The past few years may have made me paranoid, but these discussions about possibly delaying the November election give me pause. If a dozen cities are wiped out by nuclear bombs, then maybe I can see the merits of postponing an election. But barring something spectacular, I can’t see the logic in this kind of thing. Bush may be concerned that the country will follow Spain’s example and give him the boot if we’re attacked again. I think that oversimplifies what happened in Spain. Voters there were pissed because the ruling party initially tried to pin blame for the attacks on ETA when all of the evidence pointed to Arab terrorists. If not for this cover-up and its fallout, the government might have won reelection. And if something like that does happen here, it’s impossible to say what the political ramifications are. People may get scared and decide Bush needs to stay. Or they may get angry and decide new leadership is needed. Either way, a delay in elections would feel a lot like martial law to me.
From an editorial in today’s NY Times: “The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts, also indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don’t to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders � more than half the population � have settled into apathy.” The author makes an interesting observation about how incidences of depression seem to rise in correlation with our increased consumption of television and other electronic media. He has no data or research to support that claim, but it’s still an interesting basis for an argument. On a purely anecdotal level, I’ve noticed that I feel just…I dunno…icky if I watch more than 2-3 hours of television at a time. Like the mental equivalent of eating too many Doritos. I don’t get that feeling if I read for the same amount of time. I’m not sure reading how reading got its reputation as the pastime of the bespectacled, intellectual elite tucked away in the salons of their ivory towers. The proliferation of big-chain bookstores in towns big and small seems to belie that notion. Our public school system can probably share in some of the blame for this trend. Too often, kids are introduced to reading as simply another chore forced on them by the adult world. It’s something to endure, not enjoy. And that festers into adulthood and is in turn passed on to the next generation.
So I guess I should conclude this rambling by thanking Miss Kay Summerfield, my kindergarten teacher at Anne Sullivan School. She was the one who taught me to read when I couldn’t have been much more than 3 or 4. And it never felt like a chore.
We were both lucky to be taught to read early; according to my mother (now a special education teacher), the prevailing wisdom in those days held that learning to read before first grade would overstimulate impressionable little brains and cause all manner of cognitive problems down the road. So when my preschool teachers ran out of things to do with me and had to move on to reading, they actually apologized to my mother. She had always found such thinking counterintuitive, and happily began stuffing me with books.
By the way, motor-impaired children with spinal muscular atrophy seem to have precocious language development. Interesting how that works.
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