#256 – Dick Bernard: The Chilean Miners

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The rescue of the 33 Chilean miners after 69 days underground grabbed and held on to me today.
I got up about two a.m. to see the 4th miner reach the surface, and I watched intermittently today, and for an extended period tonight as the final miner reached the surface.
For me, personally, the entirety of the drama centers around community. The men in the mine became and nurtured community under conditions I cannot even begin to imagine.
The country of Chile rallied around its citizens and their families; and the rest of the world was invited in, and participated, in a moment of unity of purpose.
We saw, I think, what the world can be when it is allowed to reflect the unity of humanity – our commonality more than our differences.
It was interesting, and I suppose expected, that we, through the media, would, for some odd reason, marvel that Iranians might be human beings just like the rest of us, and that these Iranians would be gripped by the same story in the same way through the same media as we. It certainly should not be odd, but the political investment has been in our differences, rather than our similarities, and the differences are magnified, and similarities diminished. But we really are not different at all. We are simply human beings in different places, each of us with our own stories, our own frailties, our own strengths and weaknesses.
The end of this 69-day story in the Chilean high desert is far away and unknown.
One can hope that the survivors and their families can reestablish some sense of normalcy in an environment where that normalcy will be all but impossible to re-establish.
But at this moment, on the day the rescue was accomplished, it is truly a time and an event to celebrate and cherish.
Perhaps we can learn something of value from this moment in history.
One can hope.
UPDATE October 17, 2010: here

#252 – Dick Bernard: "Waiting for Superman"

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UPDATE: February 7, 2011: see end of this post.
Were it in my power, I’d require every American adult to spend the one hour 42 minutes needed to watch the documentary “Waiting for Superman“; then I’d assign them to a working group with ten of their peers of differing points of view, with the assignment to dialog at length about what they’ve just witnessed and then try to come to consensus on how to remedy the problem.
Such is not in my power, and in contemporary society people don’t much like to dialogue with people who might disagree with their view, so my idea is just a fantasy. But it would be nice….
My entire life has been in and around public education. I grew up in a family where both parents were public school teachers; I went to a great, tiny, teacher’s college; I taught junior high kids for nine years; I represented public school teachers in one of those “teacher’s unions” for 27 years; in retirement, I’m still engaged, with children and grandchildren still hanging around public education as employee or student. I know something about the topic.
Still, when I was waiting for show time at the Uptown Theatre in Minneapolis yesterday, I almost passed on going into the theatre, almost opting to sit on the bench outside and watch the world go by on Hennepin Avenue. It was a beautiful day, too nice to waste on a movie that I had heard emphasized bashing public schools and teachers unions. Life is too short.
I’m glad, though, that I went in.
There was much to learn beyond the reviews.
There was a surprisingly large crowd in the theater for the 1:30 showing of Waiting for Superman. This was not a film to allow distractions. We were a quiet and by all indications attentive bunch. When we filed out at the end of the showing, there seemed to be a pretty general reflective silence:
“What does this all mean, and what do we have to do?”
Yes, unions, including mine, were bashed, and I thought the movie overreached. But this film has villains in abundance, including our supposedly great society. What had me in tears for the last few minutes of the movie is what our society has created and nurtured particularly in the last forty years in this country, and then blamed on some ‘other’ (take your pick).
Go ahead, eliminate the teachers unions and take a shot at the “bad” teachers…but don’t think that will solve the problem. There’s a great plenty of other culprits, including some of those who seem to have been anointed as saviors in the film. Take a look, for instance, at the 100,000 or so local superintendents and school board members running America’s 14,000 or so school districts, and the abundant opportunities for dysfunction and malfunction. Or the politicians who play politics with the very large target that is presented by perhaps 45-50 million school age children and the people employed to work with these children in public schools. Or the citizens who pay zero attention to who they elect to make or implement local, state and national education policy (see end note four).
We’ve all created the disaster that made the film possible. We need to do a whole lot more than just talk about it, and find scapegoats.
But I’m not looking for miracles. Finding solutions takes work and compromise. Who wants to work…or compromise?
Please. Do. It’s our kids futures.
*
End note: I was curious about the title, “Waiting for Superman”. The answer comes at the end of the film. You need to see it for yourself.
End note two: I’d invite readers to visit the website of my friend, retired educator and writer Marion Brady, to see his ideas about solutions and reform of public education. Marion takes this issue seriously.
End note three: Here’s what I wrote about the topic of community and school four years ago. This writing is within a website I created eight years ago, specifically to convey ideas to public educators about better connecting with we folks “outside the walls” .
End note four: I live in a community which would be considered suburban and affluent. In the school board election one year ago, with four openings, the top vote getter among the ten competitors, was elected by 3% (1 of 33) eligible voters in the district. The total turnout was less than 10% of those eligible. Nine out of ten residents didn’t even care enough to vote. And our district has a large student population. It is a disgrace.
UPDATE February 7, 2011:
1984 Program ideas for “Ah, Those Marvelous Minnesota Public Schools”: 1984 Revisited001. This program was a cooperative venture involving private and public sectors which commenced with a kickoff event in August, 1984, featuring Astronaut and Willmar MN native Pinky Nelson as keynote speaker.
1984 Report of Mn Business Partnership “Educating Students for the 21st Century”: 1984001.
This report was issued as a criticism of Mn Public Schools and to my knowledge has never been assessed in terms of long term outcomes.
Personal Observations on Firing Bad Teachers, by Dick Bernard, blog post and Minneapolis Star Tribune column March, 2010: https://www.thoughtstowardsabetterworld.org/?m=20100318

#241 – Dick Bernard: The Tyranny of the Minority; and the (theoretical) Power of the Majority

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Last night on the national news of one of the Big Three (CBS, NBC, ABC) I watched a reporter contextualize for viewers the conflict over allowing 2000-era federal tax cuts to sunset (expire) for those earning over $250,000 a year. The over-$250,000 group is said to represent about 2% of American taxpayers. For the rest of us, the holiday would continue.
In order to be “fair and balanced” (I suppose), the perhaps-three minute report focused on the negative impact on “small business”, and employment, if the two percent over $250,000 small businesses would lose their tax break in 2011. Two business owners were interviewed, and of course, said that they’d have to cut some jobs if they had to pay more taxes.
At the end of the segment, the reporter took pen to white board, and gave his interpretation of reality: as I recall the numbers, he said that 2 1/2% of small businesses are in the $250,000+ category. BUT this represents almost 900,000 small businesses.
Segment over, back to the news…. Those poor business owners.
One might feel sympathy for these entrepreneur small business owners, and especially for the employees they say they’ll have to let go, but there is a “wait a minute” aspect to this – an aspect not touched (intentionally, I believe) by the news program.
What was not stated was that 97 1/2% of American small business, apparently nearly 24,000,000 of these businesses, the overwhelming vast majority, would not, under the Presidents plan, be faced with the possibility of going back to 2000 era tax rates. Only the two or so percent who are the wealthiest among us would have to wear the hair shirt of the additional tax, which means only going back to the rates prevailing at the time the ill-advised tax cuts were made.
We should feel sorry for those over $250,000 folks for having to help the lessers among us recover from near catastrophe?
Sorry.
(I don’t think the break point of $250,000 is nearly low enough. But that’s for another conversation.)
I think back to my own work experience. I worked an entire career, and within my constellation of relatives and friends, I would probably be considered to have made a really good living.
In my working years, it would take several YEARS of earnings to equal $250,000. I never got close to reaching a six figure annual income. Nonetheless, I lived well (by my standards). By no measure could I be considered “poor”…or “wealthy” either.
The ‘tax holiday’ between 2001 and the present was good for me. I have all my old tax records so can retrace all of those steps, and do an essentially ‘apples to apples’ comparison. Federal tax went down; state tax stayed pretty constant; property tax went up, but not by a lot.
I had ‘more jingle in my pocket’ those tax-holiday years, but I can’t really say that it did me any good at all. And when I compare it against the catastrophe it spawned in huge federal debt to pay for a war; and all of the credit card debt we all incurred living outside our means, it certainly wasn’t worth it.
I’m within the 98% of Americans who will indirectly benefit if the tax holiday is lifted for the top 2%.
Why, then, can the top 2% high-income folks count on the rest of us fighting their anti-tax battle for them, which is exactly what they are counting on?
Tables-turned, they’ve generally never been in the corner of the least among us.
It’s very simple: we have been taught to fight amongst ourselves, and to want what is unhealthy. To be rich is a positive value….
Have we learned anything? I’ll see how election day 2010 plays out.
If we choose to go back to the days of the 2000s that almost killed us, it’s our fault…and it will be our problem.
COMMENT received from Michelle Witte September 9 2010
Dick – what has become of facts? If I were in charge of the DNC
communication machine I would run 24 hour ads about what the facts really
are around these initiatives. For example – when we in Minnesota had the
transportation/gas tax bill in the state in 2008… there were dire reports
of businesses closing, the evils of taxes, etc. I then calculated what the
FACTS were and how it would affect our family. I figured that based on our
Honda minivan driving about 12,000 miles a year at 16MPG we would pay
perhaps $38 dollars A YEAR extra. And for $38 I would get…. an amazing
array of infrastructure improvements. $38. I can’t even fill a hole on my
driveway for that. Get a grip people – taxes allow you to access resources
for a much lower cost than you could if we just all got our cash and then
hand to build our own roads, levies, social security system, food protection
system, schools, ambulance, fire… on and on.
So, let’s look at the sunset of the Bush Tax Cuts – first of all – they are
not RAISING taxes. They are putting back in place a tax structure which
COMPLEMENTED the highest economic growth in the last 30 years during the
Clinton Administration. Those soaring profits we all once enjoyed came on
the back of those taxes being in place. So, we’re now talking about simply
restoring those taxes.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a family with income of
$300,000 per year would be paying approximately $3,995 more in taxes under
Obama’s plan. That sucks. But it’s certainly not crippling. AND… looked at
the way it should be – those families got 10 years of a tax BREAK while the
rest of us did not.
My neighbor is an accountant and actually voted for Dems after seeing the
effects of the Bush tax cuts on her wealthy clients. They got huge
$10-20,000 checks back from the government after doing their taxes that
first year – they didn’t need it, weren’t expecting it, and clearly, it did
NOT lead to a robust economy where all those people who were business owners
were hiring employees, etc. Instead, people simply extended their credit and
greed and put the economy in the tank. Why would we repeat that again?

#239 – Dick Bernard: Reflections on Labor Day

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Most Sundays the patrons of “my” local coffee shop will hear a somewhat odd trio in conversation along the east (street side) wall. Commanding one table is a retired middle manager of a major international corporation, someone who was fairly high up in the food chain in an important division of his company. At the middle table is a union guy who comes in most every weekend and is, by every indication, a very gifted “key” employee of his corporation, and (perhaps) sometimes a curmudgeon in his own union. Then there’s me, a retired Union organizer – one of “those” people – someone who spent 27 years trying to make sense out of nonsense – “the man in the middle” of assorted disputes and conflicts between working people and their managers.
After the usual bantering back and forth, when the conversation wanders back to the more reflective and serious, we three tend to agree much more than we disagree. The specifics of what we talk about are not as important as the fact that we are not as odd a bunch as we might seem to be. We might see problems and their solutions a little bit differently, but not as differently as one might imagine. We talk about things most people might talk about these days: work, workers, money in (or not in) the economy, how the national organism needs everyone to thrive to survive….
Sunday, as usual, I left coffee, went home, got set for the trip to my Church, the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.
Driving out of our town home development, we saw some cut firewood on a lawn, with a little sign – “Firewood, $5”. It was a small deal; somebody had been cleaning up a neighboring tree lot. My spouse, who’s President of our Homeowners Association, noted that somebody would complain about this little neighborhood enterprise – our Association has rules against that sort of thing. Then she said that the guy had lost his job recently, making the neighborhood enterprise make more sense – even if it was against the rules.
At Church, I picked up the Sunday bulletin. The front page commentary was by Janice Andersen, whose full-time job with us might well translate as “Social Justice”. The headline of her column: “Imagine being able to move out of homelessness with absolutely no furniture“. She then succinctly summarized the story of three anonymous people who had benefited from our Church’s St. Vincent de Paul Thrift store “gently used furniture” program: #1 – “Bill” finally has an entry level job after being out of work for some time…He makes enough money to pay for his rent and food….”; #2 – “Mary”…who lived in her car for two years…participating in a program that teaches interview skills and is looking for work”; #3 – “Ann” is a disabled senior who recently received custody of her grandson. She had no furniture other than a mattress on the floor….”
The visiting Priest, Fr. Greg Miller from St. John’s Abbey, pulled it all together for this Labor Day weekend, basing his comments on Luke 14:25-33, a key section of which says “anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”
Using a symbol familiar to all Catholics – a Rosary – Fr. Greg demonstrated the difference between Grasping (Greed) and Receiving (Generosity). In the first instance, a clenched down-turned fist, holding and hiding that Rosary; in the second, an open up-turned hand, receiving, then giving. Pretty dramatic.
“What we love is what we become“, he said. And he asked us to be especially cognizant, this Labor Day, of those who are “Unemployed, underemployed, and those who have given up looking for work.”
Good messages.
As a nation, we become together, exactly what we are individually. Period. Our “community” is much, much broader than what most of us might define it.

#231 – Dick Bernard: The Minnesota Orchestra; Preparing for the BBC Proms

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August 20 we spent a delightful evening at the Minnesota Orchestra Guarantors Concert at Orchestra Hall.
We’re long-time subscribers, so the superb music was no surprise. Beginning Friday night, August 27, 2010, the same Minnesota Orchestra performs in London at the famed BBC Proms – the only American orchestra on this years Proms list.
Over the years we’ve seen lots of conductors and guest conductors at the podium at Orchestra Hall. They are all leaders. But they are part of a team – an Orchestra – extraordinarily talented musicians who work together to bring to life music composed, most often, by long dead composers. Friday night we listened to Barber, Beethoven and Bruckner. (Minnesota Orchestra is a union orchestra, but this adds to its functionality. Conductors and Union members work within the rules to fashion brilliantly presented music.)
A few hours before Saturday’s concert, thanks to a couple of tips, I went to page 288 of the September, 2010, issue of Vanity Fair magazine to read a long article “Washington, We Have a Problem”, outlining the extreme dysfunction of our current political system in the United States.
Sitting there in row four directly behind Conductor Osmo Vanska at Orchestra Hall, I couldn’t help but compare/contrast the performance of a superb Orchestra against our own U.S. of A. as played out by its leaders in Washington and most especially the huge lobbying corps behind the scenes.
One might say that we in the U.S. have selected a Conductor for our National Orchestra. He is called “President of the United States”.
We bring our Conductor to a podium, facing an unruly mob of orchestra members (we can call them “Congress” and “Senate”), many of whom have no interest in anything other than the conductors failure. Within this Orchestra are people who not only do not practice the music for the performance to come, but feel it is their right to play whatever tune they feel like playing during the concert, if they even bother to show up. There is hardly any discipline in this motley crew; they are ‘hired’ by voters often with little interest in other than their own limited parochial issues. Some see their sole role as sowing discord.
Meanwhile, out in the audience of this national “orchestra”, we’re chatting up a storm, texting, cell phones out and at the ready, arguing with the people in front, behind and to the side, some of us trying to listen, but most of us immersed in our own worlds and needs. We feel no need for restraint or cooperation. I want country western from that bunch up there; you want 70s light rock; somebody else actually came for the dreadfully boring music we’re hearing up there – old, dead music. And we have to pay [taxes] for this?
What I describe isn’t much of a recipe for “success”.
Yet we extol our system of government as being the best that ever was or will be: a shining model for the world.
Friday nights concert at Orchestra Hall was superb, as expected.
And likely, at the BBC Proms in London on Friday night, August 27, our Minnesota Orchestra will be a superb representative of the very best that is America. Follow the tour here.
We deserve better from our own government.

#217 – Dick Bernard: "Way Out Here"

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Every year or two I get re-hooked on Country-Western (CW), and in recent months I’ve had the radio set on the local radio station that plays only CW.
It is interesting to listen to CW music, now and then. There is a particular dark side to the often simple down home laments. Like the guy whose preacher told him to pray for his ex-girl friend, and so he prays that’ll she’ll have a blow-out while goin’ 110 – themes like that.
Probably the anthem that grabs me most right now is Way Out Here by Josh Thompson. It speaks for itself. Listen, but also look at the video and the comments.
In my hearing, at least, there ain’t much hope in many of those country anthems. The one who sings about “rain is a good thang” cuz it makes corn and corn makes whiskey which makes his “baby” a little frisky…. As with Way Out Here, listen and look at the video and the comments.
Basically, it seems, if you ain’t got much, and not much hope of getting more, enjoy what little you’ve got. Quit complaining. I guess there’s some merit in that. But the next logical step is to give up, and accept a bad status quo.
All this plays right into the hands of the really Fat Cats who are quite content to have poor people be happy being poor and downtrodden.
“Way Out Here” seems to be set in coal mining country. The relatively recent tragedy in coal country, where 13 miners were killed, likely due to coal company negligence and flagrant ignoring of many safety regulations, doesn’t seem to have strong “legs” of outrage against the company among the local population. The mine, after all, is their livelihood, dangerous as it is. The multi-millionaire boss of the mining company can go around and publicly blame the government regulations for his problems, and get away with it. He knows how to get the choir to sing against the very (and only) entity that can help them out – government. Even “the good Lord” comes in second to their “gun” in protecting them from the outsiders “way out here”.
Does the Red-Neck CW represent a part of the Tea Party base? Mebbe so. Though it seems the true Tea-Partiers are more to the establishment Fat Cat side of society.
But not necessarily totally so. The difference between feeling hopeless and hopeful is only a few letters.
And CW ain’t bad. Even putting the links into this post is fun. Here’s Dierks Bentley. Dierks is a guy I actually saw in person at the North Dakota State Fair in 2007, and liked, a lot. I’d never heard of him before. You only get a sample here. Here’s the total song. And while you’re there listen to “What Was I Thinkin'”

#205 – Dick Bernard: The Looming Twin Cities Nurses Strike: Apparently Settled

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Overnight came a bulletin from the Minnesota Nurses Association, announcing a tentative agreement between Twin Cities Nurses and the Hospitals which employ them. The vote is next week, on the same day the strike was to begin. It is very good news, for everyone involved.
Having spent a long career as a teachers union representative in a state with the right to strike, my career included plenty of time dealing with, especially, ‘deaths door’ and extremely tense mediations to hopefully settle a contract in lieu of a strike, I “know the drill” – the public posturing, the reality faced by both the union and the management as they get closer to a strike. What the public has to chew on is usually “the tip of the iceberg”.
Among many items to deal with, both sides know well the multiple grim realities of walkouts. I know the Minnesota Nurses Association is a first-class union. The management team, whoever it was, knew it was time to settle, and did, to their credit as well. Oftimes, people on one side or the other get stuck in ideological cement, and the results are not pretty.
Until I read the news release, I really wasn’t positive which hospitals were facing a possible strike. Turned out one of them was Park Nicollet Methodist, which is the place I visited the patient on Wednesday (recounted towards the end of yesterday’s blog post . There was not a single indication, there, that labor and management were bracing for a work stoppage in a conflict over contract terms.
I would suspect that the tension is not over, nor will it be over after the expected ratification of terms and conditions next week. Both sides will be faced with ongoing hard work and difficult decisions.
Nonetheless, congratulations are in order!