A twenty-inch gun

Thursday, light but indirectly wet.  Nothing really falling from the sky, but the roads were wet enough to set the wipers to scrape-the-tire-flung-road-muck-off-the-window mode.  Yesterday afternoon we got real blue-sky sun for a bit.  I even managed a top-down drive home.

This Thursday isn't even pretending to be Friday or the weekend. It feels much more like Wednesday, with as much work yet to get through as already accomplished.  The calendar has a list of meetings and events, and the task list is still showing a number of time-critical items I haven't yet been able to tick off. 

Still grappling with budget reduction numbers and strategies, waiting for the real numbers to coalesce out of the legislative brawl but working with the various models of bad, worse, and gawd-awful we have been given in the mean time.  Shades of the sentiment I sense in the Kenneth Fearing poem $2.50:

But the faith is all gone,

And all the courage is gone, used up, devoured on the first morning of a home relief menu,

You'll have to borrow it from the picket killed last Tuesday on the fancy knitgoods line;

And the glamor, the ice for the cocktails, the shy appeal, the favors for the subdeb ball? O.K.,

O.K.,

But they smell of exports to the cannibals,

Reek of something blown away from the muzzle of a twenty-inch gun;

In a letter to legislators, one of our state universities correctly observes, "In essence, the "public" in Washington's public state universities no longer refers to who is paying for the education of our sons and daughters—that burden has obviously shifted, predominantly, to them and their families." Between cuts in education funding soon to approach the 50% mark, dramatic increases in tuition rates (in the 50%+ range by the time this biennium is over), and the threat to both state and federal financial aid sources for students, we may soon be facing a scarcity of students, with higher education effectively priced out of the reach of many (most?).  This is the smoking twenty-inch gun we are staring down. 

What becomes of a nation where a majority of its citizens are not educated beyond a basic industrialized high school level, in an increasingly educated and competitive global economy? At what point do we become fit only for the low-wage manufacturing jobs from other industrialized nations?  How many generations does it take to lose our global lead in research and innovation? From here, today, it looks very much like we will get the chance to find out.

On the commute-music front, it was quite the playlist this morning.  It started off with a beautiful variation on one of Chopin's most beautiful nocturnes, then jarringly followed up by the Beatles, crowing rooster, barking dogs, barnyard and all, shouting, "Good morning, good morning!" Back down to solo piano with David Lanz, then a couple of folksy-rock ballads, and finishing with the opening bars of some great straight-up jazz from the inimitable Bill Evens and Stan Gets.  Not sure why so many tunes fit into today's drive, since I didn't stop and don't recall it being any longer than usual, though come to think of it I did manage to wait through every traffic light possible along the way.

The full playlist:

 - Jacques Loussier: Nocturne No. 20 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. Posthume

 - Beatles:  Good Morning Good Morning

 - David Lanz:  Madre de la Tierra

 - Melissa Etheridge: God is in the People

 - Bob Dylan: Tangled Up in Blue

 - The Bill Evens Trio/Stan Getz: But Beautiful