Just Random? Maybe Not...

While on the New York Times website, I found something that immediately caught my attention. It was an article about Mike Kelleher’s job. He is the director of White House Correspondence, who sorts through the tens of thousands of letter received a day at the White House. I thought this was interesting because recently in class we have been reading letters sent to FDR and one of my more recent blog posts was about a letter sent to President Bush. I always wondered if they just picked the letters at random to show the president because I figured he receives far too many a day to read each one. It is reassuring to see that they aren’t just picked at random or let the president only read the ones that compliment him; there is actually someone who chooses the letters he thinks the president should most likely read.

School's Out!...Forever

While flipping through the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune’s sports section looking for high school baseball scores from Saturday to see if we would move up in the rankings, I found something much more interesting. For our Privilege and Poverty unit, we brainstormed what characterizes a life of privilege. One of the characteristics we decided on was access to a quality education. I have always thought that was available to everyone through high school, because every community has a school close by that a kid has access to. That age may have passed through because in the sports section I found an article discussing an up and coming problem: school closings. This article was about Driscoll, a school that is going to close after this school year because of a trend of less students enrolling each year. Unless parents can raise a million dollars by Monday, the school will be forced to close. The smaller amount of students enrolling each year has been a trend since the economic downturn, which doesn’t give the school enough money to operate. Whether it was kids not being able to commute to school and chose a school close by or parents not being able to pay for book and other school necessities, it’s affecting Driscoll immensely. What I see as the bigger problem is that this will be taking away one of the characteristics of privilege, access to a quality education, from about 280 kids (the amount that will be attending the school next year if it doesn’t close). I believe this raises the question of should people be denied access to a privileged life because of other people’s poverty? I’m sure this will not affect some kids, because they will be able to commute to a different school. But what about the few that have parents working long hours and don’t have the time to drive them to a school farther away and the money to pay for a taxi or bus each day? Is this fair to them when they did nothing to cause the school to close? I certainly don’t think so and am interested to see if the government does anything to help situations like this, because they did with major corporations like AIG who didn’t have enough money to operate. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because I am sure there will be many more scenarios just like this one in the future.

Babysitter for Hire

While on the Washington Post’s web site, I found an interesting letter to the president from June of 2007 about what the writer believes the US’s role in Iraq should be. Although it is outdated, I thought it brought up some interesting points and relates heavily to our new unit about war. The topic about whether or not the US should be in Iraq and what their role there should be has been debated heavily over the past couple of years. In class last week when we were looking at political cartoons, one stuck out to me that reminded me of this exact issue. The cartoon had Uncle Sam holding up Cuba, the Philippians, and some other countries we were taking care of after a war (in the form of babies) like he was babysitting them. The caption of the cartoon read along the lines of “how some people view America’s role in other countries after the war”. I found this very interesting that America was being portrayed as the babysitter and thought that this was how many people viewed America now with Iraq. We have gone in and freed them from Saddam Hussein and are still there, helping them create a stable country. If we pull out immediately, all of our work and lives lost will go for nothing, yet we can’t babysit them forever. There needs to be a solution in between. I thought this article presented the problem perfectly saying America has lived by the motto “you break it, you own” and that shouldn’t always be the case yet also realizes that abandoning Iraq suddenly is unrealistic too. The writer’s solution was “a limited deliberate drawdown of our military men and women and a redeployment of the forces remaining in the region to areas where they can more efficiently and effectively carry out a clearly defined mission”. I thought this was interesting, and in a way being done today. This is one of many opinion pieces I have read about US’s involvement in Iraq, and thought that this was one of the more interesting ones, and thought I would share it because it relates a lot with our new unit.