Opinion

A little of this and that

Friday, April 15, 2005

One of my good friends uses "this and that" a lot when we're having conversations with each other so I thought I would use it in the title of this week's column as a way of informing the readers that I'll be writing about several different things today instead of just a single topic.

I've talked before in this column about the pendulum swings that our society encounters from time to time. One of the current pendulum swings is an anti-intellectual attitude that has become pretty pervasive.

We've experienced this before in this country and other countries have experienced it as well. In fact, historically, one of the first missions of a totalitarian re-gime attempting to hold on to its authority is to kidnap and kill all the intellectuals because that's where new ideas and fresh thoughts typically come from.

This is also an attitude typically found on the part of those who want to maintain the status quo. Proponents of slavery and sexism were anti-intellectual. The religious right tends to be anti-intellectual. Those who believe we can continue to pollute and trash this fragile planet we live on without ever suffering any negative consequences are anti-intellectual as well.

All of these groups and people operate essentially from the same mind-set; that their opinions are the correct opinions and everyone else is wrong. This kind of absolutism tends not to make the world a better place to live. Ignorance is not bliss, it's just ignorance. The more you learn, the more you know, and the more you know, the more able you are to change the world you live in.

Recently released information indicates the federal government has provided $1.7 billion of pork barrel politics for Homeland defense. Rather than use the money to those sites most likely to be attacked again, if we ARE ever attacked again, the money is being doled out the same way Washington has always doled out the money.

The most powerful and tenured legislators in our Capital are taking care of the folks back home by making sure they get a slice of the pie. And some of the examples border on the bizarre like Oklahoma getting a sizeable amount of money to protect its "ports," even though Oklahoma is landlocked. It turns out that the reason Oklahoma "qualified" for this windfall was that the Arkansas River, which runs through Oklahoma, is navigable. Because it's navigable, it meets the definition of a "port" as defined in the Homeland Security legislation.

This reminds me of the goings-on of another pork barrel fiasco that occurred back in the late '60s and early '70s. Congress established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration -- LEAA -- to bolster police agencies across the country. A sub-program of LEAA was the Law Enforcement Education Program -- LEEP -- which provided every police officer the opportunity to attend college essentially for free.

The government would provide each officer who enrolled at the college level with a stipend that was usually far greater than the tuition and book charges.

Seventy five Tulsa police officers took advantage of this program by attending Connors State College, a junior college seventy miles away from Tulsa, in Warner, Oklahoma.

This was the first college law enforcement program in the state and it was created specifically to meet the demand of police officers wanting to take advantage of this new "educational opportunity." I was enrolled in the program for two years. Each semester each officer received a check for 942 dollars, even though tuition AND books at that time came to just a little over two hundred dollars. We had some pretty good parties each semester, thanks to the generosity of the American government and the American taxpayers. The bonus in all of this was that for every year an officer served on a police department, that year's debt to the government was excused. So, if you went to college for four years, you only had to work four years to get a completely free college education.

Later, after I left the police department and finished college, I became the Criminal Justice Planning Director for a regional planning commission in Beloit, Kansas. My ONLY job was to find things that local police departments in my region needed from the LEAA legislation. Although we tried to be prudent in Kansas, there were many outrages in the way the money was spent. The one I remember most distinctly was a small town in Oklahoma (yep, Oklahoma again). receiving funds from LEAA to buy a helicopter for traffic control. Helicopter traffic control in a town of less than 1,000 people with no stop lights. There were many other abuses as well. Eventually, LEAA was abolished, but not until hundreds of millions of dollars was literally thrown away through pork barrel politics, just like it's being thrown away now.

I guess the American people are getting what they wanted by electing a Congress and a President from the same party.

Gas prices are higher than ever and still going up, deficit spending is at an all time high, the attempt to privatize social security has fallen on its face, for the first time in several years, inflation has outpaced income so all of us have taken a pay cut this year, even if you got a raise, Congress is prepared to pass a bankruptcy bill that will make it much more difficult for the average person who has lost everything because of out-of-control medical bills to ever fully recover while the bill conveniently protects the fat cats the politicians are in bed with, and the stock market has fallen almost 900 points in less than two months. Happy days are here again!

Finally, I would like to thank one of my readers from Ames, Iowa. I recently received an envelope from her in my mailbox at home and in the envelope was one of my more recent columns. At the top of the column, she wrote how much she enjoys reading it every week. Down in the body of the column, she corrected my pronoun usage. I plead guilty to sometimes screwing up pronoun agreements, sentence structures, and punctuation. English was not my major in college. In fact, I only took two English courses in my college career and both of those occurred over thirty years ago. I write from the heart, without the use of a dictionary or a thesaurus. I apologize in advance for the grammar and sentence structure errors I make.

We now have new "signage" at McCook Community College. I'm not sure when or why "signs" became "signage" but evidently they have. I'm still trying to figure out what a matrix is but that's another column. Anyway, some people like the signs, some don't. Every building now has a big blue sign on the building itself, identifying the name of the building. In addition, there are more big blue signs in front of  or beside every building on the interior of the campus. I've heard the following comments: "sign overkill", "looks like a carnival midway", too overwhelming", "nice", "okay", "unbelievable." Come and walk through our campus and make up your own mind. They're certainly different, that's for sure.

Some people set very low goals for themselves and then fail to reach even those. I know one of those people personally and intimately.

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