Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Fiscally Surreal

... and surreal on a few other levels as well.

Yesterday I visited our local public middle school. I posted about their plush front offices and huge staff. The more I think about it, the more surreal it becomes. In a nation where we're borrowing more than a trillion dollars a year and in a state where the budget deficits are supposed to be around $20B again this year, the sight of a state-of-the-art office full of about 20 government employees doing the job that two people in a run-down office do at my daughter's school is beyond weird.

It's as if we're watching Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death be played out before us. The revelers are all having fun in their offices, gossiping and discussing lunch plans and attending meetings in their executive conference rooms while outside the financial Red Death sweeps across the land. (California's unemployment rate is above 12% last time I checked.) They ignore what's happening and the party goes on.

It goes on until ...

1 comment:

tim eisele said...

You know what I think you should do? I think you should go to the local school board meeting and demand some answers about what all these people are doing who aren't teachers. And if their answers do not satisfy you, you should *run* for the school board, to get into a position to do something about it.

That's what my father did when I was a kid, anyway.