Your boss will appreciate it. As far as I can tell, the main reason most people get seriously drunk is to escape. Escape their problems, escape dealing with reality. And there are many other ways to do this than through alcohol. For example, instead of worrying about our problems, we can obsess over those of Tiger Woods.
Personally, I’ve had to face the fact that the golfer’s love life is unlikely to have any impact on me, since both my significant other and I are old enough to be his parents.
You, dear listener, as much as it pains me to say it, are also extremely unlikely to be involved in a romantic twist with the world’s most athletic billionaire. Yet in the last week I’ve had people ask me what I thought about Tiger with the sort of earnestness that used to be reserved for questions of war and peace.
I suppose there is no great harm in this. Except that evading reality is usually a bad thing, if you keep it up long enough. The City of Detroit is now emerging from an unreality binge that lasted years, and did a lot of damage. The Motor City was run for years by mayors who refused to deal with the city’s shrinking economic base, other than to blame it on racism. That culminated in the reign of a self-indulgent man-child who thought the city was his playpen.
Today, the city is being run by grownups who are trying to assess and cope with the damage. The same is true of Detroit‘s public schools, which at last are being run by a rational and competent expert, Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb.
However, the state of Michigan still hasn’t come in from the cold. The state legislature has a week left before they take yet another long vacation, and they are still dithering over some basic education reforms. If they don’t get them done, they will lose $400 million dollars in federal “Race to the Top” education money.
When they come back in January, they have another serious issue to deal with. Our roads are falling apart, and lack of funds has forced construction projects to be delayed.
Unless we get them going again, we’ll lose millions more in federal funds.
Everyone wants the roads to be fixed. The easiest way to get the cash and secure the federal money that is just sitting there would be to boost the gas tax nine cents a gallon. That makes sense… except for that hated word: Tax. Republicans have sworn to oppose any tax, no matter how much sense it makes.
But there may be hope. Pam Byrnes, the House transportation committee chair, has a solution. She knows her colleagues are allergic to any talk of taxes, so, she intends to “present this as an investment in economic development.” After all, she added, “we are not going to be able to attract people to our state when our roads are crumbling and our bridges are being closed down.”
That may be the most sensible thing said in Lansing all year. How her fellow lawmakers react ought to give us some indication as to whether there is any hope of sobriety in our state capital yet.
Jack,
Your balanced comments are on target as usual. But hope? There will never be much hope for progressive government so long as Michigan has a two-house legislature which habitually cancels itself out and produces stalemate. Government is more than People and Policy It's also a PROCESS. The bicameral process does not work anymore and the old 19th century 'checks and balances' have degraded into 21st century paralysis.
Hope? Not with the legislature we have. Lansing is a place where ideas go to die.
Ron F. Rowley
Posted by: Ron F. Rowley | December 14, 2009 at 09:47 PM