Ward on Words

Two years ago, I moved from Illinois to North Carolina. It was a jarring move - I'm a life-time resident of the Land of Lincoln, a state where politics are considered a true sporting event. Yet despite the state-wide passion for political sport, governance of that state is at an all-time low. Governors tend to end up in jail. Illinois is facing a terrible fiscal crisis caused by unfunded pensions. Pat Quinn, Illinois' current governor, is now withholding legislator salaries until the passage of pension reform; House Speaker Mike Madigan, the most powerful man in the state, has filed suit because he wants his paycheck regardless of whether or not a significant, long-term problem is solved for the state. Because of the serious and ongoing political issues of Illinois, I was, to be frank, looking forward to a change of pace.  And the Tar Heel state CERTAINLY has provided that for me... in spades! The GOP has taken charge - and as a colleague told me the other day, the state to...

The North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA) has been exceptionally busy this week. They passed a budget that trashes primary and secondary education - siphons money from public schools to charter schools, offers no raises to teachers (who've been without a raise for years), offers no incentives for teachers to get a masters degree; removes the possibility of tenure from new hires. And that's just education. And it follows remarks McCrory made earlier in the year about higher education in North Carolina, home to the first public university in the country: “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it,” McCrory told host Bill Bennett, a former U.S. Secretary of Education. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job." They've just passed one of the most restrictive voter ID bills in recent history (THANK YOU SCOTUS, NOT!) They've also passed one of the most alarming gun bills in America - ...

We live in a world where people in the financial community have turned “bonus” into a debacle – who insist that there’s no reason to work at a place if you can’t make astronomical sums of money, who quit when large bonuses are not paid out to them by a bankrupt company. (Click here for a glimpse into that world...) I am a mother of three small children, and what has been hardest for me, with regard to the collapse of our economy, is reconciling the lessons I teach my children with the situation we have today. I teach my children to share, to help others, to work with others and to become stewards of our community. I see that to succeed in America today, these lessons are fraught with contradiction. Sharing is out of the question. Greed is inevitable. Bonuses are structured so that performance is irrelevant. Really smart people use their intelligence to wrest the most money for themselves. Money is the end, not the means to an end, of our labor in this life. I sound naiv...