I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
For weeks, the threat of closure loomed over a small Santa Fe public elementary school called Alvord. Here in Santa Fe, the tireless struggle of parents to overturn the school board’s decision to close the school was moderately big news, but Santa Fe isn’t the nation — or even the state — and the planned closing of the school wasn’t exactly a disaster of Hurricane Katrina magnitude.
After all, Alvord Elementary is one of the downtown schools with declining enrollments, and it made good fiscal sense to close the school. The school district — like just about every entity, both public and private these days — had cash flow problems. Moreover, the fastest growing part of town is the southside of Santa Fe, where schools are overcrowded even as the downtown schools see their enrollments decline. And so the school board made its decision.
The Alvord parents, bitterly disappointed, stepped up the tempo of their caterwauling. Oh, the injustice! Oh, the inhumanity!
And then Gov. Bill Richardson, like a parent who cannot stand to see his spoiled child cry after someone has said, “No,” appeared with a treat to stem the tide of tears. He gave the district $200,000 in state money, enough to keep Alvord Elementary open for another two years.
Now not only are southside Santa Fe parents getting short shrift so that downtown parents can have their way, but parents all over the state of New Mexico get to chip in as well. The best part, of course, is that in two years they’ll have to go through the whole dog and pony show again, in hopes that Richardson’s successor will likewise be a soft touch.
All this happened a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t seem to get the story out of my mind, because in truth, the Alvord Elementary affair illustrates, in microcosm, exactly what is wrong with contemporary American society. It is the triumph of feelings over facts and fiscal responsibility. It is a refusal to look at the big picture and see the greater good, and to make necessary sacrifices for that greater good. It is selfishness as social policy.
In voting to close Alvord, the school board members did what they thought was best for the district as a whole. This is what families and business owners do every day. They set priorities, make difficult choices, and live with some disappointment. Or at least that’s what families and businesses used to do.
A husband and wife have a certain income, and must live within their means — unless they can keep sucking equity out of their mortgage, and then get the mortgage renegotiated when the value of the house falls. A corporation can spend only as much as it earns — unless it keeps borrowing until its stock price plummets and it faces bankruptcy, only to have its comeuppance averted by a government bailout.
Increasingly, Americans are unwilling to make hard choices. They are unwilling to live within their means, unwilling to do without things they cannot really afford but can buy on credit. They are unwilling to allow companies whose executives made the wrong choices face the consequences of those choices.
They are also unwilling to put the good of the nation — or the state, city, school district, etc. — ahead of their own personal desires. NIMBY has become the new rallying cry of homo americanus. No one wants a prison or a nuclear power plant or an oil well — or, in the case of Santa Fe, a Wal-Mart Super Center — anywhere near his own home.
Oh, sure, we need more prisons. We really need cheap energy. And we want all that cheap crap from China they sell at Wal-Mart. But we don’t want any of it in our neighborhood.
Sort of like a high school sophomore wants to get straight As, but doesn’t want to spend his time studying. Why doesn’t he? Because he’s sophomoric, of course. That’s where the word came from, after all.
But what about the rest of us, those over the age of fifteen?
What’s our excuse?
