nutcase

Okay, this post is a response to comments on the last post, which somehow got picked up by the Dallas Morning News' Dallas ISD blog, generating a flood of sitemeter hits and four anonymous comments. There was apparently some sort of kismet going on here because a) someone from the Dallas News actually found my unlinked post, and b) I used none of my frequent bad language which would have probably disqualified me from being linked by a respectable family paper. Weirdly enough, I'd never even heard of the website they say I was commenting on, I'd just had the e-mail forwarded to me.

First, a few of points:

1) The gerrymandering thing was just a throwaway comment on my part. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that there is no alterations of the lines as personal political favors for well-connected folk is delusional. There's a small neighborhood off of Mockingbird Lane where the elementary school was Lakewood, but the middle school was Franklin¹. I always wondered who lived in that area who could swing such a blatant bit of boundary-fixing.
As for the idea of gerrymandering being ridiculous, how do you think that the "diverse population" of the schools was maintained, at least up until a few years ago? Gerrymandering for diversity is no better than gerrymandering for homogeny. One need only look at our legislative districts to understand that.

2) The racial bit was my bad, and uncalled for, perhaps. It was also a throwaway, the more important division being monetary, rather than racial. Of course, that doesnt change the fact that the neighborhoods with the million-dollar McMansions are are mostly white, and the apartments are not. And yes, those black and brown folks do live in my neighborhood, and my kids do go to school with them, and I'm quite happy about that, because they've grown up not giving a damn about skin color.

3) Yes, North Dallas schools need money for supplies, repairs, expansion, more teachers, etc., etc. So do nearly all of the Dallas schools. Guess what? That requires taxes. And for the last decade or so we've been electing representatives whose mantra is "cut taxes". When times are bad, the solution is to cut taxes. When times are good, the solution is to cut taxes. Do you see the problem here?
And if you're concerned about waste in DISD, the solution is not to cut off the money, but to eliminate the waste. Here's an idea: Surely in North Dallas, there's enough accounting expertise to get a group of concerned tax-paying citizens together to head downtown and do a little auditing of the school districts books. I'm reasonably sure that they cannot stop you.
Is the money distributed "fairly"? No, probably not. Is it ever? If the southern sections are getting more these days, it's because they got less in the past (though that makes it no less wrong).

Now, for the main point of the previous post: I was not objecting to the call to reject the bond issue. Feel free to do so. Giving Hinojosa more money to blow on stadiums and and the destruction of magnet schools isnt sound financial thinking to my mind.
What I was objecting to was the juvenile whining about North Dallas folks who felt they just werent getting their "fair share". I consider this to be a small part of a larger ongoing campaign by "conservative" forces to reduce all of America to pay-per-view status. You can see it everywhere, in the rejection of "socialized" medicine, in the boosting of toll-roads instead of interstates, in the push for school vouchers, in skyrocketing college tuition, and in the general overall reduction of those kinds of services which the government provides.
Such whining is especially egregious when coming from someone who apparently lives in a North Dallas McMansion.
Any nation is, at heart, a society. To belong to a society, especially to a economically successful society, carries certain costs. Such costs often involve those who've benefited greatly from that society carrying those who have not. Should this idea seem unpleasant to those among us who are the "haves", I'm sure there are many third-world oligarchies who would welcome you and your hoarded cash with great pleasure. Please accept their kind invitation rather than dragging America down to that level.
Because if history shows us anything, it is that a major key for a successful society is the pooling of that society's resources for the good of the entire society. Such "investments" by that society's members only tend to fail when they are undermined by graft and corruption. Without such pools, we would not have our water systems², telephone and electrical service in virtually every home, the interstate highway system, and an educational system (lower and higher) which was the envy of the rest of the world (up until around the Reagan years, anyway)...

Sigh, I'm not explaining myself well, here, am I?

Listen: To be a member of a society, you must contribute to that society. Often, it looks like you arent getting as much out as you put in, but that's because you are failing to take into account the cost of the chaos one may find in a place where society has collapsed. That is the function of your tax dollar, that is the function of our educational system, that is the function of those government agencies that short-sighted Republicans, crying over their "lost" dollars, claim that we dont need. As anyone who's been paying attention at all has noticed, all these things have been waning in the last few decades, and when you combine that with our pathetic record on health-care you have a crisis well into the making, which could have been easily averted if only Americans had paid more attention to things not enterable on a ledger sheet.


1. Lakewood feeds into J. L. Long Middle School, not Franklin. Normally.
2. No medical discovery in history has had as great an impact on our health as clean water. Ever.