Plumber, HVAC, Electrician, Soldier, Spy

 The plumber who arrived to work on my water heater today brought an apprentice with him. 

He told me the system for apprentices got a big help "under Trump." 

We did not move beyond that to other Trump topics, but, clearly, from the point of view of this 69 year old plumber, the establishment of this program, which pays him to train apprentices, funds the trade school on Towle Farm Road and, importantly, demonstrates the affection of the government for training plumbers, electricians, HVAC and carpenters elicited a reciprocation of affection.

The master plumber told me there were simply not enough plumbers in New Hampshire, and all the way into the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts and he's worried about who will take over the important work he knows needs to be done and will need to be done over the next forty years.

I was unaware about Trump's efforts on the behalf of trades so I Googled it and here's a piece from NPR:

The White House wants to nearly double the total federal commitment to provide states with funds for career and technical education – from about US$1.2 billion in the current fiscal year to about $2.1 billion for fiscal 2021.

This proposal marks the first time in more than 20 years that the federal investment in career and technical education could change in a meaningful way after declining for the last two decades.

For instance, in 2004, total funding through the Carl D. Perkins Act – the federal law that deals with career and technical education spending – was $1.7 billion. By fiscal 2020 it had dropped to $1.2 billion. Adjusting for inflation makes the drop even larger.

Student participation in career and technical education had also declined during the era of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that required increasing the percentage of students proficient in math and reading by 2014. Meanwhile, an emphasis on testing dominated education policy during the same time period, which maintained focus on tested subjects like math and reading, and less on career development.

The proposal also calls for allocating $83 million to competitive grants to states. Proposing competitive grants suggests that the administration will look to fund states with the most innovative proposals. This is in contrast to just giving out money based on how many students a state may serve, which is how most of the federal funds for technical education are allocated.

Trump also wants to double fees associated with H1-B visas – visas that allow for the hiring temporary workers from abroad with high skills that are in short supply in the U.S. This hike could raise an additional $100 million or more. The idea here seems to be to use revenue collected from programs that use talent from abroad to invest in educating students here in the United States.

So, when Democrats (who are mostly white collar workers) get together and grumble about the mystery about why all those people we see on TV "vote against their own interests" it is just possible these folks are not voting against their own interests but are voting very much in their own interests, i.e. the interests of the people who keep homes and businesses running by insuring electricity, water, heat, cooling and building have seen Trump working to help them while President Obama constantly talked about getting more kids to go to college.

Obama's life, of course, was changed by going to college and then law school, so it's not hard to imagine why he talked about college so much. And it's easy to understand why people of color who look from the outside at those ivy walled campuses might think, if only we could get into that world, we'd be able to make the same easy money all those college men and women have been able to claim.

Of course, "the trades" are not easy. The money they make is not easy money. It's good money, but not easy money.  They require significant intelligence and physical power and there's lots of emergency call which can make your life uncomfortable.  

When I was 12 years old, my school made me take "Mechanical Drawing" which proved to be one of the most challenging, fascinating and illuminating courses I ever experienced in the 12 years of public schooling.

Trying to see an object from the discipline of the restricting your view to a single view was not intuitive and required me to struggle with problems of visual perception. I spent more time on this homework than I spent on algebra and geography, which worried my parents because Mechanical Drawing was a "minor" subject and something blue collar, and they wanted to be sure I grew up to be a professional, a doctor or a lawyer. Their own parents were tailors, and they wanted "better" for their children. 

So, there was a class thing going on: Plumbers, electricians, HVAC workers might be important when you needed them, but they were blue collar and would never rise above a middle income status. Plumbers average $60,000-$130,000 annual income, which in most places in America allows for a comfortable life.

And this is a line of work which cannot be outsourced.

In the 21st century, work which cannot be outsourced to India and China may prove more stable and secure than some professional work.  The radiologist, who had to go to college (4 years), medical school (4 years) and residency (3 years), now finds that the hospital has hired a doctor in India to read the CAT scan of the patient's head, because that scan is now on the internet and the doctor in India works for a company which underbid the group the American radiologist works for.

And beyond that, the whole notion of what work is important, worth doing, and what is valued is now more broadly appreciated. Just watch "This Old House" on TV and see the amazing stuff those construction tradesmen and tradeswomen can do.

One of the candidates for the U.S. Congressional seat in New Hampshire, some years ago, Deglan McEachern, said, "Hold up your hands if you think you can get a plumber to come out to your house tomorrow." Of course nobody in the crowd raised a hand. "This is what we need, not more college grads with degrees in basket weaving, but plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen."

He lost.

On the way out, the plumber mentioned that he has to undergo recertification every year with the federal government, as part of the apprentice program and last year they insisted he put up a poster at his office (which is in his home) saying that he endorses equal treatment for transgenders and gives telephone numbers where offended transgender apprentices can phone authorities if they feel abused. He said he ran track at UNH, and he ran the 800 meters and his times were always better than the women's world record. He said, "I could have gone to the Olympics if I were competing in the women's 800 meter event. But there's probably a reason they separate men's from women's competition."

Transgender Competing as a Woman

Later he added, "The thing about transgender, is it's got to be a disease, right? I mean who in his right mind would cut off his own balls?"

Broke all the Women's Records

Democrats have been preoccupied with being sure that 0.6% of our population which is transgender is not offended or disparaged. And I agree, nobody should be harassed or denigrated because of their gender or sexual identity, but from a strictly political, count the numbers viewpoint, transgender is a losing proposition. Trades training is where Democrats ought to be.

Some Psychopathology is Visible Augenblick

Affirmative Action Miasma: Dept of Politically Incorrect

 

First, allow me to affirm my complete agreement with Dr. Martin Luther King: children from now and forever should be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

Second, let me acknowledge that Blacks and other colored folk have been denied membership in labor unions, in apprentice programs, even the opportunity to be fighter pilots when, in fact, experience has shown (viz Tuskegee airmen) they perform every bit as well as whites when given the opportunity in these realms.

Having said all that, I have to believe two things:

1. There are some jobs where all that counts is competence: I don't care about the color of the skin (or the gender) of the pilot when I step on my airplane, nor do I care about the color of who made my HVAC, who wired my house--all I care about is they did their job well.

2. While there have been longstanding wrongs regarding making a wide range of economic opportunities available to people of all races, it is not the job of the medical profession to right these wrongs. The job of the medical profession is to provide the very best medical care to all citizens, which of course begins by choosing, as best it can, the best people to be trained to deliver that care. 

The New England Journal of Medicine published a "Perspective" piece on March 9, 2023 "Diversifying the Physician Workforce," in which Dr. Quinn Capers argued:

1. Diversity (i.e. having more physicians and scientists of color) in the physician workforce would improve the quality of care, at least for colored patients, but likely for everyone.

2. It is the responsibility of the medical profession, namely the admission committees at medical schools, the faculty at residency training programs to be sure much larger proportions of Black and colored candidates are placed into medical schools and internships and residencies, and that failing in this effort, deans, chairmen of departments should be fired if they do not achieve demonstrable goals.

3. The idea of a "meritocracy" should include the idea that being Black is, in and of itself, a form of "merit," where admission to medical schools are concerned. 

"Any selection committee hires or admits candidates on the basis of 'merit,' which should be defined in keeping with the stated mission. For medical schools seeking students who want to serve underserved populations, for example, applicants can be stratified according to their relative past activities and potential for continuing such service in the future."

What he is referring to here is the problem of getting physicians to open up practices in poor, often inner city areas where medical care is scarce, and the idea that Black men and women are more likely to do that. Of course, what he is struggling with here is there is no evidence this actually happens: Black medical students, who have debt, or who simply have worked hard to rise above modest economic origins, have no intention of simply returning to the ghetto's once they have their MD degrees.

Then there is the sticky wicket of what is "merit." 

Dr. Capers says, "Despite compelling evidence that workforce diversity in medicine adds value to decision making, scientific inquiry and care." 

But of course, there are no convincing studies any of this is true.  It would be lovely to think that simply adding Black doctors to the workforce would mean well trained Black doctors returning the the land of their forebears and practicing high quality medicine or going out into the nation at large, in all levels of affluence and poverty, and "making a difference." There is no actual unbiased evidence this happens. 

Capers does address, head on, the old "Bell Curve" argument that Blacks simply test worse on standardized tests, which he says predicts only the likelihood of high scoring students to test well on future standardized tests. This is the old problem of cultural bias of many of the MCAT (Medical College Aptitude Test), and all the series of tests given medical students throughout their years of training.  I would be the last to argue or standardized "board exams" or any of the exams I was subjected to are meaningful or well conceived, but that doesn't mean I agree that if Blacks were judged on the basis if "clinical excellence, collegiality, leadership skills [whatever that might mean in medicine] and problem solving skills, academic curiosity,"  this would result in more Blacks being selected for medical school, residency or fellowship programs.

Another quality Dr. Capers thinks should be weighed in choosing future doctors is "diversity competency" by which he means "potential for advocating for health equity in the field."

So now we have a sort of political test for doctors, which sounds vaguely familiar, as Soviet doctors who did not advocate for "the workers" or who were deemed insufficiently enthusiastic for advocating for the rights of the proletariat were relieved of their jobs and sent to Siberia.

The official bureaucracy Dr. Capers advocates, when brought down to the specifics sounds increasingly like something out of "Darkness at Noon:"

"Best practices for successful bias-mitigations trainings, advising that session be voluntary and recurrent, provide actionable tasks for participants, be framed with positive messaging ('it is human to be biased but we can overcome biases to treat everyone fairly' rather than 'you are racist') and be situated within an institutional framework for mitigating bias and enhancing diversity and inclusion. For medical school admission committees, these training could occur annually; faculty-selection committees could undergo training before nominating and rating candidates," says Dr. Capers.

Presumably, the short summary of this is: You better admit a lot more Black folks here or you're out!

So, the New England Journal of Medicine has lined up to advocate this brand of righteousness, and one can only imagine why.

But this is exactly the sort of advocacy which hands Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis their most cherished weapons:  Look, now they are trying to put pilots into the cockpit who will crash your plane; they are trying to put surgeons into operating rooms because they are Black, not because they are good; they want your family doctor to be Black to fill some government quota!

Oh, you can imagine it all, and none of it is good.

One past chairman, who is White, of a department at Duke University Medical School, tells a story which illuminates the complexities, subtleties and difficulties of figuring out what "the Right Stuff" is in doctors and being able to identify it. He operated on his own private, unscientific theory of learning and character, but it strikes me, for all the amateur nature of his approach, it seemed to work.

One year he chose a candidate for his program who had been a tight end on an SEC football team. He was a big Black man, who was overlooked by other residency programs, perhaps because he had gone to a state medical school or perhaps because he was simply physically intimidating, or perhaps because he was Black. His standardized tests scores were not stellar. There were 90 applicants who scored better. But the chairman gave this guy one of the spots for which 100 other candidates from Harvard, Stanford, Hopkins and other elite medical schools had competed. The Chairman "took a chance." 

He did this in part because he had a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the products of top medical schools he had selected previous years: these were men and women who had never had less than an A since elementary school, who had aced all their standardized exams, who had been at the top of their medical school classes.  But, the chairman had noted, they were fragile when it came to being corrected. 

"They'd never got anything wrong in their whole lives. Never dealt with failure, and they'd just fall apart when you'd point out if they had missed something."

Not the doc in this story, different guy

"But this guy, this former football player, was used to being coached, to getting something wrong, getting corrected and the next time, he did not make that mistake again. So he starts off, first year maybe in the bottom third of his class here in the program. But I sit with him and show him stuff he's missed on this chest film, and he says, 'Oh, right! Yeah.' And he never misses that again. And by the second year, he's in the top 25% of his class and by the end of his third year, I'd say he was the best resident in our program by a country mile. He was just so 'coachable.' He'd made all the mistakes you can make, and you corrected them and he did not make them again, and, in fact, he got creative about seeing mistakes coming down the road and so you didn't even have to coach him about that. He was, more than once, mistaken by faculty members as a janitor, sitting there a big Black guy in scrubs, but he never took it personally. He'd sometimes just get up and empty a trash can, and shrug it off and go back to work. I'd take a dozen more like him, if I could find them."

Now THAT is affirmative action.

American Alienation: When Authority Dies

 Gail Collins cannot figure out Ron DeSantis.

The man is boring. Where is the appeal?

Obama could not figure out Trump.

The man is a clown. Who would ever vote for him?

Dealing as I do with "the public" every day, the folks who work for Raytheon, Dunkin Donuts, Walmart, Dollar Store,  I know the appeal.

Whoever sneers at authority, especially government authority gets attention. Resentment runs deep.

A sixty year old man and his wife, visited me. He lost his job driving a truck up to Wolfboro daily, where he loaded water bottles on board and drove them back to a Market Basket warehouse in Lawrence.  But then he had to start insulin therapy--you can't get a commercial driver's license if you take insulin. 

Then the owner of the house where they rented the first floor told them he was renovating the place and bringing it up to code (more government regulations) and once he did that he would double their rent, so after 25 years, they were faced with homelessness. They had planted flower beds around the place, scrubbed the windows and the siding, treated the house as if they owned it but now they were out.

They didn't become homeless: Somehow they were able to afford a "double wide" mobile home in a trailer park and with Social Security they could pay the mortgage, and with Medicare they could get medical care. And you can keep your government hands off my Social Security. 

They seethed about their neighbor who is on Mass Health and gets his insulin, and in fact all his drugs, for free when hard working people like them struggle to afford their medications. This neighbor gets a free ride, claiming to be disabled, when the erstwhile truck driver cannot keep his job because of his diabetes. The neighbor gets a free handout, a welfare queen, while the truck driver's taxes support that bum. 

That's the way government does: Takes from the hard working white guy and gives it to the undeserving Hispanic who just moved here for the welfare.

Public schools are nothing more than crowd control. Nobody in authority has anything to teach the down and out crowd.

This clip from "The Wire" says it all. The police major is trying to change the war on drugs, which affects all the school kids who work the corners as hoppers and scouts, but the moment he alludes to "teaching" he loses his audience. These inner city kids share the crucial characteristic with the white truck driver--alienation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSOCNez3LM0

Emma Goldman

 

One hundred years ago, Emma Goldman was one of the most famous women in America. 

Emma Goldman

William Jennings Bryan was similarly famous, now forgotten, along with most names of that era 100 years ago.  Woodrow Wilson, who purged the federal government of Negroes, who jailed dissidents and sent waves of federal agents to arrest protesters, is now remembered as an idealist who wanted to make the world safe for democracy, and his name still shimmers engraved in Granite at Princeton University. Oddly, one of the few names any American school kid might know from that era is that of Vladimir Lenin, if only because every red blooded American classroom needs a Voldemort to keep the kids interested. 

Best (L) & Banting (R) 1921

The years surrounding 1920--1914 to 1924--were astounding times: Insulin was discovered by two determined but uncertified men in Toronto, Banting and Best; Eugene Debs spoke out for freedom of speech, against the looming World War carnage in Europe and he was jailed for years for his ideas; Hemingway and Fitzgerald were forged in flame; Jazz and flappers and alcohol and premarital sex all ignited and flared brightly,  but were stamped back down by frightened men and constricted minds. Freedom of thought, in Dylan's words, "seems  like it's dying and it's hardly been born." The world's most deadly pandemic, the 1918-1919 influenza killed more than bullets and bombs did. How many school children in America know about this? How many know about the role army camps in the US played in this pandemic?

In a nation where women were not allowed to vote, or to have their own bank accounts, much less contraception, and sex outside marriage could not be discussed publicly, Emma Goldman said sex was something that was a powerful and wonderful force and women should have it, with as many partners as they wanted, and that meant contraception had to be widely available.  Her autobiography took readers through her succession of lovers, none of whom she married, as she thought marriage a form of repression. 

She said a bayonet was a weapon with a worker on either end, and that war in Europe was simply rich men making poor workers vie for domination of one capitalist over another. She was an anarchist, which even today is hard to understand. Did she really think no government was the answer to oppressive government? She meant that ultimately, if society evolved properly, no government would be necessary to force order on people. She was a fool and an idealist but she held up an ideal to which crowds responded. 

Fitzgerald

You can hardly read the history of that era and not see the seeds of today's Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch.  

Papa

The Second World War was inevitable, and in fact was really just an extension of the First World War, a second round after the first bloody punch out, but both contestants were left standing and once cleaned up in their corners, surged forth for another go round. 

The wonderful thing about reading history is you can see the present so much more clearly--you know how that story ended and you can see the movie currently playing almost as we once did in movie theaters, when you said, "Oh, this is where I came in."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BviTcbeRz8o

Watching this documentary about Emma Goldman is deja vu, as Yogi Berra said, all over again.

Under The Banner of Heaven: Hampton's Fundamentalist Churchfolk

 

God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven, we will be ranged under the banner of heaven against the Government.--John Taylor, 1880, Third President of the Church of Latter Day Saints

"If you want to get good people to do wicked things, you need religion."--Christopher Hitchens

"I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk that's not in the Constitution."--Lauren Boebert

 “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.”--Marjorie Taylor Greene

The United States says we cannot marry more than one wife. God says different.--John Taylor

Allah 'akbar

I wasn't born or brought up Catholic. Well, not officially.

But so many of my friends and my mother's friends were Catholic, from an early age, I didn't realize I wasn't actually Catholic for some time.

My best friends were not always Catholic, but over the years I've had as many Catholic friends as most Catholics ever have. Maybe more.

On the other hand, I've been aware, from an early age, the dangers of absolutism, of anyone who claims to know the will of God or anyone who says he has a special, exclusive private line to God.

Or a certain knowledge of anything, for that matter.

My grandfather's immovable faith in the Communist party brought him to some pretty weird and unenviable places: He was an acolyte of Joseph Stalin.

In college, a professor told the story of Abraham taking his toddler son up to the mountain to stab him to death, because God had demanded him to do this, as a demonstration of Abraham's complete devotion to God. 

"But," the professor said, "Wouldn't a rational human being pause and say, 'Hold on a minute! Would MY God tell me to kill this innocent, lovely child? That could not have been the voice of God. Maybe the voice of the Devil. Or maybe I just didn't hear anything. But no, my God would never tell me to do anything so vile!'  "

Students objected that the professor had no idea of the context of that story: Abraham was living in the days when God walked the earth,  spoke directly to human beings.   Abraham would have known that was God speaking every bit as much as we know it is you up there on the stage speaking to us now.

"No," the professor insisted.  "You can know something by using your sight, hearing, smell. But there are other ways of knowing something. You can ask your rational brain: 'Is what I'm seeing, or think I'm seeing, is that what I'm hearing or think I'm hearing likely to be true? If not, perhaps I should investigate some other explanation.' "

That argument applies to so many current assertions we hear every day now.

When two Mormon brothers slit the throats of a young mother and her infant, they did so under the banner of Heaven, i.e., they did so because they have heard the voice of God, and are acting upon it. Or so they said.

The woman was the wife of a third brother, and she had objected to one of the brothers insisting he was commanded by God to take his adolescent step daughters as his "wives," (i.e. sex partners)  and he used as justification, the early, originalist teachings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The received word of The Heavenly Father.

The brother whose wife was murdered said later: "They just do what they want to do and then make up an excuse using The Heavenly Father as the reason."

The brother who wanted to take his step daughters to bed reasoned that God had given him a strong sexual urge, and to respond to that gift is to accept God's will, in this case in the direction of his step daughters.

Of course, the Mormons who practice polygamy and occasional murder are as rare, or more exceptional than the Muslims who fly airplanes into buildings or decapitate school teachers for daring to teach girls how to read and write.

But, until recently, I had not thought of Catholics as fundamentalists or extremists. Sure, there may be extremists in any group, but I know so many Catholics who accommodate their religion to the practice of contraception and certainly to free speech and to  the separation of church and state. 

But when a hundred Catholic congregants attended a town meeting to vote for their church to be awarded taxpayer funds to the church, I saw the Church differently. 

These folks were not asking to be reimbursed for a soup kitchen they might have run, but they were asking the town, which has Protestants, Jews and likely a few well hidden Muslims, to pay for the church school which teaches their kids how to be good Catholics. 

And they could not be shamed by appeals to patriotism, or by arguments that  separation of church and state is a good thing, because, after all, it is separation of church and state which grants the church exemption from taxation. It did not shame these true believers to take the tax break with one hand and to hold out the other for taxpayer funds.

Christopher Hitchens

Their minds could not be changed by argument. Their priest was there, in his collar. They were there to strike a blow for their church. Anything that got between them and the money was  "anti-Catholic" and "anti-religion."

Somehow, when I listened to these folks, George Carlin floated up in front of my eyes: "God will send you to burn and suffer for all time! BUT, he LOVES you! And he needs MONEY!"

The essential parts of democracy boil down to two major things:

1/ You must have freedom of speech, to say what you think.

2/ You must agree that once the majority has spoken, has written down a set of rules, even if you disagree, until you can convince the majority to change those rules, you abide by them.  So, if the majority agrees the state should not establish a Church by proclaiming an official state church or by supporting it with taxes, then, until you can change that rule, you abide by it.

You can say, well, we elected a Catholic Supreme Court and they have said there is no such thing as separation of church and state, that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. 

But I will say: The Court is actually not elected. To change the Constitution on something so fundamental, you need Congress and 2/3 of the states to amend it.

If the Court said, well, actually, that thing about freedom of speech, that doesn't really apply any more, then we would rebel.

Oh, wait, actually, the Court did do that, once. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that in Schenck.  The Court killed freedom of speech, practically speaking.

Of course, the Court had a lot of help from President Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover and a host of absolutist fundamentalists who believed in a White, Christian, Anglo Saxon America.

Now we have, in Hampton, a church which believes in power over principle. This church has 1,400 families attending, which likely means about 6,000 citizens in a town of 20,000 souls.  And the members or friends are on the school board, the town budget committee, the zoning board, you name it. They are well placed.

So, it doesn't matter about separation of church and state, the faithful will do whatever they want to do, and they'll use the Heavenly Father as the reason. 

Learning to Love Big Brother

 

When I was in my 30's, running a small business, living not "paycheck to paycheck" because I had no paycheck, only receipts from weekly business, and I learned to set up a separate "war chest," a bank account to which I contributed weekly, to amass enough to be there on April 15th every year, when that fat account got absolutely nuked. 

Watching that account grow, month by month, I had a sense of mild success, only to crash into despondency in early Spring, on the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, and I knew that feeling of deep loss and despondency.

Flying high and fat in January, crushed in April, the cruelest  month. 

Much of those April payments went to something called a "Simplified Employees Benefit Plan" a SEP plan, which my accountant explained to me thusly: "Either you put it away for your retirement, or you can simply hand it over to the government right now."

That government again, holding a gun to my bank account.

In those days, with my income and business in fledgling stages, we never had enough money, even with my wife working. We pinched pennies and saved up for vacations, and that tax burdens seemed really oppressive. We didn't have enough money to buy a new car, but we sent thousands to the IRS and to those IRS mandated retirement accounts. 

My auto mechanic had a sign in his shop that showed a 1099 form, and it showed a line at the top saying: Enter your income here, and right below it a line that said: Enter your tax here. Which was, of course the line above it, your entire income. That sign resonated with me.

But now, the government is depositing directly into my bank account this thing called, "Social Security," which is not enough to retire on, but it covers car payments. And then there is all this SEP money coming back in the form of some mysterious thing called "RMD's" (required minimal distribution) where the government makes you take out of your nest egg a certain amount each year so they can tax it. 

But here's the thing: It's like FOUND MONEY! I never expected to see that money again. It was just part of that annual dam rupture, where all the money in my tax account got washed away and I had to start rebuilding all over again. 

But, the thing is, it didn't just go out to sea. The government forced me to save for retirement and now, well, what do you know?

So, yes, the government was paternalistic and it made me plan for the future at a time I could not believe I'd live to see a future, and when I was dead certain I could not afford to get past the urgent needs of the present to ever make it to the future. 

Thank you FDR, Democrats, big Nanny government, Big Brother and all those other institutions which beat me up all through my penurious, money strapped youth. 

Is Social Security an "entitlement?"

You bet it is! I paid into this program when it hurt to pay into it and now, wow.

Religious Education on the Public Dime?

Audi Alteram Partem

--Hear the Other side

 At the February 6 Deliberative session about the school budget for Hampton public and private schools several arguments were made about why the town of Hampton was justified in paying for operating expenses at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal's church school, the Sacred Heart School.

One of these arguments, which is my main subject today was the argument that of the 239 students, 53 were children living in Hampton, whose parents pay town (mostly property) taxes and those parent deserve to get a return on their taxes by having the town pay for the religious education of their kids, which is the education they have chosen for their own children. Why should they be forced to pay for the public education of the children of other Hampton taxpayers and not expect to get something from the town to pay for the education of their own children?

A second argument was simply there is nothing wrong with taxpayer funds being directed to a religious school because there is a New Hampshire law (RSA 189:49) which specifically permits this, and there was some, uncited, 1975 case at the New Hampshire Supreme Court saying this is perfectly alright and constitutional, despite the New Hampshire Constitution's Article 6 which says, plain and simple, "But no person shall be compelled to pay for the schools of any sect or denomination." (1784)

Other "arguments" coalesced around the notion the Sacred Heart School is a benign institution, a loving place, which treats its students lovingly, so why would anyone want to deny it anything it needs?

And then there were the indignant citizens who simply asserted sending the 53 students to Sacred Heart School saves the town $1 million every year, so it only makes fiscal sense, to send these kids to a cheaper school. This argument, of course, is unassailable, because despite testimony from the superintendent of the schools and from the treasurer of the SAU that the true figure might be anywhere from a savings of zero to $200,000, those who like this idea cleaved to it as if it were handed down engraved in stone tablets from the mountain. 

An aside: The treasurer, who attended SHS herself, tried mightily to not agree the $1 million figure is absurd, said that depending on how those 53 kids get distributed among the 8 grades of the public schools, there might be no need for any new teachers or school buses, but if the students were all special needs going to one grade it could cost "a lot," as if neither she nor the superintendent had any idea at all about what the distribution of those students would be. That "Golly gee, we just don't know," was probably the most appalling thing about the evening.  Everyone in that room knew both the treasurer and the superintendent knew precisely how many of those kids would go to each grade, and if they didn't, these two government employees had no business being locked into their current jobs.

But that is all beside the point.

The main idea I wanted to reckon with is the idea of what the taxpaying public owes to the parents of the children of Hampton.

Heaven knows, the town needs more children. Our schools have been afflicted with declining enrollments as Hampton is not immune from national demographics. And the Sacred Heart School has fewer and fewer students signing up, and fewer and fewer from Hampton.

But what about that idea of the town owing an education, whatever education the parents desire for their children?

Ron DeSantis has attacked public schools as a place where "indoctrination rather than education" happens. 

And what does he mean by that?

If a parent does not believe in evolution, but he finds his child being taught that God did not create all the earth's creatures in 6 days, is that not indoctrination?

If a parent believes the path to uncovering and knowing the truth is simply reading the Bible and asking yourself "What would Jesus do?" and the public schools teach the scientific method, or that to be acceptable an argument must be based on evidence, not simply doctrine from the church: Is that not indoctrination?

And what is "evidence" anyway?

Or, as Ron DeSantis says, the public schools teach our children America is bad, that it embraced slavery for 300 years, that it waged wars on smaller, less developed nations like the Philippines and Vietnam and Nicaragua: Is that not indoctrination?

In college, in the social sciences, I had professors who declaimed there were true things in the study of anthropology, like there is no culture which is better than any other, or any worse, an attitude called "cultural relativism,"  so we should not judge. I did not agree with this, as I thought the culture of Nazi Germany or the tribes where children were sacrificed because they were considered a burden, were worse than cultures where this was thought to be evil.

Today, we have elite universities where dissension from the idea that gender dysphoria is simply a different way of being is deemed heretical. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was shunned and attacked by medical students and undergraduates for suggesting gender dysphoria is, like anorexia nervosa, a case of being ruled by "a wrong idea."

The lists of people who were unable to speak on college campuses because they advocated ideas like opposition to the notion of "microaggression" against Black people, or against women, or because they questioned the idea that college students should be allowed "safe spaces" where they are not perturbed by disturbing ideas. Or the idea that "believe the woman" supersedes the idea of the accused being allowed due process in his own defense, in cases of alleged campus rape.

When one side refuses to hear the arguments of the other side, the idea of public education and higher education collapses.

On the other hand, I can conceive of an education which simply demands that both views are presented students, every time. I think every editorial in every newspaper ought to be in the point/counterpoint format, and so it should be in the teaching of civics, constitutional law, history in public schools.

Personally, I think every high school student graduating from Winnacunnet should have read somewhere between the Academy and graduation the following books: 

1. "A Peoples History of the United States," Howard Zinn

2. " Midnight in America," Adam Hochschild

3. "The Guarded Gate," Daniel Ockrent

4. "In Prison," Katherine Richards O'Hare

5. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," Malcolm X.

6. "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution," James McPherson

7. "A Stillness At Appomattox" Bruce Catton

8. "Anti Intellectualism in American Life," Richard Hofstadter.

9. "How the South Won The Civil War," Heather Cox Richardson.

10."War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" Chris Hedges

11. "My War Gone By. I Miss It So." Anthony Loyd

12. "Animal Farm," Gore Orwell

13. "1984" George Orwell

14. "Living My Life," Emma Goldman

15. "Gone With The Wind," Margaret Mitchell.

16. "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler

And they should all watch the movie "Godfather" and the TV series, "The Wire."

And with each reading, and viewing,  the students should be presented a rigorous counter argument to the case made by each author.

Of course, if someone chooses to home school her child or to send that child to Sacred Heart School, they can opt to read none of this.

And this comes back to the idea of what the purpose of "public education" is.

In my father's day, he went to public school to assimilate into the new country his parents had chosen. He did not speak English when he first set foot into the New York City public schools, and his parents wanted him to absorb what the teachers had to offer him--a new language, the values of his country and an understanding of what was considered proper and righteous in this new land. They could and may have given him a counter argument at home, but they wanted him to learn how to live in this new country and how to succeed and part of succeeding had to do with his learning what was considered acceptable and commendable by society as represented by government and academia, and what was not.

My father's parents knew he would have to function and compete in a larger world, a world larger than their own. They knew he would have to grow beyond them.

Generations of public school kids have brought home ideas which challenged their immigrant parents, who were sometimes scandalized by what their children were being taught in those schools, but these parents did not reject the schools or the idea of public education, however much they may object to some of the ideas about sexual freedom, equality of the genders and what constitutes a successful life. 

England and France have struggled with immigrant populations, primarily Muslim, in which the parents reject the wider society of the country in which they live. Some Muslim parents, and this is not limited to Muslims, some Hasidic Jewish parents, look at the sexual mores, the equality of genders, the clothing of the children they see attending public schools and they refuse to allow their children to grow in those directions. They circle the wagons and withdraw into their own cults. 

But few of these groups expect funding from taxpayers or the government for their schools. They may apply for welfare, as in the case of the Hasidim, but they educate their children at their own expense.

When I went to public schools, I met the children of the ruling class and I was changed by that experience, but I think they were changed by the experience of my challenging their beliefs.

Public schools served as a marketplace of ideas, when they were functioning at their best.

But now public schools are simply targets for those who do not want their own ideas challenged, and we are drifting toward a time where you do not have to accept the challenge--you can simply demand the taxpayers pay to allow you to reinforce your ideas upon your children's minds.