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Monday, August 30. 2010
Traditional Values? Really?
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After watching newsclips of the Million Moron March, I had to wonder which traditional values they were talking about: slavery, gender inequality, 3/5 rule, Dred Scott, Trail of Tears, Andersonville, Sherman's March, lynchings, Irish need not apply, smallpox blankets, Wounded Knee, cross burnings, Jim Crow, robber barons, child labor, sweatshops, Red Scare, Scotsboro Boys, Selma, Montgomery, assassinations, Chicago 7, City Riots, My Lai, Kent State, Watergate, Wall Street...
On and on it goes...
Seems to me Glen Beck would take us back to some pretty hard and ugly times, all the while worshiping a god that doesn't exist. Let's hope someday folks who insist on forcing their religion on everyone else will be consider sociopathic criminals like today's sex offenders; isolated from a society much better off and much less troubled without them.
I can hardly wait for that glorious day.
Monday, May 3. 2010
Wrong System, Wrong Times
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One high-end suburban west high school; four scary, puzzling incidents within a single school year. On the eve of the first day of school, a young woman, stellar student, took up a rope and ended her life upstairs in her room. Last week a dude who seemed to have everything going for him did likewise. In October, a series of threats were inscribed on the school walls with reference to the Columbine High killings. Around the holiday break, the police were called in to locate an explosive device rumored to be in the school. In the latter two cases, boys were expelled and arrested.
Many claim these sorts of incidents arise out of the natural pressures of an environment rife with high-performers and even higher expectations. That certainly is a factor here in Concord-Carlisle, but I'm not convinced it's a cause rather than a symptom of the larger, more widespread problem. After all, the worst of schools in the poorest of neighborhoods have their own set of peer pressure issues... gangs, for one... and being cool or uncool in the neighborhood sense is always a difficult place for a kid to find the right fit. And bullying certainly has no boundaries... unfortunately, it's everywhere.
That second suicide kicked me hard, right in me bucket. Another voice mail from the school principal announcing another wasted life, followed by the email messages citing the same sources of grief counseling and "How to Talk with Your Teen" seminars. Call now... grief counselors are standing by.
The school doesn't seem to recognize that it has any responsibility except passing out information, but in some way, you can't blame them. It's hard to reach kids who don't want to be reached, and basically, kids don't trust adults easily or readily... certainly not teachers, school administrators, surely not other people's parents.
In a sort of an epiphany, I realized the only way troubled kids could get real help is from other kids, not adults, and the way typical American schools systems are designed and implemented forces them into isolation and the ensuing risk. It shouldn't be that way. Throughout most of human history, education of the young indeed took the entire village. Kids weren't bunched into same-age peer groups, separating them through most of their school life from the rest of society. People were taught mainly through an apprentice system, working with and being taught elders who do what the kids eventually will be expected to do.
Our narrow and now antiquated industrial age concept of public education forces many teens to depend solely upon their peers for support and nurturing in any spiritual sense, and most high school kids are often not quite good enough at that... nor should we expect them to be. We need a different system, one in which people of all ages can interact in a life-long, ongoing, educational process where the old will teach the young and elders will have more opportunity to learn from their children.
Tuesday, March 30. 2010
Check That One Off the List...
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Looks like we can put a big check mark next to, "Select a College and Get Admitted" on Marii's never-ending TO-DO list. Roger William University, Bristol, Rhode Island is the place she'll be, the deal sealed after a family jaunt down there last weekend for "Accepted Students Day".
I'm proud of our daughter, how she went about getting to that choice, all told. A very short year-and-a-half ago, I would have never believed it.
I've been driving Marii to school most mornings for the past two years; part of the deal we made early in junior year after too many missed school busses. Occasionally we talk, overcoming the parent filter permanently attached to every spare teenage ear. I've watched her ideas develop over time, from patently clueless in the fall of 2008, to a lot more focused and decisive now.
Well, I've had little or no experience with college admissions, since I've never attended a day of it. As a kid, the only folks I knew who were college graduates fell into three major categories: priests, teachers and medical professionals (though I never really thought of the priests as 'college guys'). Only one neighbor I can recall: an ad salesman for a local billboard company, and the dad of just one among dozens of friends, a small businessman running a mickey-mouse phone answering service... and badly, too. Not many role models; the folks around us toiled in the factories, shops, and the trades, solidly lower-middle class at everything they did, including a strict avoidance of a higher education.
Going away to college seemed like an unattainable dream to me then, since at the time there was no money to pay for it. Anyway, I didn't want to be no freakin' lawyer... or anything else, for that matter.
Another story, but I've had no real experience and Marii's Mom went to a top women's college in Japan but doesn't know the system here. She would have Marii in one of the Seven Sisters based on reputation, at least until she got a load of the tuition costs. We were the blind leading the blinder at first. Fortunately, Marii took up a lot of the initiative in driving the process and in the end, did it quite well.
Sometimes our children will suddenly and sneakily mature on us and we hardly notice.
As the old song says, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"
Since Roger Williams never sat for a portrait and no surviving likeness remains, the artist who made the statue that centers the RWU campus used Red Sox slugger Ted Williams as the model.
Tuesday, March 16. 2010
A Nice Start for the Mosquito Breeding Season
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How nice it is to step outside and bask in the warmth of an early spring sun. During the peak of the deluge, we had a wide rivulet cascading over the top of our driveway. There are now five small running streams within 100 ft. of the house and Lake Lambert, our experimental mosquito breeding facility, has been nicely topped up.
As far as I recall, this is third time we've had an incident of driveway river in the ten years we've been here in Carlisle Woods. This year was by far the worst, though.
Should be a real bumper crop of mosquitos this year: Global Wetting.
Wednesday, October 14. 2009
Oh! Canada...
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The last time I made the trek up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, was more than half a long lifetime ago. Don't remember much, except for endless stretches of gorgeous desolation throughout most of New Brunswick into the western part of Nova Scotia, plus way friendly folks the few times I accidentally happened to bump into one.
This time around we managed to hit leaf-peeping prime-time all the way up through Maine and the Maritimes. A new postcard vista greeted us over the crest of every hill, while countless rivers and streams crisscrossed the highway, running fast, deep and beautiful, filled with the autumn rain.
Nature freakin' rules.
So, Eastern Canada turned out to be much the same as I recall through the fog of 36 years, at least outside the few and far between smallish cities. Urban and suburban areas have grown considerably, unfortunately, taking on that hideous American fright mask of chained food and shackled marketing: Walmart, Staples, Home Depot, Target, and all that crap, generously peppered with a shaker full of cheap-ass chain hotels, mega-markets and video stores.
Inevitable, I suppose... though disconcerting. The main detail of difference between Fredericton, NB, and Nashua, NH is the license plates... just replace all the Dunkin Donut shops with Tim Horton's, the Canadian equivalent.
The same US-made commercial ugly stick will beat a garish neon bruise on places like Mogadishu, Papua, New Guinea, and Chad someday, the way things are going.
Too bad for Chad, but The Way of the World.
Our main purpose was a scouting trip; the resident high school senior has more than a little interest in continuing her education in Halifax, at either St. Mary's or Dalhousie University. It was worth a trip to see if this was place she could survive... to get a feel for of the schools and the students, the neighborhoods and the city.
Turns out Halifax is way neat--unique in many ways, still quaint and quirky. Except for scale, the city is much like Boston/Cambridge, with the seaport, the many universities and hospitals and the tourism trade dominating. It's a nice blend of the old and modern, well-cleaned and well-kept. (Even the homeless panhandlers were clean, much better dressed than half the customers at Market Basket in Nashua.)
My former little girl said she had set no particular expectations on Halifax or either college before we headed up there. She ended up impressed, as were we, with both the St. Mary's and Dalhousie campus facilities and the general city scene.
I wouldn't mind going to school up there myself.
Women--even young ones--often change their mind, I'm told (ahem). The kid may not end up in Halifax, but I liked her approach at evaluating things and discovered she did a lot more pre-trip research than I believed going in.
Good job on the kid.
All in all, an excellent trip. We all enjoyed the long weekend, including the resident terrier/baby surrogate Lylaboo, good as gold and no trouble at all during the entire trip. We might have done without the two nights we had to stop over in Fredericton, one on the way up and one on the way back, but Jesus, you have to sleep somewhere.
Total drive time from Saturday noon to Tuesday evening, including side trips, about 26 - 27 hrs. Gas: around $200 for my fuel-hungry VW Touareg.
Make sure to top up before you hit the Canadian border.
Monday, September 21. 2009
More On Healthcare
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In my most recent blog entry, I tried to emphasize the inequities inherent in our current healthcare system. At the time I wrote that, I knew I lacked hard research data, no doubt weakening my case.
An article in the Boston Globe this past week cited a Cambridge Health Alliance report that appeared in the American Journal of Public Health: a study that followed 9,005 adults under 65 years old who took part in a national survey conducted from 1986 through 1994 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After 12 years, 351 people had died. Sixty of them were uninsured and 291 were insured.
I'll quote from the article...
Co-author of the CHA paper, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, noted in an interview that being uninsured is more lethal relative to being insured than it was 20 years ago, due to advances in treatment and prevention.
Even I didn't think the difference in mortality rate would be that startling... shocking, really. That means that lives lost due to lack of quality healthcare will exceed lives lost by american forces in the Vietnam War in about 15 months, and the Iraq war in about three and a half weeks.
Another Globe article Thursday reported on their recent survey of the commonwealth's major health insurance providers and the prospects of upcoming rate increases. Anticipated increases ranged from 7 to 12 percent, capping a decade of consecutive double-digit premium increases. Rates for 2010 will depend on the size of the employer and the type of coverage, but small businesses and individuals are expected to be hit the hardest.
The Globe claimed that, overall, premiums are more than twice as high as they were 10 years ago, but if the writer were familiar with the back-of-the-envelop "rule of 72", 10 years of at least ten percent increases gets you closer to a mind-numbing 150% boost. Massachusetts insurance costs are higher than most states, but the average cost of a family plan will be around $14,000 next year, with those insured through their employer footing around two-thirds of the bill.
An annual tariff of $14,000 is roughly double what an employee making $50K and her company will shell out for the twin payroll taxes, SS and Medicare.
These two trends are what the real healthcare crisis is all about. Private healthcare insurance is rapidly becoming beyond the means of the majority, and people will die because of it.
After accounting for age, education, income, and other factors, the researchers found that people without private insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of dying than people with private insurance. An earlier study by the Institute of Medicine based on 16 years of data through 1993 found that uninsured people had a 25 percent higher risk of dying than insured people, which translated into 18,000 additional deaths.
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