The Politics Of Ice Storms
March 9, 2009
Does anyone else think this weather absolutely sucks!
I’m sorry to use such graphic terms, but I’m not sure I can stand another minute of winter right now. It didn’t used to be like that. When I was a kid, I always looked forward to the winter months, mainly because of hockey season. But I haven’t laced up a pair of skates since Mike Dukakis was a viable candidate for the presidency, so let’s just say winter is no longer a season to be embraced as much as endured.
This is especially true if you happen to work in morning radio, as I do, at least one half-hour away from home. In that context, winter create on an entirely different and bizarre torment, one that can only be experience driving on icy roads at three in the morning.
I’m a pretty confident driver, but the most scared I’ve ever been in a car was this winter when we got hit with a surprise ice storm. It was a couple of months back on a Sunday into Monday commute, and it literally took me 30 minutes to get from my house to the lights on Route 2 in Gill, which is a grand total of 1.7 miles. I literally was afraid to drive home that night for fear that the ice would still be there. Now, if things are really bad, I just stay over on my air mattress in the office rather than risk a repeat of that performance.
The one good thing about this weather is that it gives me an excuse not to drive by the photo op, errrr, the big joint House-Senate Ways and Means Committee hearing going on at Turners Falls High School. Not to denigrate the guy who set it up, First Franklin District State Rep. Steve Kulik (D-Worthington), but the next time one of these hearings actually results in a change in state policy will be the first time.
The sad part is, there are actually people who care about the state of education in Western Mass. who are going to sit through hours of political bloviating waiting for their chance to tell their elected “leaders” about how the state’s pathetic system of funding education is damaging the children of this area…only to have it go in one ear and out the other. Because let’s face it–if these clowns were really interested in fixing the problem, they would have deep-sixed this ridiculous excuse for a funding formula years ago, they wouldn’t allow charter schools to compete on unequal footing with conventional public schools, and they wouldn’t have set up a school choice system that effectively penalizes school districts who are unable to keep students because they don’t have enough money to fund the programs to keep them there in the first place–because of that same dysfunctional funding formula.
You watch how it plays in tomorrow’s paper. I’m betting you’ll see big pictures and headlines about how the area got their chance to have their say in front of the most powerful people on Beacon Hill, conveniently leaving out the fact that exactly nothing that was said in the course of that hearing will have even the remotest impact on how this state funds (or doesn’t fund) education in fiscal year 2010.
Maybe I’m just being bitter, but I’ve seen too many of these political pranks to every be wide-eyed again where this state government is concerned–especially when it comes to its “commitment” to education.
I guess that’s life in Deval Patrick’s Massachusetts, where the governing never quite begins, but the campaign never quite ends.