This Isn't Short.Try Very Hard to Cope With That.

Cuts on a national level can be a little tough to accuratley interpret, so I'm going to try something a little different.

I've had a lot of fun pretending to be a writer over the last three years, but sometimes even pretending can be troublesome and emotional and generally prickly to the point where the idea of running around with a pencil in my hand and a notepad stuffed in my jacket becomes far less sexy than I'd like it to be.

Last March, Chet Culver--ex-governor and the first democrat I've ever voted against--hopped onto TVs across the state just to let everybody know that education as we knew it was about to end. Culver requested a 10% reduction of the state budget, and the majority of Iowa's state budget is appropriated to health and education services.At the time, this portioning of the budget was a major contributor to Iowa's reputation as the education state, but that was before things got ugly for the Big House.

These cuts had two direct effects, they terrified just about everybody in the state of Iowa, and they forced education administrators into a mad program-cutting scramble to save their  local budgets and their jobs. It was as a loyal and ethical observer of this scramble that I came away with one of my favorite off-the-record stories of the misery and stupidity of politics.

My school district held two special meetings to discuss the cuts, one to announce their specific budget reduction plan, and another to let the community have their say. Our share of the cut was 5.3 million dollars, and the bulk of it had to come out of teacher jobs and school programs.

I had nothing better to do those days, so I showed up at both meetings as a scruffy teenage reporter.  The first meeting terrified me, I can't say how the district's teachers felt about it specifically, but I can raise the farily responsible conjecture that a proposal to loose a bag of rattlesnakes in each school, allowing them to make the cuts fairly and equitaby, probably would've received rounds of applause if set in comparison to the district plan that unfolded in course of that two-hour meeting.

Among the bright ideas discussed were heavy general staff cuts (including 20 jobs from my school's English and History programs respectively), cuts to fine-arts, athletics, and the closing of Dubuque's alternative high school--a decision that would strand 160 students between two schools (and a crock, but we won't get into that). There were 3 levels to the cuts corresponding to increases in general nastiness, A, B, and  C. A seemed like it might be the end of education in Iowa, C seemed like a brilliant plan to raise revenue for the district by making it the ideal choice for the  filming of Mad Max IV.

The first meeting may have been terrifying, but the second meeting set a new standard in depression. The meeting sold itself as a chance for the community to speak out, and it was, but before the meeting even began a district official had already made it entirely clear to me that nobody would be listening.

Cuts are tough to make, but they're even tougher to plan out in the long term, and he made it clear to me that if Thomas Jefferson, Clarence Darrow and the Kingfish were to barge into the meeting and mount a passionate appeal on behalf of the 4th grade woodwinds, it would make about as much difference as Old Lady #1's geriatric ramblings about the school bus route.

After nearly 100 minutes of reasonable, articulate, passionate pleas from reasonable, articulate, passionate people, the only unreasonable, inarticulate, dispassionate spectators approved the A level cuts unanimously as if a strong wind had impeded their disscusion for an hour and a half.

I've described the cuts lightly to this point, but I want to make it clear that they weren't at all funny.
More of my teachers and friends lost their jobs than I care to mention, our alternative high school closed and  many of our poor students--sorry, I meant students faced with socio-economic barriers--lost another of their admittedly marginal chances of graduating. My school will never be the happy place packed with highly effective people that it once was, and now there are almost certainly more cuts on the way.

I've been long and boring and I'm sorry, I'll wrap it up.

If a person who lives 2 miles away from me can't respectfully  hear the opinions of his friends and neighbors and make the right choices with respect to their values, how is John Boehner going to pull it off when he's never even met us before?  How are enivronmental protection and education and public broadcast examples of rampant government spending when they benefit so many so directly?
How am I really going to do this job for the rest of my life if I don't even believe in it now?

When the meeting was over, I went home and I poured my righteous fury onto paper and I did it right, I kept my opinion out of it. I covered the cuts extensively and I even pulled out the parts people weren't talking about and explained them too. I really did put my heart into the process of reporting the story from start to finish
and nearly a year later I'm waiting patiently for the next round of horrendously stupid cuts to begin
"Alphonse Karr was Right."--Hunter S. Thompson.