Robert Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: Unwed Mothers Crisis; Go Vocational; and Privatize Union Station
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Unwed Mothers Crisis; Go Vocational; and Privatize Union Station
"Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves."
-- Sylvia Plath, ‘’Waking in Winter’’
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GoLocalProv reported the other day that Ray Rickman, well known as a liberal Democrat, said that “unmarried births’’ – i.e., single mothers having children – are “wreaking havoc’’ on Rhode Island. Indeed, the high percentage of children born out of wedlock has long been wreaking havoc on America in general. The current figure is 40 percent, up from about 10 percent in 1965. The figures for Blacks and Hispanics are higher. Mr. Rickman, by the way, is African-American, gay, a former state legislator and head of a nonprofit called “Stages of Freedom.’’
Every household is different, of course, but overall, it’s clear that single-parent households tend to be much more likely to be unstable, to live in poverty, to need public assistance and for the children in these households to have socio-emotional problems, to do badly in school and to have unpleasant encounters with law enforcement.
Indeed, not having a responsible father around who can contribute emotionally and financially to raising children, and model stable, kind and disciplined male behavior, often has very bad effects. Too often, the father is just a sperm donor who disappears when the duties of parenthood loom. Since the family, in a sense, is the smallest unit of government, this has corrosive effects on the rest of society.
Renewing some (not all!) traditional family values would do far more for the prosperity and stability of America than most government programs. The most important is marriage. That’s not to say that sometimes divorce isn’t a good thing for the children. (By the way, I never quite got the famous quote from Tolstoy, in his novel Anna Karenina, that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Some say that it simply means that there are more ways for a family to be unhappy than to be happy.)
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Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, supported by some other state leaders, wants to let all Rhode Island students regardless of income attend any of the state’s three public colleges tuition-free for two years. This is a well-meaning initiative but I doubt that it would have much effect on the state’s economy and/or lead to particularly better lives for the graduates.
The cost of the program would be $30 million when it’s fully implemented. The money might be better spent on boosting low-cost or free (to the students, though not the taxpayers) vocational education for such skilled and necessary trades as electricians, utility linemen, pipe-fitters, sheet-metal workers, stone masons, welders, plumbers and certain factory jobs, which increasingly involve robotics.
These provide much more job security and higher incomes than most college graduates can expect to get, especially as automation and offshoring keeps gutting many previously well-paying job sectors, including such white-collar professions as law and accounting.
Starting about 30 years ago, politicians started saying that pretty much everyone should go to college, despite the fact that for many, perhaps most young people, a college education can be worthless in terms of what they can do for a living after getting their degrees.
(I went to college myself, but as a future editor and writer on current affairs had, in a sense, a vocational education myself by majoring in history and taking courses in such topics as Latin, which helped me better understand English. But very, very few people can look forward to careers in paid journalism, whose business model has been blown to smithereens by the Internet.)
There wouldn’t be family means testing for the tuition-free plan, though that would seem fairer. I guess the idea is that by making the program available to all, it would get maximum political support. It recalls how Social Security, since it was created in the 1930s, has been available to all – from pauper to billionaire – as one way to ensure that it wouldn’t be revoked. Good politics.
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The Boston Globe ran a fascinating article on Jan. 9 (“The hardy kiwi: scourge or savior for farmers?’’) about a fruit, called a “hardy kiwi,’’ related to the famous fuzzy kiwi you can find in supermarkets. The hardy kiwi has a smooth skin and is smaller than its fuzzy cousin. It’s also delicious and, reports The Globe, has “twice the vitamin C of an orange, twice the dietary fiber of an apple and as much potassium as a banana.’’
But of particular interest here is that is hardy enough to grow very well even in most of New England. It could become quite a cash crop.
The trouble is that some people, such as at the Audubon Society, see the plant, which is a fast-growing vine, as an invasive species that would strangle some woodlands as has kudzu, which has been moving north with global warming. So there’s a campaign underway to add hardy kiwi to the state’s prohibited plant list. Of course, you could say that all plant and animal species (especially people!) are originally invasive. Life spreads around, whether we like it or not
Trying to ban the plant would be a mistake. For one thing, there’s little evidence that that it would take over a lot of woodland. Foes point to hardy kiwi’s proliferation in a section of Lenox, Mass., but that’s because the plants there are basically remnants of those used ornamentally at the big Gilded Age estates in the Berkshires a century ago after they were brought in from Japan. There’s no indication that they’ve been spreading willy-nilly across New England in the past century!
Finally, the hardy kiwi offers the opportunity for New England to have another – and very healthy – product, like cranberries and blueberries. Now, another invasive species – bittersweet – is quite another thing. It spreads very fast and doesn’t produce anything you can eat.
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New England’s hardy kiwi may not have to be so hardy in coming years. Climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Northeast Climate Science Center predict that New England’s temperatures will rise by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels by 2025 – a faster rise than in most places. Scientists cite New England’s position in the prevailing westerly winds, the region’s latitude and dramatically warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine as among the reasons.
This is another wake-up call to reduce carbon emissions and to prepare coastal regions for higher sea levels and thus disastrous flooding. One good step would be ending at least the current version of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which subsidizes irresponsible building, mostly by affluent people, on beaches (and some flood-prone inland places).
Lloyd’s, the giant London-based insurance market, has called on the federal government to stop providing these subsidies to homeowners and businesses to build in coastal areas exposed to risks related to climate change.
And Lloyd’s says that NFIP subsidy regime is financially unsustainable. The program is now in the red by more than $24 billion, largely because of such coastal flood disasters as Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, and Superstorm Sandy, in 2012. It can only get worse.
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Worcester’s glorious Union Station should become increasingly important as more and more people seek to use mass transit. But it might be much better run if owned either by a private entity or by some new public-private entity and not by its current owner, the Worcester Redevelopment Authority. Certainly the size and location of Worcester and the station’s size and beauty could make it into the nexus of interior southern New England. Consider such splendid company-owned venues for the public as Madison Square Garden.
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I felt a pang the other day when reading that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus would close after its current season ends after 146 years.
The writing has probably been on the wall for some time. Increasingly, people, and especially kids, have sought entertainment on screens and not, well, in real-life performances. And coercing animals into cleverly designed but silly acts has become increasingly unpopular among many groups.
The most popular animals at the circus have usually been the elephants. Ringling Brothers stopped using them last year, which accelerated the decline in attendance that has been underway for years.
Feld Entertainment, which owns the circus, retired its elephants to its elephant conservation center in Florida last year. As for its still-working animals – lions, tigers, kangeroos, llamas, alpaca, donkeys and camels -- the company says they will go to good homes. I’m sure that the Humane Society will monitor these transfers.
My parents took all five of their children at various times to Ringling’s “The Greatest Show on Earth’’ several years in a row at gritty old Boston Garden. My strongest memories of these events is the smell of the manure, the ominous, near-hysterical music (like the track from a Fellini movie) and the chameleons, sold in Chinese restaurant takeout boxes. They were often dead by the time we got home.
It may a good thing that Ringling Bros. is closing. But, as with zoos, the undignified and for a long time brutal (those whips!) display of circus animals also raised the public’s affection for such charismatic animals and thus has helped boost campaigns to save them. The biggest threats to wild animals are the destruction of countryside because of human overpopulation, global warming and the hideous trade in ivory and other animal parts, centered in China. Indeed, the Chinese may still succeed in exterminating the African elephant.
Late last year, China’s Communist dictatorship announced that it would ban all ivory trade and processing by the end of this year. Very, very late in the game. Meanwhile, the trade in other the parts of other endangered animals, such as tigers, continues virtually unabated in that country. Much of it is based on ridiculous but long-held ideas that parts of some animals have aphrodisiac qualities for humans.
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Given our new president’s intensely self-referential psyche, endless lying and policy ignorance and contradictions, it’s impossible to know what he will do in office; indeed, he probably doesn’t know himself.
But I liked what he said the other day. First, he said he’d force drug companies to negotiate directly with Medicare and Medicaid to cut the astronomical costs of many drugs sold in America. The Department of Veterans Affairs has had the power to do such bargaining but such is the influence of Big Pharma lobbyists over Republicans on Capitol Hill that Medicare and Medicaid have been barred from such. It’s way past time that such negotiations be allowed. He also said, cryptically, that his health plan would mean “insurance for everybody’’.
Really? Could Mr. Trump get GOP legislators to go along with these fine ideas?
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We keep reading about how the “global elite’’ are supposed to fear the Trump administration even as one of the most famous representations of that elite is the ruthless investment bank Goldman Sachs, which will have a record number – six -- of its alumni serving in very high federal government jobs in the new administration. Most of the others in his regime are also, in varying degrees, part of the vague “elite’’ that Mr. Trump denounced quite effectively during the campaign. He adores rich people for, well, being rich. He loves to surround himself with them; it’s self-validating.
Donald Trump is rich, if not nearly as much as he claims. His businesses put him in the global elite, which is about to enjoy an even more golden age.
It’s amusing how such a professional con man could persuade large parts of the electorate to support him, in the face of the facts, as he kept denouncing the “global elite’’ and “global power structure,’’ at whose center, he asserted, were Hillary and Bill Clinton. But then, much of the electorate get most of their “information’’ from social media and the likes of Fox News. And this is, after all, the “post-fact era,’’ as various Trump surrogates have announced. Get used to it.
Even Donald Trump will tell the truth from time to time, by accident or even on purpose, but apparently not much about his links with the Russian entities that he has done business with. That will keep the word “treason’’ in the air.
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