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Conventional wisdom tends to be a step behind changing trends, especially when it comes to things people have believed for centuries.
So chances are, if you’re in a dinner party and you bring up the subject of the world’s population, your fellow guests are likely to default to worries about too many people.
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If you have problems with vertigo, you probably shouldn’t involve yourself with trying to assess public school performance in Utah. It doesn’t take long for otherwise healthy people to get dizzy.
The latest report from the non-partisan, non-profit, just-the-facts Utah Foundation does an admirable job trying to make sense of any relationship between spending and outcomes in Utah’s public education. That’s an age-old question. Trust me on this one. About 20 years ago, while serving as opinion editor, I decided to begin republishing one letter to the editor each week from the vast archives of the Deseret News. I found many from the early 20th century decrying the lack of funding for education and the need to pay teachers more. The text came in the middle of a busy day, while I was in mid-sentence of an editorial.
“Hey,” the person I don’t know said, “You’re my number neighbor.” I glanced at the number atop the text. Sure enough, it was identical to mine except that the last digit was one number lower. “It appears so,” I answered after a few moments of hesitation. The return came swiftly. “What’s up?” Summer is almost gone, and Utah lawmakers have yet to come up with a winning bumper sticker argument for why major tax reform is needed, and especially why the state should begin charging sales taxes for some services.
This could prove problematic as cool weather approaches and a tax reform task force struggles to come up with something that could become law. The Food and Drug Administration has some new TV ads showing street magician Julius Dein using tricks to convince teenagers not to smoke e-cigarettes. They might work, if kids watched TV.
This isn’t the early 1970s, when Washington first took cigarette ads off TV and radio. Today’s teens see ads on Youtube and impatiently wait the requisite five seconds to dismiss them. They communicate on social media and, like so many of the adults around them, don’t pay much attention to news stories. Mass shootings make up a small portion of the total gun deaths in the United States each year. In 2016, 71 people died in one, compared with 14,415 in other firearm-related murders, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Mother Jones.
But these statistics and comparisons mean little to the nation’s psyche, which is reeling from a feeling of terror and helplessness. A few days ago, I found myself pulling into a motel in Battle Mountain, Nevada late at night, part of an impromptu trip to rescue a relative whose car had broken down during a long journey.
From inside the car, I could hear the snap, snap, snap of blue bug lights hung around the motel’s perimeter, a rapid-fire sound I first mistook for small firecrackers. These weren’t the ordinary bugs of a sultry summer night. They were grasshoppers — thousands of them. They swarmed around the entrance to my room, hopping in front of me as I tried to maneuver inside. I wish I had counted the times Republican lawmakers assured everyone last winter that people in Washington said Utah likely would get a waiver to make a partial expansion of Medicaid work.
Vote for SB96, they said. We’re pretty sure everything will be OK. "I will just emphasize that it is highly unlikely that we need to be concerned about this," the Deseret News quoted House Speaker Brad Wilson saying in February. The dog days of summer may be a good time to float questionable political ideas. It beats watching watch members of Congress bloviating at hearings — a little, anyway.
Two such ideas have surfaced in recent days. The first is online voting, announced Tuesday as a pilot project in Utah County for active-duty military members serving overseas, presumably with smartphones in their pockets or a strong desire to cast ballots while in pajamas. The second is a new refrain on term limits, an idea that has persisted through more than a generation of failed attempts in Utah. As of Tuesday morning, firefighters had the upper hand battling a blaze in Emigration Canyon that, for a while, forced some evacuations. While that was going on, 23 people were displaced in Layton because of a fire that reportedly started in the kitchen.
In Draper, a house fire killed a woman and injured a small child. The cause had yet to be determined as of Tuesday. Meanwhile, temperatures seem stuck in the 90 to 100 degree range. The Federal Emergency Management Agency this week issued heat advisories for much of the Wasatch Front. It’s dangerously hot, which isn’t unusual for this time of year. |
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The author
Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has 32 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities. Archives
May 2019
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