GERMANTOWN HS, RIP

My High School closed this week. It was nearly 100 years old. I graduated 49 years ago. The size of the current student body (in all grades) was not much larger than the size of my graduating class (534.) Students, teachers, parents and alumni are all upset. But I think it had to close – there was no other option.

When the closing was announced in December, I was struck by the fact that the school building was described as ‘crumbling’. There were parts of it that had been closed off for safety reasons. Test scores were low. There was a standardized test cheating scandal a few years ago. A teacher was stabbed right in his classroom. Yet the students and parents and teachers and community were fighting to keep the school from closing. Why?

Is this how low our expectations have sunk? Do we prefer a school that’s a disaster to no school at all? Why are we not fighting for state of the art schools with the newest technology, excellent teachers and exemplary support staff?  You would think that with reduced numbers of school-age kids we would have the money to provide each of them with a top-quality education. But, no.

It seems that money exists but it’s just not flowing to the places where it’s most needed in our society – schools, neighborhoods, public transit, infrastructure, etc. So where is it going? Money does not flow to where it’s needed – it flows to where it’s wanted. It flows to segments of society that are valued by society. Everyone has their own particular segment of society to blame – the Rich, Corporations, Corrupt Government, etc.  Unfortunately, schools are not valued, kids are not valued, neighborhoods are not valued, people are not valued. Whole segments of our society are just being written off, left to wither and die.

So this school closing is really just a small part of a much larger social problem – who gets to decide what is valuable? Who gets to decide what is written off or what is saved? Why are the people who are being written off not rising up (as folks are right now in Turkey and Brazil) to demand justice?

It’s too late for Germantown High School. But it’s not too late for the People.

We live in an electronic world - almost everything we do has an electronic aspect and can therefore be spied upon. That's why I can't believe everyone is so shocked about the NSA eavesdropping. When I first learned about the NSA I read that its purpose was SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) - electronic spying. That's what the NSA does - that's what it's for.
What interests me about this debate we're now having is that nobody has yet mentioned COINTELPRO - which was a notorious FBI program from the 1960s. It was used to not only monitor and spy on activist groups and individuals, but to also disrupt their actions. The current hand-wringing about the NSA just concerns passive data-mining - there is no engagement or disruption going on, as far as we know. So it's really not a big deal. Not yet, anyway. Stay tuned.