Bad Priorities, Bad Law

I know, I know -- it's been a while since I posted on this blog. It's because I've been publishing in another medium: my local paper agreed to publish two of my essays as Op-Ed pieces, and there's a third under consideration now. Though that one may not get published; the paper may be sick of filling up half a page with my stuff when nobody else in this town seems to have an opinion worth printing. Ah, well. I told them they should make me a columnist.

Anyway, here they are: my three essays. The first was originally published in the Columbia Chronicle of May 6, 2009, under the header, "Off track: Proposition 5-190 and our priorities"


We do this kind of thing all the time. But that doesn't make it right.

My English students get poor grades, often because they don't want to do the big projects: things that require concentrating for more than five minutes at a stretch. Two weeks before the semester ends, when they realize they need to bring up their failing grades, they ask me what they are missing, and when I give them the list, they do -- Starters, little journal questions that are worth a piddling three points each. Or vocabulary words, each worth one or two points. They ignore the 80-point book report, and the 100-point essay. Because those things are now grown too large in their minds, too complicated and confusing and just -- big. They can't handle doing all that work, especially not in these incredibly busy final weeks of the year. They can handle doing the little things. Besides, every little bit counts, right?

Let me note that it isn't only the students who do this. St. Helens High School has a high dropout rate, and too many teenaged students who drink and smoke and get pregnant, and hundreds of students who struggle to pass all of their classes, learning from outmoded textbooks in groups that are too large for any one student to have a chance for individual attention from the teacher. Want to know what we spend most of our time talking about in our regular faculty meetings? The tardy policy and the bell schedule.

Here's another example. A woman goes to her doctor, and the doctor is appalled. This woman drinks like a camel (That fish thing never made sense to me -- do fish even drink? -- but a camel can chug up to twenty gallons of water at a shot. Et voila.), smokes like a chimney, knocks back about 20 Vicodin a day in between the lines of meth, and she weighs as much as the doctor, the receptionist, and the receptionist's St. Bernard combined. The doctor tells the woman she has to make serious changes in her lifestyle, now, or she'll most likely be dead within the year.

So the woman switches to Marlboro lights.

No good? How about this:

Do you know any of those guys who have big noses with cavernous nostrils -- the kind of thing where you can see their brains when they tilt their heads back -- and thick, bushy eyebrows, pimples on their cheeks and dirt on their necks, hair coming out of their ears, eyes that are too small and too close together, flabby lips that hang open around crooked yellowing teeth . . . and every hair is in place, and their beard is impeccably trimmed and painstakingly shaped to follow their jawline, never more than a half-inch wide, no hair more than a quarter-inch long? Do you know them? The ones who don't realize, or just pretend not to know, that you can't groom ugly?

Still nothing? Probably hits too close to home. Don't feel bad, guys; I think I'm really hot, too Let's try a more distant analogy, shall we?

Imagine an ant coming home, dragging a real prize behind her. Maybe a chunk of sugar fallen from a glazed donut, or a fragment of hot dog bun that has ketchup AND mustard on it. After struggling mightily with this crumb, she comes back to her hill and finds that one of those twisted little human punks has doused her anthill with gasoline and set it ablaze -- an appalling practice, I have to say. (We used to drown 'em. Bleach works good.) Anyway, this little ant pauses, seeing before her nothing but scorched earth and the charred remains of her former comrades. The hill is clearly destroyed; there is nothing left. After a moment, she starts digging, finds the end of a fume-filled, soot-blackened tunnel, and drags her prize inside to store it in the ant pantry of a dead colony.

Is that too out there, trying to relate to an ant? Okay, then. Here's an example that's closer to home. The people of Columbia County, dealing with many of these very same issues (Well, maybe not the anthill one), along with a failing economy and crippling unemployment, passed a law against illegal aliens working within county limits.

When people are faced with problems that are too large and too damaging and too emotionally difficult to solve, we tend to deal instead with the things we can handle: the little things, the easy things. And on some level, there's nothing particularly wrong with that. Every little bit does count. Some of my students have brought their grades up with nothing more than vocabulary sheets and Starters (Though one might question how much they learned in the process . . . Never mind. A topic for another day.). It is healthier to quit smoking (Switching to light cigarettes doesn't make any actual difference, though) even if you continue to drink and are overweight and under stress. Illegal aliens are indeed a problem in the United States, and one of the ways to deal with this problem is to target and punish the employers who hire illegal aliens.

But when people put their time and energy into dealing with the small problems, even if those problems get solved, the large problems remain. Those large problems often grow worse due to neglect. Dealing with the small problems can also lull us into a false sense of security. For instance, people trying to lose weight order diet sodas, and then, pleased with their self-restraint, they get a double order of French fries and an apple pie to finish it off. Dealing with the small problems can make the situation worse in the long run, even if it gets slightly better in the short.

That's exactly what Proposition 5-190, the Illegal Worker Act, represents to Columbia County. It is an attempt to deal with a very small, seemingly very simple and easy problem: make sure people who work in this county have proper paperwork. That's all. But while our attention is focused on the, what, fifteen or twenty illegal workers brought in by Portland-area contractors, we are ignoring the thousands of people who need help here. People who are out of work -- and freeing up those twenty jobs held by illegal workers won't help the 14% of Columbia County that is currently unemployed -- and people who need food, or health insurance, or help holding a family together, or a way to get their kids an effective and useful education, are not going to be helped by cracking down on illegal workers.

Illegal aliens may be a big problem in this country, but it is a small problem here. Even if the big problems that face Columbia County are scary, even if they may be insoluble in the end, we need to start talking about the big problems and trying to figure out ways to deal with them.

One last analogy. We need to let the ingrown toenail go for now, and try to close that sucking chest wound. Because the way things look right now, our biggest problem is our priorities.