Fun With Math

After Super Tuesday, Mike Bloomberg had acquired forty-four delegates. Estimates put his campaign spending thus far at approximately four hundred million dollars. A quick estimate puts the expense per delegate at around ten million dollars apiece. If you're jumping on your calculator, I will save you the trouble: that's just a tad more than nine million dollars each. Chump change for a billionaire.
Ready for another one?
The city of Flint, Michigan estimates it will cost fifty-five million dollars to solve their contaminated water problem. Additional information here: Tom Steyer, who has recently suspended his campaign for president, dropped two hundred million dollars into his recently suspended campaign. Add those two billionaire's campaign spending together and you come up with around six hundred million dollars.
You may have already anticipated where this freight train is going, but let's do the math. That money could have been used to bring clean, healthy drinking water to Flint, Michigan almost eleven times over. That would fix a problem. That wouldn't be just putting money into badges, posters, stickers and T-shirts. And those inflatable things that make noise when you bang them together.
Yes, I understand that there are plenty of individuals who believe in their heart of hearts that anything short of a Bloomberg or Steyer victory in this year's presidential election is as big a catastrophe as the lack of drinkable water in Flint, Michigan. A wide-eyed perspective might suggest that either of these two gentlemen may have used their bully pulpit to make certain that all Americans everywhere have clean water coming from their taps.
At the taxpayer's expense.
In a related item, a lot of hullabaloo was raised about our current "president" donating a his salary, or a quarterly portion of it, to the Department of Health and Human Services to support their work responding to the Coronavirus outbreak. I would not sneeze at the one hundred thousand dollars he signed over, but it is important to note this is a man who has run up a tab of just over one hundred thirty million dollars during his three years in office for golf. Those are some pretty steep greens fees. That's a lot of golf.
And that's a lot of zeroes.

A Win

Lean in, folks. This is good news. 
Authorities arrested a Sunnyvale man who was planning a mass shooting at the Unite Parcel Service facility there.He was taken into custody after a short pursuit and booked on charges including suspicion of evading police, driving under the influence and several weapons violations. That's when they searched his apartment. 
More than twenty thousand rounds of ammunition, high capacity magazines, five tactical rifles, a shotgun, three handguns, body armor and tactical backpacks filled with the previously mentioned ammunition.
Alleged. Assumed. And so on.
Police believe this gentleman was planning a mass shooting at his place of employment. The previously mentioned United Parcel Service. Planning. Preparing. The backpacks were staged at the doorway of his home. 
No one was injured. The potential gunman did not take his own life and all his co-workers were able to return to work the next day. Alive. Relived. And probably stuck with the feeling that they had missed becoming yet another sad story, statistic. Thanks to the providence of time. Being ahead of the schedule of whatever program this fellow had laid out for himself. The ones he had texted to his employer. 
You may remember a few years back when a disgruntled UPS worker shot and killed three of his co-workers, injured three others before taking his own life. Before police arrived. Four dead, three wounded. That doesn't keep you in the news cycle very long these days. Especially since that same day a gunman across the continent in Washington D.C. shot up a Congressional Softball practice, wounding four before being killed by police responding to the scene. 
So what I am suggesting here is that body count should not be an issue. Lives saved should be the concern. That is what makes this such a fine exception. A fine, creepy exception. Living in a world where we can take heart in all twenty thousand of those rounds not being fired is the silver lining in a very dark cloud. Good job.
There is still so very much work to be done. 

The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete

Mayor Pete. That's what we all called him. That was because Buttegieg is too hard to pronounce. Even the spell check shrugs its shoulders at this candidate for President of the United States. Excuse me: former candidate for President of the United States. His honor the mayor has cashed in the few chips he had left and pushed away from the table. The headlines refer to his "historic run" as the first openly gay major party candidate for President of the United States.
Which only makes me pine for the day that will one day come when that isn't an asterisk.
And now, the tackiest of all possible interactions takes place: the wooing of Mayor Pete's delegates. If it all feels a little like hitting on the widow at her husband's funeral, then you have the right picture. It wasn't so very long ago that Mister Buttegieg was named the winner of the Iowa caucuses and he was sailing ahead on full steam. Suddenly he was a force to be reckoned with. That was February third. In early March, we are picking over his bones. Metaphorically speaking. I know that your hopes for the future of this country have just been dashed against the rocks of uncaring reality, but have you considered the advantages of hooking up with a guy who believes in Medicare for All? Take your time.
But not too much time.
As each candidate drops out, yes we are not forgetting Tom Steyer and his tie, the calls for unity become a little louder. And a little more desperate. Once all this hash is settled, there is still the main event: Who can beat the "president" and become President of the United States. That last bit may be more challenging than the office itself. The chore of pasting together all the tatters that our country has been torn and bringing all of us back to the table to talk about survival in the twenty-first century will be no easy feat. It would be simple enough to say that it is our responsibility to come together as one once the election has been held. Too easy. There will have to be reconciliation between the red and the blue, left and the right, left and far left, and so on.
Or we can surrender to the inevitable.
Mayor Pete joins a long list of the men and women who would be, well not King, but Chief Executive. And after I took all that time to learn how to spell Buttegieg.

Upgrade

The call came in a little over a week ago. Okay, the call didn't so come in as it went out. I made my weekly phone call to my mother and found her in what she would call "a state." Not the state of Colorado, which would have been appropriate since that's where she lives, but "a state of confusion," or maybe a "state of frustration," or some combination of the two. Her computer was giving her messages about being locked and she was doing all the right things to make it work, reading and responding to the directions on screen, then moving on to the hardcore technical fixes such as turning it off and turning it back on again. I caught her in the midst of one of these cycles and I could tell right away that her level of consternation had gone beyond setting the matter aside and chatting with her son. I asked her a few questions about her predicament and then went into support mode. We worried that something or someone might have phished her in and gained access to her machine. So I had her turn it off, then we chatted for a bit, catching up on the week's events along with liberal sprinklings of the computer challenge. After a few minutes, I had her turn the source of her woe back on, and I listened as she described the booting process. After a couple more minutes of tenuous waiting, she announced that it had come back to a normal login. She clicked on a few things and checked her connection to Al Gore's Internet. All was well. She was incredibly relieved, and I was pleased to have jumped into that fray and come out a winner. We talked for a little while longer, but as she was an hour ahead of my time, she was feeling the need to get back to her dinner which had been left unprepared because of her technology snafu. We said our goodbyes and I got one more special thank you for being such a clever and good son.
This lasted a few days. Then I got an email from my mother saying that my older brother had come to take the corpse of her computer away. This message came, as stated at the bottom, from her iPad. Apparently her computer, which had once been the heartbeat of a thriving bookkeeping business she ran for decades, was now a brick. Not the same exact machine, there had been repairs and replacements for the Dell that had been her companion through those many years as well as her source of solitaire. My mother and I went through out analog to digital conversion about the same time. She was freshly divorced and I was recently graduated from college. We both were in need of computer skills to enhance our job viability. A family friend with computer experience to spare came to our aid and taught us the way of the personal computer. Word processing, spread sheets, and floppy discs. At this time, the Internet was just a gleam in Al Gore's eye. My mother and I took these private tutorials and turned them into what would become, essentially, our careers.
Now our lives are more settled. I have a room full of PCs that I maintain as well as a fleet of Chromebooks serving two hundred and seventy-some kids and their teachers. My mother was spending time at her desk checking her email and pondering her next flurry of Frecell when the bottom dropped out of her world. Happily, another family friend had recently gifted her with an iPad that allowed her to join the wireless revolution. And the desktop machine with its screen and mouse and keyboard and speakers were on their way to electronic waste.
Time to move on.

That Guy

Timing is everything.
You can ask Preston Tucker about that.
But enough about history, for now. We'll have plenty of time to discuss the signs that we ignored before the coming apocalypse once the smoke clears. 
Currently, Fox News has a gentleman on their channel saying that "It's a shame that Dems and media are using the coronavirus to score political points against Trump." He continued to suggest that those bad people will try to "pin it to him like his Katrina moment and make it political." If you have forgotten about Katrina, it was a hurricane that destroyed a large portion of the Gulf Coast, centering on New Orleans. Again, I apologize for bringing up history, but this was a "moment" because thousands of Americans suffered and died as a result of poor planning and response by the Federal Government. And so here we are again, up against the wall with no hope but science on our side, and the guy who is complaining about the media and the Democratic Party being so mean is also the same guy who once insisted that “I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.” 
Which was a joke, or what folks at Fox News would like us to believe is a joke. All of this sound and funny was in the wake of the insistence by the "president" that we (Americans) were in good shape because there had been, as yet, no deaths associated with the coronavirus. 
Whoops. On Saturday morning, the first death was confirmed in Washington state. Leaving a great big hole in the defense that has been mounted by the task force led by the Vice President of the United States, who a few years back wrote, "Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill." He's also the guy who, in response to Colin Powell's support and encouragement of condom use said, "Frankly, condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases." He said Powell "may be inadvertently misleading millions of young people and endangering lives."
And yes, I know I have slipped back into that sad trend of making examples from history, and there really isn't any reason to believe that this is the group of guys who will make sense out of all this science and everything will be just fine. 
But there will be plenty of time for us survivors to discuss the administration's response to the pandemic as we shuffle through the wasteland, searching for the few remaining survivors and that last can of unopened beans.  

Qualifications

Sitting around the office, as school employees often do after the day's work has been done and all the students have been set on their ways, the conversation dodged and swerved. There is a supremely cathartic joy in having conversation with adults after spending six to eight hours immersed in the cares and woes of five to twelve year olds. As a matter of this course, I found myself relating not for the first time, the story of how I came to be a part of the few, the proud, the teachers.
Near the beginning of the admission interview for the credential program I was joining, the professor asked me why I thought I would be a good teacher. My thoughts raced with words about potential and generations and community, but what came out was, "I dunno. I've always been pretty good with kids."
This elicited a chuckle from the professor. Not a full blown laugh in my face, but a wizened guffaw at my sentiment. "Good with kids," he muttered as he looked down the list of questions that came after. Would it be best for all involved if we just cut this one off short?
As it turned out, the interview did continue, and either I eventually won him over with my much more decisive and clever answers to the rest of the questions, or the Oakland Unified School District was desperate for candidates like me. The warm-bodied breathing types. I got a call two days later that told me that I had been accepted into the intern credential program, and more information would follow.
These turned out to be prophetic words. The information continues to flood in, decades after I received my entree into the world of public education. As it turns out, "being good with kids" has been helpful in my career, but being good with trauma is even more valuable. That conversation in the office turned on this idea, as we each found our own way to express the notion that "it wasn't like this when we were kids." Somewhere out there in a suburban enclave there mus certainly be a school that is just like the one I attended when I was young. Or at least more like it. I don't know exactly what prepares you to talk to an eight year old about her cousin who died at age sixteen, or the seven year old whose parents were sent back to Mexico while he stayed here with cousins to learn English from next to nothing and discover a world that has expectations for him that grownups don't fully understand. Parents who bring their kids to our school because they don't have the time, money, resources to deal with them. Those folks are good with kids, right?
Of course we are. And a whole lot of other things.

In Other News

So here we are: The "president" is no longer extending his "thoughts and prayers" to victims of mass shootings. He has walked that back to "deepest condolences." When five people were shot and killed by a gunman who took his own life, that was the best the leader of our great land could muster. Caught in the flurry of a tweetstorm about cable news ratings, the "president" could barely tap the brakes to acknowledge that six more Americans had died as a result of gun violence. An employee of MillerCoors, formerly Molson, formerly Miller and another company called Coors, was fired last Wednesday and came back a few hours later to shoot up the place. Whatever it was called.
Searching for a motive won't be that difficult. A guy in his fifties was fired and when his world seemed at an end, he chose the way he wanted to end it. Because he has the freedom to do that here in America. The land where the "president" alternately flaunts and flouts the "2A," known by its Christian name The Second Amendment. Never mind that this bit of legislation was written more than two hundred years ago, or that it seems to conflict mightily with that open-ended commitment many of these same folks have to "the right to life." It's just far too difficult an issue to unravel on social media. Or over the past two hundred years.
Guns have become much more efficient as killing machines, and our access to those machines has become more free, since it's in the Constitution and all. It's a little like those people who like to find that sentence in the Bible that might forbid homosexuality while they skip on past the prohibition on shellfish as they sup on their lobster bisque.
Meanwhile, back in Milwaukee, maybe we could paint this in more vibrant colors to illustrate a point: Earlier this week, disgruntled former brewery employee Andrew "Squiggy" Squigman burst into the break room at Schotz, firing randomly. He eventually killed five others before turning the gun on himself. Victims include Laverne DeFazio, Shirley Feeney, Lenny Kosnowski, Carmine "The Big Ragu" Ragusa and visiting friend Arthur Fonzarelli. No motive was given for the shooting, but authorities have suggested that a history of mental and emotional instability may have been the root cause. That and the easy access to a weapon. The nation mourns this loss of life.
As we should.
And now back to those cable news ratings.