A world of despair

This post caught my attention because the writer seems so honest about his feelings and what’s going on in this world.

As I was thinking about this column, there was a part of me that knew I had to write about Haiti and there was another part that simply wanted to ignore it.

On the one hand, we are faced with a humanitarian disaster in Porte-au-Prince that cannot be ignored. An estimated 200,000 people have died. Thousands have been traumatically injured, and many of them will die of their injuries or disease. These people are not just statistics, they are men and women and children with faces and names and feelings. Those who survive will be living in a ruined country without hospitals, utilities or housing. Finding water and food is a daily struggle. Haiti was a basket case before the earthquake and now there is not even a basket.

On the other hand, I want to ignore Haiti. I am suffering from what has been called compassion fatigue. Or maybe it is simply despair. The economy of the world is in the toilet. Unemployment in the U.S. will stay around 10 percent for the rest of the year. Wars are going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over Africa. There are millions of refugees around the world. Because of global warming, humanity is heading pell-mell toward an ecological cataclysm that will make the Haitian disaster pale to insignificance. And partisan politics has created gridlock in Washington making it impossible to deal with any of these crises.

Check out the full post here.

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NH teacher, 100, gets degree a day before dying

CONCORD, N.H. – It was Harriet Richardson Ames’ dream to earn her bachelor’s degree in education. She finally reached that milestone, nearly three weeks after achieving another: her 100th birthday.

On Saturday, the day after receiving her diploma at her bedside, the retired schoolteacher died, pleased that she had accomplished her goal, her daughter said. Ames had been in hospice care.

“She had what I call a ‘bucket list,’ and that was the last thing on it,” Marjorie Carpenter said Tuesday.

Ames, who turned 100 on Jan. 2, had earned a two-year teaching certificate in 1931 at Keene Normal School, now Keene State College. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in South Newbury, and later spent 20 years as a teaching principal at Memorial School in Pittsfield, where she taught first-graders.

Through the years, she had taken classes at the University of New Hampshire, Plymouth Teachers College and Keene State to earn credits for her degree. With her eyesight failing, she stopped after retiring in 1971 and was never sure if she had enough credits.

Her wish for a degree became known when a Keene State film professor interviewed her a couple of years ago for a piece on the college’s own centennial, which the school celebrated last year.

The school decided to research her coursework and see if it could award Ames her long-sought diploma. The offices of the provost, registrar and other departments worked quickly in the last month to determine, that indeed, it could.

Full Article

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The State of the Union is . . .

One thing I keep hearing about this week is whether or not President Obama will say, “The state of our Union is strong.”  And that got me to thinking, how often has that phrase been said either at a State of the Union address or an Address of the President to the Joint Session of Congress (you know, that first speech the president gives at the beginning of his term that’s just like the State of the Union but it’s not since he’s new to the job and doesn’t really have anything to report).

So I decided to look over all of these speeches (minus special addresses like the one right after 9/11 and the conclusion of Desert Storm) since 1986, the beginning of Reagan’s second term.  I could have went back further, but hey, I’m a one man research crew.

To be honest, it was an interesting trip down memory lane reading all of these speeches, and you can certainly read them faster than they give them, because you don’t have to wait for any applause.

So what did I find?  Well, it wasn’t as clear cut as I would have liked, because some didn’t actually say “the state of the Union is strong,” although there were variations, and some stated that “America” or “the nation is strong.”  But looking at the variations of “the state of the Union is strong” I found it was stated 14 times over the past 24 years.

Here are the totals:

Reagan (second term only) – 1
George H.W. Bush – 1
Clinton – 5
George W. Bush – 7
Obama – 0

What’s interesting about Clinton and George W. Bush is that Clinton liked to make the statement towards the beginning of the speech, and Bush usually mentioned it towards the conclusion.

If you are interested, below the jump are the results of my research.  Links are provided to the transcript of the speech (yeah, C-SPAN!) and I cut and pasted the portion of the speech with the statement, and if the statement wasn’t stated, I included what I thought was something that represented the tone of the speech or something that was pretty close to “the state of the Union is strong.”

And just for the heck of it: Longest State of the Union? Truman in 1946 (over 25,000 words). The shortest? Washington in 1790 (833 words).  And Jefferson actually didn’t give a speech, he preferred sending a letter.

And yes, I enjoy presidential history way too much.

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