, and we could start by paying teachers better. Good ones make it fun, so kids stay engaged, stay in school. Oh, yeah -- our dropout and illiteracy rates are among the highest in the industrialized, modern world.
Finland might be on to something. Finland seeks out the top 10 percent of college graduates and pays them a premium to teach. There, teachers are paid on a level equal of doctors and successful lawyers and business executives.
Finland also has the highest standard of living consistently in periodic comparisons. Higher that the U. S. every time.
What's interesting to me in the current debate is how many ways we find to miss the point.
Someone, please, point out that the cost of not being educated is higher than anything you spend in cash, whether you go to community college or Harvard.
And education is not about getting a job. Trade school is about getting a job, but American snobbery being what it is, let's not go there; let's just talk college, please. That's what high school counselors do, and if you want to talk trade schools, like vocational tech, we have to call it something else so it does not sound so middle class, blue collar.
Personally, I am a champion of (dare I say this?) the European structure of education, in which German students, for example, start out in elementary grades getting basics. But around Grade seven, there is a fork in the road, one leading to academia and what we think of University courses, and the other leading to more mechanically aligned schooling. Trades, we would call it, but engineering, to a certain level, might be one of these courses.
The difference is, Europeans seem to have a healthier respect for this work. There is no high road versus low road. The idea, the point, is to match the student's educational path to interests, talents, skills, and lastly, perhaps, intelligence.
Many years ago, my teacher wife came home from a continuing education class with great enthusiasm for a new way of looking at meeting needs of students. Instead of forcing students into some mold -- and the labels that the public tends to apply -- the idea was that intelligence is not just one thing. There are multiple intelligences, some having to do with mechanical ability, manual dexterity, spatial cognition -- like that.
In short, the guy who figures out how to fix something under a car has an intelligence that is just as valuable in many ways as the doctor who opens up a patient.
Somewhere after World War Two, we got the idea in America that people who went to college were better than those who don't, and therefore, the college grads should be paid more. In some cases, maybe so.
But the idea of a college degree as an end to higher pay, or prestige, has left us behind the rest of the world. We are not teaching our kids things they need for the future.
In a recent international science test, American students came in 17th, behind Finland (1st), Japan (2nd), Canada (5th), Poland (13th), Estonia, Slovenia and Hungary.
Americans kids come in 25th in math.
Must be something wrong with our approach.
Maybe we emphasize just getting through college so we can get that higher average paycheck. But the student debt is now reaching close to $60,000 per student on graduation. Advanced fields will leave you in debt of as much as a quarter million dollars.
We might be better off if we valued education for the sake of education, and we could start by paying teachers better. Good ones make it fun, so kids stay engaged, stay in school. Oh, yeah -- our dropout and illiteracy rates are among the highest in the industrialized, modern world.
Finland might be on to something. Finland seeks out the top 10 percent of college graduates and pays them a premium to teach. There, teachers are paid on a level equal of doctors and successful lawyers and business executives.
Finland also has the highest standard of living consistently in periodic comparisons. Higher that the U. S. every time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)