You are here: Home / Archives for Cazenovia Curmudgeon

Playing Catch-Up

January 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY- Jan. 2012) Speaking of which, you hear the one about the three tomatoes out for a walk? Papa Tomato, Mama Tomato, Baby Tomato. Baby Tomato keeps lagging behind. Finally, Papa Tomato goes back and gives Baby Tomato a big squeeze and says to him, “Ketchup!”

I know; I’m sorry. Lame joke aside, I’m playing “ketchup” with all the odds and ends I left unattended during the past “holiday season.” Among them would be my own letter to Santa Claus. We know he doesn’t read all those our gullible but hopeful kids send him – see the 1947 movie “Miracle on 34th Street” – but keep’em coming; the U.S. Postal Service needs the business.

By now I figure Santa has time to read mine … if I can get it to him in a fake “important document” envelop, like that of our junk mail.

And if my computer whiz daughter can discover just which tax haven no-extradition-treaty spot in the world he’s settled into in his retirement years. You and the kids didn’t know? It’s been a few years now. Outsourced all production to China. Shut down the North Pole operations, except for the mail drop for letters that’ll go nowhere. Fired the elves, no severance pay or retirement benefits, of course.

So here goes: Dear Santa Claus (or do you prefer ‘St. Nicholas’ these days? How about Santa Claws? Santa Clous?

These last two are from among letters second-graders here in Cazenovia, New York’s, public school. A class assignment. Every year since forever. A tradition. Publicized yearly in the local weekly newspaper: “Published as submitted, spelling errors and all.”

Apparently, their teachers are not afraid of evaluation. Union, I guess. It would appear – see below – that in the Race to the Top, Cazenovia schools are running in reverse.

For example: “Is Roto the Red nose randeer rell? Hoe do you noe woe is being noty or not? Woe dooe youi stay warm well griving to hoses? Dooe you get presus an some grams? Merry Christmas. Love, ….”

Or, “How are the elves douing Santa Claus and Mis Claus making lats of shoogr cookes for you and for her two. And the elves to and doow you have lots of presints and I would Please have a snoboard please Santa Claeus pleaus. To Santa Cloas From…”

No Child Left Behind? We need your help, Santa. You’re still chairman of the board. You still have a lot of clout. An aura of good will. And I’m sure a lot of guilt for the scam you’ve been running all these years – since the Dutch settled Manhattan Island. Bernie Madoff in a red suit?

Fortunately, you’ve had a good PR – Clement Clarke Moore back in 1823 – and a makeover, not very flattering; however, by Thomas Nast, running from 1863 to 1886 – bishop to elf to jolly fat man, from riding a donkey to flying the skies.

Still, a scam is a scam. And Dec. 25 is not your birthday. You’re safe in your sanctuary. You’ve enough money to last you for a couple more centuries. Beach blanket bingo will get boring after a while.

And our kids have all the electronic gizmos and gadgets they’ll ever need forever. They’ve everything but, well, an education. Schools are failing. You read it in the “Times” and the “Journal.” You see it in those second-grade letters.

So, Santa, off with the excess weight and the beard. Lose the reindeer. Get back on your white horse. Our kids are as bad off as that baby in the boiling bathwater and the students in the pickle barrels combined.

You saved them. Save our children (see Tristram P. Coffin’s “The Book of Christmas Folklore”). You ended the famine. Well, there’s a famine in our land, too; a famine of learning … and a plague of cute.

For a start, before the next it’s-not-your-birthday holiday season, you can deliver a big bag full of children’s dictionaries to Cazenovia’s second-graders, with some adult dictionaries for their teachers. And a bunch of spelling guides. All printed on paper, mind you.

Experts say no computers in classrooms until sixth grade. You might want to fund summer professional development classes – in English and writing – for the second-grade teachers. They may need a little persuasion, but Black Pete, Berchta and Knecht Rupert can take care of that (see Coffin).

As for classes, you’ll remember you were said to be loved of young children, some said inordinately so. In this day and age, that can be a problem for your “associates” in the malls. You know, little children sitting on the laps of older men disguised with fake beards and promising them all sorts of fun things … if they are “good.” Gotta have classes in appropriate behavior for them.

And background checks.

Speaking of “good,” there is, of course, it’s opposite, “bad.” And “naughty or nice.” There was a time when these words meant something. Now it seems as if anything goes, yet the goodies keep coming.

You should have ways to ensure kinds know, and practice, the good and the ice and are rewarded for it.

Those not nice, not good, don’t get to sit on “your” lap, and can look forward to a  lump of coal or bag of ashes under the holiday tree. It won’t take them long to learn; it’s called “behavioral conditioning” … like what goes on in Sunday schools.

Speaking of which, some say you’re the leader of what they call the “War on Christmas,” others that you are “a form of Antichrist.” Then there is in the First Amendment and the “Wall of Separation.” Probably best for you to take a course between the two extremes. Leave the bishop’s stuff and the red suit and white beard in the closet – you’ll have lost weight, anyway.

Find for yourself and your associates a new, modern uniform, subdued enough not to frighten kids and their parents or atheists and secular humanists. Perhaps the classic schoolteacher costume: tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, gray flannel slacks, open collar dark shirt, brown loafers…

Whatever, the important thing is to use what means you can command to get kids to accept and appreciate learning, to work – as in schoolwork – their way out of the cute-and-feel-good syndrome.

You will have our support, and here in Cazenovia, New York, we will be looking forward to this year’s ‘tis-the-season letters from second-graders to the new, but lovable Teacher Claus … although, if they, they letters, are not cute, they may not be printed in the local paper.

There goes Ms. Feel-Good.

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

It is Unfortunate…

December 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – Dec. 2011) …unfortunate, “considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth,” so said Arthur James Lord Balfour in a 1918 letter to one Mrs. Drew.

We are left to wonder who was this Mrs. Drew and what was her relationship to Lord Balfour, he who gave us the Balfour Declaration, which could be someone’s Hanukkah story here.

But ours is the Christmas story … as told by enthusiasts. And it says right there in the Bible – John 8:32 – “The truth shall make you free.” Could be John was following his own advice; he didn’t include the Christmas story in his gospel. Neither did Mark. It was left to Matthew and Luke to ignore John’s axiom; you know, that stuff about virgin birth and a nativity set in Bethlehem. And Luke was supposed to have been a physician.

So, you Bible-reading kids, turn on the electric fireplace and gather ye around the plastic Christmas tree … which we have been told to now call a “holiday tree.” That we will not is another story … of the War on Christmas, which you can read all about in John Gibson’s book with that as the title and subtitled, “How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christmas Holiday is Worse Than You Thought.”

“War on Christmas?” “Holiday season?” “Happy holidays?” Don’t we have enough holidays scattered through our calendar that the politically correct folk won’t allow us a Christmas Day?

Surely, even the most dedicated of us secular humanists, freethinkers, non-believers, atheists, whatever you call us, can once a year appreciate a festival “to lift ourselves about the commonplace and the everyday, to escape from the weight of monotony…”

Christmas, that is.

We, some of us, anyway, are not so hardened we cannot enjoy a midnight mass in a grand cathedral or a humble country church. Or Handel’s Messiah. A folk art crèche – even on the village green. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker. Special gifts for special people in our lives.

And we need not require ourselves to indulge in orgies of consumerism in those cathedrals of commerce we call ‘malls’ to celebrate Christmas.

Nor need we watch the sentimental pap of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Instead, we freethinkers or whatever can remind ourselves of the myths and fables of the Christmas story by viewing, again, the PBS Frontline “From Jesus to Christ” and reread Clement A. Miles’s 1912 “Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan.”

Never mind about Santa Claus, Virginia. And kids, we do know that Hanukkah is not a Jewish Christmas and appreciate it, too.

That said, it doesn’t mean we do not have questions – that you should be asking, also, of those world-moving enthusiasts, the majority of whom may not be trusted to speak the truth. So, boys and girls, settle down and take out your note pads. There will be a test come next year’s … holiday season.

Will it be the Jesus of belief or the Jesus of history? The true story of Christmas may, you now, be more than a tad different from the, well, Holiday Story.

For instance, you learned “The virgin will be with child” (Matt. 1:22), yet you also learned (Matt. 1:18) that the teenage (history says) Mary, mother of Jesus, was only “betrothed” to the much older Joseph – who may have been her cousin – not married to him.

Now, if you are a true believer, what do you say about the commandment (Deut. 22:23) that if a betrothed virgin is found to be with child, she is to be stoned to death, along with her seducer?

That would be poor old Joseph?

Maybe not. There are historians who hold that young “virgin” Mary was impregnated by a Roman soldier, one Pantera … who does not appear in the Bible story. Those same scholars have located a Pantera’s grave in, as I recall, the south of France … to where that OTHER Mary may have fled – with Jesus’s child! – after the crucifixion, in itself another of those conflicting fact vs. fiction stories. Another case of what the Oxford “A Dictionary of the Bible” calls “mutually incompatible assessments of the evidence.”

The gospel’s writers (Matt. 2:1, Luke 2:4, John 7:42) tell us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Theirs can hardly be called ‘eyewitness accounts,’ as some fundamentalist pastors would have it. People of that time had only given names; their surnames were the town or city in which they were born, as with Jesus of Nazareth.

The historical fact is that the gospels were written two or three generations after the events they recount. They were cobbled together from hearsay, wishful thinking … and political propaganda for the new religion.

They had the nativity located in Bethlehem, as that was the ancestral home of King David, thus Jesus was declared to be of the kingly House of David by way of Joseph. Never mind that for Jews, descent is determined by the mother’s lineage. Mary was on the House of Benjamin.

So, kids, forget the shepherds in the field, the stable manger … and, while you’re at it, the three wise men following yonder star.

Jesus born of a virgin? Not a fact (merely a mistranslation from Hebrew to Greek). Born in Bethlehem? Not a fact. Of the House of David? Not a fact. A poor carpenter’s apprentice, son of a poor carpenter? Not a fact. If anything, Joseph was what we would call a contractor, a building and the family was, by standards of the time, we would say well-off.

Judging by Jesus’s words, although put into his mouth by the gospel writers, he was well-educated. Spoke and read Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek; had studied the Greek philosophies, including Plato.

Certainly, he was not the poor “man of the [poor] people” portrayed in the gospels. In fact, it is likely he grew up in the thriving, upscale sophisticated nearby city of Sepphoris and perhaps also studied at a well-known and respected synagogue-yeshiva in Egypt (flight to Egypt story?).

In no way can Jesus be considered the founder of Christianity. That was Saul-Paul’s doing. Jesus remained completely imbedded in Judaic culture and religion. Christianity included adaptations from – some would say corruptions of – Judaism.

Jesus was born, lived and died a through-and-through Jew. As such, of course, he would have been expected to marry in his 20s … and start a family. Who is to say he was not and did not? Not the generations-removed gospel writers.

Then there is the date of his birth, given as Dec. 25. It was set not by the circumstance of birth, but by fourth-century church authorities in the hope of attracting converts to the new, not-Jewish religion. Dec. 25 was the day some pagans celebrated the return of the unconquered Sun, others making the seven days before and after the 25th, the occasion for Bacchanalian – some say orgiastic – festivities honoring the sun-god Saturn. Which might be said as we do today, although ours are more orgiastic festivities of consumerism.

Take your pick. Fact or fiction. Much of the latter, fewer of the former. Start with reading something other than the Bible. I doubt the Internet will be much help. I’d suggest a Bible atlas and a Bible dictionary, specifically the “Oxford Bible Atlas,” third edition – or later, if available – and the Oxford “A Dictionary of the Bible,” edited by W.R.F. Browning, 1996, paperback 1997. In my opinion, it is less faith-full than the “Oxford Companion to the Bible.”

If you do get turned on to the facts, you can follow-up the Oxford Atlas and Dictionary with any of Bart D. Ehrman’s books, among them “Jesus Interrupted” and “Misquoting Jesus.” Ehrman has traveled the whole road, from the Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College to the Princeton Theological Seminary to the University of North Carolina where he’s professor of religious studies.

Although a true believer, he is also an open-minded liberal, and even we non-believers can benefit from his wisdom.

In the meantime, don’t forget: it’s Christmas, for Christ’s sake.

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

What’s a Fella to Do?

November 13, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – Nov. 2011) He’s played by the rules all his life. The whole family values thing; goes to church, takes his kids. Says his prayers; makes his kids say theirs.

Could be a poster boy for the American dream, chamber of commerce version … except it was his dad who was the up-from-his-bootstraps, self-made businessman. Never mind, graduated from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, was a successful businessman in his own right. Has a $12 million beachfront home. Did OK as a one-term state governor. And, as are many Americans, he is jobless. Which may explain why he’s a candidate for president of these United States…again.

Poor Mitt Romney. He’s running as a Republican, and that’s the party that requires a religious test of its candidates, forget the Constitution. Not enough that every year he attends right-wing religionists’ Values Voter Summit … which Jon Meacham calls “a kind of Station of the Cross for Republican presidential candidates.”

That’s where this year one of those good ol’ boy, Billy-Bob-type Texas pastors, a supporter of likewise a candidate Rick Perry called Romney’s faith – Mormonism – a “cult.”

“Those of us who are born-again followers of Christ always prefer a competent Christian to a competent non-Christian like Mitt Romney.”

At least Billy Bob thinks Romney is competent. But he’s not an “authentic” Christian. This, despite his being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ – that’s ‘Christ’, as in ‘Christian’ – of Latter Day Saints.

May be, but he damned himself, say the Billy Bobs, when he made a speech his first time around in 2007, saying he would be loyal to the constitution of his church. That gets another of the Billy Bobs to say “You measure a leader by how they (sic) walk, not (by) how they talk.”

Apparently, Mitt should be wearing cowboy boots that have been sprinkled with Texas holy water.

So Mormonism, no matter a “Church of Jesus Christ,” is a cult. Let’s see. Cult: “A group of people who share religious or spiritual beliefs … a system of religious worship, esp. with reference to rites and ceremonies … extreme or excessive admiration for a person, philosophy of life, or activity … a system of supernatural beliefs …” and so on.

Sounds to me like plain, old garden-variety Christianity … and the 270 or so Christian sects in the U.S. When it comes to religious denominations, sects, cults, what’s the difference?

It’s a cult if an angel appears to a teenager and shows him where to dig up some golden plates that, when their “reformed Egyptian” is translated by the onetime teenager, now a young man, tells yet another story of the “Lost Tribe of Israel?”

But it’s not a cult if a voice booms out of a thunderstorm, telling a guy – who looks like Charlton Heston – to climb a mountain with lightning all around him and come back with a couple of stone, not gold, tablets carved with a set of inflexible god(s)-given rules to live by, or else?

Your choice of cults; I’d go for the gold. That’d be the Wall Street – excuse me, American – way.

Would we say it’s a tad cultish to be drinking the blood and eating the flesh of the cult’s major figure? And there’s the business of being fruitful and multiplying, never mind the consequences for the environment of seven billion people subduing the earth and consuming all they have dominion over.

It can be said of the Mormans they do much of their multiplying without contributing to the earth’s – and the U.S.’s – population surplus. More practical than cultish, they baptize-by-proxy all the dead folk, whatever their religion when alive, they have listed in the files of their Family History Library.

Fastest-growing religion in the U.S.

Maybe a questionable practice, but one not as objectionable as the Christian Right cult’s endorsing of the murder of doctors who may have been performing abortions and disrupting military funerals with anti-homosexual invective and their warning placards that “God hates fags.”

If they can, they’ll do away with the U.S. Department of Education that funds, they say, public school sex education and teaching evolution and defund Planned Parenthood because eight percent of its budget goes for abortion … the rest for women’s health and for family planning.

If it quacks like a cult …

And then there’s Republican presidential candidate pray-for-rain Perry’s wife telling us god revealed to her hubby should run for president.

“If you talk to God, you’re praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”

Maybe.

And there’s candidate Michelle Bachman saying Herman Cain’s label for his tax plan, 9-9-9, is really 666 upside down.

We’re supposed to take these people seriously?

What do you say, Mitt? Your Republican Party itself a cult?

Well, you pays your money, you takes your choice … of cults. Whichever you choose, just remember the founders’ words: “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Government & Politics, Opinion-Editorial, Religion Tagged With: , ,

Playing Head Games Part 2

September 24, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – Sept. 2011) And then there are the legal questions. Parents of high school players who collapsed and died on the field are suing school boards. A group of former players has brought a concussion-related class-action lawsuit against the National Football League.

Will taxpayers decide that public school football is a form of child endangerment? Simply, “You can’t hide from the evidence anymore.”

(All of the quotes here not otherwise attributed are from my two-year accumulation of articles from newspapers and magazines and from the PBS Frontline “Football High.”)

School boards and school administrators should need no more convincing than the mountain of evidence already in … and the more that keeps coming. Or do they need to take field trips to Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy to view the growing lineup of diseased brains donated by now-deceased football players?

While they’re playing catch-up – they shouldn’t have to! – schools and public libraries can be showing PBS Frontline’s “Football High.” Surely, their bloated football budgets can give up enough for a few copies (visit pbs.org).

School libraries should have copies – one on reserve for school officials – of Bissenger’s “Friday Night Lights” – skip the movie. They might want to add copies of Robert Lipstyle’s 2006 novel “Raiders Night” for its picture of football culture and accounts of students’ feelings about coaches, the game itself … and the pressures to play from dads, friends and school personnel.

School librarians report the novel has frequently been banned by male superintendents and principals … but women librarians find ways to get it to students, especially athletes.

Despite manufacturers advertising to the contrary, helmets – even the new and improved (?) do not, will not prevent concussions. Concussions can and do cause traumatic brain injury; the effects, even of minor concussions, are cumulative.

The more hits – from Pee Wee to Pop Warner to high school to college – the greater the damage.

The NFL’s and colleges’ and soon-to-be some high schools’ rules to play-nicely-gentlemen do not, will not prevent hits to players’ heads.

The only solution to the problem is … not to play football (or ice hockey). If the excitement of violence, the hint of threat and danger, schoolmasters and parents believe they cannot live without … well, substitute English rugby for American football. Rival team – in rugby, club – competition is there. But no helmets for players to use as weapons. The sports looks to be much more violent than it is, in fact … and brain trauma is not a product.

Aside from multiple bruises and the occasional sprain, injuries are few.

Taxpayers and school budget-makers would appreciate they savings of rugby over football – ask your school superintendent what football is costing you for uniforms and all the equipment to outfit a player. Compare with the cost of rugby shorts and shirts and shoes; that’s all it takes.

School officials might enjoy the positive publicity for a change that would come from their forming a Central New York Rugby League. Title IX watchers will welcome a women’s league.

And parents, not to worry: you’ll get used to it after the shock of watching your kid playing in his – or her – first rugby match.

I know. I was once a rugby dad; while still in high school, my daughter played for the Brown University women’s club.

In what other context can a parent proudly sport a button and a bumper sticker saying, “My daughter is a hooker”?

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

Playing Head Games Part 1

September 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – Sept. 2011) ’Tis the season again when the majority of young folk will hit the books, the content of which is arguably more intellectually advanced than that of the previous year. Exceptions will be the select few less-bookish young men who, physically – and mentally – conditioned will go out onto their schools’ playing field to hit heads instead of books, spurred on by cries of coaches, teammates, peers and parents: “Hit’em again! Hit’em harder! Good hit!”

We may wonder if these players, their schools’ officials and their supporters have seen in the last couple of years headlines in city newspapers and national magazines. “High school athletes face serious concussion risks.” “Concussions re clobbering U.S. kids.” In a Time Magazine feature article: “Headbanger Nation.” Even National Geographic: “Lasting impact…even small hits to the head may lead to brain deterioration over time.” USA Today: “Injury to brain(s) more than doubles risk of later dementia.”

And so on and so on.

Add to the reports of football – and ice hockey – head injuries those of catastrophic spinal injuries most often resulting from playing following a concussion, called “second-impact syndrome. A second impact to the concussed brain can cause it to swell, shutting down the brain stem. “Friday Night Fights” author Buzz Bissenger, watching filming of the movie being made from his book: “I saw a cluster of young men in wheelchairs on the sidelines … the price of paralysis that had come from … (their) willingness to sacrifice themselves for team and town.”

Players not yet paralyzed say, “We just continue to bash heads around.”

“I can’t move anything. I can’t feel anything. Am I paralyzed?” Are our elected and appointed school officials paralyzed? Can’t move anything? Or won’t move anything? Is there any talk at school boards’ meetings of traumatic brain injury, paralyzed students, deaths from concussions, deaths from heatstroke?

Do school officials tell students and their parents of the risks to players? My guess would be no … I’d love to be found wrong.

Still, talk is not enough. The National Football League has imposed a few rules about hits to the head, but these place responsibility entirely on the players, and the players don’t want rules. They insist this are and always will be part of the game: “We want hitting in the game. There will always be contact to the head. We don’t want to change.”

High school, college and NFL coaches say, “Football is violent. It’s got to be that way … pretty much beat people’s brains in. Smash-mouth football. Turn young boys into monsters.”

The high school player says, “I don’t want to seem like a baby. I don’t want to betray my team…”

It’s football culture.

“Friday Night Lights” author Bissenger says, “Baseball is America’s pastime, but football is its true passion,”

And we know that once aroused, passions are hard to quell. The games entertain us. We like the violence. It excites us. We see the play of the moment; we do not think of the players’ futures.

“It won’t happen to my kid.”

Yeah, sure. Something like 67,000 concussions suffered by high school players are reported every year. More than twice that number are not reported. You might ask your family doctor to look in his or her files…

The mounting evidence of the neurological consequences of football has moved the New York Legislature to pass a “Bill to Protect Students who Sustain Concussions While Playing School sports from Further Injury(!).”

North Carolina has a similar law, but neither address the real issue, which is the prevention of concussions. To “protect” after the fact is a lame response to Football Culture. North Carolina’s law is named for two high school players who died from concussions in 2008.

School board members and school administrators need to ask themselves: Is it morally defensible to offer a sport which is demonstratively dangerous to the physical and mental health of its young players … whose still-developing brains are especially vulnerable? Is it morally defensible for parents to encourage their children to play the sport? For the media and the community to glorify players of the sport?

To be continued.

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Opinion-Editorial, Sports Tagged With: , ,

One Way or Another …

July 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(July 2011) A few weeks ago, I wrote of that, no other word for it, farce produced and directed by the ladies of the Cazenovia Chapter League of Women Voters. It was titled “Candidates’ Night” and featured contestants for three open seats on the Cazenovia School District’s Board of Education.

Promised audience participation: questioning the candidates. An aside: the League of Women Voters was founded in 1920 – a pretty good year for women – by members of the National Women Suffrage Association.

It was to provide political education and information on social and economic issues for the newly empowered women. Founders said it to be non-partisan.

Non-partisan? In Cazenovia? Well … those questions for school board candidates? The League ladies wouldn’t let us ask them directly of the candidates; had to write them out for the ladies’ approval … or not.

The process included editing – censoring? – before the principal lady would ask them of candidates. All very ladylike. Only one of my four questions survived the process, so “edited” – censored? – as but lost all substance, making me wonder if the League ladies might not be all that non-partisan.

And I wasn’t asking even about sex education or same-sex marriage, although one of my not-to-be-asked questions did have to do with Thomas Jefferson’s Wall of Separation between church and state.

There are people still who believe religion should have a place in public schools. Among them, apparently, Cazenovia school authorities. I’d wanted to know what the new school board members’ positions would be on the district’s program of “released-time” for religious instruction … never mind the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution.

Used to be Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy would come into public schools during regular class periods to do their thing to students whose parents approved of the practice. That was until a freethinking mother in Champaign, Ill., felt that teachers and students were making her kid’s life in school miserable because she wouldn’t sign him up for religion classes.

She sued the district board of education; the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, McCollum v. Board of Education, 1948, the Court ruled released-time was unconstitutional.

Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.

New York state’s inordinately powerful and influential church lobby didn’t take kindly to the Supreme Court’s decision. If clergy couldn’t come over the wall into the schools to do their thing to school kids, parents willing, then why not have the kids come to the churches?

And so it came to be, as it is in Cazenovia even today. Students are released from regular classes during the school day to be transported to local churches.

Taxpayers take note.

This devious violation of the First Amendment was challenged in court, on up to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the court unwisely – the Court having been known before and since to make unwise decisions – said New York’s pandering to the church lobby was constitutional, not, however, without dissent. That was Zorach v. Clauson, 1952.

At least the Court later said New York’s Board of Regents’ mandatory daily student prayer violated the First Amendment – Engel v. Vitale, June 25, 1952.

The dissent in Zorach v. Clauson could have been directed to us today … and to Cazenovia’s school board. Justice Hugo Black wrote: “I see no significant difference between the invalid Illinois system (McCollum v. Board of Education) and that of New York … except for the use of school buildings in Illinois … (no) difference which I consider even worth of mention … (it) encourages religious instruction or cooperation with religious authority.”

He called it “coercive.”

Oh, those liberal judges! Justice Felix Frankfurter in his Zorach v. Clauson dissent: “The result in the McCollum case was based on principles that received unanimous acceptance by this court … I agree with Mr. Justice Black that these principles are disregarded in reaching the result in this case. From this, I draw the hope that in the future variations of the problems which are bound to come here, these principles may again be honored in the observance.”

Guess the Cazenovia League of Women Voters ladies didn’t want school board members to be bothered with such things as principles and honor. Maybe they’re Republicans.

Or it could be that we’re living among the dying embers of the Burned-over District. You may enjoy reading the book of the same name by Whitney R. Cross: “The Burned-over District: The Social & Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850.”

Pay no attention to some calling it the Infected District.

School board members new and old should read – and recommend to the majority of students left behind with nothing to do while the few are off during a school day, their fires lit by religious – “We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for & About Students,” by Jamin B. Baskin … a good textbook for a Constitutional Law Course.

The Bible is not, you know.

In the meantime, may we look for – hope for – your answers to the question of released-time. Readers, too. And we “dissenters” will be thinking about offering a released-time alternative to religious instruction … something like “Principles & Practices of Atheism.”

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , , , ,

So What Else is New?

July 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – June 2011) A couple of weeks ago, Courier columnist “From Here & Back Again” Jim Coufal commented on headlines he’d read in a Sunday Post Standard.

Did I detect a note of nostalgia, Jim, when at the end of the column you said that a great way to start the day is from the comfort of your “reading” chair with a cup of black coffee and a newspaper?

You said newspaper; you didn’t say Post Standard. Also, you asked if anyone remembered when there was an evening newspaper with which we could repeat the ritual.

My answer: barely … and I’ve been around a long time. Just as I have a hard time remembering when there were genuine liberal papers and independent papers free of corporate ownership and control … and when our “reading” chairs were for, well, reading and not watching a TV or computer screen.

More clearly, I remember when we could call newspapers, big city, small town or in between, OUR newspaper. Speaking to us and for us, in service to us and not to and for corporate interests; you know, profit.

Back in those good ol’ days, OUR newspapers had stalls of real reporters and feature writers who reported real news … that we could use…. and features that informed; some even made us think.

That was because OUR newspapers’ publishers and editors gave us readers credit for having at least a measure of intelligence and common sense. They didn’t talk down to us, patronize us, take us for granted.

Nowadays?

Well, here’s a headline for you from page three of the June 12-18 Post Standard’s TV Week – “Central New York’s Television Guide: Welcome to the new Sunday TV Book.”

It was preceded on page one by an eye-catching, boldface, all-caps NEW! Uh-oh.

In this era of corporate greed, when we see NEW! on a product, we know something not good for us will be inside: what was 16 ounces is now the NEW! 14 ounces; x-number of sheets of toilet paper, now the NEW! y-number – fewer.

Same prices, though.

The Post Standard’s TV Week: old, 24 pages; NEW!, 12 pages. The P-S’s bosses tried driving down this road once before, but, fortunately, they reached a dead-end then. Don’t count this time on their hearing the shouts of all of us lining the sides of the road. You know, “greed is good,” and they are saying this NEW! TV Week – “Book?” – is good for us: changes “we hope will make it more entertaining, informative and easier to use … a story or two about the world of TV entertainment … the week’s best bets … everything from celebrity news to the latest network line-ups …”

And … a “featured celebrity” crossword puzzle. Don’t laugh; they’re serious. The “celebrities” are those we (could if we looked) find in supermarket checkout line magazines and tabloids. The “best bets,” sitcoms, soap operas and vampire series. “Latest network lineups” DO NOT include anything, old or new, after 11 p.m. weekdays and weekends; no day or night Saturday listings at all – NO kids’ programs, sports, cooking, whatever. The Post Standard’s bean-counters’ idea of “more informative?”

The corporate bosses do admit: “TV Week consumes a lot of newsprint, and … newsprint is one of our biggest expenses.” Reminds me, Jim, of a recent headline from not-the-Post-Standard, one of those with all-the-news-fit-to-print, “Corporate Profits up 22 Percent.”

And we read – in other papers – that, despite the Great Recession and downsizing of employees and products – TV Week – corporate executives still receive their customary salary increases, bonuses and stock options. We will assume The Herald Company’s execs are included … and we know where we now stand in their grand scheme of things…

That’s despite their Post Standard spin-meisters’ best efforts: “We hope you enjoy the features we’ve added.”

I wonder what the TV stations have to say about TV Week’s NEW! look, minus a way lot of shows … and their commercial$. By the way, see the P-S’s spin-doctors are calling this thing of theirs a book: “The New Sunday TV Book?” My dictionary’s definitions for book don’t include one for something with only 12 unbound pages … short on content.

They must mean the one: “a record of a business financial transaction or financial condition.” All the news you can use … about what the P-S thinks of its readers … and how they make their profits.

“We hope you enjoy…” Yeah, I’ll bet the editors will still have a schedule for their viewing HBO’s R-rated movies … and Katie Morgan in and out of costume … and the ladies of its “reality show” from the Moonlight Bunny Ranch.

If we call them at home during the wee hours, will they give us the times?

Meanwhile, we can be thankful we have the Courier. No TV listings – now there’s a thought – but it’s OURS.

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

 

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

The Way We do it Here

June 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – June 2011) Recently in the “New York Times:”

“The venerable League of Women Voters, perhaps best-known for sponsoring candidate debates and issuing voter guides, has begun flexing its muscles … recently launched a hard-hitting television campaign (against two senators – one a Democrat, one a Republican – for their votes limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s powers). League officials say the ads fit with the group’s advocacy role.”

I guess that news of the League’s new look hasn’t reached the Cazenovia chapter, or hadn’t in time last month for its Board of Education Candidates Night.

From its founding in 1920 – women finally got the vote, now what to do with it? – the League has focused on political education and campaigning on economic and social issues. These days, surely schools should be up at the top of the social issues list. We may not have the problems big-city schools do, but that doesn’t mean ours are so good – are they, in fact? – that they can’t be better.

Advocacy, ladies? Muscle-flexing and hard-hitting?

Or might that be too much not the way we do things here?

Maybe it’s just that I’m too venerable, a/k/a “old,” or that I spent too many years teaching the “products” of public schools in their first years of college. But I don’t buy the excuse for continuing to do the way we do: what was good enough for grandpa or grandma is not good enough for me.

So, I took myself off to the Cazenovia League ladies’ candidate night. Muscles flexed, armed with hard-hitting questions, ready to challenge candidates’ answers…

Well, no questions from the floor, no challenges. If we had questions, we were to write them on cards, no editorializing or background information allowed, no reasons for asking our questions. The cards went to what I guess could be called a jury of League ladies gathered around a table off to one side, not to be approached by any audience members.

Questions surviving this jury process went to another League lady to be asked of the candidates. We were to stay in our seats and keep quiet.

As I discovered from hearing the only one of my questions – what I thought might have been mine – to get to the candidates, the jury of League ladies had freedom to do what they would – the way we do it here – to “correct,” edit, revise, bowdlerize, expurgate and otherwise butcher our questions, in other words to remove sense and substance from them. All very nicey-nice, but way far from hard-hitting.

I had wanted to now the candidates’ positions on Cazenovia’s continuing to include football and ice hockey in its sports program. The question required explanation: research and evidence – such as brains of deceased football players, microphotographs, testimony of neurologists, scientists’ findings – show clearly and conclusively that football and hockey players, especially the young, risk brain damage and lifelong mental illness … and possibly early end of life, this from concussions that are a “natural” part of these violent contact sports.

After its emasculation by the League ladies, my question came to the candidates with all reason and explanation removed and the word “concussions” changed to “injuries.” That’s the way we do it here.

Or the League ladies can simply toss in the trash questions they don’t like … no way we can resurrect them. For instance, I wanted to know, if elected, would candidates take our school’s violation of the First Amendment its including “religious education” – an oxymoron if there ever was one – in the curriculum.

This the school administration does by way of “release time” from regular class periods in the regular school day … and transporting students in school buses to local churches, never mind the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 McCollum v. Board of Education … decision.

Students “left behind,” “not blessed with release time are required during the class period to stay in their homerooms and as one student has said, ‘sit quietly and do nothing.’”

A Cazenovia League of Women Voters Candidate Night?

Another of my discarded and unanswered questions = What would be the candidates responses if it was found Cazenovia’s is one of the 139 New York state school districts that require a child’s immigration papers as a prerequisite for enrollment?

The Supreme Court said in 1982 this is a no-no.

Even if Cazenovia does not ask for papers, it would still be good for us to know what candidates think of immigrants’ rights.

My last unasked, unanswered question was what did candidates think of Cazenovia schools’ “mission statement?” composed, it reads, to be in the 1970s or ‘80s or before: “Self-worth,” “caring attitude,” “safe environment,” yeah, with football … nothing about education, self-discipline, critical thinking, problem-solving, preparation for the future … it’s the 21st century, kids.

That’s the way we do it here.

Thank you, ladies.

Donald Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired college professor and active contrarian. He can be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

 

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Education, Government & Politics, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

Taught to the Tune of…

April 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

Well, not a hickory switch. Not for Yale law professor Amy Chua, although from the thousands of angry and hateful responses – death threats, even – to her best-selling “Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother,” you’d think she’d written a how-to manual on child-beating.

“Mommie Dearest” for the memoir age, said Time magazine.

“Hair-raising,” said the New York Times.

“Monster” is one of the mildest epithets hurled her way. Hardly something one would expect from a scholar-professor who has written on the rise and fall of world empires (see Jim Coufal’s column in the Feb. 23 edition of the Courier).

Poor Prof. Chua. All she’s doing is offering an alternative to American parents’ permissive, over-protective – some say obsessive – child-rearing. She is saying success depends on self-discipline, hard work, long hours.

“By disciplining me, my parents inculcated self-discipline,” Chua writes. “And by restricting my choices as a child, they gave me so many choices in my life as an adult.”

Schools take note. Her daughters say they intend to be strict parents one day, too.

Parents should expect strength in their children, not fragility. They shouldn’t be able – allowed, schools take note – to take the easy way out.

“If a child has the experience, just once, of successfully doing something she didn’t think she could do, that lesson will stick with her for the rest of her life.”

Teachers take note.

Chua’s simple lesson is that children can and do learn from failure. If they try and try again … and again, they can succeed. The F-grade can be an effective teaching tool. Yet parents demand As and Bs … and teachers give them … for what once was C and D – and F – work.

Schools proudly report the number of students and their grades in advanced placement classes … which for the most part today are at the level of junior and senior high school courses of a decade or so ago.

Dumbing down. Excusing failure. Teaching to the test, the test designed for a lowest common denominator. More than 50 percent of today’s first-year college students have to take remedial English – and math – courses. Colleges have to teach parents not to hover over their children once they’re off to college.

Thanks to child development experts, so-called, schools put “self-esteem” and “character-building” above academic achievement as measures of success. Research in psychology and cognitive science has shown that children shielded from failure do not develop what is called “mastery experience.”

So, if American parents are as angry with Ms. Chua as their responses to her book suggest, how come they are buying enough copies to keep it on the best-seller lists for weeks now? Could it be they are feeling guilty?

An American father living with his family in China, his daughter in a Chinese school, says that U.S. parents’ “obsessive concern” with their children’s self-esteem “has practically become a form of dementia.”

If, dear parent, you are feeling guilty, you should be. But don’t lay it off on the teachers; they are merely doing what they’ve been trained to do … and are told to do by school administrators.

What did you learn in school today, Tiffany? “We learned about French cooking.”

What did you do, Ashley? “We wrote letters to Santa Claus.”

Did you use a dictionary? “Is that like an iPod?”

And you, Brittany? “We sat in our homerooms doing nothing while some kids were off getting their weekly dose of religious instruction.”

Could those left behind (!) maybe study the Constitution? You know, the First Amendment?

If you want to relieve your guilt, it is the school masters – the superintendents and principals – you should be going after. They are the ones whose “obsessive concerns” have “practically become a form of dementia.”

Take them copies of “Tiger Mother.” Challenge them. Why aren’t your kids learning to think for themselves? Kids in the 1960s and ’70s did … whether the school masters liked the results or not.

If there is to be any reform in your schools, it is going to have to come from  you, not from the president of the U.S., from Congress – heaven forbid! – government programs … or from school supers’ “study committees.”

What with all the concern on the part of parents and school with children’s emotional well-being, why is it so little attention is being paid to the schools’ obsession – what else to call it? – with sports? There is now more than enough research-based evidence to prove that football and ice hockey, basketball, too, are hazardous to young people’s physical and mental health, short- and long-term.

School officials, coaches, and helmet manufacturers are willfully ignoring the evidence: concussions and sub-concussions will occur on the playing fields and rinks. Concussions and sub-concussions mean brain damage … and death.

The Kansas high school football star dead on the field following a concussion. High school, college and professional players carried from the fields on stretchers, never to return. Others with long-term brain damage. The growing collection in neurologist Ann McKee’s Boston laboratory of professional football players’ diseased brains.

It now includes Super Bowl champion Dave Duerson’s, “too depressed at the end to live, but rational enough to aim the gun at his chest, rather than at his head. He wished to preserve the brain he had asked ahead of time to be studied.”

We have university conferences (the Courier, March 23, page three) for educators, counselors, parents on bullying in schools, something once left to kids and their parents. But no conference, even casual discussions, on the certain risks associated with contact – or is it combat? – sports … for which there is no protection.

Helmet-makers admit there is none, nor can there be, ever. Isn’t it time you confronted your school superintendents and board members to demand the end of these proven-to-be-dangerous sports? They know the risks. They ignore them. You should not.

The current school budget crises are enough to stifle the sure-to-come outcry from uninformed parents and from alumni and booster clubs … and coaches and kids hoping for football scholarships … and a career with the pros.

Ask your supers for an accounting of the money now spent on sports: equipment, uniforms, field maintenance, coaches’ salaries … how many teachers’ salaries does it take to fund sports programs?

Arm yourselves with research. Check the websites for Dr. Ann McKee (if she has one), the Centers for Disease Control, the National Children’s Medical Center, the Journal of Pediatrics and Julian Bailes’ at West Virginia University – he is medical director for the Pop Warner Youth Football Program; brain damage starts young. The New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine … by the way, you might ask your doctor and your attorney what they think.

School officials? Well, “Hit’em again! Harder! Harder!”

Donald Krueger is a retired professor and active contrarian. He can be reached madnews@m3pmedia.com.

 

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Education, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

Enough, Already

February 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

 

Cazenovia Curmudgeon

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY – Feb. 2011) Enough of those letters, e-mails and infomercials pleading with us to save the planet, the environment, animals wild and domestic

Filed Under: Cazenovia, Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Front Page, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: , ,

Cazenovia Curmudgeon: ’Tis the season … still

January 8, 2011 By 2 Comments

By Donald Krueger

At risk of provoking the ire of our Dear Editor, who does not welcome multi-part columns on a single topic, I feel it my duty as a former professor-type to continue asking parents and college hopefuls to question the dollar value of what can be a massive layout of hard-earned funds for … well, that is the question: For what? “College life?” Enriching a college or university? Maybe education? The deadlines for applications are fast approaching, if not already passed. The same for letters of acceptance … and rejection.

’Tis the season … still.

Depending on the content of those letters – and mom’s and dad’s reaction to the unpaid balances on their credit cards after that other season – and very possibly a disinterested banker’s disinclination to loan money for college, we may call this the dis-season: dis-stress, disappointment, disillusion, dismay … undisciplined use of credit cards … and the discovery of the lack of discretionary funds that might have been applied to college tuition and accompany cost-of-living.

But do not be disheartened. There are other roads by which the college hopeful may reach where he or she may want to go. One or more of those may lead to a more interesting and rewarding end.

There is the nearby – and affordable – community college, a foundation for clearer and wiser decision-making about the years to come – continuing at a four-year college … or not.

There’s the increasingly popular and sensible “gap-year” … or two: working at whatever job might be available, living at home, saving money for college. Or volunteering for something to add to your qualifications for college, say Habitat for Humanity in South America or with a non-government agency in Africa or Palestine.

Full-time au-pair childcare could lead to a college major with an experience based tuition scholarship. You’ll learn from any volunteer work … and maybe find college isn’t necessary, after all.

Anyway, do you want to be paying inflated tuition for a lot of college stuff that has nothing to do with education? You should ask what your $39,036 to Georgetown is really paying for. $40,384 to the University of California? $38,529 to the University of Michigan? Northwestern wants $39,840; Wesleyan, $38,934. Add $15,000 or more – Harvard says $21,774 – for room and board and extras, and even that $15,000 in-state tuition begins to sound out of reach for young Mr. or Ms. Average American … and their moms and dads.

Those figures are from Andrew Hacker’s and Claudia Dreifus’s recent book, “Higher Education: How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It,” a must-read for college hopefuls.

Both are university professors.

Hacker and Dreifus say some colleges and universities have endowments that would allow them to cut tuition costs in half; but why should they, with so many parents willing to pay their prices.

There’s one born every minute.

You should know – again from Hacker and Dreifus – that on the average, only 28 percent, at best 33 percent, of your tuition goes for instruction. The rest is for “image” and “college life” – a long way from Plato gathering his students in Academus’s garden.

And there are those administrative salaries: it takes 43 students to pay Rensselaer’s president his $1.6 million a year.

Your tuition also pays for the typically one-third of the teaching faculty that is on leave every year. It pays for the “name” professor, touted in the college’s advertising, whom students will never meet and whom they may rarely see in a crowded lecture hall.

Classroom teaching is by graduate students. There are exceptions to these, of course; I taught in one for 20 years. Senior professors taught first-year undergraduate classes and included undergraduates in their research projects.

Good luck in finding such.

Adding to your tuition is the cost of those luxury dormitories and gourmet dining hall meals, which colleges say they must have to attract students. Student centers with Jacuzzis and climbing walls. Counseling and psychiatric services. Your home away from home, but no guarantee of a campus police force to ensure student safety.

If you do survive, there will be a placement office where you will be told you will have access to top jobs after graduation … of which you will learn there are few, if any … unless by top, they mean with Tops Markets.

Do not forget the share of your tuition to be spent on the college’s or university’s sports programs, not just those of the majors. Hacker and Dreifus say the majority lose money: “Even if creative accounting masks athletic deficits, they end up included in students’ tuition bills.”

Those football games are exciting … if you don’t think about the coaches’ six-figure salaries: $5,166,666 at the University of Alabama. Arkansas, $2,700,000; Florida, $4,010,000; Georgia, $2,811,340; Oklahoma, $4,275,000; Texas, $5,100,000.

Syracuse University? “Not available.”

So it goes at the 120 universities surveyed by USA Today and Marquette University’s National Sports Law Institute.

By the way, do taxpaying parents ever ask what their public school football coaches and programs are costing them … and us? Not likely their football-playing sons will be coaching university teams, but, hey, enjoy the game … and the concussions?

Discombobulated? You want to leave home for the dis-world. Well, remember what happened to Marie Antoinette when she left the palace for the first time: She got lost as soon as she was outside the gates … and she lost her head. Oh, yes, one economist says you should have a job that enables you to pay off your college debt in one year!

Good luck with that these days.

Donald Krueger is a retired professor and active contrarian. He can be reached madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Education, Front Page, Opinion-Editorial Tagged With: ,

Cazenovia Curmudgeon: Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round…

November 21, 2010 By 1 Comment

By Donald Krueger

(Cazenovia, NY) The old oak tree? Not any more. Nowadays, on the TV news, it’s CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tied ’round scenes of blood and gore. Fortunately, not so’s we noticed, in our fair villages and towns.

Not that we’re crime-free; it’s just that we go more for the bloodless kind: traffic violations, drunken-driving, breaking and entering and the like, with an occasional adult-strikes-minor and “unspecified violations of the Family Court Act,” which I assume includes child abuse and child endangerment.

’Course we might ask, “Is child endangerment a lesser crime?” “It’s my kid, and I can do what I like?” “But I didn’t know it was a crime?” Committing our children to conditions of the kind that can result in physical and/or mental disability lasting the rest of their lives? Disability or … death?

As was the case of the Kansas high school student who died in a football game: “Cleared to play after sustaining a concussion in a previous game.” I don’t know what you think, but it’s plain to me those who cleared him to play were guilty of a major crime.

For parents, coaches and school officials to say they didn’t know that kid’s death was a crime is so much bovine affluent. The Culture of Football speaking. Like some Higher Power telling parents to withhold treatment from their deadly ill child.

Sorry, but ignorance or faith is no excuse.

Back in February, the Courier printed my column, “Two-Minute Warning.”

Well, time’s up.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy – CTE – is not an illusion, not a myth, not a joke. It is a fact.

“An estimated 100,000 concussions are reported each season among high school [football] players. Several times, that figure goes unreported or unrecognized… The annual count of football concussions [among high school students] could approach one million.”

And that’s not counting concussions to the more susceptible brains of Pee-Wee and Pop Warner players.

“But I didn’t know it was a crime.”

You do now.

As I write this, I’m watching an NFL player being carried unconscious on a stretcher from the field. The NFL is “studying” the problem – the crime. The National Organizing Committee for Standards of Athletic Equipment will – will, not has, reports the Oct. 24, New York Times – will “analyze possible changes in its helmet-testing standards,” for now, the same for all levels of play from Pee Wee to professional.

In the meantime, the NFL has established rules for players’ behavior on the field: “Play nicely, boys.”

Forget more studying and analyzing. Scientists and medical professionals have already done more than enough studying. They have proved the case. It is in the hands of the jury – you.

As for helmets – present design or future design – they may – not will – protect from impacts that might result in skull fractures. They cannot now, and will not in the future, protect from the forces that cause concussions… and the likelyhood of permanent brain damage.

“A helmet will not do everything … It will not prevent the linear and angular forces that cause the head to rotate suddenly and the brain to crash into the skull.”

Yet helmets are marketed (you know, for money) to our high schools as protecting against concussions!

“When you sustain a brain injury, it doesn’t go away,” and, researchers say, “lower-impact subconcussive blows can have the same effect as concussions(!).” In other words, there is no “cure” for CTE. No cure for “Friday Night Fever.” No cure except to stop playing football.

It is a crime to not stop playing what is clearly child abuse and child endangerment. It can be manslaughter… homicide… Parents, coaches, school officials and school board members, our friends and neighbors are guilty of it every Friday night and every practice session of the season… “Wanton disregard for the health of participants.” Just as parents who withhold treatment from their child. Faith or prayers before the game will not excuse the crime.

An increasing number of private and public schools and colleges, those not so caught up in the Football Culture, are doing  away with their football programs. And they are finding they are saving bunches of money in their budgets… hiring teachers instead of firing the, taxpayers take note… and not opening their boards, officials and coaches to the lawsuits surely to come, when parents realize they have been paying tuition – and taxes – for their children to be exposed to certain risk.

The FBI says crime rates are falling. Wait until they discover football. What do you think? The pages of the Courier are open for your comments. Our school boards have open meetings. Village and town officials should show their concern; and, of course, parents have a primary obligation.

Maybe the Courier will publish color photographs of CTE-diseased brains now lined up in researchers’ laboratories: no more gray matter, just all-over brown.

Says the college player viewing them, “(Y)ou think, ‘This is your brain on football.’”

In the meantime, hoping meantime is no more than that for a copule of school board meetings, we can be stringing yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS ribbon ’round our football fields. By the way, a number of schools report that students who do not do sports get better grades … and higher SAT and ACT scores…

Donald Krueger is a retired professor and active contrarian. He can be reached madnews@m3pmedia.com.

Filed Under: Cazenovia Curmudgeon, Front Page, Opinion-Editorial, Sports Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts