Meet your new friend, kids

This piece originally ran in The Alliance Review on March 1, 2018, shortly after then-President Trump suggested that some teachers should be armed in the classroom . Sadly, lawmakers are resurrecting the same tired debate in 2022. 

Good morning, class. I’m Mrs. Rosenfeld.

Class, class? Please, pay attention.

As I said, I’m Mrs. Rosenfeld, and welcome to the sixth grade.

We have a new friend in class this year, and you can all see him on my hip. Yes, a gun. I am now licensed to carry this weapon in school because of certain awful things that have been happening in our country.

What sort of things? Well, some bad people have been getting into our schools and hurting students, so the president, and Congress — you know, the people who make the laws — and the NRA have decided that I am now responsible for protecting all of you with this weapon.

Excuse me, what’s that? Yes, you. Jason, right?

Oh, yes, Jason, the gun is loaded.

And you? Sierra, isn’t it?

Do I want to carry the gun? That’s a very good question, and I’m not sure I know how to answer it. See, I’m just a few years away from retirement, and my evaluations haven’t been so good lately, so I guess I felt like it was in my best interest to say yes when I was … “voluntold” to protect the entire sixth grade.

What is “voluntold”? You’re a little young to understand, but sometimes you volunteer to do things to help people, and sometimes you are told to volunteer or feel pressured to volunteer. Yes, like when your mommy and daddy make you rake your grandma’s leaves. That’s a terrific example, Jasmine.

Yes, you in the back — Freddy. Oh, great question. Freddy wants to know what a little gun like this will do against an AR-15, which is a much bigger gun that shoots a lot faster and has been used by some bad people to hurt students and teachers. (Freddy certainly knows his guns, doesn’t he?)

Well, Freddy, I don’t really know the answer to that, and I hope we never have to find out. They told me at gun-training school — yes, sometimes teachers go to school just like kids — that some of the best-trained professionals, like police officers, only hit their targets 30 percent of the time, and when the targets are shooting back, that drops to 18 percent, so I don’t know how’d I’d do in a situation like that, and I hope we never have to find out.

But if I ever tell you all to duck, then you duck, just like in the drills from last year, OK?

Another question, Sierra? You certainly are an inquisitive young lady.

I don’t seem excited about having this gun in class? Well, maybe excited isn’t the right word. I mean, I’m excited to teach you math, and when I was a little girl I used to dream about how exciting it would be to teach kids how to read. So, no, “excited” is not how I’d describe having this gun, especially when I have to keep track of it all day, even while I’m walking around your desks and bending down to help you figure out long division.

What’s that? You heard Mr. Bailey in the seventh grade really likes his gun? That’s nice, I suppose. And he likes to sometimes brush his hand across the holster when he makes assignments or disciplines his class? Hmm. Maybe that seems a little threatening, yes? No, it’s not? Oh, because he says it’s not — it’s just a habit he has. I see. Mr. Bailey told me at a faculty meeting last week that he imagines a day when some teachers will want to teach just so they can carry guns around kids because they really like them. Guns, that is, not kids. Although they probably will like kids too. I suppose.

Can you ask that again?

Oh, that’s a terrific question, Jerome. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to add more guns to make schools safer, does it? But the NRA tells us it is “counterintuitive.” That’s a big word that means “different than what you expect.” So if we add guns in each and every classroom in America, and use time in college that used to be spent teaching people how to be better teachers to show them how to load, unload and shoot, we will be making education better for every child.

Would I ever shoot a misbehaving child? Heavens no, Benjamin. What would ever make you ask such a question?

Oh, you overheard Mr. Bailey saying it in the hallway with another teacher. Well, I’m sure he was just kidding. After all, he had to be psychologically evaluated before he even went to gun school for teachers and before he got a bonus for carrying a weapon.

What’s a bonus?

Well, that leads us right into our first math lesson of the year. Now if you’ll all open your books to page seven, we can begin.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Send in the clowns. Never mind, they're too creepy

In a week dominated by discouraging news, as more and more weeks are, one bright spot was the imminent return of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Like most things, however, it won’t be quite what it once was. But, just maybe, it can be something better.

The venerable — and, for some nostalgia-seekers, venerated — circus folded up its tents for what appeared to be the final time in 2017, a victim of changing mores. Many spectators had cooled on animal acts, and bleachers that were once as packed as the inside of a clown car were starting to be more sparsely filled.

But this week the company announced the circus would reopen in 2023. The most visible change will be the lack of animals, a decision activists are applauding. Company executives are throwing around the buzzword “evolving” to explain contemporary attempts to wow jaded audiences in an era of “Jackass”-style stunts, TikTok and CGI effects.

Based on numerous media reports, the new circus will have an emphasis on human performers and their biographies, making it feel more like an episode of those ubiquitous TV talent shows. You know the ones, where every performer has a sick relative at home or an insurmountable obstacle they’re chipping away at through sheer talent and moxie.

The 2023 circus, as it turns out, may be more about grit than grease paint.

While the thought of a “narrative show,” as the revamped spectacle is described in The New York Times, doesn’t necessarily thrill me, it is encouraging to see the circus trying to change with the times, and doing it without animals.

As a kid, I don’t think I ever made it to an actual Ringling Brothers circus. I do recall some version of a circus that would pitch a few tents on the east side of Alliance, just past Mahoning Avenue. Even then, the elephants and other animals looked scrawny and sad. Although to be fair, I didn’t know what a happy elephant looked like.

The era of animals-as-performers is receding further and further in the rearview mirror, so that entertainments that Americans consumed thoughtlessly in decades past – Sea World, I’m looking at you – are now largely verboten, thanks in large part to well-organized activism that changed hearts and minds.

None of which takes away from the majesty and spectacle of such creatures, nor from the curiosity of spectators, young and old, to see them. A far better place to engage with lions and tigers and bears – say it with me, I know you want to – is a zoo, where animals are kept in environments closer to their natural habitat and cared for by trained professionals.

Zoos aren’t perfect, but the best ones focus on conservation. They shield animals from the stresses of travel and predation. The alternative, returning animals to their natural habitats, is sadly impossible, as humanity has already decimated said habitats too much.

Beyond the animal issue, I wonder if any of the new circus acts will feature clowns, which are as intertwined in circus lore as elephants and lions.

Nobody asked me (which happens a lot), but I suspect not. The clowning profession should file a class-action lawsuit against Stephen King, who took their admittedly always-present creepiness and upped it by a factor of ten in 1986’s “It.” With multiple generations scared and scarred by that novel and its two movie adaptations, it’s hard to imagine spectators chuckling as Pennywise-lookalikes spray one another with water from fake flowers.

Ultimately, consumers will judge if a circus without animals, possibly without clowns, and maybe even bereft of big tops and other bona fides is a place they want to take their families. Or if the circus will go the way of penny arcades and vaudeville.

One thing’s for sure, if it doesn’t work out, nobody can say Ringling Brothers didn’t make a good-faith effort to change with the times and reinvent itself, albeit belatedly, for the 21st century.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Roamin' for Romans is new example of thrift

Talk about a head-scratcher.

A woman in Texas was shopping at Goodwill in 2018 when she bought a Roman bust. Not a “bust” bust, like some dirty minds are imagining, but a head. Think Nero or Caligula or one of those other noble Romans.

Turns out the bust wasn’t some replica that had gone rogue from the local Olive Garden. No, it was legit – an authentic sculpture dating back 2,000 years. So about 10 years younger than my mother-in-law.

According to published reports, the shopper paid $34.99 for it (the head, not my mother-in-law), transported it home by car after securing it with a seatbelt, named it after a character in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and presumably did all the other things that people in “Weekend at Bernie’s” did with poor Bernie’s flaccid body.

I imagine her taking the bust on vacation to the Caribbean, dancing the flamenco with it and watching sappy black-and-white movies on rainy days. She probably dabbed its eyes when Ronald Reagan said to “win one for the Gipper.”

Nothing in the last paragraph really happened, of course. At least to my knowledge.

Instead, Our Hero assumed her find was valuable, contacted the sort of people who assign monetary figures to old, musty busts and found out that, yep, it was once the noggin of a bonafide Roman statue.

Eventually, after it’s been displayed in a museum, officials will return it to Bavaria, from whence it previously was looted by the Nazis before being further looted – uh, liberated – by an American soldier before being brought back to the U.S. before being sold to a Goodwill.

Lots of “befores” in that last sentence. Next year, it’ll befive.

To think that the only valuable thing most people ever get at a thrift shop is bedbugs. And those are only valuable to an exterminator’s bottom line. But here is somebody who won the flea market equivalent of the Triple Crown and the Grand Slam (the golf championships, not the Denny’s breakfast, although the breakfast is pretty good, too). She should have been set for life, right?

Wrong.

Surprisingly, the thrift shopper didn't profit from the piece. Apparently, “finders keepers” and “possession is 9/10 of the law” hold up only in schoolyard swaps of comic books and marbles, not the marble head of some long-dead general.

I can imagine a latter-day Indiana Jones, protecting the head with a bullwhip while shouting, “This piece belongs in a museum!”

Not only couldn't she sell it, but I can’t find confirmation that she even gets reimbursed for the $35. If so, does it come from Goodwill or the government? And if it’s the government, is it American or Bavarian? And does she have to claim it on her taxes?

At least she gets her name on a fancy plaque displayed next to the piece. That, and $35, would buy a halfway decent meal at Denny’s. Maybe a Grand Slam for the recipient and a friend, provided the friend isn’t the severed-marble head of a first-century Roman. (Maybe it can at least order off the kids’ menu.)

Anyway, every news cycle has winners and losers. This hapless shopper is one of the week’s losers.

She thought she was getting ahead, but all she got was a head. And now she’s gone and lost her head, although at least she generated some headlines.

And before this commentary heads toward disaster, it’s time to head out.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Too much noise in census results, or not enough?

Years ago, a speaker at a seminar I attended advised teachers to intentionally make mistakes on tests for students to find. The premise was that these errors would make educators appear more human.

It was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. Mistakes happen often enough without making them on purpose.

I wonder if similar concerns wafted through statisticians’ heads at the U.S. Census Bureau over so-called differential privacy. The controversial practice introduces “noise,” or mistakes, into census data to make it harder for third parties to reconstruct the identities of census respondents.

The law requires census records to stay private for 72 years, so it was just last month that the National Archives opened the vault, so to speak, and released names and addresses from 1950.

However, many experts argue that data from the 2020 census, already marred by controversy over President Trump’s insistence that it exclude unauthorized immigrants (he lost that bid), could be merged with publicly available information to reveal the identities of individual respondents almost immediately if steps aren’t taken to obscure them.

A recent New York Times report mentions a census block in Chicago that has 14 people living underwater. They don’t really, of course, but the census computers assigned them there to make it harder for bad actors to connect the information to specific people. And this particular census block is just one of tens of thousands such locations that are wrong in the name of privacy.

It’s the proverbial Rock, meet Hard Place situation. On the one hand, people who volunteer potentially sensitive information on a Census Bureau survey do so because their identities will remain anonymous. Without such a guarantee, they are less likely to share information, which makes census results less complete.

On the other hand, intentional errors in census data – even for the best of reasons – undermine the public’s faith in that data, used to determine budgets, government aid, and legislative districts.

Some readers likely feel the same nonchalance toward census privacy that they do to various forms of in-person or online surveillance. In other words, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, what are you worried about? Out of 330 million people in the nation, why would somebody bother to reconstruct information about you and the people you know?

That’s an easy attitude to have if you’re a WASP and most of your personal data couldn’t be weaponized against you.

But if you’re a minority, or an immigrant, or LGBTQ+, answering census questions increases the chances that some unscrupulous third party could merge your data with other readily available information (voting registration, for instance) and create a list to share with the world. Why take the risk?

Still, fuzzing up the data creates its own set of challenges. The whole “people living underwater” faux pas was an unintentional mistake made in the course of trying to make an intentional mistake, a computer that randomly assigned respondents to a census block that no longer has at least one person actually living in it.

And it doesn’t humanize the US Census Bureau, like that long-ago speaker suggested would happen when students caught teachers in a mistake. No, Americans already recognize the bureau is all too human, trying to do an impossible job made even more challenging since the advent of easily available computing power in the hands of those who would misuse it.

I don’t know the solution. Results should not be made inaccurate in the name of privacy, and privacy should not be violated in the name of accuracy.

At least the Census Bureau will have more time to ponder it, as most 2020 data has been delayed until next year, partially because of COVID and partially because of this fuzzy-data issue.

Is there a middle ground – private enough? accurate enough?

One “enough” is for sure: Whatever the solution, It’ll never be enough to satisfy everybody.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Look, Ma, it's me — on Friday!

Here I am on Friday.

In all the years I’ve written a weekly column, I’ve never appeared regularly on this day. Even so, I’ve always considered Friday the best fit for what I first pitched as a lighthearted look at the world.

No day is better situated to help readers blow off steam after a week in white- or blue-collar America. And no day is more forgiving. Even the bosses are less annoying because you won’t see them for the next two days.

After all, if I rile you up with my opinion on a Friday morning, with only eight hours between you and the end of the workweek, how angry can you be? And if I make you angry on a Friday night, after the trials and tribulations of the day have passed … well, let’s be honest, you probably aren’t reading this on a Friday night. Too many other things to do.

Days of the week don’t matter much in the newspaper industry these days. The print product exists mostly to round up material posted on a “newspaper” website hours or even days earlier. Readers no longer worry about the paperboy tossing their laptops or phones into a mud puddle or onto the roof, and those two means of communication – laptops and phones, not mud puddles and roofs – are the way most readers get information in this brave new world.

Still, Fridays are pretty cool.

Pop-culture enthusiasts of a certain age, and especially aficionados of TV horror and sci-fi, know Fridays have a distinguished pedigree. The first three seasons of “The Twilight Zone” aired on Friday nights. “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” a short-lived series about a heroic reporter — see, newspapers again! — battled vampires and zombies on Fridays. “Kolchak” is arguably best remembered for starring Darren McGavin before he went on to holiday immortality as the father in “A Christmas Story.”

In my childhood, Friday nights were the home of the greatest one-two (and sometimes -three) in semi-rural, corduroy-pants-wearing history – “The Incredible Hulk,” followed by “The Dukes of Hazzard,” followed by – if Mom and Dad fell asleep – the super-steamy “Dallas,” all on CBS.

If I were really lucky, I stayed awake until 11:30 p.m. for “Hoolihan and Big Chuck,” the Cleveland movie hosts. They eventually morphed into “Big Chuck and Little John,” mixing un-politically correct sketches with bottom-of-the-barrel fright flicks.

If you’re getting the impression that my social calendar wasn’t exactly filled to bursting, you’re not wrong. My idea of fun was to invite friends over on Friday nights and subject them to arduous sessions of recording my homemade comedy scripts on a portable tape recorder, complete with sound effects of flushing toilets and slamming doors.

For some reason, few friends came over more than once.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the greatest Friday series of all, “The X-Files,” which aired on that night for its first few seasons before being moved to a much-less-scary Sunday timeslot. I’m traumatized enough by thoughts of work on Monday; I don’t need extra thrills courtesy of Mulder and Scully, thank you very much.

I realize for most people Friday night is more about whatever high school sport is in season, preceded or followed by pizza and adult beverages. Whatever floats your boat.

For me, though, Fridays have always been about horror and comedy, in somewhat equal measure.

And if you think about today’s world, being scared senseless or laughing hysterically at the news is pretty much de rigueur, pardon my French.

So catch me in this space each Friday, if you’re so inclined. I’ll do my best to scare you or make you chuckle, like the Incredible Hulk and Bo and Luke Duke, way back when.

And if you really want me to, I can stop over and record the sound of your toilet flushing or your doors slamming. I mean, my social calendar is still very open.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Recent decisions put score at Political Expedience 1, Earth 0

It’s one step forward, two steps back for the environment this Earth Day.

The step forward is President Biden’s reinstatement of parts of the National Environmental Policy Act dumped by former President Trump. Federal agencies must once again consider greenhouse-gas emissions for proposed projects like pipelines and roadways, and local communities unduly impacted by such projects will have a stronger voice at the bargaining table.

The step back is the decision by Biden to once again allow the federal government to drill for oil and gas on public lands, violating a signature campaign promise.

Neither decision is as big a deal as it first appears, which may provide some political cover from fallout on both sides of the aisle.

Restoring parts of the National Environmental Policy Act will have little immediate effect because “the Biden administration had already been weighing the climate change impacts of proposed projects,” according to a New York Times story. The long-range implications are for future administrations, which must abide by the same set of rules.

Unfortunately, nothing can stop a future president from doing just what Trump did by gutting parts of a policy he disagreed with, or what Biden did by restoring it. So the announcement effectively changes nothing in the short term and is poised to have a dubious impact in the long term, depending on which way the political winds blow. But it’s good political theater for Earth Day.

The drilling decision, too, is something less than it first appears, neither a slam-dunk win for fossil-fuel advocates nor a sky-is-falling moment for environmentalists. This is because it will be years before such drilling actually commences, and because the new permits come with a steep increase in the royalties that drilling companies pay to the federal government.

Optimists might say the two announcements give Biden a chance to demonstrate moderation and compromise, components sorely lacking in politics today. Pessimists might note that the twin decisions give everybody something to be mad about.

Without a doubt, the high price of gasoline, coupled with ongoing inflation, have many Americans cranky about their budgets, with some facing hard, no-win decisions as a result. Biden is trying to balance his commitment to fighting climate change with the immediate reality of Americans being more worried about finances than saving the environment.

Coincidentally, as these monetary tensions are bandied about at dinner tables and boardrooms across the country, climate scientists have been protesting in record numbers. More than 1,000 such specialists from 25 different countries, calling themselves the Scientist Rebellion, spoke out earlier this month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report. It warned of more pronounced climate effects if greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t cut in the next three years.

The letter from the Scientist Rebellion is harrowing reading. While it has become reflexive in some quarters to dismiss such warnings as the same white noise that has been playing for decades, the letter demonstrates that many of these predictions, sadly, have come true. Among them are a large decrease in animal populations, an increase in weather extremes, and imminent harm to human habitats and food supplies.

At some point, politicians the world over, at every level, must give priority to the environment, keeping it at the forefront of proactive change no matter which party or regime is in power.

Fighting climate change and decreasing pollution should not be viewed as competing with other pressing concerns. Indeed, a decrease in fossil-fuel usage and more stringent standards for clean air and water are part of the solution to other problems. Abandoning or deemphasizing them – the latter appearing to be the current Biden strategy – when they become politically inconvenient is unacceptable.

Americans should hold their elected officials accountable for their climate promises and press them for long-term policy solutions. Implementation should then be held inviolate, part of a legacy we leave to future generations, who will either prosper or fall based on decisions we make today.

It’s not the Earth we should be worried about this Earth Day, but the people on it. The planet will keep on keeping on. Whether it will do so in a way conducive to human life is the bigger question.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.