Tom Finneran: The New Year Beckons
Friday, December 28, 2012
Here’s a year’s end potpourri:
Let’s start with the most important wish of all--that your family will be blessed with good health, which, beyond a strong faith, is the greatest blessing of all. May you also enjoy the blessings of work, opportunity, and prosperity.
Three cheers for GoLocal Worcester and its contributors. And a twenty-one gun salute for the recent GoLocal article calling for an exam school for Worcester. Go for it Worcester. It’s a sterling idea, great for the students and great for the city. For a model, only a few hundred years old now, look to the Boston Latin School which remains the best public school in America (my opinion) and is considerably superior to just about every private school as well. A little known fact: Harvard University was founded in order to give Latin School graduates a further opportunity for education. To this day, the Latin School, yes, an American public high school, will send from 20 to 30 graduates to Harvard each year. And Harvard is lucky to get them because believe me these kids have choices. I know some well-to-do communities in Massachusetts, with good school systems, where there is genuine excitement and pride if one or two of their seniors occasionally gain admission to Harvard. Go for it Worcester. You can and should do it. Mimic the Latin School.
Speaking of Worcester, two of the best sportswriters in America have connections to Woo. Clark Booth who writes for The Pilot (the Boston Archdiocesan weekly) and Dan Shaugnessey who writes for the Globe. I believe that they are graduates of the College of the Holy Cross. I suspect that they are not only keen observers of the athletes and the games athletes play, but that they also were paying attention in class. They write magnificently, with insight and punch. These guys are not toadies. I go looking for their columns. And I invariably learn something from those columns, often laughing along the way. All credit to them, and to their teachers at Holy Cross.
Pro-life and pro-choice politics are loaded with emotion, making it difficult for people to talk quietly in an effort to find common ground, but I must share a recent experience with you. I saw an ultrasound image the other day which labeled the baby in utero as twelve weeks old. It’s heart-stopping imagery of a fully-formed baby, and I suspect that it would give any thoughtful person great pause. Of course, the termination of human life should give great pause...all this at a mere twelve weeks, I remind you.
I spent a fair number of years in politics--far too many according to some of the weekly comments--and there are still some things that I’ll never understand. One of those things is how a person in public life can adamantly espouse a particular position on an important issue and then, a few months later, when political factors have changed, take a position that’s completely opposite their original stance.
Two prime examples should suffice: Republicans who railed loudly about Johnson’s and Carter’s dangerous spending and then went mute during the Reagan, Bush, and Bush deficit spending extravaganzas, actually arguing during the later years that deficits were no longer a serious concern.
And Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, not the only Democrat by the way, who, on the issues of “filibuster reform” and the extension of the “Bush tax rates," has done contortions worthy of Olympic gymnasts. Is this what philosophers mean by “situational ethics”? To my simple and linear mind it is stunning hypocrisy. And make no mistake, it does extraordinary harm to our body politic, entrenching the cynicism and despair of the electorate. All the while, the mainstream media either sleeps or wags its tail.
Not that you need further proof that the world is mad, but consider the sheer lunacy of people actually fighting, in fact shooting other people, for the chance to buy Air Jordan sneakers at well over one hundred dollars per pair. Or the spectacle of “midnight madness” on Thanksgiving evening, when shoppers have been trampled to death by mobs lunging for their swag. Appalling. P.T. Barnum spoke of suckers being born every minute but that hardly captures the reality of modern America. We are a sick society with warped values.
Let’s close on a strong note: Despite our sickness, despite our politics, we can regain our footing and continue to be the world’s best hope for mankind. Spend less, save more, guide your children. And pray for America. She needs the help.
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