Field of Crap

(Under consideration for publication in the Columbia Chronicle -- or maybe forwarded to the editor's trash folder)


There's a sign on the fence, that divides the park near my home. The park has several distinct areas: baseball fields, a playground, tennis and basketball courts. Some small areas, leftovers, are simply left open for grass to grow, and flowers, and maybe a little spontaneous contentment. The areas are dissected by chainlink fences, and on the fences that surround and loom over the baseball fields, there are several signs, yellow paper laminated -- thus made immortal -- and zip-tied to the fences. The signs read, "Please keep dogs off the ball field."

That's not what they should say. They probably shouldn't say "please," firstly. That is a polite word, and this is not a polite conversation. But even without the please, the signs don't say what they should. The people who put them up meant to say something like: "If you walk your dog across the field, clean up any excrement it leaves behind. There are other people who use this park, and they do not want to step in your animal's used kibbles 'n' bits."

At least, that's what I always thought they meant to say. But then a few weeks ago, my wife Toni and I walked our dog, Charlie, down to the local park near our home. We walked him across the open field, where he did some sniffing and left some doggy-mail on the appropriate clumps of weeds, and then we headed down the median-strip-like corridor of grass which runs outside the fence that surrounds the ball field and bears the laminated signs. We meant to walk him past the two ball fields, one of which was in use, and then cross the access road and go to the other large open area behind the basketball court. But Charlie had other ideas, and since he has always longed to be a sled dog, and thinks putting on the leash is the same thing as strapping him into the traces and yelling "Mush!", his ideas take precedence, or he pulls your arm off. Charlie's idea involved the unoccupied ball field: the fence does not surround it completely, and he prefers to perform on crisp, thick, well-tended grass whenever possible. Whenever we walk him down the street, he displays an almost uncanny knack for finding the most persnickety lawn care obsessives on any block we traverse, and there he makes his deposits. Since the grass on the ball field was neater than the grass on the median strip, it was onto the ball field we went, where Charlie began his rendition of the Digestive Tract Tango.

I have to ask: does anyone else's dog keep walking throughout the procedure? Or is mine the only one that poops for distance?

Anyway, I handed Charlie's leash off to Toni and got out my plastic bag. I tracked down all of Charlie's souvenirs, and then we started to vacate the field, back to the median area and the closest trashcan. But as we walked, I was surprised to see a man yelling at us from the cab of his pickup truck. He parked and jumped out, walking briskly on an intercept course, calling out, "Hey!" We slowed and waited for him. Maybe he wanted directions to the swingset, or to compliment Charlie on his clean lines and beautiful coat.

But no. He asked us if we had seen the signs, the laminated signs. We had. He told us -- with reasonable tact, I will admit -- that they (there was no clear antecedent for the pronoun) were trying to keep ALL dogs off of the ball fields, so the kids who played there would not have to worry. "Now, I see you're doing the right thing," he said, gesturing at the doggie bag in my hand, "but other people might see you walking your dog out on the field and think it's okay, and they won't pick up after them." He pointed out the open field as the area that they felt should be used as the dog area -- an area too small, enclosed only on one side, and fronted by a busy street without curb or shoulder but with visual obstructions for drivers -- and said that they (It was beginning to grow ominous, to me) were trying to get the city council to agree to designate the separate areas as dogs-allowed and no-dogs-allowed.

So apparently, those signs should actually read, "Keep all pets out of this area because we, the self-righteous people who claim ownership of this public park by virtue of the fact that we like our children better than your pets, don't want to clean up the area before we loose our children on it. Even if you are responsible enough to clean up after your pets, we're still going to try to keep you out, because you might influence the irresponsible people to follow your lead. But only insofar as coming into this area -- not cleaning up after the animals."

I'd like to put my own signs up on that fence. Mine would read as follows: "Please do not allow your children to play unsupervised in this area. Please note that sitting on a park bench and talking on a cellphone, saying nothing while your child, tornado-like, lays waste to the land, is not 'supervising' your child. Please do not allow your child to eat or drink anything that comes in a disposable container, as that container will never, ever, make it to the readily available trashcans nearby. If it is aluminum they will crumple it so that it cannot be collected for the deposit; if it is waxed paper or plastic or tinfoil they will shred it and strew the pieces everywhere like toxic snowflakes; if it is glass they will shatter it and leave the shards to lacerate my dog's feet. Please do not allow your children near the Portapotty: they think it is funny to tip it onto its side. Please do not allow your children near those small rocks: they will throw them at each other and anything within range that is either mobile or breakable, or both. Please do not allow them on the basketball or tennis courts, as they will intentionally destroy the netting in both places, just because they can. Please do not allow them to play on the playground equipment, as they will most likely misuse it and hurt themselves, and then you will sue and force the city to take away all the good playground equipment from the rest of us. Basically, you all have no right to complain about any amount of dog crap, because you and your little brats do so much more damage to this park than any animal ever could, that it's a wonder we have a park left at all -- and we'd like to keep enjoying it. Thank you." And I wouldn't differentiate between responsible and irresponsible parents and kids, since obviously, responsibility does not save you from being lumped in with the irresponsible. But I'd keep the "please" and the "thank you" in there, because I have manners.

But really: the signs should simply say this: "Be responsible." If that's not enough -- and in today's society, where blame and scapegoating have become a national pastime, it probably isn't enough to simply use the word "responsible" without also defining it -- they should go on to say, "We all share this space, and we all get so much more pleasure out of it when it is neat and well-maintained. Clean up after yourself, don't break things on purpose or misuse them in such a way that they are likely to break; and if you come here with someone, whether on two legs or four, who cannot be trusted to keep these rules themselves, then you should make sure that they do so, or clean up for them, and pay to replace anything they break. If you are responsible, then welcome -- and thank you."

But really: those signs shouldn't be there at all. Because we should all act this way wherever we go, whoever we go with. Public places are not just available for everyone to use, they are dependent on everyone for reasonable care and maintenance. It is not anyone else's job to clean up after your mess: not ever. To everyone who cleans up after themselves and after those for whom they are responsible, I say thank you, and to everyone who cleans up after someone else, I say thank you twice.

And to everyone who tells me to keep my dog off the public field, despite the fact that I am a responsible dog owner, because your kid wants to play there, and you think your kid has more right to the park than my dog does, I say: here, you want a doggie bag?

The Mighty Librarian

Originally published in the Columbia Chronicle on May 20, 2009 under the header, "Save our school libraries . . . and librarians"

Dedicated to Jaime Meadows


When I was in school, I was taught to start essays with quotations, or with personal anecdotes, as a way to catch the reader's attention. So I'll use both.

Ray Bradbury said, "Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future." This is one of my favorite quotations, and I think of it whenever I think of libraries. It shows, I think, exactly how important libraries (public and private) are to us; they hold almost everything we need to know, which means they are the foundation for anything new we will ever create.

But this quotation isn't enough, because the issue here is more about the librarian than the library. So I had to find another quotation, and of course, I went down to my local library to find it. Since I am a high school teacher, I went to the high school library -- can't get much more local than down the hall from my desk.

I looked through the books of quotations, and found this one: "Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed." ~Charles Medawar. I've found this to be true, as well: the most common complaint I get from my students is that they can't find a book they want to read, or they can't find the information they wanted. And the question I always ask is, "Did you try the library?" Followed immediately by, "Did you ask the librarian?" The answer is usually, "No." Because if the answer to my question had been "Yes," then the student would already have the book or the information, and wouldn't be lost in the first place.

But that quotation still isn't enough, because it isn't quite definite enough, with its "almost" and "probably." So I asked the librarian, Jaime Meadows, for help, and after telling her what I was looking for, she helped me find this: "What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education." --Harold Howe, former US Commissioner of Education

Perfect. That's exactly the point I wanted to make. So now that I have my quotation, with my anecdote about finding it, I'll go ahead and make the point.

The St. Helens School District, like every school district in Oregon and across the country, is facing financial troubles for next year. The state's tax revenue is down, and that means services will be cut. The School District is losing teachers, administrators, support staff, and much of the materiel we use to pursue our goal of education. (I would use the school district's mission statement, "Dedicated to inspiring excellence for all," to describe our goal, but I'm an English teacher, and that is not a good sentence.)

So be it. Everyone has to tighten belts. People everywhere are losing things that they need, things that they don't know how to do without -- businesses, homes, vehicles, insurance. I feel very lucky that there is still a school district and I, for one, still have a job. But that's the point I want to make: there is still a school district, and I do still have a job, which means that we are going to continue to educate the young people of St. Helens and the surrounding areas. We will have to do it with less and fewer resources, but we will keep on, keeping on.

The issue, then, is where do we save money? Which resources should we cut, and which should we maintain? It's the same question that everyone who has felt the pinch of the recession has had to deal with, will continue to have to deal with, and it's a hard question with no easy answers -- if there's an easy answer (something like "I guess we'll have to sell the second yacht"), then you aren't really feeling the pinch of the recession.

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education." The library at St. Helens High School, and at all of the schools in this district, is the most important tool we have in teaching students -- period. The individual teachers are nearly as important, but you have to consider the fact that all of the teachers go to the library for help in teaching our classes, to get textbooks, to copy our handouts, to bring our classes so they can do research; the universality of the library puts it, I think, above any one teacher.

Even in a recession, in an era of belt tightening and uncomfortable sacrifices, you don't cut the most important thing. You just don't. My wife and I make our house payments first, before we even look at our other bills. We don't have to think about it. We need a roof over our heads, so we make our house payment. The school rightly does the same thing, assuring first that the buildings are safe and functional places for education to happen.

But that's just it: for education to happen, we need our library. That's where the knowledge is, first, and education is about gaining knowledge; but education is also about gaining skills. Reading is the most fundamental skill our students learn, and so the books become symbols of all learning -- and the library is the symbol of all books. That's what that quotation means: libraries are not only important tools in building education, they are also the heart of the school. The way we treat our library shows our students what we really think about education, where our priorities lie.

So I cannot express strongly enough how disturbing it is to me when St. Helens High School, as part of our contribution to the cutbacks for next year, laid off our school librarian. I recognize that any cut, every cut, is painful and is going to have a negative impact on education, on the school's ability to give our students what they need to succeed -- but I cannot understand how the administration can cut the most important part of the most important resource the school has to offer. Then I found out that all of the school libraries are being cut in some way -- losing assistants, having to share librarians -- and it staggers me. How do we do this? How do we teach students to love knowledge, to love learning, when the one place with the greatest potential for learning is clearly so low on our priority list?

I'm not trying to suggest that there are easy answers (Though I have one question: why do we still have sports programs? Is there any way that we can see sports at the high school as anything more than a luxury that benefits a minority of the students? It's an important luxury to that minority, and it isn't a huge part of our funding, but still: when you cut back on your spending, don't you cut the luxuries first?), or that the other people who have been laid off are unimportant. The librarian at St. Helens High is not the only friend of mine who is losing her job. But I cannot imagine how we are supposed to pursue our goals -- how we are supposed to accomplish that ugly mission statement, "Dedicated to inspiring excellence for all," -- without our most important tool, our most useful asset.

Here are those quotes again. Please, I beg of you: read them carefully. Think about what they mean. And think about what it shows the students of St. Helens when we think that the most dispensable person at the school, one of the first people laid off, is our librarian.

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education."

"Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed."

"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."

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.