Free Press – March 30, 2006

Godshall School Labor Day, National Anthem, Teenage Drivers Chomsky

Dear Friends,

Good morning. Two recent news events have reinforced my belief that term limits is the only way to force state legislatures to be productive. Incumbents win reelection over 90 percent of the time at both the federal and state levels so your representatives understand that they are election proof. And that’s precisely why nothing meaningful gets done quickly.

Take the recent tragedy of Silas Peters, the 17-year-old junior from Hilltown Township, who was the fourth student to die in three separate car crashes within six months. Every state legislator realizes that the rules for teenage drivers need to be corrected. The American Automobile Association has countless studies that prove that incidents of teen auto crashes increase when other teens are in the car.

The remedy is obvious…raise the age of drivers when they carry passengers…and put curfews on young drivers.

But the Pennsylvania legislature has been fooling around with this for years and there’s no end in sight. How long do you think it would take for the legislators to fix this problem if they only had 12 years to serve? I say 12 years because it would give state representatives and congressmen six, two-year-terms; state senators, three four-year terms; and U. S. Senators, two-six year terms, to show their worth.

That’s enough time for elected officials to get the job done.

And I was dismayed when State Representative Robert Godshall decided to introduce legislation, which would prohibit public schools from opening before Labor Day. The Hatfield legislator says that he has a state wide poll which proves that Pennsylvanians don’t want public schools to open before Labor Day…47 percent approve of his idea; 27 percent disagree; and 23 percent had no opinion, he adds.

Godshall is also Chairman of the legislature’s tourism committee. He claims that the tourist industry depends upon teenagers to work in the tourist business. He doesn’t say that the industry likes young people because they provide cheap labor.

Maybe the Montgomery County representative hasn’t noticed that American public school graduates lag far behind their Asian and European peers. Maybe he doesn’t realize that most of our American kids only get 185 school days each year compared to as many as 245 teaching days from foreign schools.

Maybe Representative Godshall doesn’t understand why schools have a three-month vacation? It’s because 100 years ago, Pennsylvania’s economy was based on agriculture and farmers needed to do the planting and harvesting. And our Montgomery County neighbor might not have noticed that teachers spend several weeks each September bringing their students up to speed because of the long summer vacation.

If anything, Representative Godshall should propose lengthening the school year and add Saturday mornings to boot. I went to school six days each week…college too. It didn’t hurt one bit.

What did surprise me was that local newspapers didn’t include the Godshall story (as of March 26 when I wrote this column).

And speaking about newspapers, I was surprised that the Morning Call chose to run an important national story (Mar. 19) in the local section instead of the main [first] section. Noam Chomsky, a famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, spoke to a standing room only audience in Bethlehem. The MIT professor is critical of the Bush administration and says that the United States does whatever it wants including violence and economic strangulation to achieve global dominance.

“Chomsky cited as examples,” reporter Joanna Poncavage wrote, “the threat of nuclear war. Environmental disaster. The decline of a functioning democracy in the United States. Iran’s nuclear programs. The U.S.- Israeli rejection of diplomatic settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict. And the lack of a mainstream media coverage of all of the above.

“It is shocking that these are not major topics of discussion day after day,” Chomsky said. “It is impressive to be able to overlook it.”

So true! Chomsky has written more than 80 books and has been grouped with Einstein and Darwin because of his contributions to world scholarship. Wouldn’t you think that the Call would have positioned this story on page one of the first section?

Item.

Did you know that 61 percent of adult Americans don’t know all the words of the National Anthem’s first verse? The New York Times reported (Mar. 14) that the National Anthem Project is trying to make a difference. Sponsored by Jeep, the NAP is touring the country, teaching children about the meaning and history of the anthem.

“There have been earnest attempts to drop the song as the anthem, and replace it with something more benign, like “America the Beautiful,” Michael Wilson wrote. “A major problem with “the Star Spangled Banner,’ experts say, is that it is all but unsingable.”

And that’s true. You need a two-octave range to be able to belt it out. If you’re asked to lead the anthem, my advice is to pick the lowest note you have in your voice range and hum “say” (as in “oh, SAY can you see). That way, when you reach the highest note on “free” (as in “O’er the land of the FREE”), you won’t be singing falsetto.

By the way, Mighty Betsy and I were on vacation and I asked a waitress who’d just become an American citizen whether she could sing the National Anthem. She knew the words and sang them flawlessly.

Sincerely,

Charles Meredith

PS. Next week, I’ll try to get to Congressman Fitzpatrick and State Senator and their plans for starting commuter train service.