[Vision2020] YES ON THE LEVY

[keely emerinemix]

Visionaires,

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of months regarding what kind of town Moscow is, particularly as it applies to business.  Is Moscow pro-commerce and pro-growth?  Or is it pro-environment and pro-neighborhoods?  Do the two have to be mutually exclusive?  And what role, two and a half years after the failure of the facilities bond, and today, four days before the levy election, does education play in what kind of town Moscow is seen as?

It would appear, based on Tuesday's city council election results, that those who believe Moscow is anti-business spoke the loudest and have the largest following.  Many of us who worked hard on the bond believe that its failure made Moscow look anti-public education in its resounding rejection of a plan to upgrade existing schools and build a new high school.  And most of us know of someone who, upon hearing that we live in Moscow, remembers that they heard something about some right-wing church group here that thinks slavery is OK and doesn't allow women on its school board.  

Perception is a pernicious monster.  Whether stench or aroma, it lingers long after reality has had its say.  Anti-business.  Anti-public schools.  Anti-equality for all.  That's probably not going to reap for us a great deal of social or economic benefit from those looking to build and spend, live and grow, somewhere in the nation's second-fastest growing state.  In fact, it makes Moscow look downright scary.

Tomorrow morning I plan to stand in Friendship Square as a proud and privileged supporter of Moscow's upcoming school levy.  That's my plan for the next several hours.  My dedication to public schools and their adequate and appropriate funding will be in my heart and spoken from my lips until the day I die.

What used to be considered a force for the common good -- public education, free and available to all children -- is considered by some of our Moscow neighbors a training ground for all kinds of godless behavior.  A recent comment on Dale Courtney's virulently anti-MSD blog, Right-Mind, says that public schools, funded as they are by tax monies, teach our kids to take things that aren't theirs -- never mind "getting back to the basics" of math, reading, and writing.  Our kids are being taught thievery of the highest order, the writer said, demonstrating conclusively that exposure to Latin and the classes has little impact on logical, virtuous thinking. 

Courtney himself decries the "legality" of indefinite levies, knowing full well that the legality of permanent levies was established by the GOP Idaho Legislature more than two decades ago and applied to MSD in the 1990s in response to the pre-Christ Church era of unwavering, wise, forward-thinking approval of seven consecutive levies.  Courtney, with his usual dishonesty, writes as though there were a public school district somewhere to which  he might, under the right conditions, offer his support.  He's well aware that most of the editorial page readers for whom he writes don't know that he worships God by hating public schools and would no more vote to support them, in any form, than he would publicly applaud the flogging of the Apostle Paul.   And the brilliantly hardhearted Gabe Rench, writing in the Daily News, calls public schools "socialist" in nature and a violation of all that's good and decent in application.   He writes about what's "best" for kids.  One wonders whose kids he means, because denying support for public education certainly isn't good for those kids who didn't spring from his Lbertarian, Reformed loins.  

As if, in community, such a thing mattered.  Rench's pastor, Doug Wilson, doesn't deny that he may well have prayed for the destruction of public schools; he's written eloquently about the need for the dissolution, and Wilson is not one for subtle rhetoric, and while he's often evasive on subjects that make him look bad, he's crystal clear on the need to overturn and abolish the public school system.  Let the Muslims have theirs, he says, and the secularists theirs.  Let there be Jewish schools and Christian schools and Wiccan, blue-collar denominationally unaffiliated schools geared toward same-sex couples and Catholic schools specializing in pre-Vatican II Latin rite Mass.  In short, Wilson says, with not a trace of shame, let me educate my kids.  You educate yours.  And those wretches whose parents can't or won't educate them?  They exist, yes, but undoubtedly to prove only that in the economy of Christ, in the most basic and eternal sense, there truly are the haves and the have-nots.  Like people-shaped cutouts on a Sunday School feltboard, those kids exist as useful illustrations of a greater point, but their needs aren't any of Wilson's  concern.

They are of mine, and I'm guessing they are of yours, too.  We live in Moscow, and regardless of how we feel about business and the economy, religion and the environment, we hate that our town is portrayed as a racist, economically sluggish backwater locked in perpetual struggle with worn-out hippies and socialists who exist solely to hate Wal-Mart.  We know it's not true.  We won't ever let it become true.  But many folks believe that Moscow as we know it is limping towards its grave.  Anti-business.  Racist whackos.  Anti-public education.  That sound you hear is the pounding of nails in a coffin, and it's time for all of Moscow to rise up and reject the deathwish that religiously motivated, anti-community opposition to public schools brings on us.

Keely Emerine Mix
Moscow School District Board of Trustees member, 
2003-2006






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