1/1/13

Hey Uncle,

Happy New Year from your Silicon Valley niece.

Here are 3 New Year Resolutions I’ve made for you:

1.Not another child will die in a school shooting in America ever again. Please let those twenty kids in Newtown be the very last victims of gun violence. Ban assault weapons, require background checks, improve mental health services – do something anything everything so students are free to fear tests, not bullets or bombs. The novelist William T. Vollmann suggests that “shooting really is the quintessentially American experience” and we should feel “sorry for people in other countries who can’t do this.” What say you, wise Uncle? By the way, my own high school, the nerdville of Silicon Valley, was shut down just the day before the CT shooting because of a bomb threat. True, no bomb was found and I was forced to take that calculus test the next day – the same day the twenty in CT escaped all calculus tests forever. But tell me Almighty Uncle, what moral calculus determines when and how many children have to be killed before you will say enough is enough?

2.Fund schools, not prisons. According to California Common Sense, a non-partisan non-profit, California’s higher education received 13% less state funding in 2011 than it did in 1980, while funding for prisons expanded 436% during the same period. Data gathered by the National Dropout Prevention Center shows that 82% of the inmates currently housed in federal prisons are high school dropouts who cost the taxpayer $55,000.00 per inmate. In contrast, a student in the K-12 education system receives only $10,500 per student. The math is clear, Uncle dear. Schools are cheaper than prisons. So either stop funding prisons and start funding schools or just merge the two. After all, many schools are already like prisons and some prisons at least are trying to become like school. So a corporate style merger may be just the right thing to help you cut costs and boost profits.

3.Quit pretending the American economy works equally well for all. Surely, 2008 did away with that myth and that dream. A grand canyon has opened up between the 1% who are job makers and the 99% who are the job seekers. The system is rigged to benefit the 1% while the rest are pacified on borrowed money so class warfare doesn't break out in the streets and threaten profits. If anyone asks questions, you tell them some things are too big to fail, that sub-prime mortgages and derivatives are too complex to explain, that some people are too important to jail. But the writing on the wall (street) is clear: the biggest bash in the history of the world can’t go on forever. So in the name of Gen X and Y and Z, I pray you find a more equitable sustainable alternative.

Almighty Uncle, give us a future we deserve.

-- CK