Tough Times in OK

When the usual means of funding run short local churches become the lifeline with food, medicine and shelter. Oklahoma is in such a state now with its schools. Funding is dangerously short for repairs and maintenance that are normally covered under the yearly budget.

I remember an anecdote from author Mark Steyn about a woman at a political rally who asked the president if he was going to fix their school. It was an old school after all and hadn’t had repairs in years. The windows rattled when the train went by, the paint was peeling off the walls and the computers were out of date. The student desks broke down practically every day and the plumbing needed attention.  The woman demonstrated perfect exasperation and hopelessness at the situation. The president promised to do what he could and used the occasion to bloviate about ‘kids’ and ‘destiny’, the usual boilerplate politician stuff. The whole notion that the president should concern himself with one schoolhouse in one rural district of one state is truly a measure of how far from citizen/state relations we are. When did residents of a town, a district, a parish forget how to paint walls and fix plumbing on their own?

 States and districts and counties and townships should see to their own welfare and not expect taxpayers to repair schoolhouses across the country. It doesn’t matter how genuine the question was. It reflects ignorance about the relationship of citizens and state. This ignorance is tough to undue. The woman at the rally could have been a plant designed to make the president seem caring, good hearted. It may have likely been someone who thought by getting the ear of the 'organizer in chief', by calling attention to the plight of this school it might force the community to pay attention. Who knows, maybe the president arranged for some contractors to clean up the place but I doubt it.
  

That Americans thought the question to the President was acceptable tells me we aren’t helping our communities in need. These are opportunities for churches to raise money and volunteers to begin rebuilding and renewing schools. I wonder how much of these state budget problems can be fixed by taking some of the burden of retrofits and upkeep off the sagging shoulders of local governments. Americans are used to civil society being run like a business with invoices and payrolls, credits and debits. Money from sales and property taxes funds schools and libraries; when revenues are low for long stretches we scarcely know what to do short of blaming the Republicans (or is it the Democrats). Both parties end up managing a sinking ship but using different bailing techniques. The problem is simple. When revenues are down projects get cut, so do employees like teachers. That kind of math is something both parties hate and voters have to deal with.

Churches help by feeding the poor and arranging for counseling and drug rehab programs for the destitute. Some of the larger churches have ‘in-house’ programs for single mothers, ex-cons and scholarship funding for talented kids. Here in Oklahoma the problem of funding for schools is acute. Districts have cut funding for teacher pay and custodial work and even sports programs and office supplies. A lot of Tulsa area schools need more than just regular levels of spending; they need to rebuild large chunks of the infrastructure. We have trouble just keeping the lights on right now.  Oklahoma needs a drive for school renewal projects. Americans have a long history of pitching in and helping with building projects through churches and community led volunteer efforts.

I don’t mean to pick on the woman who asked the President for help. Too many crumbling buildings get ignored budget after budget since the money isn’t available; how frustrating it must be. Churches have the people and can raise the resources to cover the gaps for schools when funds are short. Local church volunteer projects are the collective response by citizens to tough times. Taking care of school buildings doesn’t have to mean a federal role for a federal purse, it just takes local citizens and local volunteers.

Maybe than we can get back to a reasonable understanding of federal roles and local responsibility.  

Crime and Punishment: Death Penalty

Opposition to the death penalty comes in two forms. The first is the what-if-they-are-actually-innocent argument that Northwestern University in Chicago has based much of their research. The second is a philosophical and ‘principled’ stand holding that states shouldn’t have the power to take life even for horrific crimes.

The debate over capital punishment today is mostly a debate over the legality of the procedure or procedures.  Some high profile cases always pop up showing how ineffective (and occasionally biased) the system can be. How many prisoners have been wrongly convicted by a bent jury and weak defense? Famously Northwestern University reviewed a handful of cases and managed to get many guilty verdicts overturned on an appeal. Many contained forced confessions, some hinged on inconsistent eye witness testimony or had false forensic evidence. Every time a case gets overturned and a convicted man or woman released I feel a pang of sadness that such an injustice occurred. I also get a sense that something fundamental needs to change in the court system.

 First Principles doesn’t pretend to know how to fix every situation but understand the tendency to get offenders off the street and put future victims at risk.

 If your argument is we can’t execute because they might be innocent, you aren’t arguing against having a death penalty just applying it in questionable cases. I believe in capital punishment because life is sacred. That might sound odd so let me phrase it like this: Protecting the innocent trumps saving the guilty. Societies that value life have a moral obligation to uphold justice for innocents killed. An element of “Let the punishment fit the crime” exists in some form; this tit for tat motto is about proportionality. Its purpose is justice and doesn’t consider reform or deterrence. Punishment is rooted in paying back what was taken, squaring the debt to society in accordance with principles of proportionality (retributive justice). Men who refuse to pay child support often have wages garnished. Thieves spend time in prison and speeders pay fines, both punishments are proportional to the crime. We wouldn’t put someone with outstanding parking fees in jail for 20 years.

Many Christians like to quote the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill” as a biblical rebuke to capital punishment. But the text isn’t referring to judicial or governing bodies, only individuals. The word “kill” isn’t about a punishment only a crime. No one complains when a deadbeat dad is sued and the court orders he pay money owed from future wages. In other words no one says when the court takes the man’s money “Though shalt not steal” although ‘stealing’ is exactly what taking earned wages means.  Most people understand the courts exist to seek justice and taking wages fits the crime. Some courts even award punitive damages on top of the amount being requested. Talk about stealing huh? The state (expressed through the courts) exists as a mechanism for applying law, punishing the guilty and seeking justice for victims.

Capital punishment as a tool of the state is under assault from drug makers.

 Manufacturers have started refusing to sell the 3 execution drugs involved in lethal injections on principle. Just this last week Arkansas tried to move up the execution schedule since the drugs used to execute will expire at the end of the month. The pharmaceutical company responsible (Pfizer) for the selling the drugs to Arkansas managed to get a federal judge to suspend the executions on the basis they were purchased under false pretenses. The company is probably responding to public pressure more than anything. This is still worrying because of the shift in attitudes among the public on lethal injection, if there really is a shift.

  

The point here is that anti-capital punishment advocates are finding clever ways to stop executions going forward. Pressuring pharmaceutical companies to stop selling the deadly mixes and using courts to issue injunctions are some of the latest tactics. Their adherence to principle is admirable but consider the philosophical ramifications of not putting murderous criminals to death when most every part of the law hinges on the ‘eye for an eye’ principle. Life gets devalued.

The rights of the guilty overtake justice for the innocent.

Life in prison is not an acceptable alternative to death. It doesn’t matter if the life in prison comes with hard labor and difficult circumstances. The toughness or ease of the sentence is beside the point. Societies should value life and the inherent blessing it represents. Taking one means losing another.

Whatever problems exist in the courts the death penalty needs to remain a viable method of punishment for murderers. Justice is often slow and fraught with error and imperfection but if we throw out capital punishment we lose the ability to correctly apply the law as it was established for the worst offenders.

  

ESPN and Sportishness

The stakes aren’t very high in sports so give my little rant here the attention it deserves by not taking it too serious.

 I miss the days when ESPN used to record the hour long Sportscenter coverage of the previous day’s scores and highlights. If you caught the first half and missed the second it would repeat every hour from 6 a.m. till noon. It gave viewers memorable sound bites and clipped highlights in a tidy package. It told America what happened in a clever and fun way; they introduced witty anchors and memorable lines, like the late Stewart Scott’s “Cooler than the other side of the Pillow.” Now we have what? I don’t even know what to call it, sportishness?

The network’s main course is still sports but now includes a mixed helping of politics, star power and talk show antics.

I should probably explain that I am not talking about the live sports they cover, the Monday Night Football segment and all the basketball games are great. Kirk Herbstreit on college football is superb, as are Dick Vitale and Jay Bilas for basketball.  Daily ESPN is like network soaps and talk shows, colorful characters and opinionated talking heads. One of their morning shows, First Take, encourages 3 guys to argue over a given topic. Each gets a short segment of time and occasionally uses it to blast another’s point of view. It’s more ‘talk friendly’ and works with the overall transition to hot take scripts that nearly every program before the 6 o’clock news follows. SportsNation, another hot take show, uses mic’d up audience feedback heavy on the “WOOAHs!” and “OOOOHs!” that Talk Soup made popular decades ago. These aren’t terrible shows and when you realize sports is entertainment the move toward personalities and gimmicks makes sense.

They just resemble the rest of the daytime television landscape instead of rising above it.

I don’t fault the executives at ESPN for wanting to change direction. Few companies have the boldness and intuition to cast aside a winning formula and head into the digital unknown. ESPN is avant garde in this way. Sportscenter went from a recorded morning news roundup to a live one in 2008. That was huge because it meant they needed to create new content for 6 hours every day. That was the beginning of this shift away from sensible today-in-sports broadcasting to a hodgepodge of Twitter posts, gossipy did-you-see-what-So and So (insert star name) wore trolling. Again, this is sports so the level of outrage is tempered by its entertainment nature.

Today’s version is heavy on opinion and light on reporting.

They have to fill up time somehow though. A cable channel that needs to get new material out for 12 hours a day every day should get a break on a few of the shows. They can’t all be Emmy winners right? Whatever the quality, a certain progressive political fiber runs like a thread through nearly every studio show. Not that every personality or journalist thinks like an editor of Mother Jones but the presentation of events suggests the network has Leftist sympathies. During the Missouri football team so-called strike last year the journalists’ covered the team like they were civil rights pioneers. Some of the players didn’t like the way the university president was handling complaints of racist incidents. The tone was very what-does-this-mean-for-athletes-in-America and unfairly portrayed a tolerant school into a place where bigots find refuge. ESPN didn’t say this of course but the reporting on it as a serious issue of our time was too much for me.

I don’t like the athlete profiles they do either. The productions are better than magazine covers for promoting star image. Uglier parts of their life get airbrushed or ignored. Not that stars should be criticized or dragged through the mud but neither should they be presented in an unflinchingly positive light. Journalists should always worry about their closeness with people, places and things they are covering.

For all my criticism of the new daily format ESPN trains their on air talent well. They had a formula for news and reporting that everyone seemed to like though. Go back to the recorded morning schedule and get back to sports news. 

Get rid of the sportishness.