My take on public school safety and those offensive mobile classrooms…
We have an abundance of retired military and law enforcement officers living in our county. I would work with the Sheriff and municipal law enforcement to develop a way to utilize this valuable asset of our community.
Banks and businesses use guards who are heavily armed to protect their money. Shouldn’t we take the same precautions to protect our most precious resource, our children?
We also need to find the money to eliminate those offensive mobile classrooms. Our children deserve better.
I call on Dr. Lowder and the education establishment to move out of their nice, safe and cozy offices and work out of a construction trailer until this issue is settled.
Where are our priorities?
Mark Plemmons @markplemmons had a chance to help a Navy War Veteran who was cheated by out of state developers. It has been 473 days since I introduced my father to Mark. He seemed so interested in my parent’s struggle. Never heard a peep back. #cedarvalejustice@indytribune
Paging Mr. Mark Plemmons….
It has been 473 days since I brought my Korean War Veteran father to your office to introduce him and tell our family story.
473 days of deafening silence…
Ironically, that was just before the county commission meeting where I spoke and introduced my father and told my family’s story. Not a peep. Not a “Thank you for serving our country, Mr. Hill” or anything…
Just 473 days of deafening silence and disrespect from Mark and his paper. 473 days since the GOP county commission ignored my veteran father.
For in you, I see a divine spark, cradled by a old, wise and loving soul. What the world seeks, I find in you. What I thought was lost I found within you,
When the spirit of revolution arises in the people, it promises to change not only the outer world but also the inner domain of thought, dream and desire. The desire for revolution is the yearning for the decisive event that ends the separation between dream and reality – the threshold when suffering is redeemed, when freedom is gained, here and now.
The wait has been a long one. ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed, back in the eighteenth century. ‘One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.’ Rousseau’s ideas ended up shaping the French Revolution.
The cry for freedom has been the persistent undertone in the music of the oppressed, those who sing for Kingdom Come, the rising of the new sun, for whom history is an unfinished melody or a call that awaits its response. The dream of revolution is a secular version of the monk’s desire for religious ecstasy, which erases the separation between subject and object, and, like fire, purifies as it scalds, transmutes as it consumes, creates as it destroys.
‘All machines have their friction,’ Thoreau admitted, but when injustice is too great, you should ‘let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.’
In March 1845, the United States acquired a new president – James K. Polk – a forceful, aggressive political outsider intent on strengthening his country and asserting its pre-eminence in front of other world powers, especially Mexico and Great Britain. Within a year of his inauguration, he had declared full-scale war on Mexico because of squabbles over the Texan border, and was soon rattling his saber at Britain over the ownership of Oregon. To complete the picture, Polk was a vigorous defender of slavery, who dismissed the arguments of abolitionists as naive and sentimental.
Polk was a popular president, admired by many for his gung-ho manner, but a sizeable minority of the citizenry disliked him intensely. One especially committed opponent was a writer from Massachusetts called Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is now a canonical American literary figure, studied in every high school for his lyrical masterpiece, Walden. But there is another, more political side to Thoreau, now usually air-brushed out of the story, which came to the fore in relation to the President.
Thoreau quickly realised he was opposed to everything Polk stood for: he hated what became the Mexican-American war, instinctively siding with the losing Mexican side, was wary of Polk’s squabbles with Britain and was appalled by the administration’s policy of hunting down and returning runaway slaves to their masters in the South.
