Kasey's Page of Mindless Rants

November has always been one of my favorite months. It starts out with Election Day (by the way, the Voucher Referendum was soundly defeated), continues through Veteran's Day and ends up at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is, in turn, one of my favorite holidays of the year. It means that family will be getting together, that there will food, parades, football, and best of all, it means that the Christmas Season is officially starting. It is a time for being thankful, enjoying life, having fun, and just plain being happy.

And it is a time when all kinds of people are going to make me feel guilty about it.

As retailers start to advertise Christmas, various charities and organizations will start to advertise guilt. You know what I'm talking about. This is the time of the year when hordes of commercials appear, particularly on the radio, that emphasize how we shouldn't be enjoying the holidays because poverty still exists in the World.

Now, please don't get me wrong. I think that it is VERY important to give to charity and to help those in need. My wife and I give to charity, we donate to the food bank, and we always give quarters to the Salvation Army Santa Clauses. My problem is not with any organization looking to do good deeds, but with some of the methods that are used. I have issues with commercials that say "You're enjoying Thanksgiving? How dare you? Don't you know there are children starving in China?" - or - "I see that you actually have PRESENTS underneath your Christmas Tree. What kind of monster are you?" - or - "Are you singing Christmas Carols? Well, the only songs that the impoverished people who live on the Plains of Tajikistan will be singing this year are the woeful dirges of misery!" - or - "Any fool who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!"

Wait, that last one was somebody else. But I digress.

I just don't think I should feel guilty for enjoying myself, especially when I REALLY AM trying to do my part to help people out! I don't think you deserve to feel guilty during the holidays unless you have actually done something worthy of it, like executing a stuffed dummy named Bob or cooking up Big Bird for your Thanksgiving Turkey (though if you do that second one, you'll probably have a lot people begging you to go one step further and make Barney your Christmas Ham). The advertisers for many charities, however, want you to feel guilty about simply being happy. One of my personal favorites is the Jiffy Lube commercial that comes on the air about this time each year. They start off by saying something about how "We here at Jiffy Lube would like to share a holiday meal with everybody out there". Then they present you a three course meal of morbid statistics. "Our Appetizer today is this -- in 2006, there were over 17 million homeless children in Utah. The Main Course may not be very appealing -- Utah has a higher rate of poverty than all other 49 states put together, plus Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Vietnam, and most of Madagascar. Finally, the Dessert will be hard to swallow -- if one single Utahn had donated just one cent more last year, we would have been able to completely end World Hunger, eliminate AIDS, cure Cancer, fix Social Security, pay off the National Debt, and buy everyone in the country a pet llama." They actually describe their 'meals' using phrases like "Hard to Swallow", "Tough to Chew" and "This'll give ya indigestion", all while playing background music that is more depressing that Mozart's Requiem.

Again, I think charity is good; I just don't like the advertising. I don't dislike WHAT they're trying to accomplish; I dislike HOW they're trying to do it. And I honestly think people as a whole are good natured, especially at this time of the year, and I think that people will give even without morbid commercials. I DO like the radio stations that get donations by forcing their DJ's to sit out in the cold on top of a bus until they collect enough food to feed everybody in Sri Lanka. THAT'S funny. (Hee hee, the DJ's are outside. How can they do their radio show if they're outside?)

So this year I'll give to charity, and on Thanksgiving morning I'm going to get up, watch a 400 foot long Garfield balloon float through New York City, watch some football, and then eat enough turkey and stuffing to knock me out for a week.

But I will be sure to pluck out all the yellow feathers first.

Well, here we go! Hello there, and welcome to Kasey's Page of Mindless Rants. Amy and I are planning on putting together a family blog with pictures and everything, but I wanted to have a place where I could speak my mind about whatever I happen to be pondering at any given moment. That's right, whether it be politics, sports, hiking trails, monkeys, rocks or whatever, you're going to hear about it. So, with the exception of a one-shot post on a page from my Hotmail account, this is my first official blog entry.

And what better way to start my mindless rants page than with a mindless rant about something political. It's the first week of November, and you know what that means. Election day is only four days away, and anyone reading this from Utah knows that it has been a particularly intense political season for an election in an "off-year". This has been largely due to the inclusion of Referendum 1, the school vouchers debate, on this year's ballot.

Again, it's likely that most of the people reading this (If I can flatter myself enough to assume that ANYONE will actually end up reading these posts) are fully informed on the voucher issue, but I'll describe it anyway (Because it's my blog and I get to write whatever i want. Like ending a sentence with a preposition if I want to). The basic idea is this: the Utah State Legislature passed a bill in February 2007 saying that qualifying families that want to send their kids to private schools can receive state-funded vouchers that they can use toward tuition. The vouchers are worth anywhere from $500 - $3000, depending on the size and income level of the family. While these vouchers are coming from public funds, the idea is that the public schools don't lose out because they still get to count the kids that leave when calculating per-student appropriations during the first five years of the program. So parents get more choice in education, and the public schools still get funding with fewer kids to spend the money on. Great huh? Well, apparently not so great. A huge debate arose, the bill ended up being contested, the State Supreme Court said "let the voters decide!", and Bam! We have Referendum 1.

So basically, it's all about money. Now for the part that I find the most interesting. My rant is NOT about which side of this debate I think makes sense. I'm actually leaning toward voting against the vouchers. This mostly because I strongly believe in and support the public school system and I don't think that the vouchers will be very helpful to public schools in the long run. But that's not what I'm going to talk about here. What I AM going to talk about is money, and specifically, how much if it has been spent contending this issue.

During the last two weeks I have received 3 pro-voucher ads and 4 anti-voucher adds in the mail. These are full color, full size mailers, some of which have multiple pages. At my company, we've produced similar mailers, and I can tell you that they are not cheap. I can imagine that it becomes even more expensive when you send them out to EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN UTAH. In addition to mailers, there have been numerous television, radio and newspaper ads produced by both sides. As of October 31st, the proponents of the vouchers had spent 4.4 million dollars in advertising, and the opponents of the program had spent 4 million dollars, for a grand total of 8.4 MILLION DOLLARS. (See the SL Trib article at http://www.sltrib.com/ci_7327643 -- look at me citing my information!)

Let's do the math on this, folks. If you take that 8.4 million dollars and divide it by 3000, the maximum scholarship amount, you get 2800 -- 2800 students that could have just been handed the silly scholarship based on what was spent fighting about it! And that's at the MAXIMUM scholarship rate. If you based it on the minimum rate of $500, that number increases to 16,800. 16,800 students? How long will it take before nearly 17,000 students transfer from public schools to private schools using the voucher program? The SLC Trib article that I cited mentions that the program is estimated to cost 5.5 million dollars in the first year. The first year of the program and then some could have been funded by the amount spent on the campaigns.

Of course, you might say that I should only be counting the pro-voucher dollars spent; but they total to 4.4 million alone, and that's almost the first year. And, more than half of the anti-voucher dollars have come from the NEA and teacher's unions. This whole piece of legislation is about helping out the children of Utah by putting money into what each side believes to be the right place; the proponents want to put it in a place (voucher funds) where it give parents more choice in education and the opponents want to leave it in a place where it will benefit public schools. The thing that I find ironic is that in order to prove where we should put that money, the two sides spent more money on the fight than they will on the kids during at least the first year. So what's really important?

I agree that this is an important issue, and I think people should get out and vote on it. I just feel that the campaigning has been so overblown that the whole point of the issue has been missed.

So there it was; my first rant. I promise not all of them will be political in nature. I'm pretty sure most of them won't even be very important. About all I can promise is that they will be written by me. Tune in next week when we talk about the benefits of owning your own toaster oven.