The Creative Life

On the weekend, gentle readers, your MatchGirl was listening to Studio 360 on WNYC. Part of the program was about arts funding in public schools (check it out here). Or, more to the point, if a turnaround arts initiative could save schools.

Your MatchGirl only knows what this piece told her about the initiative. But she knows this. Art saves students. And that will be what saves schools.

When your MatchGirl was a kid, she went to several schools. Being the shy, bookish girl before that was a hip thing to be, it wasn't easy to make new friends. But the art room was always a place of solace.

I never would be the smartest kid in class. I would never be the prettiest and I most certainly could never have been, no matter how I longed for it, the most popular. But I could go into the art classroom and feel smart and talented and like I could do anything that I wanted to. I could be accomplished. And I could feel admired.

That was just the self-esteem part of things.

Having the opportunity to participate in arts programs also made me aware that there is seldom one right answer. It made it clear that one could use creativity to arrive at the truth. 

I was never one who did well on standardized tests, probably because of this. My world was always in shades of grey. There was always something that could be the right answer, if only I knew more of the puzzle pieces. 

The thing is, dear readers, when we get out of the classroom and into the real world, it's not so black and white as bubbles filled in with a Number 2 pencil, either. We need creative thinking to make our way in the world - in personal relationships, in the work place, too. Think where we would be without creative thinking. 

And I don't mean think where we would be without the painters and the poets and the composers. Creative thinking is what drives the greatest innovations in our world. Engineers, scientists, mathematicians ... all of these disciplines rely on people who can think outside of previously drawn lines to come to new discovery. 

And they can't land on these discoveries if they've never been taught to wrap their head around problems from a different perspective.

Your MatchGirl, for one, hopes that this initiative proves its worth. And that expands to other schools. She hopes that the school system realizes how many children "No Child Left Behind" is truly failing. 

Who knows, a little creative thinking might help ...

Image: Life

May Day

Today marks May Day, gentle readers, a day when we take pause and think about the rights of those who labor daily. The workforce has changed, of course, since the origins ... but we're still a world full of workers.

What will you do today?
Will you join the Occupy movement in protest and strike?
Will you go to work like it's any other day?
Will you take a moment to think about where we, as workers, as unemployed and underemployed, stand in this world?
Will you look at the protests around the world and think that you have it so good? Or so bad?

Your MatchGirl is interested in your comments. Tell me.


Image source

Safety Nets

Ah, gentle readers. Let's talk about safety nets. I imagine quite a few of you out there are taking advantage of one or another right now. Is unemployment insurance a safety net? Do you become poor living on unemployment insurance for long enough, while you struggle to find a new position?

The federal poverty line is $10,800 a year for a single person, $22,000 for a family of four.

Wow.

Can you imagine living on that? Let alone in New York City, where everything from food to rent costs more than most other places in the US?

About a week ago, GOP Presidential hopeful (and my former Governor) Mitt Romney said, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it." He went on to speak about how he's concerned mostly with the middle class in America, who is struggling. He didn't say that a lot of them are teetering precipitously close to that line of being amongst the very poor.

In your MatchGirl's opinion, gentle readers, Mitt just doesn't get it. While he was governor of Massachusetts (though not voted for by me), it seemed like he might. He rolled out "Obamacare"(otherwise known as health care reform) before Obamacare was even a term. Or, you know, about a year into Obama's career as the Junior Senator from Illinois. Your MatchGirl still has a lot of friends in Massachusetts and the reform itself has mixed reviews, but, overall...  isn't it better to be able to go to the doctor, to take your kids, than to either not be able to or to break the bank doing so? Your MatchGirl thinks maybe.

But back to those safety nets.

Your MatchGirl wonders if there is not something more that can be done.
What good is a safety net, after all, if there is no way to climb out of it?

Sure, the majority of the country isn't at the poverty level. Yet. But that number is growing.

We need more than nets to catch people - that brings to mind fish gasping for air to this seacoast girl's mind. We need a way to make the American dream more than a dream for more Americans

In my opinion, dear readers, this starts with education reform. Big and hard changes that will scare the people who think the only way to measure intelligence is by having a kid fill in little bubbles on a scan card. That there is only one way that kids can learn. I've written about it before. And I'll keep talking about it.

Because America is falling behind - it's falling behind not only the Asian countries that the candidates keep calling out as our biggest threats, but smaller countries, like Finland. Because we don't look at the problem long term.

We look at everything in terms of electability.
In terms of a manufacturing sector that does not exist in the way it did for our grandparents (or parents).
In terms of the good old days where you could provide, well, for a family on a high school degree and where you could be guaranteed a good job with a college degree.
Guess what - we live in a different world. And we need to adapt to it if we're going to survive.

America, dear Mitt, doesn't need safety nets (nor, Mr. Gingrich, does it need trampolines - you just fall back down, you know)

It needs a ladder.

Hiding In Shadows

Today, some groundhog, with a cute name, in some city in America, peeped his little head out of his burrow and saw his shadow.

Or he didn't.

As I write this, gentle readers, I have no idea what the rodent saw.
And it doesn't matter. Not one little bit.

Life keeps on moving and there's no reason that one should hide in the shadows.

Get yourself out there. Say hi. Be seen.


Whatever you do, no matter where you are in your own life, don't go hiding from your own shadow.

Get Out The Vote

People used to line up to vote, gentle readers.

It was a right worth fighting for. It was a privilege worth showing up for.

Yesterday we saw the NH Primary. It was growing up in New Hampshire that made your MatchGirl so interested in the political process. And she's saddened to see its gamemanship only grow as the years go by... But, one thing she knows, dear ones, is that you can only change the rules by taking part. By showing up. By voting your conscience.

No matter you political affiliation, as the year moves on, show up to vote. And to vote for the smaller offices in your town as well - those are the ones that will really affect your life. Those are the ones who will make a difference you can see.

Good luck to us all!

How to Fix Things

Gentle readers, Tuesday was the day of the Iowa Caucus, and next week marks the New Hampshire primary. It marks the beginning of our presidential election cycle.

And while I'll write more, as the year progresses, on this topic, you know that I've been urging you to vote in your local elections, to take part in government at the most local levels if you really want things to improve. But this is the election cycle that gets everyone amped up every four years, so it's the one your MatchGirl will talk about now.

The right to vote is something that people, not so very long ago, fought very hard for. And it's something that we now so easily take for granted.

If we want things to change, gentle readers, we need to take a stand.
We need to stop blaming the politicians (who are, for the most part, royal screw ups, one and all) and take a hard look at how they got into office.
We put them there.
All of us.
We bought into sound bites and rhetoric and the gaming of politics.
We skipped voting at mid-term elections.
We put into office the guys (and gals) we'd like to have a beer (or latte or wine spritzer) with. Not the person who was the best qualified for the job.
And we've been doing it for a long time now.

It's time to stop.
It's time to vote.
It's time to pay attention to what the candidates motivations, beliefs and ideals really are. It's time to look at their voting record.
It's time to respect compromise and to boo political baiting and gamesmanship.

It's time to take responsibility for what's become of this country.
It's time to fix it.

The New Great Depression

Gentle readers, your MatchGirl is a bit terrified. Terrified of what's coming down the pike. Terrified of what is going to become of us.


In reading this piece in the Washington Post earlier this week, I realized that we really are coming to the next great depression in America.


The article, an adaptation of Bruce Springsteen's intro to Someplace in America: Tales From The New Great Depression, reminisces about a book that came out 30 years ago, by the same authors, filled with pictures and stories of ordinary Americans just struggling to get by.


Springsteen writes:

That book — “Journey to Nowhere,” by Dale Maharidge and Michael S. Williamson — put real lives, names and faces on statistics we’d all been hearing about throughout the ’80s. People who all their lives had played by the rules, done the right thing and had come up empty, men and women whose work and sacrifice had built this country, who’d given their sons to its wars and then whose lives were marginalized or discarded. I lay awake that night thinking: What if the craft I’d learned was suddenly deemed obsolete, no longer needed? What would I do to take care of my family? What wouldn’t I do?

Without getting on a soapbox, these are the questions Maharidge and Williamson posed with their words and pictures. Men and women struggling to take care of their own in the most impossible conditions and still moving on, surviving.

Gentle readers, is this not the same thing we've been talking about for the past (over) three years? What happened to this country, the political rut we are stuck in, occurred be cause we as citizen's were too blinded by the glitter of a small economic boom to see failure coming. What has happened to this country has happened to this country before, yes, in the poverty and layoffs of the 80s - where manufacturing jobs started on their inevitable decline - but also in the wake of the "roaring twenties."

Extremes, dear ones, are not sustainable.

The failure that we didn't see coming - how stupid were we. Plants started shutting down in the midwest and the south. The family farm started getting eaten by the factory farm. Wages were cut in half and half again (The great book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding details well what the loss of these types of jobs has done to our country). Towns started to die. This started in the 1980s.

But what did we do? As citizens?
Sure, we donated to FarmAid, but FarmAid still exists. Thirty years later we're still begging for donations to help the family farm. And, maybe, in some places, this is coming. And maybe, as more people really want to know where the food they're eating comes from, we'll see their lives improve. We'll see.

We bemoaned the loss of "real American jobs." We watched Roger & Me. But what else did we do?
Did we "buy American"? Maybe.
Did it help? Not so much.
Because those American cars, at least parts of them, were being manufactured in Mexico and Taiwan and loads of other places where the labor was/is cheap and labor laws barely existent.

What we did not do, gentle ones, is look at the core problem.
What we did not do is to invest in education.
What we did not do was look at spending money now to teach people to be more prosperous in the future.

My generation, Generation X for those of you who pay attention to those things, is the first generation to be, overall, worse off than the one before it. Let's not let it keep getting worse for the ones who come after us.

Let's let our leaders - the ones in office, they work for us, you know - know that we want them to think long term. That we want them to invest in education and innovation. That we want them to look beyond creating 5,000 for the next 3 years and figure out how to create 5,000,000 over the next thirty.

Let's learn a lesson from our past - for once - and push push push for an American where there is a priority placed on learning to the highest level, of the skills that will build a future and carry us forward into the 22nd century.

Sure, we won't be around to see it, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthy investment.