My modest school zone/parking lot proposal

The route from my house to the mall takes me past a school, and yesterday as I was making the drive shortly after the school let out, I thought about a friend from my early teenage years.

You see, I grew up in a small town, and for the most part, if you were between the ages of 11 and 15 and wanted to go somewhere (the arcade, the library, or a friend's house, etc.), you rode your bicycle.

Don't take this as me bragging, but at the age of 12 or 13, I had a fair amount of understanding as to how the world works. I especially understood that in the event of an automobile-bicycle collision, the automobile is always going to win, and I also understood that with Mexico only being a few miles away, a large number of drivers were both a) uninsured, and b) disinclined to phone the authorities for help in the event that they hit you. My friend "Tim" never understood that (and no, the story doesn't end that way).

It's at least understood, if not required by law, that bicyclists should ride within about three feet from the edge of the road and obey posted traffic signs. And I'll reemphasize my point here, you shouldn't follow these rules because they're polite or because you might get a ticket; you should follow them because if a guy driving a car hits you, you'll be the only one to feel it.

None of that ever made any sense to Tim. He didn't care about the law, common courtesy, and it never quite sunk into his head that someone either had to have money or insurance in order for you to sue them. I can distinctly remember five or six times when he ran a stop sign or was riding in the middle of the street and a car had to screech to a halt in order to avoid killing him, and dozens of other more minor incidents where there was a strong potential for him to be hurt.

The thing is, he wasn't dumb. As far as IQ went, he was probably a little above average. Like the father on That 70s Show would say, he was a dumb ass; someone who lets their immaturity or self-centeredness override their intelligence and common sense in order to do something stupid.

Tim and I quit being friends around the age of 16, but it was a small town, so word of his various misadventures would get back to me to fairly regularly (his arrest during spring break for shoplifting a can of bean dip was a good one). This steady stream of idiotic activity would culminate when he was about 22 or 23 and instantly elevate him from mere ne'er do well legendary local dumb ass.

I'll spare you the long version of the story and just bottom line it for you. Tim got into a heated argument with a cholo. The cholo pulls a knife, Tim pulls a gun. That ends the fight, right? Not exactly. The fight ends when Tim shoots himself in the leg. Having heard multiple explanations, even one from an eyewitness, as to how it happened, for the life of me, I still can't understand how it happened.

Tim never faced any real consequences for his actions until the day a 9mm slug bit into his femur. Tim, and more importantly, the people who were on the receiving end of Tim's idiotic behavior, would have had a better life had he gotten his cosmic comeuppance a decade earlier.

OK, so what does all of this have to do with the mall and schools at dismissal time? If you've driven by either of these places recently, you've probably noticed the behavior of the people at these places is similar to Tim's (except these are mostly pedestrians). What I suggest is that we help these unfortunate souls become better people, and by helping them, we'll be helping ourselves as well.

My modest proposal can be summed up in two words: keep going.

Here's the beauty of the plan. The 20-30 mph you're normally driving at when going past a school or in parking lot isn't fast enough to kill most people, but it's more than fast enough to teach a lesson to sullen teenagers or the odd, middle-aged doofus who think the rules of polite society doesn't apply to him. What's more, the six months they'll spend sitting with an ankle to crotch cast on their leg will give them plenty of time to reflect of the fact that they're not the center of the universe.

More polite people means fewer angry drivers, which in turn means more people with lower blood pressure, and that means more people will have longer, happier lives.

So let's all pitch in and make the world a better place! Just be sure to keep a copy of this to show the judge when he asks you about the plan.
courtesy

Where have all the teachers gone?

Ahh ... it's late April in Texas. The rain has come, the wildflowers are in bloom, and for those of you who don't know, school districts all across the state are having job fairs so that they can hire soon to be ex-teachers.

Yeah, it's cynical, but it's also true. Trust me about this, I'm an ex-teacher. Oh, and if something about pay just popped into your head, you're most probably off base.

The thing is, unless you teach at a private school or in a really small town, you probably do OK as far as dollars go. Here in San Antonio, the starting pay for the average teacher is around $40,000. That's not yacht in the Caribbean money, but when you figure that you only work 187 days a year, it's not bad.

Seeing as how there are many different aspects to this topic it would be easy to write an overly long post, so in the interest of pithiness, I'm going to keep it short and just say a few words about a couple of things the first-year teacher will be hit in the face with.

When people are people are planning a teaching career, they tend to naively think that most their time as a teacher will be spent teaching. Poor fools. They won't be a week into the job when they discover that they're spending a lot (and I mean a pick-up truck full) of time on discipline issues and on BS classroom activities that are designed to keep students relatively quiet and relatively well behaved.

Believe me when I say that as a teacher, your ability to communicate complex ideas or lessons in an easily understandable form to students ranks a distant second to your ability to keep students quiet and in their seats.

Another thing that makes new teachers become former teachers is that they have responsibility without authority. In case you can't quite grasp this concept, this is the same thing as playing poker and only being able to bluff. If another player calls your bluff, you lose a stack of chips; if the other player knows that ALL you do is bluff, you lose all of your chips.

The bottom line is, if the kids ever find out you're bluffing, you're in for pure hell the rest of the year, and the sad part is, they almost always find out that new teachers are bluffing.

So who wants to work at a job where you don't do what you were trained to do, and where 11 and 12 year-olds can run roughshod over you? The sad fact of the matter is next to no one, that's who.

Is the political correctness half empty or half full?

I have mixed feelings about this.

News from the last issue of San Antonio College's student newspaper, The Ranger, has a story about the college's search for another mascot to "augment" (they don't want to catch hell from those on the other side of the issue, so he's not being replaced) their existing mascot, the Ranger.

The Ranger has been the school mascot for about 80 years, and the culprit is the insensitivity or perceived insensitivity embodied by the mascot, which makes this similar to the NCAA's gripe about team names or mascots with American Indian names or iconography. The difference though, is that you shouldn't feel bad about seeing 80 years of tradition step out of the spotlight, because there never really was a tradition to begin with. San Antonio College has had a barely there or nonexistent college athletic program for decades, and in fact, prior to this story, most students there couldn't have told you what the mascot was to begin with (and I should know, I went to school there).

It's mostly a just compromise to only "augment" and not replace the Ranger, but there is still a large amount of unseemly oiliness to the decision. If the Ranger is racist and offensive to hispanics (that's what the those in favor allege), then replace him, if he isn't, leave him alone.

I suspect a big factor in this wishy-washy decision was that if they did replace the mascot, they'd also have to rename the school newspaper, which is a brand name in college publications in the state, and consistently ranks pretty high among non daily college newspapers in the state.

While the decision was good politics on the part of the administration, I wish a decision had been made one way or the other. The ensuing controversy would have ensured a good old fashioned fight, and then maybe some of the more rabid "rangers were/are a racist organization" types could be shown to be the fools they are.

There's some truth to what they're saying (but can you tell me what 19th century law enforcement agency has a sparkling record in regards to race?), but the fact of the matter is that these people exaggerate, cite out of context, and even lie outright about the past to attack the culture of people in the present.

Only this time, we fought back. Oh, I guess we didn't. Like I said, I have mixed feelings about this.

Alec Baldwin and pigs

I'm sure that practically everyone has heard that actor Alec Baldwin is taking flak for calling his 11 year old kid a pig by now for missing a scheduled phone call from him. If you haven't, this account is as good as any.

Alec Baldwin is a good actor and a goofy person (he publicly announced he would move to France if Bush won, but don't feel bad if you don't remember him saying that, neither did he), and sure, what he said sounds bad, but what parent hasn't lost it with their kid?

Let me tell you. It's the parent whose kid is running wild in the grocery store, the restaurant, the airplane, etc. forcing nearby adults to try and remember whether the state they're in has a mandatory death penalty for killing a child.

Kids don't misbehave because they don't know right from wrong. They do it because bad behavior tends to be much more fun than good behavior, and if a kid knows he has an idiot parent who isn't going to call a spade a spade when it comes to right and wrong (and they do know, regardless of their age), he's going to do what's most fun every time.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't take a phone call from Alec Baldwin either, but I'm not his 11 year old daughter. This overreaction by the media to a mostly normal response is just too much.

Is there an editor in the house?

Don't get me wrong, I like the Express-News, the newspaper here in San Antonio, but for the life of me, I don't know what goes through their collective heads sometimes. Do they read everything they print? I'm kind of hoping they don't because thinking about the alternative makes me sad.

The latest item to make me shake my head and sigh is today's lead editorial which says that guns from the U.S. are "fueling the drug wars in Mexico."

Isn't that statement a little strong? I mean, wouldn't money, corruption, or lack of a strong, honest government be more likely candidates for "fueling the drug wars?" Yes, the cartels get most of their guns from North of the border, but if they didn't get them here, they'd get them somewhere else. Do the Iraqi insurgents in the Middle East, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the rebels in the Congo, or the extremists in the Philippines get there guns from the United States? No, they don't. The cartels get most of their guns from us because it's more convenient to get them here. If the supply on this side of the river dried up, they'd get them someplace else.

But if it was just that, I wouldn't have bothered with this post.

The best (worst) part is when Eduardo Medina Mora, the Mexican attorney general is quoted (by the AP, according to the editorial) as saying "it's truly absurd that a person can get together 50 to 100 high-powered arms, grenade launchers, fragmentation grenades and can transport this cargo into our country."

What?! Even Mora didn't know that it's illegal for Americans to possess grenade launchers or fragmentation grenades, you can bet the editor and the person who proofed the piece did. And if they didn't, they have no business working for a newspaper, except as delivery boys. Nowhere in the piece does it state that that is flat out wrong. If the cartels do have those weapons, it proves my first point.

Mistakes happen at newspapers, especially at deadline. This, however, was an evergreen piece without a news peg, so there shouldn't have been a rush to print this.

The blame game

The blame game is the sport of choice in the media in the wake of the atrocity at Virginia Tech. Was it guns? Gun-free zones? Ebay? Failure to enforce federal gun laws? Fuzzy language in federal gun laws?

My feeling, and I suspect the feeling of most people, is that 99 percent of the blame falls on the shoulders of the crazy bastard who did the shooting, and raging against anything other than the shooter has the effect of shifting the responsibility away from where it should be.

However, having said that, I ran across Peggy Noonan's latest column that documents the lack of common sense of university officials and their failure to simply do their jobs regarding the warning signs this guy was showing. She wrote:

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus
counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net."

The inaction or bad decisions of those at the bottom of the ladder tend to affect only themselves and maybe one or two others. When those at the top make the same error, many are affected and they usually get away clean because there is always a person or entity above them to shift the blame to. And we let them get away with it.

Numero Uno

Here it it is, the first post. If I was a ship, I'd be breaking a bottle of champagne over my head.

Initially, I was turned off by blogs because they all seemed to written by narcissists who write bad poetry, make a show of every mood change that comes over them, and seem to have a pathological need to convince you that tofu really is pretty good.

The last year has taught me that some blogs are as good as pro stuff and that if someone wants to write about whatever strikes their fancy, they either need to own a newspaper/magazine, be a Pulitzer Prize winner, or have a blog.

This is all new to me, so I'm making it up as I go along, however I can say that the plan is to post at least three times a week and hopefully more, work permitting.