Almost Like Being In Love

All week I’ve been smiling for no reason. Shrugging easily when I get irritated. Staying up too late and wearing my weariness lightly. I’m in love. With health care reform. This infatuation is cleaner than all my romantic falls. Every romantic love I’ve drunk has been laced with a touch of nerves. I don’t know […]

Reforming

It was not easy to sit through the discussion. Maybe the cancer histories of various relatives were invoked. Maybe someone suggested that people who love European ways so much should go live there. I absolutely did not endorse Cuban dictatorships or mob-fueled economic revolutions.

Kansas City District School Closings

I hope closing schools will get the district’s finances down to a manageable level. They have spent too many years living in the past and bouncing from one temporary fix to another. Their mission has changed. Instead of serving all the students in one geographic area, they now serve students who aren’t interested in the offerings of charters schools, or can’t afford private school, or particularly want to invest in the district, or want some specialized experience they offer, like African-centered education or an arts focus.

Not Robin Hood. Not Lionhearted. Just Wise.

I think the leeches are the people who benefit from the military fighting in the Middle East to ensure your supply of oil, the NIH studying flu viruses and developing vaccines, OSHA keeping their workplace safe, and the Department of Labor limiting their work hours to a manageable level. The people who drive over federally funded bridges and interstates and accept federal student grants, and then claim the federal government is unresponsive and worthless, and say they don’t want to contribute to it, in fact, say they want to take it apart and return us to some kind of backward Articles of Confederation when we agreed in 1789 that that was a dumb idea.