Wally Hayman
The Canary in the White House
The 1950s were a time of maturity for America. All was not fine on the civil rights front but the rumblings for change had begun. It was a time of growth and prosperity; a time when no project seemed too bold or impossible; a time when we spent $128.9 billion dollars (about $1.2 trillion in 2017 dollars) to construct 42,795 miles of interstate highways.
The 1950's also marked the beginning of the space race which created inspiration for all of us and aspiration for many. It was a time when a coal miner's kid from West Virginia could dream of becoming a NASA rocket scientist, and on the way, inspire a half dozen local young friends to love science, too. As James Thurber satirically noted in 1961, "Since the days of Gagarin, even former religious people have suddenly given up their belief in God and now worship science."
Education was the only way out of the mines, even if it took you only as far the mining company's front office.
How things have changed, for both science and education, in general.
Now, along comes a White House budget director questioning funding public television with the declaration, "Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mother in Detroit to pay for these programs? We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting?"
So it's bombs or Big Bird, America; you can't have both.
But some of us might wonder how that coal miner or single mom personally benefit from paying for Mr. Trump's weekend golfing and bacchanalia at Mar-a-Lago, or personally benefit from Paul Ryan's platinum, and free, lifetime family healthcare coverage.
You'd think a trust fund-benefitted President or once government-assisted Speaker of the House would appreciate and relate to the 3 million skilled and taxpaying Americans they could create if their border wall folly was redirected to scholarships and training programs. Seems a better way to stimulate the economy while raising our quality of life and sense of dignity - certainly better than manufacturing cluster bombs designed to be dropped on people in other countries seeking the same dreams for a better life.
No doubt many Americans whose taxes help support public broadcasting, the arts, education, libraries, national parks and other critical components of a healthy society have little personal use or time for these institutions - just as I never drive on 99.99% of America's publicly maintained roads and bridges but help pay for them, anyway.
But I get it. Someone worried about job security and the immediate needs of their family, may have as little use for educational television as some boorish real estate tycoon or sociopathic career politician. They may not realize that the entire annual budget for the National Endowment of Arts in 2016 ($148 million) was less than the cost of maintaining Melania and Barron Trump in Trump Tower for a year ($182.5 million). Should they move to Washington by the end of the summer, it will still have cost taxpayers $115 million - or $115 million more than next year's NEA budget since Trump is planning to eliminate the NEA. That's quite a tuition fee for little Barron. It may have been cheaper to relocate his entire school from New York to Washington.
Perhaps more chilling are Trump's proposed cuts to the NIH and what they will mean to the health and welfare of all Americans, rich and poor. Seems the man currently slashing through our government with his over-sized sickle is not our leader, but the the Grim Reaper.
I will posit this. Any society that aspires to nothing, will lose everything. Through an insidious devaluation of curiosity and intellectualism, lost empathy and abandoned governance, it will eventually fall victim to its self-engendered demise.
WBH
