I made a comment on a Facebook post about ignorant Southerners and I got myself into a flame war with people I don’t even know. Some guy went nuts on my about calling Southerners ignorant and what did I mean by that. He was all fired up. I looked up the definition of ignorant in the online dictionary, just to make sure I wasn’t misusing the word. But I was right and I held my ground on the argument. It was all just semantics. But I do know my vocabulary.
The headlines this past week or so have been pretty disturbing. There are natural disasters, like the flooding along the Mississippi River. There are all kinds of politic announcements – like Trump not running but Newt is running. Ron Paul is running and no one has heard from Palin for a while.
Schwarzenegger and is wife have split because she just found out about a love child born within days of her own baby. And now some religious kook says the world is going to end this weekend.
This is all too much for this old boy to take in and process. I think I will be better off if I just down watch TV for a few days and avoid the newspapers, too.
Our new mayor is getting serious about his campaign promise to attack the dropout rate in the county. But he might be a little too late. Evidently, the state has taken over the county schools and has their own plan of attack in mind. They fired most of the school principals and moved people around all over the county, giving some promotions and others just re-assigned to where they can do less damage.
I would love to see the schools get serious about making the school campus a safe and pleasant place for our children to spend the better part of their days. If you’ve not been inside a public school lately and seen the awful conditions, listened to the demeaning and humiliating way that the teachers and school staff talk to the students, and actually looked inside their current textbooks to see what they are supposed to be learning – you can’t begin to understand the ginormous problems we are facing in trying to improve or revamp our public education system here.
This is the start of a new year and also a new decade. The year Twenty Ten has great promise for us all, as our President gets settled into office and is able to use his influence to create the great changes that he has promised to bring us. There have been some economic stimulus plans, such as “cash for clunkers,” that were a huge success. Now we need to see some serious, lasting jobs created and help for Americans to keep or buy homes, and a new approach to our health care.
I live in a red state. Even though I voted blue and both of my kids voted blue, and several of our friends voted blue, our votes weren’t enough to make our state turn blue. That was pretty frustrating – I wish I fit in better with our neighbors. But they are evidently red.
On a good note, blue won overall. So there.