Skip to main content

The Over-Zealous Activist...

 The over-zealous activist had a litany of complaints...beginning with the usual local thorns in everyone's side... for starters, she said, the schools are failing our children... In this enlightened age, mind you, behold the outdated curriculum,  the dog-eared books, such systemic favoritism of a dying and whitewashed canon, those incorrigible teachers and their obstinate clinging to the familiar,  a dearth of sustainable classrooms,  low morale, weather-beaten, dim, dank compromised interiors,  a broken district's unacceptable inadequate funding, a declining tax base - full of childless tax-payers who are fed up paying for other people's kids - unconscious intentional bias directed toward marginal outlier populations...a lack of understanding, a lack of sensitivity in a city distracted city by homelessness and food insecurity, rising rents, zoning restrictions, housing prices, too many condos and not enough homes, free cannabis (a boon?) and lax standards for industrial hygiene... Traffic congestion and the absence of new construction... Add onto that the under-funding of health care, opioid addiction, child neglect and a shortage of mental health facilities, elder care, hospice care, weekend clubs for teenagers, community centers,  dilapidated roads and bridges, too large of a fossil-foot-print,  the exorbitant costs of higher education...The choices so stark and so clear...and the problems so easily solved...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Suburbs

 I have spent much of my early life in the suburbs and after a brief stint in the big city - with its noise, crowding and cramped spaces,  I find myself immersed again in this familiar realm - an environment that seems part of my destiny. I've always thoughts of the suburbs as a place meant for children - where children can feel safe and protected - with non-busy streets and clean sidewalks - room to ride one's bike or go door-to-door selling cookies. To consider how many of our early impressions and sensations were spawned by this largely artificial world...How different such a milieu is from other places on earth, war zones, rain forests, Siberian outposts, tiny mountaintop villages or large sprawling mazes of high rise apartments in vertically-inclined mega metropolises...The suburbs are a place where a definite order and routine can be imposed...where regularity is king... lawns get mowed on time, shrubs are trimmed, garbage bins are placed at the curb and returned to thei...
Post a Comment
Read more

1974

Prologue - > We are fortunate to live in a time, or so it is said, when we of the future no longer feel the burden of gender to such a degree as in previous ages; nowadays there is no pre-established norm or "role" for us to perform or hold onto like a chain about the neck. There was a time, of course, and not so long ago, when men were de facto expected to be  tough strong, resilient, athletic, assertive... and which to judge by the role models in movies and popular culture which we could add on silent, stoical, protective, while no great shock was registered if there should be a woman or more than one who in some degree was known (also through popular culture, movies, novels, songs, etc. in comparison with her male counterparts) as:  soft, demure,  flirtatious, sociable, wise,  and to which one might add on: practical, prescient, intuitive, gregarious, solicitous, nurturing and perhaps multi-tasking,  socially-aware, loyal, resilient .   With regard t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The "Endless Summer" Feeling a.k.a. "Time Stop Mechanism"

Growing up out west - we had what was known as the "endless summer" feeling - a moment in the summer when - not Time per se - but hectic, anxious, nerve-wracking time would come to a standstill. Change would still happen of course, things would continue moving, interacting, but at a slower, more predictable pace...the rhythms of summer would take over with sunny days giving way to balmy nights...a certain degree of repetition would lend structure to this seeming "pause" in the action...Clouds still move across the sky, waves still crash against the shore, traffic on the roads, people walking, biking, swimming - but all in a self-contained world over which one had some semblance of control..Long days at the beach, lying in the sun or playing tennis at the community college, watching the heat rise on the pavement, shooting baskets on the outdoor courts, sitting poolside at a neighbor's house, sitting on the lawn at dusk, staying outside on summer nights with no wi...
Post a Comment
Read more