Blog Archives - Jay Evensen

Will civics test help students learn to be good citizens?

4/30/2015

“No Child Left Behind” didn’t work. Various state laws requiring tests or threatening schools with closure if students don’t perform has a spotty record. We’re not quite sure about Common Core because we can’t seem to stop arguing about it long enough to see.

So maybe the new requirement for high school seniors to pass a civics test before being allowed to graduate — now the law in Utah and five other states — will make a difference.

What will it take to put an end to hazing?

4/28/2015

I remember well my initiation into the high school Lettermen Club.

At my school, you didn’t automatically qualify by risking life and limb on a football field or doing endless wind sprints on a basketball court. Those things were important enough to earn a letter your mom could sew on a sweater. But to prove your valor and qualify for the vaunted club, one step remained. You had to spend a day at school dressed as a girl.

Nazi trial brings current atrocities into perspective

4/22/2015

In Germany, a court is reminding everyone that World War II and Nazi atrocities are not so far in the distant past. That is a good thing, especially for a young generation that needs to appreciate lessons once learned through sacrifice, suffering and death.

What remains to be seen is whether our collective efforts to never forget the Holocaust translate into a recognition of similar things happening today. So far, the answer isn’t clear.

On trial is Oskar Groening, a 93-year-old man who was the accountant at Auschwitz, marking the first time someone not directly responsible for murder has been tried in connection with the deaths at Nazi concentration camps.

Utah is better prepared for floods than for drought

4/21/2015

Author Wallace Stegner once wrote that, “Water is the true wealth in a dry land.”

That sounds a bit more highfalutin’ than “whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’,” a quote that sometimes is attributed to Mark Twain but that probably is just an anonymous common-sense observation about life in the West.

Either way, you get the idea. Humanity may have learned how to settle and thrive here, but not really

Norm Bangerter was Utah's Harry Truman

4/17/2015

It was early October 1988, and Norm Bangerter and I were knee-to-knee in the cramped quarters of a small twin-engine plane winging its way over the spectacular red and rocky landscape of Southern Utah, on our way back to Salt Lake City after a long day of campaigning.

He was the embattled incumbent governor of a state in economic turmoil, 10 points behind Democratic challenger Ted Wilson in the polls and fighting a third-party challenge from Merrill Cook, who had broken from Republican ranks. I was a young reporter assigned to his campaign, and I was about to ask him a question that, in retrospect, revealed a lot about him.

“What other politician inspires you politically?”

“Harry Truman.”

When I reminded him that Truman was a Democrat, he said he wouldn’t have voted for him. When Bangerter came of age, he cast his first vote

Cliven Bundy a distraction to real federal lands reform

4/14/2015

Some anniversaries are worth celebrating. Cliven Bundy’s militarized stand against his own government isn’t one of them.

But there he was recently with many of his supporters, eating barbecue at a “liberty celebration” to mark one year since they got federal officials to back down with a show of force. He still owes more than $1 million in grazing fees, but the Bureau of Land Management no longer has much to say about that.

"BLM no longer exists in this section of Nevada," Robert Crooks, founder of the Mountain Minutemen, told an NPR reporter.

That means a section of Southern Nevada has a lot in common with remote parts of Pakistan and decaying sections of Detroit — places where traditional governments and police departments fear to tread. The NPR report featured a photo of a homemade sign near the Bundy ranch that said, “’Welcome and enjoy a free land’ by the people.”

What Americans really thought of Lincoln's assassination

4/8/2015

No matter how far America travels down the roads of time, the Civil War never seems too far behind.

Tuesday will mark the 150th anniversary of the evening when a delightfully funny stage production turned into an assassination tragedy. What happened at Ford’s Theatre the night President Abraham Lincoln was shot has come to symbolize the end of one conflict and the beginning of another — a post-war struggle pitting ancient prejudices against the search for a sense of national identity

Act of honesty shows we're not so crooked, after all

4/7/2015

Every so often we need a reminder that we’re not all going to Helena in a hand basket, or something like that.

So it’s lucky that, every so often, someone like Dan Kennedy makes the news.

He was driving to work a few days ago when he saw a large orange bag on an off-ramp from I-80 near Salt Lake International Airport. He stopped to move it so it wouldn’t become a traffic hazard when he discovered it came from an armored Brinks truck — just the kind of thing enterprising criminals have been known to spend hours plotting to steal.

It was 4 feet tall, 2 feet wide and weighed about 75 pounds, he said. Take the bills in your wallet right now and estimate how many of them it would take to equal 75 pounds. Then calculate the value if many of them were $50 and $100 notes.

This is anyone’s definition of a very good commute; a veritable cache of commuter cash; the modern

Working a little harder for your tax freedom

4/3/2015

Politicians often act as if there are several sets of taxpayers — one each for local, school, state and federal budgets. You know better, of course, because you get bills for all of the above.

And when more than one government gets the same idea — raising gas taxes, for instance, or adding to the sales tax — your wallet can begin to feel like one of those footballs New England quarterback Tom Brady likes to use. Except that it doesn’t help you get a grip.

Obama coming to town; where are all the protesters?

4/1/2015

When I heard President Obama is coming to Utah this Friday, I cringed a little.

Not because I don’t want the president to come, and not that I’m not flattered that this isn’t the last state he will visit while in office (sorry, South Dakota). It’s just that I remember August of 2006.

That was when George W. Bush came to Salt Lake City to speak to an American Legion convention. Salt Lake City’s mayor at the time, Rocky

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