I Am Worried

I'm worried about a lot of things. Nothing that has to do with me personally, but more along the lines of This Country Is Going To Hell In A Handbasket (and get off my lawn!).

I am worried about the schools in Newark, NJ

This morning, I heard on the radio that someone wants to give the school district of Newark, NJ, $100 million. Yes. One hundred million dollars. For a school district. For one school district. At the moment, the average cost of educating (and I use the word loosely) a child in the state of NJ is $26,000 per year.

For that amount of money, you could put a kid through Catholic high school, assuming they could pass the entrance exam.

For that amount of money, you could send the kid to boarding school for a year, where the teacher ratio / class size is 1 to 14.

Flinging money at these schools has done nothing. When I first moved back here, it cost $19K / yr to educate a child in Jersey. Seven thousand extra dollars hasn't made any difference that I can see.

E, who taught middle school, told me that it was not unusual for a girl in her fifth grade math class to be pregnant. And not necessarily with her first child.

Yes, there are good school districts around, I hear. But they still cost $26K/yr/kid.

I am worried about the devaluation of learning

I've also heard that there is a cultural taboo in schools against learning. This was kind of on the sidelines when I was in high school, but I gather that actually handing in homework will get you no end of mockery. And that parents, if there are any around, are too busy with their own whatever to knuckle down on the kid.

I am worried about the crumbling of my privacy

And your privacy, too. I realize too late that I have been happily divulging all kinds of private information for the last umpteen years. I use a Push'n'Pay shoppers card. I have a B&N card. (Yes, they do send the silent black helicopters after you if you buy a copy of Catcher in the Rye.) You can go into a Target database and tot up the number of times I've bought a tub of Kozy Shack. Yes, I realize it means nothing in the grander scheme of things, but what about the grander scheme of things?

I'm watching a BBC / Masterpiece Theater series called "The Last Enemy". It's focusing on the advent of the national British ID card. I don't even know if this is in place yet, but it scares the living daylights out of me.

When I was in London in 2005, a taxi driver pointed out to me that he had a device on his dashboard that relayed information about his speed and location. If he went into a particular area of London where traffic is restricted, he would be fined a certain amount of money and as I recall, it wasn't just five quid.

Lo-jacking and cell phones are suddenly kind of creepy to me.

I think about how easy it is to find me if you want to. From the EZ Pass in my car, to the debit card at Dunkin Donuts and the company caf, to the time I click my badge against the turnstile to let me in the building. My cell phone.

I am worried about the loss of manufacturing capabilities in America.

"There's not a cannon factory in the whole South." Rhett Butler to the blustering bully boys in the library at Twelve Oaks who are convinced that it just takes honor to win a war.

Are there any cotton mills left in the South? Can we make more than precious organic hemp sacks if suddenly the clothing factories of China won't sell to us? Are there any steel mills left? What manufacturing power is left in America? What raw materials are we even bothering with anymore, instead leaving it to other countries?

Bauxite is a mineral necessary for manufacturing aluminum. The main producers of bauxite are:
Australia
China
Brazil
Guinea
India

Recycling only takes you so far.

What does America make anymore?

I am worried about every step we take toward willing ignorance

Who reads anymore? I mean, besides us. Who thinks about things? Who bothers to go to city or county council meetings?

And if you do, does it matter?

The people of Santa Clarita, CA protested when a private company took over their libraries. But it didn't do them any good.

I'm worried that a country so worried about their individual problems - and there are plenty of them - won't watch government, local and not so local, nibbling away at their rights, and are so preoccupied by their own descent and financial troubles that they don't look up and see that their country is marching toward a new version of feudalism and totalitarianism.

I honestly believe that all the 1990's corporate "diversity" brainwashing was the precursor toward outsourcing and globalization.

Would the French put up with the crap we've not only been handed but gobbled down? Hell, no. But we're Americans. The world thinks we're dumb and crass and too big for our own britches and so we take a timid step back from the anger we feel at the tsunami of illegal immigration and in Jersey, even agonize over whether or not an illegal alien who is a student at Rutgers should pay in-state or out-of-state tuition.

We went along with it.

We are fat, we are dumb, and we won't admit it, but we're happy with our fatness and dumbness. Don't bother me. Don't show me pictures of American men and women with limbs blown off in the war for oil. Don't tell me how bad I am, I hear it all the time. Lull me. Feed me TV and McDonald's. You can even make the TV witty some time. It'll be a national in-joke. While corporations suck the marrow out of us, shuck us out of our skin and toss us aside. While our life savings drift away, while our families crumble, while we try to figure out exactly how we're going to live after no one hires us (over 50, ya know) and the unemployment has run out.

Now I'm not worried - I'm angry

And frustrated. How do you throw a rock at Wall Street? How do you send an alarm bell to politicians from the mayor to the President of the United States? The system makes the system seem impenetrable.

If there was one last thing that tipped me over today, it was the $100 million for Newark schools. You might as well flush it down the sewer because that's the amount of good it will do.

Oh - there was also a story about a stimulus program in Jersey. They had $70 million. And they created exactly seven jobs.

I've got the fantods. I've got to go have a swig of something stronger than milk.