1.  High-Maintenance High Schoolers—No Light at Tunnel’s End?

2.  It’s a Small World after All, Part 1

3. Announcements

4. Fun Facts about Ohio

5. The Flashback Quarterback:  LUCK:  Law of Unintended Consequences Kills

6. Be Aware and Share:  Heard of “Intergenerational Tyranny”?

7.     About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello”

High-Maintenance High Schoolers—No Light at Tunnel’s End?  

Do you think that high schoolers have potential which goes untapped, to their and our detriment?  I believe so, but I remember one person telling me that high schoolers were “high maintenance”;  in other words, there would be more cost in supervising them than there would be benefit from whatever they did.  

I tried over a year ago to prove that high schoolers were not high maintenance.  I proved to myself that I was wrong.  On March 21 of this year, I came across the following in the Higher-Education Service Learning listserv:  

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2008 by a local nonprofit organization. 

1. Why are high schoolers not reaching their potential?

(a) They spend too much time in the classroom.

(b) They do not have enough time outside of the classroom learning by doing.  

2. As the Federal government and big corporations find ways to put us in debt, our community is going to have less money to maintain itself.  Turning high schoolers from community liabilities to community assets would be useful.  But how?

(a) Defy “No Child Left Behind” and create a community-oriented curriculum.

(b) Introduce service-learning into Montebello Unified and ensure a large role for the community in implementation.

(c) Print a local currency to help our community, whether or not we be able to turn high schoolers into community assets.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1924 – 2006,
 was a liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist with international stature. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ.  In his younger days he was a superb athlete, a highly talented pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to become a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  

Have you thought about getting away, about being left alone and leaving others alone?  As the population of our planet increases and the amount of land upon which we can live remains unchanged—if not, in fact, decreases—this dream of many people becomes a fading, wistful thought.

We are interconnected, in ways which we wish to avoid, but cannot, in ways which we deny, but only delude ourselves by such denial.

A public-service announcement broadcast often of late comes to mind.  In trying to persuade people not to smoke, the narrator notes that second-hand smoke, which is injurious, can travel from one apartment to another, affecting children too young to be aware of what they are breathing.

On March 13, 2008, in its e-mail newsletter, the Worldwatch Institute stated

The average woman worldwide is giving birth to fewer children than ever. Nonetheless, an estimated 136 million babies were born in 2007, bringing the global population to about 6.7 billion. Governments must improve access to good health care and family planning to see further declines in childbearing and increases in life expectancy, writes Worldwatch Vice President Robert Engelman in the latest Vital Signs Update.  

Let us say that we want to limit our personal stress by purposely turning a deaf ear to what transpires in other countries.  Will that makes things worse for us, because of population increases around the world?  And would increasing populations around the world increase consumption of nonrenewable resources, raising the price which we pay for such resources?

Because there is limited land upon which we can live, a population increase means that technology has to keep pace with the increase in order to feed, clothe, and shelter people.  Because countries like India and China, each with over a billion people, are following in our consumer footsteps, technology has to keep pace by providing alternatives to diminishing nonrenewable resources and by providing solutions to the pollution created by the fuels which we use.

Is technology keeping pace?

In past issues of E-News, we have looked at “LOCO,” “Limits on Constructive Output.”  LOCO is related to “LUCK,” “Law of Unintended Consequences Kills.”  Here are a couple of examples of LUCK, bad LUCK.  

1. We hail the fall of the Soviet Union and  

... [o]ver the past decade and half, Russia—with extensive help from the United States—has tried to lock down this atomic detritus, at great expense. But the task is a massive one, and, as of 2008, the two nations face nuclear problems that scarcely registered during the upheaval of the 1990s. Seven years after 9/11, Russia has become something of a terrorists’ nirvana, with 12,500 miles of borders, a military so corrupt that its members have sold weapons to their battlefield enemies, and vast networks of poorly safeguarded nuclear facilities. ... Lavin, Timothy, “Uranium on the Loose,” TheAtlantic.com, March 18, 2008.  

2. The People’s Republic of China exercises control over religion within its borders and  

… the number of underground Catholics faithful to the Vatican easily equals the number of official ones [Catholics controlled by the Communist Party]. Unofficial Protestants, who attend unsanctioned "house churches," are said to number anywhere between 70 million and 130 million; one prominent Chinese pastor puts the count closer to 300 million. That latter figure is probably exaggerated, but there's no question that Christianity of the unofficial kind is winning Chinese converts in huge numbers. Not only that, it's winning them among every class of Chinese: farmers, urban migrant workers, professionals and intellectuals.  

What is the appeal of Christianity to so many Chinese -- or, for that matter, of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, the old-time peasant religions and the newfangled Falun Gong? In smashing" organized religion, Mao Zedong also destroyed the traditional institutions of charity and social support that used to provide succor to the lonely and the needy. Now that succor is desperately in demand, and the churches are there to meet it.  

The party also helped destroy traditional morality in the name of an ideology it has itself largely abandoned. To a degree that alarms even Chinese rulers, morality and ideology have been replaced by corruption, opportunism and widespread indifference to life's ordinary decencies. Religion offers a corrective to this, too, as it does to the quandaries of 21st century existence. ...  

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter, and for submitting stories to "Montebello Memories" at the Web site.