Friday, July 27, 2007

Spending Tax Dollars

There is a local issue that is getting quite a bit of chatter and it is starting to bother me that we don't have people of higher quality thinking these issues through. One of my pet peeves is that I feel the education system is letting a lot of young people down.

The solution to what ails us that has been put forward is that we need a new high school in the region. What a bunch of rubbish, we have a perfectly good 100,000 square foot high school now and the proposal is to replace it with another 100,000 square foot school in another location.

I don't see how moving the school less than 1/2 a mile is going to improve the quality of the educational system. Through the ages it seems that when rulers feel some discontent amongst the people they want to put on a spectacle for them, helps them deflect attention from their own inadaquacies by giving the people something to look at. Some rulers built huge monuments to themselves like statues and gardens, the Romans moved it to a new level with the coliseum.

In each case it was the same tactic, give the people something to make their slack jaws drop in wonder and take their minds off the real issues, that incidently are much harder to solve.

So we replace a building with a new building and those lobbying for it can stand around and pound each other on the back for how they made government listen to them and spend that 22 million . I wonder if they realize in about 40 years a new bunch of unimaginative twits will rise up and propose that all they need to do to solve the educational dilemna is to bulldoze the school that is now the focal point of their frustration and propose a new one to solve the problem.

Monday, July 23, 2007

How time flies

I can hardly believe it has been over 6 months since the last time I posted something to this. Its not that I haven't got anything to say, I just got out of the habit.

Life has gotten to be a blur for some reason, I think its because I have to much to do and not enough time to do it in. Maybe thats normal when you are over 60, and subconsciously your body realizes that is exactly the state you are in.

I think the constant stream of despair coming from Iraq has also had an effect on me as I find it depressing to constantly be reminded of the madness the human race is not only capable of, but drawn towards. Somehow I keep coming back to my belief that we were created for better things than practicing acts of savagery, one upon another.

God must be terribly disappointed! But then I suppose nothing surprises him so maybe thats not an emotion he practices, but then maybe it is. The better emotional description might be troubled.

When Jesus came to the family of Lazarus he saw the dead mans sisters grieving and his friends weeping, the bible uses the term "troubled" to describe the feelings Jesus had. And the action following his feeling gives us the shortest verse in the bible. "Jesus wept".

God must spend a lot of time weeping, that makes me sad.

I also spend a lot of time being confused because hard as I try I can't make any sense of the whole mess no matter which side I try and look at the issues from. The prince of this world is having a field day, but then I guess he always has been.