(Not) Smoking in Pennsylvania

(News-Herald, June 26) I admit to having some mixed feelings about the Commonwealth’s new smoking ban.

For one thing, I’m not sure about the actual nuts and bolts of the law. As near as I can tell, the law will ban smoking in all public places except those that are protected by really good lobbyists. Perhaps there’s a bit more logic behind it than that.

I don’t much care for smoking. I’ve never been a smoker. I once attempted to smoke a cigar driving back from New Stanton in a Joy company car well past midnight on the theory that it might keep me awake. It would have been just as effective to slam my head in the car door while driving, but probably more dangerous.

My grandmother was a smoker; to this day, certain aromas of stale cigarette smoke take me right back to younger days in her home. In the days when I played late-night jobs with a local dance band, I would often come home smelling like my grandmother’s car.

Smoking is indefensible. There isn’t any good argument in favor of it, no possible benefit to be derived from it. I’m not really sure how tobacco executives live with themselves. People simply shouldn’t smoke; it’s a stupid habit.

That said, I don’t believe that because something is stupid, the government should necessarily be prohibiting it. Our country is largely founded on the rights of people to do stupid things.

Sen. Mary Jo White has taken a lot of heat for being one of the few legislators to vote against this. Some commentators suggested that her vote proves that she’s in favor of cancer and toxic gases. I don’t buy the idea that if you are opposed to something, you must favor of a law against it. You may not like looking at ugly people, but that doesn’t mean the government should make them wear bags over their heads.

This particular incursion by the Nanny State owes a lot to some general hysteria about second-hand smoke. The discussion of THAT research doesn’t so much highlight the dangers of second-hand smoke as it serves as yet another reminder that many Americans don’t understand science very well.

The research about second-hand smoke consists largely of recrunching numbers from a variety of health studies. It’s a complex process, the kind of problem that’s easier to solve if you start out knowing what conclusion you want to reach. At best, we can say there has been disagreement about how solid those conclusions are.

As often is the case, the loudest voices aren’t very helpful. On one hand, we have the tobacco companies pooh-poohing the whole issue, but these are the same guys who have insisted for decades that smoking makes you healthy, well-adjusted, and irresistibly sexy. On the other hand, we have anti-smoking zealots who insist that just ten minutes of exposure to second-hand smoke will harden your arteries, scramble your dna, and raise your blood-pressure until your head explodes; some reports conclude that second-hand smoke is more dangerous than being an actual smoker.

What do we know for sure? Many people hate cigarette smoke (fond memories of my grandmother aside, I’m one of them) and they wish smokers would just quit. But they don’t want to make a scene asking someone to put it out, so they’ll have the gummint do it.

I look forward to the enforcement side of these regulations—will we hire special smoking police, or do our current officers get one more duty? What will we do with habitual repeat offenders?

As I said, mixed feelings. Smoking is bad. It harms people. It makes things stink. Health problems suck up a ton of money and productivity. Second-hand smoke may not be instantly lethal, but it probably doesn’t do anybody any good. Smoking mostly harms our country.

But. Ditto for teen pregnancy, alcohol, bad driving, fatty food, lack of exercise, stupid tv shows, politicians who lie to win elections, old men in ugly shorts, rudeness, plastic packaging, bad art, toxic household cleansers, overzealous political action groups, and spandex clothing on overweight people. How many of these really cry out for the government to step in and pass some more laws?

I won’t miss the smoking in some (more) public places. My life will be marginally more pleasant without it. But every time the Nanny State passes one of these laws, I can’t help thinking that it’s one more limit for us, and one less limit for them.

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The Whiskey Rebellion

(News-Herald, June 2004) It is unfortunate that we Americans are not big on history. It contains many good stories, and provides an enormous amount of insight into who we are as a people. But there are many chapters that we have simply lost. If you want an example close to home, take the Whiskey Rebellion.

Our country is rooted in a great deal of schizoid behavior. Colonists wanted to establish religious freedom, but executed and banished people who worshipped differently. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men were created equal, but was rewritten so that it wouldn’t criticize slavery.

Since day one, we have tried to balance opposing impulses and contradictory principles. Some days it can seem discouraging that Americans disagree so much about what is right and what we should do, but the fact is, most of our history is about such arguments.

The Whiskey Rebellion came out of another one of our old arguments—how strong should the federal government be. The Founding Fathers couldn’t even agree on this one.

We have a tendency to view the framers of the Constitution as a unified group, a pack of wise men who divined the best and brightest way to form a government and captured it in a perfect document.

But the Constitution was a work of massive compromise. It was not obvious that a democracy was the best choice (said one of the framers, “The people should have as little to do as may be possible about government”). Balancing the states was contentious; some states favored one vote per state, while others favored votes weighted by population. It’s not hard to guess which was which.

But the biggest issue was states rights vs. federalism. Would the state or federal government be sovereign?

The Constitution was a patchwork quilt of compromises, and I think it’s valuable to remember that this document did not come about because the framers all shared a common view of one bright and shining Truth. It was, in fact, a document that many, if not most, of the founding fathers considered flawed by the compromise of important principles.

Once the Constitution was adopted, the founding fathers wasted no time in trying to steer the US government in one direction or another to “correct” the compromises that created it. In 1790, Quaker delegations from New York and Pennsylvania presented petitions to the House demanding an end to slave trade. And in that same year, Alexander Hamilton proposed the federal assumption of all war debt from the Revolution. The feds, not the states, would take charge of USA IOUs.

Many resisted what they took as an attempt to give the feds financial power and primacy over the states. But a deal was struck that appeared to trade assumption for a new capital located by the Potomac River.

Once the federal government assumed the debts, they had to raise money to pay them. Hamilton placed a 25% tax on liquor sold in the US. Farmers in states south of New York protested this oppressive move by the federal government.

In western Pennsylvania, this protest took the form of tarring and feathering tax collectors. In 1794, officials ordered the arrest of the rabble; a militia commander was shot and killed by federal troops who were protecting a tax official. The anti-tax settlers went berserk, and President Washington raised a military force from the tri-state area. When negotiations failed, George put on his war uniform and personally led the troops into Western Pennsylvania (now there’s a commander-in-chief for you).

The rebellion was put down. Two rebels were convicted of treason, but pardoned by the President. Thomas Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State and formed the Democratic-Republican Party, which supported states’ rights against the Federalists. When he was elected President, some Federalists began plotting for New England to secede. Aaron Burr, who ran as Jefferson’s VP and almost won the Presidency, waged a political war against Federalist Hamilton so bitter that he ended up killing Hamilton in a duel.

America’s political life has always been cantankerous. And our greatest documents represent solutions to thorny conflicts of principle, not the triumph of one single point of view. The different views weren’t merge, one side didn’t win, and one side did not give up. The American Way is not, historically, that the people who are Right win; the American Way is that everybody gives up a piece of what they want and believe in for the greater good.

A violin string lying on a table makes no music. It’s only when you grab the two ends and pull it in opposite directions that you can make it sing.

The Marriage Mortgage

(News-Herald, June 19) It’s the wedding season, the time of year when many folks are preparing to get hitched. Predictably, this leads to lots of other folks thinking about divorce.

While it’s not strictly true to say that half of all marriages will end in divorce (it’s an example of statistical abuse for rhetorical effect), it’s true that many attempts to enter that lifetime institution come up short on the “lifetime” part.

We wonder why. We talk about why marriages fail in general, and we devote plenty of time to discussing why particular marriages failed. It ought to be educational, but despite the wealth of negative examples, the failure of marriages remains a mystery (well, at least to many people whose marriages fail).

Of course, it’s popular and comforting to assign all the blame for a marital meltdown to just one party. However, it’s almost always wrong.

A marriage is a complex and dynamic relationship between two people. When a marriage succeeds, hardly anyone says, “The success of that marriage is totally because of Spouse A. Spouse B had nothing to do with it.” Why take the same view of divorce?

It is often true that one particular spouse sets off the bomb that creates the final spectacular collapse. But marriages don’t reach that point overnight, and usually it takes both parties to get there.

I suspect that you could select any two people at random, and they could have a successful marriage—if they decided that they would do whatever it took to have it. Heck, in many places and times in human history, that’s how it worked.

Nowadays it doesn’t work that way, and that’s probably a good thing. Sometimes “whatever it takes” ends up being “learn to live with emotional isolation” or “cheerfully accept being a punching bag.” But I think the basic concept is sound.

Here’s my analogy for the week. A marriage is like a house.

I don’t mean a house as in “large structure with walls and foundation etc etc etc.” I mean a house as in “big expensive thing that you spend most of your adult life taking care of.”

The first rookie marriage mistake is to put all your care and attention into the wedding without thinking about the marriage. This is like putting your down payment on the house, signing all your closing paperwork, and imagining that all that remains is to move into the house and live there.

But, of course, there are payments to make, every month, for years and years. Telling the bank, “Well, we signed the papers and gave you a down payment—what else do you want!!” won’t cut it.

Lots of folks buy that marriage house without really understanding what it will cost. And then lots of people forget about the monthly payment, the cost in time, attention, putting something ahead of yourself.

They get comfortable. They start spending on other things. These expenses can be good and noble (children, health, the World Peace Club) or they can be selfish (fancy clothes, snazzy car, cheek implants) or they can be stupid (drugs, gambling, illicit petting zoos). But if the couple spends too much money, at the end of the month, they can’t make their house payment.

If you end up a hundred dollars short, it’s easy to blame the mortgage default (divorce, for those of you getting lost in this metaphor) on the person who spent that last hundred dollars. But that last hundred only hurts because of all the other expenses that preceded it.

Occasionally someone does end it all unilaterally. Chris cleans out the entire bank account, so they lose the house.

But usually both parties have spent in other places the bits and pieces that they needed to make the marital mortgage payment. Sometimes they’ve done it with good intentions; one classic marital challenge is the person who basically dumps their spouse in order to spend everything on their kids.

And sometimes even when the couple scrimps and saves, it’s not enough. Some people can’t resist getting a house they can’t afford.

The one big flaw in this comparison—with a house, you usually know up front what the cost will be. With a marriage, you can discover down the road a cost far beyond what you imagined. But one similarity holds true. When you find the right one for you, the cost won’t bother you, because it will be worth every bit of what you pay.

Forum at the Barrow

Here's a special blogging invitation to come see Franklin Civic Operetta's production of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" this weekend.

If you're not familiar with the show-- it's a bit of Roman vaudeville. The show doesn't have a single moment of seriousness, high art, deep feeling, or moving sentiment. It's just relentlessly silly.

It's the early work of two guys who went on to do plenty of interesting work. Larry Gelbart wrote the book years before he went on to become one of the guiding writers of M*A*S*H. The score is by Steven Sondheim, and it has just enough tang to make some well-worn musical-theater traditions interesting; the later Sondheim who can be very, um, challenging to audiences, is not yet on display.

Jodi Hoover is directing the production, and it's long past time that Civic got her to helm one of their major productions. I am handling the music chores-- you can see my little flesh-toned yamulke poking up over the edge of the orchestra pit. It is a particularly eclectic cast; I can guarantee that just about every audience member will see one performer that they've never seen on stage before. Ted Smith is doing what I consider to be, by far, his best stage work. Ed Ramage is hilarious. Lots of folks have seen Bill Trimble on stage before, but rarely singing and dancing. The cast includes weathered veterans like Rob Hoover and students from Franklin, R0cky Grove and Oil City.

It's a fun cast, fun music, and a fun show. You can find more info about the theater here.
(Though it only likes to deal with internet explorer-- boo, hiss). Civic has also started a blog of its own which you can find here.

No One Told Us We Were Responsible

(News-Herald, June 12) In an interview in the winter 2005 issue of Invention & Technology, I found this gem of a quote from Robert Gallo, a man who started out in cancer research, but who made AIDS his life’s work. “No one told us we were responsible for finding the cause of AIDS and doing something about it.”

No one told us we were responsible.

“Responsible” is a powerful word. I’m not talking about the debased interpretation that equates responsibility with blame. “Responsible” means I take ownership of the problem. It’s mine. I’m going to deal with it, see it through, not assume that it’s up to someone else. I focus on getting the job done, not just going through the motions and walking away before I know how things turned out.

I know people who appear irresponsible. But maybe people who seem irresponsible are just waiting to be told what they’re responsible for.

Some wait to be told exactly what their responsibilities are. Some are afraid to take on stuff beyond their assigned area of responsibility; some just don’t want to.

The folks who stand out in the world take responsibility. They don’t wait to be told, and they don’t carefully read the letter of what they’re told.

How people define their responsibilities pretty much defines who they are. This isn’t always on some large scale. There’s a big difference between a waitress who believes her responsibility is to do only as much the boss demands, and one who believes her responsibility is to make sure you’re well taken care of while you’re in the restaurant.

No one told us we were responsible.

One plague of the modern world is that we’ve made it too easy to dodge responsibility. That’s not my job. We have people for that; let them take care of it.

But where do the responsible people come from? They see what needs to be done, and they recognize that they could do it, and so they step up. We see it every day. Fifty people see a man fall through the ice; two or three people jump in to save him. Fifty people walk past someone who needs a helping hand; two or three stop to lend it.

No one told us we were responsible.

We have entire workplace hierarchies developed with a main function of telling people what they’re responsible for so that they’ll get up and do it. Some people rarely step up—there’s a special draining misery in managing someone who must be told, every single day, exactly what he’s responsible for. Of course, there’s an equally frustrating misery that goes with trying to step up to a responsibility and having it taken away from you by a numbskulled boss.

But most of us look, in and out of work, for that calling, that perfect marriage of who we are, what we can do, and what needs to be done.

No one told us we were responsible.

The best leaders don’t wait to be told. They know their own strength and understand what the situation calls for. They don’t mistake responsibility for blame, and they don’t mistake it for credit either (responsibility is not about making sure you get a big shiny medal). Nor is responsibility about having an excuse to make sure you get things your own way.

No one can tell you any of these things. Rarely can anyone see as clearly as you can see yourself what needs to be done, how you can rise to that occasion.

It’s easy to take on just part of a job, to kick over the sandcastle, file a lawsuit, shoot down someone who’s getting things done, and just generally make a mess while saying, “Hey, it’s not my job to fix that. Nobody can tell me I’m responsible.” Or “No one said I had to fix that!”

Well, it’s rare that anyone ever tells you you’re responsible. When your child is born, no voice booms “You are responsible for this tiny person.” Even at work, it’s more common to get a list of actions to perform than a statement of what area you’re responsible for.

And so many people wait to be told, wait their entire lives. Some are secretly relieved that no one appears to point and say, “That’s your responsibility” and some are uncomfortably idle, wishing to be assigned a sense of purpose and direction.

Yet most great people agree: No one told us we were responsible.

In Praise of Discrimination

(News-Herald, April 2003) Discrimination is not always bad.

Discrimination, after all, is simply the business of spotting distinctions between things. We used to praise someone with “discriminating tastes”—that was a person who could tell the difference between good stuff and junk.

Now, there’s no question that there’s such a thing as bad discrimination. That’s when we discriminate on the basis of clues that can’t possibly tell us what we want to know. When trying to select a real estate broker, we could discriminate on, say, the basis of height, but we’d be dopey to do so. And some businesses encourage us to discriminate poorly. Used car dealers love buyers who discriminate on the basis of clean floor mats and nice paint jobs.

It was dopey discriminating that gave the term a bad name in the first place. The history of discriminating on the basis of race is a sad one, all those long stupid years of thinking that the trait of race could tell us what we needed to know about brains or ability.

But the fact of bad discrimination does not indict the whole process any more than the fact that there are bad doctors means we should do away with all surgery.

Discrimination not only can be good—it can be necessary. If I can’t discriminate between good food and poison, I’m in mortal danger. If I can’t discriminate between a good deal on a home and a bad one, I’ll end up living some place scary.

You’d better believe that I’m going to discriminate when it comes to doctors. I doubt that anyone out there is willing to say, “One surgeon is as good as any other; just send in whoever’s handy to rearrange the various lobes of my grey matter.”

Even in daily life, I need to discriminate between the people who are actually concerned about me and those who couldn’t care less if I ended up stuck under the ice at Two Mile Run.

There are people who believe that discrimination is bad, that the world will be a better place when no one anywhere ever discriminates. I think these people are absolutely wrong.

For instance, schools not only can discriminate, they have an obligation to discriminate. It’s part of our job.

Now, part of our job is to discriminate in ways that are fair and ethical and meaningful. Schools should not, for instance, say that since this child has blue eyes, she must get lower grades in physics. But if we’re going to recognize the best physics student, we should be able to discriminate based on ability to discern who that student is.

This runs counter to some of the looney educational wisdom that’s been out there for a while. We’ve all heard the occasional stories about systems designed to keep little Euridicia Hypothetical from feeling bad that she can’t do physics very well.

We have mistakenly concluded that we can do this by rewarding Euridicia as if she had earned straight A’s in physics. It’s a dopey conclusion.

If we have a race and give everyone a blue ribbon, we do not convince everyone that they have won. We convince them that the blue ribbon is meaningless because anyone can get one just for showing up with a pulse.

I’m sorry that some people feel bad about not winning a particular race. I don’t think they should feel bad for losing, but that’s not the same thing as believing that the winner shouldn’t feel good for winning.

Discrimination is an essential life skill. We need to be able to tell good from bad, safe from dangerous, insightful from stupid, able from incompetent. We need to learn what standards of discrimination work well, and which do not.

And we need to learn that losing a race does not mean that we have been publicly declared stupid and ugly and worthless. Nothing is gained by insisting that those who can win the race stop trying. Truth is, there are a thousand different races to run, and nobody is suited to win all of them. In the Constructing a Sentence race, I do well enough; in the Transplanting a Spleen or Farming a Few Acres races, I finish dead last. That doesn’t make me any better or worse than the Spleen or Farm winners, but someone who needs food or a new spleen or a letter of recommendation had better be able to discriminate between us. And what we all have to do is learn to discriminate between the races that will break us, and the races we were born to run.

Graduation Audiences

(News-Herald, June 5) A graduation, particularly a high school graduation, is one of those activities that requires an audience even though the audience has no real purpose.

It’s a sliding scale. On one end we have funerals, where the central participant is well beyond caring about the quantity or quality of the audience. On the other end, we have, say, high school sports where the audience is still unnecessary, but their quality often matters to the main performers.

A bride and groom could tie the knot just as permanently in a small room alone with a preacher and maybe a witness. And a graduate would still be a graduate if the diploma arrived in the mail. Yet both events are traditionally staged publicly so the community at large can recognize a big change in the central character’s life. We don’t just want to make a change; we want everyone to know.

So an audience at graduation is a must. That’s part of the point of graduating a whole group all at once—each individual is guaranteed an audience for his official transition.

There are a few rules for all participants to observe.

First, the graduates have a responsibility to each other. You may think it would be cool to release a hundred paint-covered weasels during the ceremony, and if you were graduating alone, you’d certainly have that right. But while you may be happy making a mockery of your own commencement ceremony, you have no right to make a joke out of someone else’s special day.

It’s good to practice this restraint. Someday you may have the urge to stage some silliness at your own wedding without consulting your fiance; a moment of restraint may prevent a honeymoon alone on the couch.

Most graduates behave pretty well at the ceremony. It’s their friends and family who need some training.

It’s beyond simple rudeness. Johnny, wrapped in cap and gown, hears his name read. For one brief moment, he will be center stage, a world of people focusing on him in recognition of what he has accomplished. And then someone hollers.

It doesn’t matter if they holler “Hey Johnny!!” or “Woot woot—we rule” or some inarticulate bellow. What they’re hollering translates simply as “Hey, look at me!” At the very moment when Johnny should get to be the center of attention, some alleged friend tries steal that attention away from him.

It is true that some folks are so overcome with joy that they just have to holler. But here’s a simple test you can perform at any graduation you attend:

First, check your clothing. Are you wearing a cap and gown? Second, check your family records. Did you personally participate in the conception, birth, or rearing of the graduate in question?

If the answer to both these questions is “no,” then this graduation ceremony is not about you, and you should probably just shut up.

The crowd is always asked to hold applause till the end, not just for the above reasons. A family should not miss Junior’s name because the previous student’s cheers drowned it out. And nobody should have to remember graduation as the day that everyone else got more applause than he did.

Graduation should be a joyous occasion, an event for celebration, certainly not a dull, lifeless ceremony. But it is not a football game or a NASCAR event; some dignity and respect are called for. Throwing gifts, taking and sharing embarrassing photos, screaming pet nicknames—these are all fine activities for the graduation party, not the ceremony.

Weddings are a fine model. Quiet dignity during the ceremony. Respectful tomfoolery afterwards in the designated area. And even that tomfoolery has limits—you can certainly join in throwing rice or bubbles or organic tofu cubes at the couple. But jumping in front of the bride and yelling, “Pay attention to me!!” is never cool.

Our graduates have accomplished one of life’s special little milestones. By all means, take the chance to show support and appreciation. Yes, commencement comes close to being boring. Yes, the party afterwards involves many people you neither know nor like. But the point of graduation stuff is not to make you feel important or entertained. It’s to give the graduate a moment to be recognized and respected, a day that feels special because so many people have gathered around. If we can remember, for just a few hours, that it’s about them, it will be a better day.

Venango County School Consolidation

(News-Herald, May 29) Valley Grove schools are struggling with administrative cuts. Oil City School District ranks on the undesirable end of the poverty scale. Franklin schools are whittling down staff a piece of teacher at a time. Cranberry School District has rejected a fact-finding report in current contract negotiations. And every school district is wrestling with bus fleet gas costs.

There are other challenges. Most of the county school building boom came in the sixties; districts are looking at aging school buildings that need serious attention, even as the population of those buildings is shrinking.

County schools carry more than the average state percentage of learning support students (what we once called “special ed”). Our regional reputation as a welfare mecca provides a steady influx of students from below the poverty line. Both groups bring special needs and challenges to school.

And lest we forget, the gummint wants every student to be above average within the next five or six years.

To meet all these challenges, schools need strong teaching staffs. That means recruiting the best teachers, but that requires money and creative aggressiveness in hiring. It also means getting the best out of the people we do hire, but that requires bold and clear leadership to train and develop staff.

Lately all of these issues are under frequent discussion, which means that it’s time, once again, to bring up the 800-pound gorilla that’s always in the room when we talk about local schools.

Venango County does not need four separate school districts.

Forty years ago, the picture was different. Franklin was considering building a separate Middle School, and the district was sending portable schoolrooms to Utica to deal with growing student population. In 1968, Franklin High School graduated 228 students; Cranberry, 184; Rocky Grove, 125. Oil City handed diplomas to 290 students. Thirty years ago, Rocky Grove still put out over 130 grads. Franklin easily topped 200, and Oil City graduated over 300.

But after another decade passed, the picture changed. RGHS graduating classes have not seen triple digits since; the current senior class is barely more than half the size of the group thirty years ago. Valley Grove is the one district of the four without a projected downward trend. Cranberry (125 seniors) and Franklin (under 200) both show downward trends for the next twelve years. Oil City (177 seniors) can expect some fluctuations, but no actual long-term growth.

In short, all four districts are maintaining facilities built for larger populations than they currently serve.

These are not easy choices. Trying to jam students into too-small facilities is ugly business, so districts must be careful not to lose capacity they could someday need. On the other hand, maintaining facilities for “ghost students” is expensive.

On top of that, the vagaries of PA school law lead to oddly-shaped districts; every morning many Venangoland students ride the bus through one district in order to arrive in another. At the very least, not very fuel-efficient.

How many districts do we really need? Two would be plenty. Oil City could absorb Cranberry and still serve fewer students than it did thirty years ago. Franklin plus Valley Grove would create a larger district than in the past, but in all cases, we would end up with a district with more than enough capacity, saving money now and preserving space that could be used in the event of a sudden influx of students.

It makes sense. Each new district could have separate high schools and middle schools—a major educational bonus. The combined schools could offer more programs, staff more efficiently, save money by cutting redundant administrative personnel. Transportation costs could be trimmed. And really—our students already play sports together, go to church together, even date across district boundaries.

Just as the common sense arguments in favor of merger are well known, so are the objections. The political wrangling between school boards would require divine intervention (Cranberry board members can’t even share power with each other—another board in the room might make heads explode).

And in a region where so many people identify for life with their alma maters, the state supreme court might be needed to settle the mascot question. Cranberry oil? An armored oriole?

There’s no question that small local schools with strong community identity are great, a luxury that local generations have been fortunate to enjoy. But it’s time once again to ask the question—how much do you really want to pay for it?

The Summer Begins

For those of you who are actually in the neighborhood, just a quick mention/reminder that the Franklin Silver Cornet Band will kick off summers in the Franklin park with a concert tomorrow night at 7:30. The concerts are free and open to the public. Bring your own chair or blanket (we sell popcorn on the premises). It looks like it's going to be a good evening. If you've never enjoyed our little slice of small-town Americana, there's no time like the present. And if you are a regular, you should know that in addition to our usual acquisitions of new music, we've made it a point to pull out some music that hasn't seen the light of day in decades. It's practically like Christmas in the summer!

What I Learned This Decade

(News-Herald, May 22) Today’s column marks ten years of filling up this weekly space. I have voiced many opinions (about 416,000 words—almost double the number of words in Moby Dick) but I decided to mark my anniversary by stating as clearly and briefly as I can what I actually believe. So…

There is a God. However, a human trying to understand God is like my dog trying to understand my Hawaiian shirt collection. Any human who claims to know exactly what God is about is full of bologna.

Most of human existence is wasted on silly junk that we just make up. We spend 95% of our time and care on things of no importance; only the other 5% has value or reality. Many people do not disagree with those numbers, but most disagree vehemently about what, exactly, constitutes that 5%.

Whatever you’re doing, try to spot the main point. This requires thinking and paying attention—the main point is almost never “to just go through the motions.” It is not necessary to be particularly smart. If you can just shut up and pay attention, you can fill in the holes in your smarts.

Comfort and convenience are the enemies of everything great and good. People go to great lengths to avoid anything difficult, uncomfortable or inconvenient. Everybody succumbs to this temptation now and then; that’s just human. Some people are ruled by it; they become truly bad people.

In every aspect of your life, you are always either getting better or getting worse. There is no standing still. If you think you have something mastered and no longer need to work on it, you are getting worse.

Life normally generates plenty of conflict, heartache and hurt. It is a foolish waste to make a special effort to add, on purpose, more hurt and heartache to the world. Our minimum responsibilities as human beings include looking out for each other and being kind.

Being kind is not the same as being nice. It is not kind to offer warm fuzzy affirmations to someone who is driving himself over a cliff. It is almost never kind to lie to someone, even though the truth can be hard.

Very few situations are improved by withholding the truth.

It is important to make judgment calls and to make the very best decisions that we can on any given day without waffling or flinching. At the same time, it would be a mistake to believe that you are so wise that you need never listen to another viewpoint. No good judgment was ever harmed by being re-examined. You can never learn too much.

Be a pessimist about the present and an optimist about the future. Be ruthless about confronting any ugly truth now, and always be certain that no matter how bad the situation is, the next moment could still bring something better. One of the great tricks of evil is the belief that if you have made ten bad choices in a row, the eleventh is sure to be bad and you might as well not bother to try. That’s a lie. No matter how many bad choices you have made, the next choice could be a right choice. Not only can you try to get it right, but you must try. Redemption is not just a possibility, but a responsibility.

There’s a long list of problems that government cannot solve. It’s a bad idea to use government as a tool to implement the horribly common human impulse to make other people behave the way we think they’re supposed to.

Life is like a card game. Fortune deals the cards, and those cards decide what choices you have. Within those limits, the outcome will be determined by your skill, wisdom, and nerve. Fortune (God, fate—pick your favorite) and human effort determine each outcome; to imagine it’s all fortune is lazy, and to imagine that it’s all human effort is egotistically foolish.

Every choice happens where the circumstances of your life intersect with who you are at that moment. Nobody can know what that intersection looks like but you.

Figure out what you believe the point is. Never stop figuring. At the same time, act as if you really mean what you say you believe.

Every moment in life is one of a kind. Filling it with spirit, meaning, beauty, purpose, use and sense is important. Growing and getting better, and helping others do the same, is most of what we are made for.

This is what I've been up to this weekend. My daughter is now officially a college graduate.

Springtime in Venangoland

(News-Herald, May 15) After a quick and cruel tease, spring appears to finally be arriving in Venangoland.

To tell the truth, spring is not my favorite season; I’m much more of an autumn guy. But I’m glad to live somewhere that actually has seasons, particularly after nine months of weather reports from my son in Southern California (“Well, today it was warm and sunny. Kind of like yesterday. But I think tomorrow it might be sunny and warm.”)

Spring in Venangoland is a big reveal. For a few weeks, you can climb up on the hills, clear of snow and slush, and find spectacular views unhampered by leaves and greenery. A few weeks back I discovered that Franklin Heights is still growing, with a small batch of houses now built where you can stand in the back yard and throw a rock that will land on Sixth Street. It puts you right on the old dirt road that snakes around the top of the hill. One end comes out at the spot known as “back the Gurney,” site of decades of various teenaged misbehavior; the other end winds around to the Third Street hollow (does anybody know the story behind the foundation and lot perched halfway up the hill above Fourth Street?). The whole length of that dirt path offers a fabulous view of Franklin and the river. Or at least it did until the recent eruption of leafery.

Down by the river, spring reveals what the waterways have been up to. Down in my neck of the riverbank, the water chewed its way through a lot of riverside growth and dirt (we lost a wide swath of lawn in my neighborhood).

To really see what the river has been up to, you have to get out on it. Personally, I follow the 100 rule—if the air and water temperatures don’t add up to 100, I stay on land—so I only recently dragged the kayak out of the basement and started paddling upstream.

Now, I love my bicycle. I think the bike trail is one of the great local resources. I look forward to many fine trips up to Oil City and down to the Belmar bridge. Traveling out the Sandycreek spur toward Van or pedaling all the way down to Emlenton reminds me that I live in the middle of a gorgeous park the likes of which the poor, deprived urban dwellers can only dream of. An active biker can see most of the county without burning a drop of gas.

It’s not perfect. The Great Missing Link in Venangoland bicycling is the cities themselves. We could bicycle to one of the three sister cities to eat out or shop—if we could get around the cities on the bikes AND if we had someplace to put the bikes when we got there.

There have been attempts to even out some sidewalks—great, if you want to get off your bicycle and walk beside it. For riding, the street works much better (provided you can avoid getting smushed by traffic). Some bike racks are popping up here and there. I hope more appear, but I still love my bike.

As much as I love it, though, the kayak is my recreational vehicle of choice. There is nothing like being out on the water, watching the wildlife as the great green gentle valleys slip by.

I’ve seen kayak traffic increase over the years, so other folks must be catching on. My neighbors at Wiegel Brothers Marina have even launched an entire Big House Full O’Paddle Sport Stuff across the street from their regular shop. (Since I live across the river from Country Pedalers, I am happily located at the nexus of bikes and boats in Venangoland.) These days, kayaks are made out of materials that will last until long after the last cockroach has keeled over, so a careful kayak purchase can keep you entertained for years and years (though, as with bicycles, there are plenty of handy accessories that can add to your fun and make you look really cool, too).

It should be said that water sports have to be taken seriously; our local waterways are not the most treacherous, but a heedless weekend warrior at the wrong time under the wrong conditions can still get in serious trouble. But approached with respect, the region’s rivers and creeks (don’t forget the Clarion River) can be an enormous source of fun and relaxation.

Poor Oil City Schools

(News-Herald, May 8) What does it mean to say that Oil City has the tenth poorest PA school district?

That statistic is based on a formula using property values and personal incomes. But there are certainly other ways to calculate the economic health of a school district. If we look at poverty rates, Oil City didn’t make the bottom ten on the last census. 2006 figures for the district show about 35% economically disadvantaged students (compared to over 42% for Franklin). The state figure is 31%, so Oil City is on the high side, but not spectacularly so.

And there are districts like Forest schools which have to figure out how to slice a million bucks from their budget while handling the rising costs of transporting students enough miles to make a trip to Mars and back—every single day.

But poor doesn’t equal stupid. The bottom-ten ranking has to do with the district’s ability to raise money, and that’s a factor that’s only partly quantifiable.

No area school district has suffered a larger identity crisis over the past several decades than Oil City. When the current high school opened in 1968, the district had over 4500 students. Today, enrollment is just over 2300. In other words, Oil City School District could absorb all of the students from Franklin Schools and still be smaller than it was a generation ago (with room left over for Valley Grove).

To lose the position of regional giant is not easy, particularly in an area where folks identify closely with their school of origin and maintain loyalties based the building in which they slept through class fifty years ago. That’s why the economic picture is not just a matter of simple numbers. Supporting a school system is also a matter of will, and in this respect we are strangely conflicted.

On the one hand, it’s not hard to find folks around here who will be Oilers or Knights till the day they die. On the other hand, if the state made it legal, I believe you could muster much support for a ballot item to close the local school district.

There are many voices to overcome in the battle to fund schools.

“Don’t nobody need that fancy schoolin’. I didn’t.” This generally from the person who either retired or was laid off from the industrial job that is now gone forever. The argument works if the plan is to transport graduates via time machine to the past. For students who live in the present, competing for jobs with sixty gazillion Chinese and Indian students requires a bit more

Then there’s the ever-popular, “I don’t have kids going to school here. Why should I pay school taxes?” Let me be clear as I can be—that attitude is just stupid.

Do you want to live in a world where people can get jobs that allow them to be solid, contributing taxpayers? Do you want votes cast by people smart enough not to fall for any stupid thing? Do you want your neighbors, co-workers, employees, and people who serve you to be, well, not unedumacated boneheads? I’ll bet you answered yes to at least one of these. And that’s why you pay school taxes.

That said, schools like Oil City must face economic reality. If you don’t have enough money for a Lexus, you may have to make do with a used Yugo. You can’t spend what you don’t have. Still, within that basic economic reality, there’s a lot of room to maneuver. Individuals, corporations, and governments often manage to find a way to get what they want—if they really, really want it. There’s the will.

If the people of Oil City want to maintain a top-notch school system, they’ll find a way. If all they want is to provide just enough school system to avoid getting sued, then that’s all they’ll get. If the schools are led by leaders with vision and determination to get the best they can out of the resources they have, then the schools will still be excellent. If they’d rather not work that hard, then the schools will drift and decay.

It’s a delicate balance. Oil City schools can’t tax property owners to death. But “to death” does not mean “at all.” And no community ever attracted new citizens with the slogan “Our schools—As Cheap as the Law Will Allow.”

What does Oil City’s place on the bottom ten list mean? It doesn’t have to mean a thing.

In Praise of Mistakes

(News-Herald, May 1) I write today in praise of mistakes.

Being wrong has great value in this world.

First of all, negative examples can be powerful. The thing about people who do things right and do them well is that they make so much of it seem natural and easy. When you watch a perfect performance by an athlete or musician, you can’t imagine that it could have been done any other way. It’s hard to learn from perfection.

But while it often seems as if there’s only one way to be great, there are a thousand ways to mess things up. Each one of them is instructive. The managers of Oil City and Franklin hospitals undoubtedly did a thousand things correctly over the decades, and those decisions are lost to posterity. But the botched merger of the two facilities is a management manual of mangled – well, I’ve run out of M words, but you get the idea. Even Herb Baum claims to have learned from his gross mishandling of Quaker State’s business in Oil City.

Of course, these lessons are not always worth the cost of the actual mistake. Like many divorced men, I can say that I learned a great deal from my marital meltdown. I also learned a lot from the time I lay down on a bunch of bees and the time I picked up a white hot piece of charcoal. Yet as instructional as all these life experiences have been, I can’t say that I would recommend any of them to someone else.

There is another value in making mistakes. Oddly enough, Albert Einstein is a fine example of this brand of useful mistakenness.

Among his other many achievements, Einstein laid the groundwork for quantum physics (which we are not going to explore today, thank you very much). But Einstein didn’t like quantum physics, and could never shake the feeling that it was just wrong.

And so, having laid the foundation, he proceeded to toss bricks at the young scientists who tried to build the house. On numerous occasions Einstein confronted the young turks of physics with challenge after challenge—“If quantum theory is right, then how do you explain X?” Now, Einstein was always a scientist about this. The challenges reportedly never contained a hint of “You stupid jerk kids.”

But the challenges forced the young pioneers of quantum theory to refine their ideas, to correct their mistakes, and otherwise try to find answers for the smartest man in the world. In the end, with his spirited dissent, Einstein drove the development of quantum theory forward, even though every step forward suggested that he was wrong.

At various times, various people have dreamt of the beautiful, efficient glory of having everyone On The Same Page. If we just had everyone in agreement, we could rip forward with all resources focused with laser-like intensity on a clear, consistent goal.

It’s a beautiful and inspiring picture, but it only works as long as whoever is picking the page picks the right page 100% of the time. And the only thing that is 100% correct is the statement, “Nobody is right 100% of the time.”

It doesn’t matter whether you’re the Grand Imperial Poohbah in charge of Frakistan’s Five Year Plan or the uber-bossy head of a roadside ice cream stand—if your plan is that you will never listen to anyone because you will always be right and they will always be wrong, you’re headed for trouble.

One of the things that has always made America great is the Right to Make Mistakes. Sometimes the only path to the bright sunny meadow is through the dark forest. Sometimes messing up is the only way to learn what we need to know to get things right. Nobody should want to be mistaken, but I’ve seen plenty of folks who were so afraid of making a mistake that they didn’t make anything at all. A caterpillar is not nature’s mistake in the attempt to create a butterfly; it’s just a necessary step on the way.

We need people who are mistaken, just as we all the need the flexibility to let go of our own cherished mistakes. When it comes to local development, we’re better off having many people try many different things. Some of them may well bomb, but that’s better than an endlessly paralyzed search for the One Right Thing to do.

Consultants of Nazareth

(News-Herald, April 2000) Scholars recently revealed that among the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls they have found direct evidence of the first known management consultants:

MEMO TO: Jesus of Nazareth, et al

FROM: Ernest Livgood, Management Consultant, Campaign for Sensitive Personhood

Here at CSP we have been following your career with some interest. We appreciate your invitation to join you in your work, but feel there are several points of sensitivity and effective packaging which you first need to address.

STAFFING: Your organization is simply too patriarchal-- too many guys. All twelve of your disciples are young working-class males of Middle Eastern/Jewish heritage. We suggest a group that better represents cultural diversity-- add at least three women, a Caucasian, and a few Africans. Perhaps some Confucians and Buddhists. A druid would be a nice touch, too.

You also show constant gender bias by referring repeatedly to God as a male. It would help if you could occasionally alternate the use of "Mother" and "Father." A better solution would be to refer to the Supreme Being with a gender-neutral term such as "Parent" or "Large Nurturing Presence."

QUALITY: We strongly recommend instituting a Total Quality system. While your organization possesses many of the characteristics of a fine collaborative effort, too many of your policies are handed down in a "top down" management style. Your "Sermon on the Mount," for instance, would benefit from being processed through a shared decision making model, allowing more of your customers a buy-in with the concepts.

To demonstrate the benefit of this approach, we have taken the liberty of forming a focus group here to refine some of the elements of that sermon. Our feeling was that, for example, the Beatitudes raised unreasonably high performance expectations and were also too exclusive.

For example, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Let us suggest instead, "Good news and positive energy are highly probable to those who express a reasonable humility that is still consistent with a high level of self-esteem based on a positive self-image growing out of whatever social, cultural or lifestyle choice backgrounds they may possess, because these individuals and many somewhat like them will eventually receive a just and reasonable portion of success (provided they are not the victims of political injustice from any oppressive government systems which fail to recognize their unique value as individuals)."

I think you will agree that this team-generated statement is much more inclusive. It also creates an expectation that we feel is less likely to lead to any legal action by any disappointed customers.

INFLEXIBILITY: Certain elements of your movement are simply too strict. Your regrettable tendency to label certain sorts of behavior as "sinful" and suggest that it could result in "eternal damnation" is entirely too harsh. Throwing all those potential sponsors out of the temple was simply bad business. If you have not already heard from the ACLU, I am sure that you will soon (See our attached memo re: "The Ten Guidelines").

At the same time, we are puzzled over your treatment of members of the movement who depart from the accepted guidelines. For these individuals to simply pray for forgiveness seems rather lax and liable to dilute brand identity and the movement's strength. It seems to us that some sort of sensitivity retraining before allowing them to reenter communion with the Large Nurturing Presence would help assure that everyone is on the same page.

The notion that their sin and subsequent forgiveness are somehow between them and the Supreme Being simply doesn't allow for enough checks and controls. We would also recommend that the practice of speaking in tongues be phased out. Instead, we recommend that a core committee develop a mission statement that members be encouraged to repeat in moments of extreme motivational enthusiasm. It might begin, "As persons of varied life choices, we are pleased to form consensus with the Large Nurturing Presence--"

At this point the scroll breaks off. Scholars will not yet comment on whether the charred edges are indicative of a lightning strike.

Frank Evans

(News-Herald, April 24) Amazing sometimes how one family’s story can stretch over so much time and distance. Here’s where a simple thread with just one local name took me.

The First Baptist Church started up in Franklin in 1867 with 23 members. By 1874 they were ready to build a full-sized church to seat 450 members (with Charles Miller footing a good chunk of the bill). That year the church hired the Rev. Frederick Evans, a minister in his early thirties, born in Wales and immigrated to the US (probably New York City) in 1866; it’s likely that this was one of the many times that Miller used his considerable financial resources to recruit and hire top notch people to fill positions in his favorite organizations.

Evans (Ednyfed, to his Welsh family) never lost his connection to Wales; the Baptists of Franklin granted him a leave to return there where he delivered lectures in Salem Chapel, Glamorgan. Afterwards, he returned to Franklin and a newly-built parsonage, where he lived with his family. In print (not local) he was called one of the most moving preachers in all of Wales and America, and under his leadership, the First Baptist Church increased membership from 80 to nearly 300.

His son Frank was born here in 1876. The Reverend retired and returned to Wales, where he passed away in 1897. The next year, Frank served as an infantryman in the Spanish-American War right after graduating from Princeton. Apparently the military life agreed with him because he was commissioned to the marines in 1900.

By 1909 Frank Evans was a retired marine captain serving as secretary to US Senator Briggs of New Jersey. In October of that year he married Esther Caldwell Townsend of New York City, niece of Lawrence Townsend, former US ambassador to Portugal and Belgium. The couple’s wedding announcement ran in the New York Times.

Frank soon returned to military service first in the Philippines, and then in France during World War I, where he won a citation for meritorious conduct and a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. Other post war service included duty in Haiti as Chief of the Gender merle d’Haiti. He retired to Hawaii, where he died in 1941.

But the Evans name had not yet finished its long travels from home in Venangoland.

In 1944, the Bethlehem Steel Company manufactured an Allen N. Sumner class destroyer. She was launched in October of 1944, sponsored by Frank Evans’s widow, and commissioned in February of 1945 as the USS Frank E. Evans.

After arriving in Pearl Harbor, the Evans performed radar picket and escort duty, until after the war. She was placed on reserve in 1949, but reactivated in less than a year to serve with the Seventh Fleet in the Korean War. She served two tours of duty there, including the siege of Wonsan. After the war the Evans remained on patrol duty in the Far East, but there was one more chapter left.

In 1969 the Evans was near Saigon in company with the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. They were part of SEATO exercise called “Sea Spirit.” A Time magazine report of the event described a dinner with the Melbourne’s captain, John P. Stevenson, reflecting on the horror five years earlier when the Melbourne had collided with a destroyer, sliced it open, and killed 82 hands. Australia could not stand another such disaster.

But four days later, the Melbourne cut the Evans in half. In just five minutes, the bow sank and took 74 men to their deaths (including three brothers from Nebraska).

The Australians made heroic rescue efforts. The Evans’s captain was reported asleep, a less-experienced officer responsible for a wrong turn that put the Evans in harm’s way. It didn’t matter; Stevenson was quickly hung out to dry for the disaster.

Stevenson’s wife Jo flew to be with him at the inquiry and on her own took page upon page of notes, which she later used in writing the book In the Wake as an attempt to cleanse the record. In 1999 Australia marked the anniversary of the collision, one of the worst maritime disasters ever for their nation, and Jo Stevenson was still trying to clear her husband’s name.

Her desire to clear his name is understandable; a name can travel long and far. The Evans name, even with its small roots in Venangoland, managed to spend a century criss-crossing the entire globe.

NCLB & the Texas Miracle

(News-Herald, January 2004) Okay, if it seems sometimes that I’m a little cynical about the current wave of education reforms, let me tell you a story.

One of the selling points of “No Child Left Standing” (or “Behind” or “In Public School” or whatever we’re calling it these days) was that it was a national version of highly successful reforms already proven in Texas. In 2000, Bush cheered the “Texas Educational Miracle.”

Since then, word has slowly been emerging that the miracle is slightly less miraculous than when your Uncle Floyd pulled a nickel out of your ear. But it does provide a good view of how this drive for “accountability” plays out in the field.

In Houston in February of this year, an assistant principal in Houston was surprised to discover that his school had a 0% drop-out rate, even though a freshman class of 1000 had become a senior class of 300.

There were a variety of accounting techniques used to achieve this effect (remember, this is Texas, home of Enron, that we’re talking about). Students were reportedly encouraged to take a hike; an independent audit of the school system found that roughly 50% of the students who did not graduate should have been labeled dropouts, but were not (“Um, Johnny just moved out of the district, as far as we know…”). That was about 2,300 students.

The drive behind all this was, of course, the push to make good numbers. The superintendent put the principals back to single-year contracts, and they could be terminated “without cause.” Those principals were given mandates: “The district-wide dropout rate will decrease from 1.5 percent to 1.3 percent.” In other words, their job was not to educate students, but to “make their numbers.”

When that same Houston superintendent took over, the success rate for the state’s tenth grade math test in one school was a measly 26%. The year he left, the rate was 99%.

How do we accomplish such a thing? It’s remarkably simple, actually. Houston’s technique was to keep low ability students in the ninth grade; after two or more years in ninth grade, they were bumped directly to twelfth grade. So the worst students in Houston simply never took the assessment test. In the year of the miraculous 99% success rate, there were 1,160 students in ninth grade and 281 in tenth grade.

Houston schools were also under pressure to keep their safety numbers in line to avoid being labeled “persistently dangerous,” another tag that triggers vouchers and loss of funds under the new rules of the game.

How do you keep those numbers down? Schools stopped reporting rapes, stabbings, and assaults as “school crimes,” because those students were arrested by the police and sentenced by the courts, not suspended by the school.

Over a four year period, the in-house police force recorded 3,091 assaults. In its report to the state capital, the school district reported 761 of those.

The Houston system was supposed to be the flagship school district for the country, and it certainly provides a fine example of how the sort of corporate malfeasance that has shot holes in the private sector can be effectively applied to school systems.

You tell your underlings that you will reward them for the appearance of success and crush them for the appearance of failure. It would probably be a better world if lots of people stood up to that sort of bullying, but when a bully holds a gun to your head and demands that you act like a supporter of Jefferson Davis—well, most of us will start whistling Dixie.

A survey of teachers by (take a deep breath) the National Board of Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College (phew) found that in states that use high stakes testing (like, say, the PSSA tests in Pennsylvania) 70% of teachers said that the test leads some teachers in their school to teach in ways that contradict their ideas of good teaching. I imagine that problem, of being pushed to do what you know is wrong in your job, is even worse for principals.

Now, none of what I’ve talked about this week is arcane or secret knowledge—it’s all taken from published reports in reputable papers like The New York Times. But my story is not quite over.

Who was this superintendent who led Houston schools through an exercise in cooking the books in order to give the appearance of compliance with the law, while actually avoiding it? And did anything happen to him when it was discovered that he had been thumbing his nose at the regulations?

He’s doing fine. He’s Rod Paige, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. This would be the part where I become cynical about government reform.

Going Through the Motions

(News-Herald, April 18) What could be worse than Going Through the Motions?

Sometimes students want to GTTM. The favorite question to justify GTTM without becoming involved is “When will we ever use this in real life?”

The sarcastic teacher would like to answer, “What? You mean, when will you ever have to use your brain in life?” Unfortunately, the sarcastic teacher knows that there are many opportunities for people to go through life without using their brains or becoming involved.

People who focus on GTTM usually become focused on what minimum motions they need to go through, and hitting that minimum estimate is a skill in itself. A bad under-estimator would be the student who observes other students writing and thinks that the minimum requirement is to wiggle your pen around while making random marks on paper. Even teachers who are themselves going through the motions may require more than that, but not by much. I suspect many students can tell a story about the time they inserted the words to, say, the Pledge of Allegiance in the middle of an essay, and the teacher never noticed.

People in any organization hate bad leadership, but often what we call bad leadership is really no leadership at all, and no leadership at all most commonly takes the form of going through the motions. The non-leader isn’t involved, isn’t engaged, and never has a large goal in mind other than simply Going Through The Motions. The minimum required motions are generally defined as enough “to avoid breaking the law, being sued, or receiving angry phone calls.”

It’s not just a matter of picking a low number of motions. GTTM is easy, but becoming really involved or really trying to get the job done often requires effort. Faced with the actual goals they should achieve, the GTTM person replies with some version of the age-old complaint, “But that would be haaaarrrd!”

If we’re going to do more than go through the motions, if we’re going to say what we mean and then behave as if we really mean it, life will often call our bluff and require us to step up. This is where all those clichés about rubber meeting the road and giving 100% and putting and/or shutting up could mean something (spouting clichés and platitudes is a great way to GTTM).

GTTM is also easy because we don’t have to bring our own compass. We just follow someone else’s directions, do as we’re told, copy and paste from someone else’s text. Because having to think things through yourself is haaarrrrrd. The enemy of the right thing is not the wrong thing—it’s the easy thing.

This issue distinguishes different types of malcontents. I disagree with most everything Ray Beichner has ever said publicly, but I totally respect that he doesn’t simply go through the motions. On the other hand, some of our local Grumpy People appear to fire off letters and lawsuits as a way to demand that others stop thinking and get back to GTTM. Dealing with people who are thinking and doing and actively trying to do what it takes to pursue goals—well, that’s just haaaaarrrrd.

Certainly everyone switches on autopilot now and then and just Goes Through The Motions. Sometimes you just need a break. But overall, I think life is not best served by GTTM.

One of the drawbacks of GTTM is that it eventually becomes hideously boring. If you never invest yourself in something, never awaken your passion and involvement, life can be a grey, dull, featureless expanse of blandness. Therefore, GTTM folks eventually want to skip over motions they find boring or unpleasant. “I wish it were the weekend” becomes “I wish it were next month/next year/ a decade from now.” This is spectacularly self-defeating, since such skipping ahead only brings you closer to the end.

Throwing away days because they are filled with dull GTTM instead of something to excite your passion is like throwing away twenty-dollar bills because they aren’t hundreds. Actually, it’s worse, because unlike money, our days can be invested with as much value as we care to put into them. Earlier this week hundreds and hundreds of people stopped by the funeral home to pay respects to Robert Porter. They didn’t do it to honor a life spent GTTM. At the end, no one ever says, “Well, at least he never tried to do anything haaaarrrd.”

Professional Politicos

(News-Herald, April 10) There are lots of reasons to argue against the slow but steady intrusion of government into every nook and cranny of modern American life.

We could talk about the meddling, the separation of those who make decisions from those who must live with the consequences, the tendency of bureaucrats to get things wrong, or the way that government oversight makes endeavors stiff and inflexible, poorly positioned to deal with change.

Each of those is a valid complaint. I’ll probably get around to each of them sooner or later. But that’s not where I’m headed this week.

One problem with ever-spreading government is that it has created a widespread need for professional politicians.

My own profession is as good an example as any. Teaching has always been tied to government and bureaucracy; since we are an arm of government, that seems only natural.

Nowadays, the state and federal government make decisions about what I’ll in my classroom beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. Harrisburg and DC make choices about what I will do in the everyday-to-day practice of my profession.

But when politicians want to talk about education, they don’t want to talk to teachers. They want to talk to other politicians. And so we have the PSEA and the NEA, groups of politicians who are hired to go talk to politicians about education. I’m not a big fan of either group, and I often suspect that they feel a stronger allegiance to their fellow politicians than to the people who hire them.

But the bottom line is that politicians in Harrisburg or DC are not going to talk to me, not even if they have a question about teaching high school English in Venango County. So if I want to have any sort of voice in the decisions made about my profession at all, I need to hire politicians to speak for me.

My profession is by no means unique. Virtually every walk of life in this country has to hire rows of professional politicians. Doctors, lawyers, grocery store clerks, people of retirement age, left-handed basket weavers—if you want to be heard as politicians make decisions that change the shape of your life, you must hire a politician to speak for you. Employers and employees and customers don’t settle matters with each other; they send their hired representatives to battle it out in a capitol somewhere.

We call them lobbyists, but they are simply hired politicians (often retired from elected office), and each one is there because when politicians start deciding things, they want to talk to other politicians.

There was a time when Americans found their solutions locally. Problems were addressed by family solutions or neighborhood solutions or business solutions. Financial missteps and moral misjudgments were viewed as personal human problems. Now we treat them as political problems. If an issue needs to be addressed, we call for the hand of government. But any government solution is a political solution.

There was a time when we trotted out political solutions only for large problems, like the secession of half the country or massive widespread economic collapse or destroying the ugly legacy of segregation. But after discovering how effective that big club can be, we can’t resist picking it up for every little thing, and now we call for political solutions for smoking and bad salesmanship and dry cleaning chemicals and restaurant signage and spelling.

We don’t think we’re clamoring for more politics. We imagine that we are calling on the heroic figure of a good and just elected leadership. But whenever we call on the government, what we get is that guy-- “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you fill out these forms.” I hire my politician to go sic the major politicians on the people I think are the problem, and hire my politician to protect me from the politicians that other people have sicced on me.

The days where one could quietly stay in his corner and do a good job and be respected for that are fast fading. Doing a good job is not enough any more. You have to be able to sell it to a politician. And to have a voice in even the most simple parts of your own daily work and home life, you have to hire a politician to stand up for you, because no one else can.

My Sister's Birthday

(News-Herald, March 2003) My sister turns forty this Saturday. She is the baby of the family (let’s not reflect on what her crossing the big four-oh checkpoint means to my brother and me).

I distinctly remember wanting a sister. I don’t remember my mother being pregnant, but I do remember staying with friends, waiting for my folks to come back with a new child.

Apparently I found my sister interesting at the time. There are many pictures of the three of us, highlighting her legendary hair. For the first several months of her life, it appeared that my sister’s hair was never actually going to lie down, but simply keep growing straight out, like an overachieving porcupine of a chia pet run amok. Even though she was too young to understand, my brother and I still made fun of her for it. It is never too early to start.

By the time we all moved to Franklin, we had learned how games like the running away game; some of you parents will recognize this as a more active version of “La-la-LAAA-I’m not listening!” It all evened out, because she had learned to get us in trouble for things we may or may not have done.

My sister is six years younger than I am, and six is a big number when you’re young. By the time she was in high school, I was off to college.

There are disadvantages to being a youngest sibling, I hear. Your older siblings may have acquired reputations of one sort or another and you face frequent comparison. As the oldest, you just follow your interests and abilities wherever they may lead; as the youngest, people expect that you’ll be good at this or belong to that. I know my sister wrestled with some of that. But there were compensations.

My parents never threatened to be the kind of permissive overly lax parents that messed up so many baby boomers. But by the time my sister was growing up, somehow all rules had disappeared from the house. My brother and I had a list of approximately six billion rules to follow, while my sister had roughly three. Our curfew was 8:15 pm; hers was mid-June. She and my parents will deny this, but my brother can back me up. The baby of the family always gets away with murder.

As the brother Off At College, I enjoyed a certain halo effect. When I would come home, my sister was delighted to see me and would defend me vigorously from any and all challenge, assault, or inconvenience. Well, for about the first forty-eight hours, anyway.

I was back at Franklin High School as a substitute during her senior year. It’s excellent training for a substitute teacher to try to get cooperation from someone who still remembers when you hid her toys and called her “pickle puss.”

She went to college at Mount Union and became a Marching Purple Grape (I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the official name, but it’s all we ever called them). She fell in love with a man who played lacrosse, a game, as near as I can tell, in which players beat the daylights out of each other with webbed sticks while referees occasionally stop the action to administer first aid and announce random scores (I may have missed some of the nuances). She went to graduate school at Rutgers to become a librarian.

She got married, and they had a couple of sons; this was no small achievement, as she is one of those women for whom childbearing didn’t come easily. They lived in a variety of places, including a rather grubby corner of New Jersey. My sister is tougher than she looks.

Now they live in State College. My brother-in-law has one of those University computer sub-contract for the Defense Department “I can’t tell you what I did at work today” jobs. My sister spent years as an at-home mom; now she runs the Christian Education program at a church.

It is true that my sister can be a bit of a den mother. She once scolded me for walking outside in the rain in my bare feet. I was forty-three at the time.

But my sister is one of the handful of people on the planet that I actually admire. It’s not just that she’s family, though I think it’s true that no one ever knows you quite like a brother or sister. I feel bad for those who have lost that connection; I know that there are toxic siblings, just as there are toxic spouses and parents, but I don’t think you can’t lose the connection to a sibling without losing a piece of your own past.

Somewhere along the way my sister became the responsible adult dependable rock solid nurturing member of the family, and I want to be like her when I grow up.

Surprise Surprise

(News-Herald, April 3) Everywhere you look, you can find people who are surprised.

I notice it, for instance, in the grocery store. Frequently, while moving through an aisle, I find myself behind someone who parks in the middle of the aisle and slows to a speed that I would describe as glacial, except that these days we are told that glaciers are melting a few feet per year, which makes them much faster than my shopping roadblock.

Eventually the puzzled shopper registers the collective death stare of the half-dozen shoppers he has trapped, looks up, and is surprised to discover that other people are shopping in the store! Imagine. And many of them want to use the very same aisle!!

I can actually sympathize a bit. Many’s the time I have found myself transfixed by a particularly lovely piece of packaging (fruit and pasta are both delightfully arty). Since my son began his side-career in late-night grocery stocking, I have learned a certain professional appreciation for a good facing job (Facers are like little grocery store elves who toddle into the store in the dead of night to make sure that each shelf presents a full and lined-up front that hides gappage behind it; facing is a sort of consumer-based sculpture that captures the battle between chaos and order, human accomplishment and existential angst, oreos and fig newtons. When you decide you won’t buy the cheesy puffs after all, and stick them in between packages of soap, you’re making work for some facer).

At any rate, I can see how grocery displays might lead one to absently forget about the traffic around. But then I meet the surprised people in the check-out line. These are the folks who are, apparently, surprised that food costs money! They unload their food, watch the checker ring it up, and then, only after the checker has announced that the customer will, in fact, be asked to pay for the food, does the customer begin to consider how the transaction might be completed. Does she have money in her purse? Might she write a check, or could this be a plastic kind of evening?

It’s a suspenseful moment, best appreciated by people in line who had no hopes of going anywhere soon. I pass it by imagining the conversation later at home. “Yes, dear, I got groceries. I thought I might not have to get out money this time, but it turned out they charged me for the food again!”

Probably the biggest class of surprised people are the folks who are constantly surprised to discover that they are not the only human beings in the world.

Grocery stores, the mall, the highway—you can find them everywhere, acting as if it had never occurred to them that they might be sharing space with other slices of humanity.

You can find a full herd of them in just about any school parking lot at the end of a sports event or other post-scholastic activities, bobbing and weaving and honking and being rather surprised that they are not the only person there to pick up Junior. Other people want to drive past the school entrance? I should park my limited edition custom land cruiser athwart the traffic lane? That’s just crazy!

Some people manage to be surprised by the events that unfold in front of them. The best way to experience this sort of surprise is to simply ignore history. It took a real willful ignorance of history (both Iraq’s and our own) to be surprised by the hash of events in the Persian Gulf and the failure of USA style democracy to quickly take root and bloom.

Likewise, one would think that local leaders, trying to accomplish anything quickly and quietly, could hardly be surprised that people A) catch on, B) jump to conclusions and C) become cranky. Nor could any of us be surprised any more than the result of some local crankiness is that some folks will hit the speed-dial code for their lawyer faster than a junk yard owner can yank his bad-mannered attack dog out of its shed.

I think we’ve all caught on to most of that. And yet, I can already smell the preamble to that inevitable moment when folks are shocked and surprised that Two Mile Run County Park & Cage Match ends up costing county taxpayers money. Surprise!

1960's Newspaper Nuggets

(News-Herald, February 2004) There’s nothing like reading newspapers to give you a sense of historical perspective. For example, I recently read a series of articles about middle-eastern troubles. Seems the Kuwaitis deployed soldiers because Iraq claimed that Kuwait belonged to them.

I read that in newspapers published in June of 1961.

In my continuing efforts to reconstruct the history of the Franklin Silver Cornet Band, I’ve read through miles of newspapers on microfilm. I’ve recently been working through the early 1960’s. There are plenty of other interesting non-band items that turn up.

For instance, I never really appreciated just how controversial the moving of Franklin High School was at the time.

The early sixties were a big time for building in the area. Venango Campus of Clarion, Venango Christian High School, the airport expansion, and numerous elementary schools were built in that time, all with great fanfare about moving Venango County forward.

There was even a major push to raise money for a Fort Franklin reconstruction. An editorial in the News-Herald said of that project “This project will succeed or fail in 1961. It may well mark the turning point in the future of this city and this area.”

But when the joint board for the area school districts proposed that a new Franklin High School be built out on Pone Lane, there was massive squawking.

A Citizens’ Committee was formed to oppose the move. It addressed the Chamber of Commerce, and even took out a full page ad in the paper, listing all the school directors by name. Oddly enough, none of the coverage that I read of this group’s activities lists names associated with this opposition group.

Letters to the editor were frequent and spirited. Writers insisted that the move would be bad for the city, that having the school in the middle of town was an essential part of life in Franklin. One writer claimed that the children would be at risk going up “that treacherous hill.” Another pointed out the school’s proximity to the newly expanded airport “poses a real threat.”

Other writers replied that the school was a joint project, and that many of the rural students already had to ride buses and that the wimpy city folk should stop whining (I’m paraphrasing a little here).

This was all accomplished before the various school districts were merged. That merger vote came in the spring of 1963. Those figures were fun to stumble across as well. Canal and Mineral township actually rejected the merger (Canal voted 109-39 against, Mineral 39-37), while in downtown Utica, they went for it by 74-16. Polk joined up with a 106-16 vote while Sandycreek hopped on board 213-49. The City of Franklin itself was less enthusiastic—merger passed in town by 1179-817.

But nothing I stumbled across regarding the school system could top the fun of finding a full-sized feature story about the Warren Light Center. Out on Creek Road (aka the back way to Utica), the WLC has long been a source of myth and mystery.

According to the article, the Warren Light Center, headquartered in Newton Falls, Ohio, bought the 130 acres in 1954. In covering their seventh annual solstice, the paper noted that it was a “new thought religious group” that based its studies “on astrophysics and cosmic science.” Members studied “archaeology, religious philosophy, magnetic currents, and a variety of other fields.”

Writing about the 1962 solstice observance, the paper continued: “ Last Saturday night a campfire meeting was highlighted along with the sky watch. Several groups scattered to different parts of the property to watch for spacecraft. They reported seeing several such craft, describing them as ‘friendly forces.’” Inspired, I checked the internet for WLC references to spacecraft, but found only someone’s childhood memories of watching fairies dance near French Creek.

People had come from Ohio, Sharon, Miami, and Los Angeles for the celebration. 170 were present for a dinner at the Elks Club to hear an Egyptian Coptic Master speak.

Said one of the local leaders, “There is nothing prescribed—we take truth wherever it’s found.” Asked how he determines what is truth, he stated that it can be sought out by going directly “to the root of the matter.” Oh. Well, that explains it. The group anticipated a golden age on Earth in about the year 2000. Allowing a fair margin for error, it might be too early to declare them wrong.