Perhaps it’s fanciful of me to wonder, but could Joe Scott’s jumping parties be an indication that Republican “double agents” and Democrats-at-heart sense change in the minority air? When the Big Bad Right-Wing Extremists knock on the door, Republican liberals may feel more comfortable departing the straw house that is the RI GOP.
Little RINO, little RINO, let me in…
Yesterday we went to see the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, based on Christopher Gardner’s book of the same name.
I didn’t know anything about the movie before viewing it or know anything about Gardner until the end of the movie, including that it was based on his life story.
Today, I found this interview with Gardner:
Washington Technology [WT]: When you were one of the working homeless in San Francisco, did you have hope that you would get out of the situation?
Gardner: We were homeless, we were not hopeless. There’s a world of difference…
WT: To what do you attribute your rise to the top?
Gardner: My mother…I chose to embrace the “spiritual genetics” of my mom. We all understand genetics. You get your eyes from your dad, your mom’s nose, there’s nothing you can do about that. But your spiritual genetics you can choose, pick, embrace and commit to. That’s what I did.
Though my mom had too many of her own dreams denied, deferred and destroyed, she instilled in me that I could have dreams. And not just have dreams but had a responsibility to make them reality…
…But I made a commitment to be world class at something.
WT: What important lessons have you’ve learned from your life experience?
Gardner: Man, I’m still learning. One is: The cavalry ain’t coming. You’ve got to do this yourself…Another very important lesson is that baby steps count, too. As long as you are going forward. You add them all up, and one day you look back and you’ll be surprised at where you might get to.
WT: What advice would you give people who are just starting out or who are trying to get ahead under difficult circumstances like those you experienced?
Gardner: Do something that you love. Whatever you’re going to do is going to be tough enough. Find something that gets you so excited that the sun can’t come up early enough in the morning because you want to go do your thing.
And you have to be bold because there will be folks who will say ‘you can’t’ or ‘you shouldn’t’ or ‘why’? There is a certain boldness to saying ‘Well, I really don’t want to be a high-powered corporate lawyer. I’m really passionate about painting.’
One thing I do say to folks — and I don’t put myself out here as somebody who has all the answers — but I do state the obvious when I say that no matter how much money is involved or no matter how easy it is for you to do, if you’re not happy, you are nothing more than a slave to your talent and money. So be happy.
…You have to be committed, and you have to find something that you are passionate about.
And forget about money. I’ve learned that money is the least significant aspect of wealth. Do something that makes you happy and makes you feel good about yourself. Do something that makes you feel your work is significant and meaningful. If you just want to make money, that’s a whole different trip. I can’t help you with that.
WT: How does it feel having a film being made about your life experience?
Gardner: I’ll tell you when I wake up. I now know the definition of surreal. On the first day of filming, I didn’t know where they were filming. They took me to 555 California St., the Bank of America world headquarters building. At times when I was homeless, I used to sleep in that building. Nobody knew. I never told that to the writers and never discussed it with the producers.
Another day filming. We’re going to film in Golden Gate Park. We’re filming in a place where I used to take my son to teach him how to fly a kite. We had nothing else to do, no other form of entertainment, no money. I told no one that…
WT: What do you hope that people take away from your book and the film?
Gardner: The film is going to focus on one year of my life. That year being the toughest, darkest, scariest year of my life. Living with a baby tied on my back, trying to work. It can be done. But you have to make it happen. And no matter what, you have to cling to it like it’s life itself, if that’s what you really want to do.
WT: Do you think that people who make it to the top have an obligation to mentor others?
Gardner: I do it [but], not out of a sense of obligation. I went to some very successful business people when I was trying to open the doors of my company, and none of them would give me the time of day. I made a promise to myself and to God. I said, ‘God, if you ever let me get to a certain level, I am not going to be like that.’
Just like anybody else, you’ve only got so many hours in a day, but as far as being available and accessible and have these relationships developing, I did something a number of years ago. I got involved with a program in Chicago that was designed to help young people get internships in the financial services business and learn the business at the exchanges, insurance companies, banks, money management firms, brokers.
The coolest thing in the world is walking up the street in Chicago, New York or San Francisco and having someone say ‘Hey, you might not remember me, but thank you for helping me get in the business.’
WT: So that was a way for you to give back something?
Gardner: You know how mountains get moved? Everyone who can move a couple [of mountains], move a couple. Those who can move rocks, move rocks. Those who can move boulders, move boulders. That’s how mountains get moved. If every one of us did everything we could, I believe we would be in a different world.
For more on Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about the pursuit of happiness and the American Founding, go here and here.
[Open full post]Bill Rappleye of WJAR-TV (NBC 10) is reporting that State Representative Joseph Scott (Charlestown/Exeter/Richmond) is leaving the Republican party and joining the Democrats.
[Open full post]In Tuesday’s Projo, former Rhode Island GOP Executive Director Jeff Deckman proposed a five-point plan for rebuiliding the Republican Party in Rhode Island (h/t SusanD)…
Mr. Deckman goes into specifics about each recommendation in his article. [Open full post]
- Step One: The governor must take a strong leadership role in the re-organization of the party just as he did in his first two years in office.
- Step Two: Recruit a chairman who understands the complexities of organizational design and the human dynamics that affect them.
- Step Three: Build the organization bi-directionally — from the top down and from the grass-roots level up.
- Step Four: Build coalitions with taxpayer groups and other reform-minded organizations.
- Step Five: Focus the resources.
…year-in-review articles. Ian Donnis files his entry in this week’s Providence Phoenix…
Imagine a year when the Narragansett Indians were energetically pitching a casino, cynical Rhode Islanders had plenty of reason to reinforce their jaundiced views, and state house Democrats maintained the upper hand over hapless Republican opponents without even breaking a sweat….[Open full post]
Yet whether the Dems’ politically advantageous position enables the state to deal any more effectively with its most serious problems, including a deficit pegged at more than $100 million, not to mention a long-term structural deficit and the perpetual to need to create more good jobs, remains to be seen.
According to ProJo’s 7to7 Blog:
The Narragansett Indian tribe is pursuing plans to build a slot parlor on its lands in Charlestown and has approached Rhode Island’s Congressional leaders about reversing a federal law that would block their efforts.
“We don’t want table games. We don’t want roulette. We want what the state has,” Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas said.
Thomas has requested a meeting with members of the state delegation about the Chafee amendment, a 1996 law that introduced by U.S. Senator John Chafee that bars the tribe from federal Indian gaming privileges on its 1,800 acres. {Hyperlinks added by me.}
In 1998, the Federal Court of Appeals upheld the Chafee Amendment, leaving the tribe no other option but to seek it’s revocation. I’m not opposed to the Narragansetts having a casino on their land. It’s their sovereign right, after all. Yes, I realize they bargained away some of that sovereignty, but they have every right to redress that mistake. And if they can get someone in the RI delegation to overturn the “Chafee Amendment,” then more power to them.
[Open full post]Time magazine’s cover story announcing the idiosyncratic choice of “You” as the 2006 Person of the Year is receiving the requisite amount of media and water cooler attention. However, the Time cover story on education reform from the previous week contains more ideas of substance likely to be remembered in the long run. In its reporting, Time summarized a number of recommendations put forth by a body called The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. (I wonder what happened to the old commission?)
The first recommendation is quite radical…
The next two recommendations have been around for a while, but are only slowly being tried due to opposition from, well, let’s call them “entrenched interests” (in other words, it’s not just the unions blocking these measures; municipal bureaucracies don’t want any big changes either)…
- Most kids should finish high-school-level work by age 16 and be prepared to tackle college or trade-oriented higher education. The commission proposes that the states introduce State Board Examinations, more rigorous and more thorough than most of today’s state tests. Once a child passes the state exam — at 16, 17 or whenever — they could move on to higher ed. This change, the commission estimates, would free up some $60 billion in schools funds to be invested more wisely.
After that, disappointingly, we hit the standard euphemism for raising taxes and/or cutting programs in communities with good school systems in order to further subsidize communities with failing school systems…
- To attract high-caliber people into the teaching profession, a new career ladder should be introduced that raises pay for new teachers and includes rising rungs of merit pay. The report proposes to pay for these changes by phasing out today’s lavish teacher retirement packages and moving toward benefits that more closely match those in private industry.
- To introduce more competition, diversity and dynamism to the nation’s schools, the commission proposes that schools be run by independent contractors — in some cases groups of teachers — who agree to meet requirements set and measured by the district or else lose the contract. Parents would choose the school their child attends.
And two more recommendations round out the set…
- To equalize resources between rich and poor communities, the report recommends that school districts be directly funded by the state, receiving funds according to the needs of their student populations rather than the property taxes of the local community.
With it’s focus on actual education reform, the New Commission program is the diametric opposite of the plans put forth by organizations like the National Education Association of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals who assert that in preparing the next generation for the future, the existing structure of public education needs little change and that education reform should be less of a priority than increasing spending on non-educational social services programs. With different factions beginning from such polar opposites, the question is how do we prevent education reform (if it hasn’t already) from following the path of energy policy reform – something oft-talked about where nothing serious is ever done?
- All states would make high-quality pre-kindergarten programs available to all.
- To enable workers of all ages to adapt to a rapidly evolving economy, the federal government would create tax-protected “personal competitiveness accounts” — “a G.I. Bill for our times,” in the words of the report — that could be drawn upon for education and training at any point in life. At birth, the feds would deposit $500 per child into the account.
Finally, let me express one concern about the New Commission. This is how Time described its composition…
The commission of heavyweights included four former cabinet secretaries, the president of the American Manufacturers Association, the chancellor of the California State University system, executives from Viacom Inc. and Lucent Technologies, and other government and education leaders.Assuming that description is accurate, then the interests of teachers, business, and public bureaucracies all seem to have been well represented in the New Commission’s work. But who was there to represent the interests of parents and students? [Open full post]
In a comment to my post on sex education, Rhody points to another of those differences of understanding between conservatives and liberals that seem nigh impossible to resolve:
I think the best way to discourage sex before marriage is building kids’ self-esteem and letting them know they don’t have to give it up to feel good about themselves. And the same lesson can be applied to gay teens, too.
But “self-esteem” seems to be considered just as dirty a word in many conservative circles as “masturbation.”
I’d say that “self-esteem” — that is, self-esteem trapped in quotation marks, as a buzzword — is rightly a dirty word among conservatives, because it indicates a mushy make-adults-feel-good dictum that the metaphorical fat kid in the class should never feel badly about himself. A more conservative approach toward a similar end would be for teachers, and other adults concerned about a particular student, to put forward the additional effort to help the child achieve such things as make him deserving of self-esteem. The difference is between banning competition so that nobody can lose and acknowledging that the possibility of loss is what gives value to success. Failure is never absolute, only context-specific, spurring the loser to find ways in which to succeed, perhaps by choosing other areas of competition.
But back to sex.
We’re at an enigmatic time in cultural history, indeed, if the (I daresay) antiquated notion that young girls are consenting to sex in order, simply, to prove that they are desirable to males can coexist with a conviction that any sexual orientation is tangibly equivalent to any other (as for the purposes of defining marriage). If there is no substantive differentiation to be made between male-female sexual relationships and, say, male-male sexual relationships, then there is no justification for Rhody’s sexist imagery when he muses that it might be better if “sexual excess went into towels instead of teenage girls.” The construction exhibits an undeniably phallocentric understanding of who is ceding and who is claiming power.
It can no longer be taken for granted that girls, much less boys, believe that they are giving something up when they consent to premarital — even prematriculational — sex. The non-contingent “self-esteem” in the liberal arsenal does not apply, because liberals are defining sex as something natural and ordinary for both genders to pursue and perform, without requiring any substantial proof of worthiness on the part of potential partners (e.g., marital commitment).
For conservatives, in contrast, human worth is intrinsic, but self-esteem is contingent upon our assent to a higher behavioral norm than that expressed, for example, by the safe-sex-education assumption that abstinence is unrealistic. In religious terms, we are all of equal worth in the eyes of God, but the value that we perceive ourselves to have to Him is contingent upon our willingness to place our relationship with Him (especially through self-improvement) above our biological urges.
It isn’t that children have something so valuable that we must puff up their self-esteem in order to enable them to hold on to it. Rather, by insisting that they not participate in the objectification inherent in teenage sexual desire, that they treat sex as something more than the mutual gratification of human objects, we teach them that they can achieve a state of being that justifies their holding themselves in high regard.
In today’s Projo, Felice J. Freyer describes a new small business/individual health insurance blueprint unveiled yesterday by the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner…
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and UnitedHealthcare of New England are required, starting in May, to offer a “wellness health benefit plan” to individuals and businesses with 50 or fewer employees. The plan has to meet the state’s criteria and the average premium can’t exceed 10 percent of the average Rhode Island wage….The program’s concepts are stunningly unoriginal, consisting of nothing more than…
The new plan’s deductible will be about $500, with out-of-pocket costs capped at $3,000 — provided the enrollee signs a pledge promising to choose a primary-care physician, undergo a health-risk appraisal, either maintain a healthy weight or participate in weight-management programs, either remain smoke-free or participate in smoking cessation programs, and participate in disease-management programs if applicable. In the first year, subscribers will be asked just to promise these things; in the second year, they will have to prove participation.
Someone who didn’t want to sign such a pledge could still buy the plan but he or she would face a $3,000 deductible and out-of-pocket costs up to $6,000 a year.
- Price controls on the amount insurance companies can charge employees of small businesses, and
- Government regulation of individual behavior that will hopefully lead to individuals consuming less insurance.
Seriously, there are at least 3 problems with the plan…
- A fixed-price formula divorced from actual costs of providing healthcare could eventually drive health insurers out of the state. There is recent precedent for this. An irrational regulatory structure forced most workers’ compensation insurers to pull out of Rhode Island in the early 1990s because they were required to pay out more money than pricing regulations allowed them to collect. There is no reason that the same thing couldn’t eventually happen to health insurance.
- The partcular mechanism for implementing the “wellness” program sets a dangerous precedent. It is wrong for government to use its power to demand that interaction between individuals occur only on the government’s terms. It is not hard to imagine a future where, for example, attendance at the sex-education program of the government’s choice, chosen with as much political input as medical input, is made a pre-requisite of getting lower insurance rates on a family plan. (I chose the sex-education example because liberals, conservatives and everyone in-between should be able to envision a potential problem here.)
- Finally, it will never make sense to pay for “wellness” programs through an insurance-type system. Insurance assumes that many people pay into a pool of money, while only a few take monies out to pay for unexpected emergencies. But usage of “wellness” care will not be occurring on an infrequent, emergency basis. Ideally, the wellness program will be utilized by many people at regular intervals. This means that paying for wellness care through an insurance program will be always be less cost-effective than paying doctors for wellness care directly, sans any middleman. (Of course, if people start paying their doctors directly, they will never develop a sense that their visits to a doctor are a government-provided entitlement, making the government seem a little less powerful, creating an impression that strong-government advocates would prefer to avoid.)
- Implementing some sort of community rating system, ala the Wyden plan, so people can buy insurance independent of their employer,
- Modifying the community rating system so that insurers can modify their rates based on certain types of behavior (participating in a wellness program, not smoking, etc.), and
- Creating health-savings accounts that people can use to pay for their routine and “wellness” care.
