Falling in love with a house

Dreaming of living in sunny Florida, I came across this house for rent and instantly fell in love with it.

A classic old Floridian home with hardwood floors and screened in porch.

Contentment settles on me just dreaming about it.

CNN's fairy tale version of economic crisis

CNN encapsulates the financial meltdown in a thousand words or less-blaming the subprime borrowers (firstof course). The greed and lack of restraint on wall street-bush give to the rich policies aren't in this fairy tale-Let's make the peasants the villians.

CNN lead in:

How a 'perfect storm' led to the economic crisis
Story Highlights
Firms are cutting jobs, credit is frozen and billion-dollar bailouts are being doled out
Experts trace the crisis to a housing bubble from earlier this decade
A confluence of greed, lack of regulation and reckless borrowing played a role
(interestingly this isn't attributed to Bush or Wall Street greed)

Republicans-Like Flying Monkeys-stupid and scary

Those of you who armchair the economy like the Republicans are doing need to settle down.

Most of us don't understand economic theory anymore than we do black holes in the universe.

We can foist our ignorant opinions on any polite listener(and believe me, you will be lucky to find one) but we are in uncharted territory here and we have some of the best minds in our country working on it.

This team work concept of Obama's doesn't sit well with the school bullies.

They don't want to take their toys and go home because they aren't allowed to cheat at the game anymore and twist arms, yelling, "say uncle".

Instead they have found a new venue for their bullying-

They call it "conscience" and the collective conscience is "stupid is as stupid does" These guys want to make sure (if they have the opportunity to destroy whatever possible success the Americans have of getting out of this mess-)that everyone knows they didn't vote for the aftermath of their destruction.

Do you understand that how that works? The GOP are using that airtime telling everyone they could not vote it. Need more tax cuts for their rich friends.(Like that worked). Doing everything to obstruct it-

to replace it with the same presents to their rich friends and corporations that got us here.

Hey, armchair economic experts-lets try something new. Not listening to your same old tired rhetoric full of hostility and resistance.

Let's give this a chance.

Or aren't you scared enough yet? Is that what we need to do to get you to build instead of rip apart?

Make you so scared you are ready to wet your pants?

How the New Generation Shares-A telling moment

A silly but telling incident happened at my school yesterday. I am still shaking my head. Be mindful of this generation of teachers-twenty-somethings-
Someone placed about ten cases of snack foods on the "share table" in the teacher's lounge.No note had been left.
Another teacher and I were speculating and decided maybe the guy was there to fill the snack machine.
When we returned for lunch about an hour later, people were walking out with cases of snack foods. Each one held over fifty bags.
People were eating lunch and had cases sitting by their feet.
So I asked them,
"What are the snacks for"
Reply, "We can have them"
me, "Are you guys taking them all?" "You aren't planning on sharing them or dividing them up?"
Reply-"no"
Another reply-"well, there weren't any instructions or rules"
Off they walked/
These were teachers-role models for children.
You don't want to hear the rest of my teacherly-motherly-little lecture.

The snack dates expired and were placed on the table for the teachers to enjoy. The principal had to send an e-mail out that sounded like a parent to a child-"These are for teachers, they are to share-please bring them back"

The parallel to wall street greed struck me. Have we taught this generation anything is okay unless 1) explicit rules exist and 2) someone better be there to enforce it
because it doesn't count if no one says anything?
I find it an interesting consideration.

Choosing Our Precipice

Our choice of precipice is about the only independant act we have nowadays.

If we choose to do nothing we allow ourselves to play the victim.

We have been making that choice for eight years.

A fat lot of good it did us.

Welcome to the hood. The neighborhood of victimhood.

Doing nothing and saying nothing does not make us any less responsible for our condition today.

Collective Fear-A Vicious Cycle

There isn't much empty land to squat on nowadays. Laws have changed since 1929. Money is supposed to be insured so banks can't just tell you-"Too bad", laws are supposed to be in place to protect the most vulnerable of our people, social security, medicaid, unemployment, welfare acts are supposed to provide food stamps for the truly desperate.

All of these provisions were implemented during Roosevelt's administration to protect the US economy and its people from another great depression.

Yet unemployment rates are soaring, mortgage defaults continue, wave after wave of layoffs continue-

Why ? Has our economic system really been a house of cards all along? How can we stop this downward spiral?

Us little guys don't have much control, do we?

We are at the mercy of business and the way our economy is built, those who invest pull the strings.

As we lose jobs, we don't have money to spend, business suffers, more layoffs occur, business suffers and the spiral continues.

I really do believe collective fear is an insidious thing-crawling into our psyches, disabling us, or worse yet, signaling that old "fight or flight" instinct, often bringing out the worst-you know, that part of us that oozes anger, attacking those around us, looking for a cliche to blame-those who have, portraying others as less than human, if they don't have.

I am waiting for one big corporation, one world business leader, one very influential group, or even one little voice of a powerful powerless person to ring aloud, the sense we all need to hear-

"That we are in this together and there isn't anything we can't do collectively to make this earth better for us and our families.

If we believe we will always have food to eat, a job to put our honesty and labor into-a roof over our heads for our families, and that those we love will have the same safety because we have their backs, , we will be just fine.

Give the fear back to that place in your mind that stores it-you know the place where sometimes the worst can come out of us?

Put it back in there. Take stock of your strengths-the ones which mean the most in this life-your health, those you love, what you can do to give back instead of take-

don't let the fear mongers in the news, the doomsday naysayers in the press, those whose negative energies spill out to grab you-don't let those take you off the path you know is right-

You know that path-the one that reduces us to the basic, the very basic core of what our needs really are-our belief that life is good because we have all those essential necessities in life-and as long as we have each other-that is all that counts.

Don't let it go-not for a second.

Gibbons-Education FIrst Now Education Last..

Gibbons may keep his word on NO NEW TAXES but he doesn't keep his word of EDUCATION FIRST-
A lightweight gov. in all aspects, he is is equal only to Dan Quayle in the brain cell department.
A perfect example of the Political Machine's ability to put ANYONE in office if they campaign to a certain lowest common denominator-greed-in big business, corporations, gaming and mining.

It is a theory I thought only possible on the grandest scale-i.e. George Bush-but it is obvious, we have little threads of brain dead light weights woven into our country's government.
Or-my other theory-is this the best we can do-nowadays?
If it is, as an educator, I promise to work even harder to teach my students not just the three "R's" but more civics and common sense.

Governor Jim Gibbons signed Assembly Bill 627 into law on Wednesday, June 6th during a signing ceremony at Bernice Martin Mathews Elementary School. The governor signed the education budget bill at the same elementary school where the Education First Initiative was launched in 2003. Nevada voters approved Education First overwhelmingly in 2004 and 2006, and it is now a part of the Nevada Constitution.
�Placing our children's education first as a state priority has proven to be a vital policy that protects the interests of our children and our state�s education system," Governor Gibbons said.
AB 627 provides nearly to $2.2 billion in K-12 funding over the next biennium, and represents an historic 18% increase over previous funding levels