It'll Be a Beautiful Day When the Pentagon Has All the Money It Needs and Bombs Schools Having Bake Sales
Nick Gillespie | December 2, 2005, 10:08pm
Eric Berlin blogs a fuckin' unbelievable story out of Hartford: The public schools there are fining high schoolers $103 a shot for cursing.
I'm thinking discipline has been something of an issue at this school. Still, if my kid brought home a $103 demand for money because he said "shit," it would not occur to me to be angry at my child.
His whole bit here.
Story on the fines here. The fines do seem to be working--which is yet another way that these kids are lettng us down.
Hartford Police Officer Roger Pearl said the program is working.
"Before, the kids were swearing all the time. It went from many incidents to almost nothing," he said. "It's quiet in the halls."
Fido | December 3, 2005, 11:54am | #
Think about reading this (out this month), a work by Almighty God for the salvation of our nation’s souls: Our country’s falling into the Abyss of Misery faster than the Indy 500, faster than a fully-loaded-747. But, yet, our novel has a plethora of extremely helpful insights; engrossing wit, sardonic satire; and basically straight-forward-Jesus that’d make anyone realize this is only a test of our Finite Existence.
We talk of a Heavenly Scent, an ardent desire with the whiff of a definite locale, while we bolster the Great Beyond with the passion of a magnanimous madman: Full of some gorgeous, panoramic, tall-true-tales that’ll make U.S. yearn and sigh for Heaven Above. A novel of short-stories, quotes, prayers, poetry, heartbreaking/hardcore hilarity, aggressive conundrums, and a collision substantial from a severely-head-injured-Catholic. At the risk of sounding too verbose, friend, far beyond any sinful mortal, I use the personal pronoun ‘WE’ because I didn’t write this. I only held the pen.
Read our novel, America. Then, you’ll be able to see with enough vision to find your Way outta the stagnant hole mosta U.S. have dug ourselves into. What you’ll find in our wonderful, fruitFULL, dynamic novel is a treasure, unlike any other. If you decide to read this indelible script, here’s the next step: Get in touch with my CPA, Edward Foree, at 1-800-266-9111.
MAY GOD BLESS YOU WITH DISCERNMENT!
Long Live Christ the King!
-Fido
[FI = Latin prefix for ‘FAITHFUL’;
DO = Japanese for ‘WAY’ or ‘PATH’]
Ken Shultz | December 4, 2005, 2:21pm | #
I agree it's tough. I still think you can't
keep a good man (or woman) down.
I ran a department in a hospital that's supposed to require AMA certificiation; the certified person at one of our sister hospitals was always available on the phone, and was always present for scheduled inspections. I don't remember calling for help.
I leveraged that job into a quality control gig at a hospital software company, but I didn't know much about programming, and I'd never worked in Unix. I was supposed to be certified in both.
I took a job in a commercial real estate investment company as a number cruncher; they told me I had to have an MBA if I wanted a percentage of the deals I did. So when the acquisitions guy left to form his own company, I incorporated and got a contract.
...Those certification requirements merely served to deprive the companies in question of my talents--they didn't hurt me. In fact, they made it easier for me to make the decision to jump, which is so much harder for people in safe union/certified jobs.
To the larger question of schooling, I think we sometimes project our own expectations on other people when we talk about failure. Some of those inner city kids have what I suspect you think of as pretty low expectations. I know I think of them as low, but who am I to judge? Many, many people think that working in low wage jobs and living in what I think of as a slum is just fine, so long as they can get married and have kids and watch TV and take a vacation every once in a while.
I sometimes feel the same way about people who live in suburban tract homes.
I worked my way through the boarding school I attended. I took odd jobs when I was young--local farms, etc.--and made the most of entrepenerial opportunities when they arose. When I hit 16, I took a job in a saw mill. I spent my summers woking at summer camps or riding shotgun in a big rig all over the country, and what I got in return was as good a high school education as money can buy--and room and board too. Those opportunities are still available to any 14 year old kid that wants it and can get his or her parents to sign a permission slip.
So what do we do with the rest of the kids? ...the ones with the low expectations and parents with low expectations? I see this is as something like the Wal-Mart discussions we've had lately. That is, the reason Wal-Mart doesn't pay more attention to the working conditions of its subcontractors is because its customers either don't know about those people or--let's face it--they just don't care. Similarly, most people don't know about or don't care about the quality of inner city education.
How do we get people to care more?
