It occurred to me — as I realized how little I’ve posted this week — that I used to be a good deal more autobiographical on this site, which makes posting easier. To offer a summary by way of remedy, I’m pursuing an advanced degree, for which (relatively speaking) I’m of an advanced age. Meanwhile, my paid work has increased beyond what I’d planned for my daily schedule. That’s a welcome development, indicating a recovery from my lost job with the Center for Freedom & Prosperity last year, but it does strain my days a bit.
For some reason I cannot articulate, a very specific scene from the 1979 movie Breaking Away came to mind this evening. The plot of the movie is less important to this post than the fact that I saw it on cable TV (remember that?) when I was a teenager. In retrospect, thirty some years later, I’m surprised how significant the scene was to the way I’ve lived my life:
The quick summary of the relevant details is this: The protagonist lives in a town that has become defined, within recent memory, by the college housed within its borders. The blue-collar folks carry the label of “the cutters,” referring to the prominence of stone cutting in local industry, specifically for the construction of the college. In the scene above, the protagonist tells his father, when asked whether he plans to go to college, that he’s “proud of being a cutter.” His father replies: “You’re not a cutter. I’m a cutter.”
Somehow, sitting around watching TV (probably) on a Sunday when (probably) George H.W. Bush was President, that line in a justifiably little-known movie from the late-70s struck me with life-defining force. The clip begins with the kid’s father talking about how much pleasure he derived from stone cutting. “I was young and slim and strong. I was damn proud of my work.” How many times I thought of those words when I worked as a carpenter! And how highly I valued the knowledge that I was a cutter — a genuine cutter, albeit of a different material.
In another scene, a young Dennis Quaid gripes about the hot-shot quarterbacks who come and go in the local college. “They’re gonna keep calling us ‘cutters.’ To them it’s just a dirty word. To me, it’s just something else I never got a chance to be.”
It’s been a long, long time since I watched this movie, and I think I only saw it the one time. I remember these scenes much better than I remember the plot, but as I recall, the protagonist wants to be a professional bicycle racer and spends a lot of time pretending to be Italian. I expect if I watched the movie again, I’d find that central pretense to be closely related to these scenes about being genuine and having the opportunity to be genuine. To Dennis Quaid’s character, who talks about how he still feels like he has to stay in shape as a former high-school football player, the collapse of the local cutting industry took away his ability to be damn proud of his work, leaving him only to be young and slim and strong. The protagonist’s father has become a used car salesman, with all the insinuations that implies, such that he is no longer even genuine, except as a husband and father.
Another detail I remember, because my friends and I engaged in the exact same working-class pastime, is that the kids in the movie swim in the bodies of water created by rain falling into the rock quarries over years. The quarry is a great gouge in nature — a lake with the lines of human activity plain to see. It is the heritage of the young cutters-in-name-only, and the privileged college kids invade even there. The protagonist’s father asks whether his son’s friends still go there; then, “So, the only thing you got to show for my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind.” What a great line!
I don’t remember whether the movie came to this conclusion, but these days I see it so clearly: The opportunity to be a cutter is always there. Cutting is doing your work and living your life well, whatever it entails. Live it such that you squeeze the meaning from it, and the next generation wishes it had the chance to do that work!
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Something about this story feels profoundly discouraging to me:
Forty Rhode Island business owners traveled to Washington D.C. last week as part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit to meet with hundreds of officials to discuss how to boost access to capital, child care and government contracting.
Katie Schibler Conn, owner of KSA Marketing in Warwick, was one of those participants that made the trek to D.C. and spoke with Rhode Island’s U.S. Senator Jack Reed and U.S. Rep. David Cicilline.
“Small business owner” should connote a sense of independence — of providing for one’s self, one’s family, and one’s employees. It’s “yes, I built that!” Running to government for cash and subsidized family services is rent seeking, which is very much like working for the government.
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Stories like this, from WPRI’s Shannon Hegy, too easily slip under the radar without anybody’s pointing out what, specifically, is happening:
[Cranston Park View Middle School] STEM Coordinator Caitlyn Blankenship tells 12 News she’s seen firsthand the evidence of key skills lost during the pandemic in middle schoolers, who are struggling to problem solve, work together and communicate.
“They lost the ability to work in teams during COVID, so they lost those skills of communicating with each other on very simple tasks,” she said.
The United Way Rhode Island’s Summer Learning Initiative is working to reverse that learning loss.
Marlene Guay, who manages the statewide initiative, said the need for it has grown exponentially.
She said 35 communities have applied to participate, but there is only enough funding for five. Cranston was one of the communities that was accepted.
Not mentioned is that the United Way is a progressive activist organization. Guay is not merely an educator; she’s a radical social justice warrior who is running for elective office with the far-left Political Co-Op, with a nod from Bernie Sanders, who emphasizes not equal treatment and opportunities for all, but making education “the learning agent to even the playing field with equity and representation.” This context becomes crucial when she emphasizes the need for “social emotional support.”
In the mouth of a standard educator, the adjectival phrase, “social emotional,” may mean the strategy of teaching children to regulate their emotions so that they can better interact with others in the social sphere. In the mouth of a radical like Guay, who emphasizes “equity” and “social justice” at every opportunity, the reference is certainly to transformative social emotional learning, which is “a specific form of SEL implementation that concentrates SEL practice on transforming inequitable settings and systems, and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement.”
Promoting this program in 2021, United Way listed the three goals for students of the program: “sharpening their social-emotional skills, tackling service projects to address community needs, and preparing their minds for a return to the classroom.” Notice that the educational is last of the three.
In the context of addressing children and families harmed by our society’s response to the pandemic, progressives’ primary goal is not helping them to regain the skills to interact in our society as it exists. Instead, their primary goal is to ensure that children recover from pandemic harms by becoming progressives. It’s an ideological power grab.
This may all be well and good. After all, until Guay and her comrades have their way, the United States will remain a free country, and communities and parents should be free to center their beliefs. Still, the question (cliché though it may be) answers itself: Is this how school districts and the news media would treat a program sponsored by, say, the Catholic Church and run by a Republican running for General Assembly on an explicitly conservative ticket who uses codewords indicating Christian evangelism when describing his program?
No way. And we should stop this progressive privilege whereby our institutions treat members of the leftist cult as if they’re just ordinary citizens doing objective good work with no ulterior motives.
Featured image by Alex Iby on Unsplash.
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Rhode Island provides an excellent case study in how corruption works. Elections aren’t stolen at the ballot box (except as a last resort). Rather, corruption rigs the game at every opportunity — buying and coercing votes so that they don’t have to be stolen or manufactured. The only way to stop this is to get the money out of politics, and the only way to do that is to get as much power out of politics as feasible.
The reminder for these thoughts was the Providence Journal’s searchable tool for legislative grants, which House and Senate leaders hand out to legislators if they behave so they can buy good will (i.e., votes) in their districts. It looks like the Projo duplicated the data while setting up the tool, so check it against the House and Senate lists, but it’s instructive to look through the grants in your community.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Did McKee’s mother help his image?
- What’s with the McKee aid’s arrest in VT?
- Should the McKee-supporter’s DUI keep him out of promotional commercials?
- What does the AG’s stinging criticism of a former McKee aid portend?
- Are there full tickets in the RI Democrat primary?
- Was Kalus right to go after McKee and Biden?
Featured image from Daniel McKee campaign ad.
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John Loughlin talks with Dr. Shafman about bladder cancer, Tim Taylor of the Lost 52 Project, Lori Garver, former Deputy Director of NASA, Tom Lopatosky, owner of LOPCO Contracting, and Joe Bastardi of WeatherBell Analytics.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Actually, it’s worse than that. Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wants an American dictator who actively harms our country for the benefit of foreign countries that are mostly hostile to us. Objectively, the malice or mania necessary for a privileged American to make such declarations as the Wall Street Journal describes is something of a puzzle:
Progressives are furious at West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin for scuttling a big climate spending bill. “With legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode,” Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse tweeted last week. And now the White House is leaking that the President may declare a national climate emergency as soon as this week.
The Journal likens the proposition to President Trump’s use of military funds to build a border wall. While that was arguably an instance of executive overreach, at least its purpose was to defend the country from a wave of illegal immigration so uncontrolled as to be reasonably called “an invasion.”
In this case, progressives want to harm the U.S. (and global) economy by further restricting energy production, which will all but transfer wealth directly to America’s enemies while, as the Journal notes, making Americans suffer in order to compensate for the disregard for the environment of our greatest international adversary, China.
While it’s natural to wonder why Whitehouse so vehemently hates his own country, one must realize that he has lived his life untouchably wealthy and, no doubt, fancies himself “a global citizen.” Demented fantasies and disregard for human life are, while not excused by that condition, at least explicable.
The real question is why Rhode Islanders hate their country so much as to put Whitehouse in a position of national influence (assuming, of course, that our elections are legitimate).
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Mack can do no wrong… or else
- McKee can’t escape the FBI news
- Media can’t get the consequence of voting changes
- Paid abortion activists can’t stop short of infanticide
- Democrats can’t escape Biden’s polls
Featured image by Aaron on Unsplash.
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Anchor Rising received information that a Brown University student had been hospitalized in March, 2021 with myopericarditis after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
This raised a couple of important matters regarding Brown University’s strict vaccine mandate on students, staff and professors. Has the university been tracking adverse COVID-19 vaccine effects, including among the student body? If so, had they publicized this data; in part, for the benefit of students so that they would have informed consent when they considered whether to conform to the vaccine mandate? After all, it was known early in the pandemic that not only did the virus have a sky-high all-age survival rate but it skews significantly by age, making the medical and public health necessity of vaccinating young people quizzical at best.
A search of the internet turned up no such data publicized by Brown University, or any other source. The search did turn up Brown University’s webpage entitled “Vaccine Safety and Effectiveness”, subtitled “Studies show that COVID-19 vaccines are both safe and effective at keeping individuals from getting COVID-19”. The webpage includes a partial list of non-life-threatening “Possible Side Effects” of COVID-19 vaccines but contains no data about adverse vaccine effects. The page was last updated over a year ago.
Absent this information online, I contacted Brown University officials directly starting on July 6 and asked them the following questions.
– How many Brown undergraduate and graduate students have been hospitalized or died from myocarditis and/or myopericarditis from January 1, 2021 to the present? If any, had the student received a COVID-19 vaccination?
– How many Brown undergraduate and graduate students have been hospitalized or died from adverse effects of a COVID-19 vaccine from January 1, 2021 to the present?
– How many Brown undergraduate and graduate students have been hospitalized or died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic?
No identification of any student is sought; this is a request for data only.
I e-mailed these questions to Brown President Christina Paxson; Russell Carey, Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy; and Dr. Eric Estes, Vice President for Campus Life. When no reply was received to these e-mails, I called each office and left voicemail messages with Mr. Carey and Dr. Estes’ office. (President Paxson’s office number routes to Brown’s main phone number so it was not possible to leave her a message.)
None of these Brown University officials has responded to this outreach.
Anchor Rising is not the first to pose such questions to Brown. Dr. Andrew Bostom did so and also received no response.
And he reports that the concerned parent of a Brown student e-mailed President Paxson similar questions. Dr. Paxson did reply to that person; her response was apparently short, dispassionate and non-responsive to the questions asked.
Brown University’s “Vaccinations” webpage, last updated in January, states [emphasis added]
Brown is committed to providing up-to-date information about COVID-19 vaccination and resources to help the community understand this important next step in addressing the global pandemic.
Yes, please, Brown University. For the sake of properly informed Brown students and for the advancement of vital medical information, your own “up-to-date information about COVID-19 vaccination” is badly needed. Please reconsider your current course and provide it.
[Photo Credit: von Vix via Unsplash]
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Guest: Mike Cerrullo, mental health practitioner
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo
Description: Host and guest are mental health practitioners. They discuss how therapy helps us navigate through life’s challenges and the various approaches therapists, including themselves, use to help people manage their personal lives. Included in this discussion is the reluctance/resistance to seeking help and the barriers associated. Goals of therapy typically include how to remain well and healthy; understanding what factors have contributed to their situation; the troubles and problems they will learn to manage, and much more.
