Light/Breezes

Light/Breezes
SUNRISE AT DEATH VALLEY-Photo by Tom Cochrun

Sunday, April 15, 2018

The Resilience

    It's a trick we never tire of. And it is a heady tonic; new life, rebirth, an élan vital for those deepest chambers of who we are. Spring reminds me.

      It makes us look, 

     creates intrigues,
  and broods. 

   Ben, my late friend, producer and television business partner joked that after college he wanted to open an office in Manhattan and sell words and lines. 
   Please allow me to offer you a new line....

  sight lines
   Here are some visual lines that deserve a well done!
  
     (some tricky window washing required here)


   Oh yea! Ice cream done this way.


   Nature or nurtured, spring brings hope. BTW, does anybody know what is the tree with these pods?

they deserve the best
    Among those to whom we can take such a question is a teacher. I'm one of those who think teachers are among the very most important people in our culture. I also think we should be ashamed at the economic dislocation between the crucial role players they are in shaping a future, and what we pay them. 
    Pay inequity is a disease in the body politic, a symbol of a social code or set of values that is wrong and dangerous. 
    I read a note to her mother by a teacher who has participated in the protests and demonstrations in Oklahoma. She spends her own money to help feed her students and to provide the support material they need to learn. She is grossly underpaid to begin with. They sacrificed further to take the message to the street and to the state government.
    I spent enough time reading city and county budgets, school board budgets, state budgets, federal budgets and all manner of analysis and accountability studies to know there is always a way to pay public servants more than what they are paid.
    In a philosophical finish I question whether any corporate ceo, cfo, coo, or board member is worth their salary, really! I'm more confident saying what they do is not more important than shaping the intellect of a child. The discrepancies between what we expect of teachers and what we pay them has to end, even if it means a radical restructuring of our current way of doing public business, which is obviously broken.
    As a post script-my resume includes being a president/ceo, an occupant of the corner office. CEO salaries are like pay of professional athletes. You might be able to make a "justification" given an organizations income but it's still absurdly inflated. That is never more true than compared to what we pay teachers, fire fighters, cops, health department workers, etc, etc. 

    See you down the trail. 


3 comments:

  1. Listening to "Marketplace" on NPR they brought up bonuses for corporate level officers when a company goes bankrupt, they didn't get a logical answer. Maybe they should have said, "Because they can."

    MY school teacher daughter just got a 7k raise, of course she will be running a program that will take up 15k of her time.

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  2. Interesting piece on 60 Minutes tonight about the CEO of Salesforce and gender equality.

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