Montebello E-News

May 22, 2008  

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals.  Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
D. H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930,
was an English writer of the twentieth century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters.  His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization.  

[Is Lawrence saying that questioning the status quo is a good thing and that the conclusions reached are a good thing?]

  1.  An Elephant in Your House?

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

3. Announcements

4. Fun Facts about Oklahoma

5. The Flashback Quarterback:  Are We in the Cuckoo’s Nest?

6. Be Aware and Share:  Don’t Like the Frog?  Try an Airplane   

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

 An Elephant in Your House?

The Wichita Eagle

March 30, 2008  

Dr. Bill Roy:  U.S. Refuses to See Insurance Elephant 

More good people are spending more good effort and more good money trying to make our inequitable and tattered health care system sustainable than can be measured or imagined.  And the "system" per se is getting into deeper and deeper trouble, because Americans refuse to see the elephant in the room -- the health insurance companies.  

No country can long afford a health care system run by private health insurance companies.  They take 15 to 30 percent for their fees (and add 15 percent to the administrative costs of physicians and hospitals);  refuse to insure the sick, disabled, chronically ill and elderly; and generally distort the health care delivery system for their own profit. ...  

(Bill Roy is a retired physician and former member of Congress who represented northeast Kansas.) http://www.kansas.com/205/story/356501.html  

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. What is meant by an “elephant in the room”?

(a) This is a criticism of a repulsive person.

(b) The cause of a problem is obvious but nobody talks about it.  

2. What is the elephant of health care?

(a) Health-insurance companies.

(b) Poorly trained physicians. 

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, decreasing—this dream of many becomes a fading, wistful thought.  

In part one of this essay, we saw that other people’s problems could become our own—in fact, have already become our own.  We wondered whether technology could save us.  

Technology could help in a variety of ways:  

·        making uninhabitable land habitable, enabling us to get away from the loud crowd;

·        reducing pollutants, which have the nasty habit of traveling via water and air for miles, if not thousands of miles;

·        increasing health care and food production to alleviate the huge poverty which compels people to travel, to pollute, to have large families.  

However, technology is but a tool.  Technology can be used for good or bad, or not used for good or bad.  For example, PlayPumps, www.playpumps.org, has a merry-go-round which is actually a water pump, for communities around the world which need water.  As children play, people drink for a day.  But if the government disallows its use or controls the pump arbitrarily, the technology’s usefulness to a community can come to nothing.  

The popularity of the cell phone and the ability to bring photos quickly to news media have made it possible to address a problem like the abuse of human rights, as we witnessed in April when Tibetans protested against China’s rule of their country.  

Another example is Médecins sans Frontieres, “Doctors without Borders” in English.  What good is their technologically-advanced mobile operating room if a government or rebel army makes it dangerous for the organization to do its work?

Thus, technology is useful if permitted to be useful.  Unfortunately, for those in power or seeking power, technology can become a means to a nefarious end.  So, while technology has the potential to help, technology does not necessarily alleviate the problems of an ever-shrinking world.  

Of course, not all technology is useful.  There is destructive technology, which aggravates problems and uncomfortably, even dangerously, shrinks our planet.  A salient example of bad technology is the dirty bomb, a small quantity of radioactive material which can cause considerable harm.  And some technology is useful or harmful, depending on the purpose for which it is being used;  an obvious recent example is the Internet, which can be used for good, like viewing Professor Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture,” or for harm, like trying to get one’s fame by harmful stunts or harm to others.  

So, ultimately, technology cannot by itself save us from a shrinking world.  What then?

FOR EVERYONE.  Food festival.  Yum.  Mark your calendar and save the date.  Saturday, May 31, from noon to 11 p.m.  The Armenian Apostolic Holy Cross Cathedral will host the First Annual Armenian Food Fair and Fest.  Live Armenian entertainment and performances.  Fabulous, freshly prepared Armenian food and pastry.  Guitar Hero contest, dance classes, cooking demonstrations and much, much more.  For the first time your favorite dishes can be pre-ordered and packed to take home.  Visit www.armenianfoodfair.com to get the latest info on the festival!  

FOR EVERYONE.  Flip side of the coin.  In last week’s E-News, we read about high-maintenance high schoolers.  Yet, there are exceptions:  While it’s not uncommon for young people to run for public office, they aren’t often elected, particularly in cities larger than several thousand residents. Someone forgot to tell that to 19-year-old Chris Brown who was just elected (with 84% of the vote) to the city council of Bedford, Texas — population, 48,000.  “If you’re dedicated to something and you work hard, it doesn’t guarantee you anything,” says Chris, “but without it you don’t stand a chance.” That’s why this teenager attended every single city council meeting for a year. “I wanted to run for council last year, but I didn’t think I had the knowledge, and so I took the past year to make myself ready.” For Chris, doing hard things paid off.  http://www.therebelution.com/blog/category/teens-in-the-news/  

FOR EVERYONE.  Commission meeting.  The Montebello Civil Service Commission is holding its regularly-scheduled meeting on Tuesday, May 27, 2008, at 6 p.m. at city hall.  The meeting is open to the public.  If you wish to speak, fill a card before the start of the meeting.  For more information, 323.887.1200.  

FOR EVERYONE.  Who is pulling your strings.  It is interesting how new expressions of technology, like YouTube, give you the good mixed with the bad.  As for the good, here is an excellent ten-minute piece on how advertising media influence our behavior, with the note that youth are more susceptible:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fistakoNok0.  Unfortunately, while the video looks credible, I cannot speak to the veracity of its lesson.  

Established in 1871, Vinita is the oldest incorporated town on Oklahoma Route 66.  [Do we know the significance of Route 66?]  Vinita was the first town in Oklahoma to enjoy electricity.  Originally named Downingville, the town was later renamed Vinita, in honor of Vinnie Ream, the sculptress who created the life-size statue of Lincoln at the United States Capitol.

During a tornado in Ponca City, a man and his wife were carried aloft in their house by a tornado.  The walls and roof were blown away.  But the floor remained intact and eventually glided downward, setting the couple safely back on the ground.

A statue entitled “Hopes and Dreams,” in downtown Perry, was created by local sculptor Bill Bennett and placed there on a massive granite pedestal as a Cherokee Strip Centennial memorial. The statue portrays an early-day couple coming to the newly opened western frontier.  [How would we portray hopes and dreams today?]

Born in 1879 on a large ranch in the Cherokee Nation near what later would become Oologah, Oklahoma, Will Rogers was first an Indian, then a cowboy, and, finally, a national figure. Will Rogers was a star of Broadway and seventy-one movies of the 1920s and 1930s, a popular broadcaster, and wrote more than four thousand syndicated newspaper columns.  [Will Rogers was known for his humor.  It is worth looking him up.] 

A life-size statue stands in honor of Astronaut Thomas P. Stafford in Weatherford.

The National Cowboy Hall of Fame is located in Oklahoma City.

The town of Beaver claims to be the cow-chip throwing capital of the world.  It is here that the World Championship Cow Chip Throw is held each April.  [I imagine that most anything would draw tourists.]

An Oklahoman, Sylvan Goldman, invented the first shopping cart.  [Inventing is not the exclusive domain of men.]

Originally Indian territory, the state of Oklahoma was opened to settlers in a “land rush” in 1889.  On a given date, prospective settlers would be allowed into the territory to claim plots of land by grabbing the stakes marking each plot. A few of these settlers entered to claim land before the official start of the land run; these cheaters were called “Sooners”.  [So, that is where the name comes from.]

Tahlequah, Oklahoma, is the tribal capital of the Cherokee nation.

State motto:  Labor Omnia Vincit, “Labor Conquers All Things.”  [Why do you suppose that people in the Oklahoma territory would conceive that motto?]

Oklahoma is one of only two states whose capital cities name includes the state name.  The other is Indianapolis, Indiana.

Oklahoma’s state wildflower, the Indian Blanket, is red with yellow tips.  It symbolizes the state’s scenic beauty as well as its Indian heritage.  The wildflower blooms in June and July.

Oklahoma has more man-made lakes than any other state, with over one million surface acres of water.  [Thought question:  why so many man-made lakes?]

Oklahoma has the largest Native American population of any state in the U.S. Many of the 250,000 American Indians living in Oklahoma are descended from the sixty-seven tribes who inhabited the Indian territory.   Oklahoma is tribal headquarters for thirty-nine tribes.

“Sequoyah’s Cabin” in Akins is a frontier house of logs, occupied by George Gist, known as “Sequoyah,” the teacher who in 1821 invented a syllabary that made it possible to read and write the Cherokee language.

http://www.fun-facts.com/item/86124 

We have talked about painting ourselves into a corner with our idealism.  There was a stark example in early April:

First-Grader Labeled a Sexual Harasser
Has Zero-Tolerance for Sexual Harassment in Schools Gone Too Far?
by July Chang, Alisha Davis, Cole Kazdin, and Olivia Sterns, April 4, 2008

In schools across the country, kids as young as three and four are now facing charges of sexual harassment that will stay with them permanently on their school records.

These so-called "zero-tolerance" policies, designed to protect students from weapons and drugs or sexual violence, are often being taken quite literally.

Randy Castro, 7, who likes recess and soccer, now has an alarming red flag in his school records. It started on the playground with a first grade classmate. 

"I saw another kid like hitting her butt so I did it," Castro said.

His Potomac View Elementary School then called the police and wrote him up as a sexual harasser. Woodbridge, Md. school officials described the incident as "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive," in their report. ...

According to the state's Department of Education, 166 elementary students were suspended in Maryland last year for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, 16 kindergartners and 22 first-graders.

In Virginia, 255 elementary students were suspended for offensive sexual touching last year as well. …  

While a school's priority is to keep kids safe, critics argue the "zero-tolerance" policies can mean zero discretion.

"Overwhelming research suggests that "zero-tolerance" is not effective and often engenders more bad behavior," said Feinberg [of the National Association of School Psychologists] ...  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/AsSeenOnGMA/story?id=4585388  

We have mentioned the lesson to be learned from Al Gore’s cartoon frog, which does not have enough sense to jump out of gradually warming water and dies as a result, this analogized to the failure by us humans to take action on climate change.

If you are tired of Al’s frog, there is a different example, from a PBS documentary about home-made airplanes.  There were builders of airplanes who, launching from high cliffs, would think that they were flying because the ground was so far away, but, in fact, they were on their way to a crash.

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.