Opinion
The aorta is the largest blood vessel in the body. It starts in the heart and runs through the abdomen, supplying blood to vital organs along the way before it branches into the major arteries in the legs.
We are in the Christian Easter season. A season that fosters mixed emotions and can challenge our beliefs. “Christ” is not necessarily Jesus’ last name nor, I believe, is the second coming a single person
The aorta is the largest blood vessel in the body. It starts in the heart and runs through the abdomen, supplying blood to vital organs along the way before it branches into the major arteries in the legs.
The slow but steady death of live original music in the Claremont area sustained two massive body blows this week, leaving one to wonder if the art form might just vanish entirely from the 91711.
For weeks, the news media has been warning of an impending crisis if the two houses of Congress and the president are unable to reach agreement on raising the debt ceiling. Let’s look at what’s going on here and whether you should be losing sleep.
In this century, the United States has run a budget surplus exactly once, in 2001. More typically, we run an annual deficit, meaning the federal government spends more than it collects in taxes. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the deficit averaged nearly $3 trillion per year due to massive government stimulus, before dropping to $1.4 trillion last year. The government borrows to cover these annual shortfalls, issuing U.S. Treasury securities (bonds, notes, and bills) that range in maturity from just a few weeks to as long as 30 years.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”
Those words were rattling around in my head as I made a hasty exit from Tijuana, Mexico on Monday after gunshots rang out near the migrant shelter from which I was reporting, causing panic among its already shell shocked residents.
It was an abrupt, if poignant ending to a day that shattered my preconceptions about the refugees trying to make their way to the United States at our San Ysidro border with Mexico.
It was only a month or so ago, in January and even February, that I was complaining that there was never any snow below Baldy Village. Or that there was barely any in the village. At least not for a long time.
I was telling friends about the time I went up Baldy Road, and there was no snow, or barely any, until I went into one of the tunnels and came out, suddenly, into a white wonderland. I couldn’t remember if it happened 15 years ago or if I remembered 15 years ago that it had happened years earlier.
I’ve consistently stood on the left side of the Covid fault line. Righteously filtering aerosols through my surgical mask, I dispensed public health facts and hand sanitizer with near religious fervor. Yet, I was seismically shaken to find my belief system undermined by individuals who stood with me on what I had considered the fact based side of the tectonic divide.
It appears the petition drive to compel Claremont Unified School District to pony up an estimated $273,000 for a special election will succeed.
What a shame.
What a waste.
In a passage from the World War II novel, “From Here to Eternity,” a U.S. Army captain based at Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks contemplates how he “liked to climb the stairs to HQ building. They did not look like concrete, they looked like old marble streaked gray and black. Age had polished down the once porous concrete and rounded the raw edges with rain and feet, and given it a smooth slick gloss. When the stains were wet they always caught and perpetuated the rainbow, like a promise. There will always be an Army, they said to him.”
The passage reflects a common human desire for continuity. In the face of inevitable change, it can be comforting to count on a beloved institution always being there to evoke proud memories and carry on its original vision. And like the stairs, a familiar object or landscape feature can embody that continuity.
As I reported last week, our neighbor Cashman “Cash” Whiteley is on the mend.
That is a joyful sentence to write.
Some may recall my August 12 story and subsequent columns about the 59-year-old unhoused man who had been suffering for several years with a large, open, and growing mystery wound on the left side of his face. The wound is a mystery no more: it is skin cancer.
But with the diagnosis has come an unlikely renaissance.
Normally I try to stay out of these us vs. them conflicts, or at least weigh in gently. But this time it’s too important to be anything but clear: this proposed special election is a colossal waste of money.
There is a movement afoot to collect the 99 required signatures of residents of Claremont Unified School District’s District 4 to force a special election to fill the vacant school board seat. That special election will cost CUSD $273,000. That’s right, the school district foots the bill for that special election.
There is also real value in stability, and the CUSD Board of Education could really use some right now. The Llanusa spectacle seems to be behind it now, but it has certainly has left a bad taste in the mouths of many constituents. The last thing this board needs is more drama. A drawn-out, expensive special election — which could result in no change at all — just does not fare well in the cost/benefit analysis. That $273,000 buys a lot of iPads.
Like everyone else I breathe a sigh of relief that the Laemmle Claremont 5 theater has not been dimmed. Claremont prides itself on its art and cultural connections, and how can any self-respecting college town not have the greatest of popular cultural art venues — a movie theatre?