Hell on the dirt
“Are You Not Entertained?” (oil on canvas), by Enfield, Conn.-based artist Devon Edwards, at Hartford Art School Galleries, West Hartford, Conn.
— Image courtesy of the artist
Enfield Shaker Village in 1910.
Chris Powell: Racism? Get specific; pass Larson’s Social Security bill
The village of Thompsonville, in Enfield, Conn. Thompsonville was established in the 19th Century as a carpet-manufacturing center. Orrin Thompson, for whom the community is named, built a dam across Freshwater Brook in 1828 and opened the first carpet mill in 1829. Thompson's first mill employed skilled weavers brought from Scotland.
Carpeting continued to be manufactured in Thompsonville until 1971, by which time most production had shifted to the southern United States.
— Photo by Mirandalovely (talk)
MANCHESTER, Conn.
How racist is Enfield, Conn.? Town government's overreaction to a recent disgraceful but trivial incident is giving the impression that the town has become the northern headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, even though the incident could have happened anywhere.
It occurred as members of the Enfield High School football team were knocking on doors throughout town soliciting financial donations. At one door a Black player was scorned and sent away with a racial epithet from the resident. Police investigated but determined that, abhorrent as the resident's conduct was, there was no cause for arrest.
Whereupon town government convened another of those "community conversations on race," as if the whole town needed to be lectured on decent behavior.
Maybe Enfield really is that hateful. But if so, specific evidence of anything seriously wrong in town regarding race has not been reported and was not produced at the first "community conversation," which drew about 200 people to Enfield High School. Instead the moderator urged people to examine their own consciences about race, as if some might be obliged to make confession.
In the absence of evidence apart from a single small incident, summoning a "community conversation" was presumptuous, if also politically correct.
Enfield and other towns should have a "community conversation" on race, but of a different sort — that is, regular hearings to air specific complaints about racism in town and to investigate them.
The perpetrator of the insult to the high-school football player is known to police, the player and others and should be invited to the first such hearing along with the insulted player for questioning and discussion. Other witnesses to what they consider racism in town should come forward too and their complaints should be followed up at future hearings, with the accused people and institutions invited. Town officials and residents then could discuss what if anything should be done.
Such procedure would generate real and relevant conversations, not the pious and irrelevant handwringing of the first "community conversation." Far more than such handwringing, a hearing on specifics might deter racists, warning them that they might be held accountable in public for their hatefulness.
More likely, of course, such a procedure would generate few if any complaints of racism in Enfield. Maybe then the town could begin to get its good name back and, along with Connecticut generally, might pay less attention to the occasional, and trivial misconduct of jerks on their own doorsteps and more attention to the state's longstanding racial disparities.
Those disparities include the racial-performance gap in education, zoning's obstruction of racial and economic integration, and welfare policy's destruction of the family and creation of a racial underclass.
Obsessing about occasional racist epithets uttered by nobodies is a pathetic copout.
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As they campaign for re-election, Democrats on the national and state level are touting lots of new programs created in the name of alleviating poverty, even as soaring inflation, caused in part by the explosion of those programs and other government spending, erases the programs' benefits.
Meanwhile, the nation's most comprehensive anti-poverty program, Social Security, is eroding under that inflation even as Connecticut's own U.S. Rep. John B. Larson bravely keeps pressing legislation to improve the system's benefits and finances.
But according to a recent report in Politico, Larson's Social Security bill is being blocked not by the usual retrograde Republicans in Congress but by the Democratic leader in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Larson's bill isn't another giveaway to be financed by debt and inflation. It would be financed largely by eliminating the limit on Social Security taxes paid by high earners, whose Social Security taxes now are capped at the first $400,000 of annual income.
Pelosi and her husband have gotten rich trading stocks whose values are heavily affected by the federal legislation she steers and votes on. Her party should push her out of the way and pass Larson's Social Security bill while the Democrats still have a majority in Congress and a president who would sign it.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. He can be reached at CPowell@JournalInquirer.com.
Chris Powell: Lessons of Enfield’s pizza/sex crisis
Is this your preferred topping?
Innocent-looking Thompsonville Village in Enfield, a large town in Hartford County where the biggest employer is the U.S. headquarters of Lego, the Danish toy company.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Republican state legislators around the country are proposing to require public schools to post all curriculum materials on the Internet as an accountability measure, and the other day they got powerful if inadvertent support from Enfield, Conn.’s school system.
Enfield's school administration acknowledged that an eighth-grade class had been given an assignment in which students were instructed to choose pizza toppings as a sort of code to signify the sex acts they preferred. The objective seems to have been to teach the 14-year-olds that sex, like pizza, should be consensual and negotiated.
The Enfield incident, first publicized by a national parents group, was picked up by news outlets far and wide and put the town on the world map for stupidity.
The school administration apologized and attributed the assignment to a mistake of absentmindedness. That is, a different assignment involving pizza choices but without the sexual allusions, also aiming to teach consent and negotiation, was meant to be used. But this account evaded the big questions.
How did the pizza/sex assignment get into the school system in the first place? Exactly where did it come from? Why is the school system receiving such material? Who authorized it?
And why, in a state where most students graduate from high school without mastering basic math and English, is a school system using a Family Health and Human Sexuality class to teach students, even without sexual allusions, what they already know from their own experience with pizza and life generally -- that when ordering for more than oneself, the preferences of others must be considered?
It's all beyond moronic, even if it is the work of people holding degrees in education and drawing at tax expense annual salaries of $100,000 or more.
Responding to the proposals to require all curriculum materials to be posted on the internet, teachers and school administrators around the country insist that they are not hiding anything and that they make curriculum materials available to anyone who asks. But this is evasive.
For having a misplaced faith in schools, few people do ask, and few people might think they need to ask to see any curriculum materials likening pizza toppings to sex acts or imputing to white students guilt for the mistreatment of racial minorities throughout history.
Yet such materials are indeed in use in American schools, precisely because they are not routinely publicized and easily accessible.
Enfield's Board of Education may appoint a committee to look into the pizza-sex assignment and how a recurrence might be prevented. This too is moronic, for the school superintendent already should be able to answer the big questions. It is distressing and revealing that they were not answered at the board meeting when the incident was discussed at length.
The problem here isn't the sexual prudery of parents or other observers. The Internet distributes pornography so widely that Enfield's eighth-graders already may know more about sex than their parents do. No, the problem is the unaccountability of public schools.
Yes, posting on the Internet all curriculum material will facilitate many questions and complaints, and some will be mistaken, arise from prudery, or have bad intent. But that's democracy, which inevitably is less convenient for government than totalitarianism, a lesson schools should teach -- perhaps most of all to their own staff.
But will any legislators in Connecticut propose a curriculum-posting law and thus risk the ire of the teacher and school administrator unions? (Yes, in Connecticut most school administrators, supposedly managers, are unionized too and so not really managers.)
Any such legislation shouldn't stop with curriculums. It also should require the posting of school salaries and teacher evaluations, thereby repealing Connecticut's law exempting teacher performance evaluations from disclosure, the law's only exemption for evaluations of government employees.
Of course the teacher and administrator unions surely would dissuade the governor and General Assembly from enacting that much accountability in public education. But a discussion of accountability legislation at least might establish that the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it's not really public at all
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Chris Powell: Videotape cops at work all the time
(Apologies for the format problem on this) MANCHESTER, Coon. On the whole, police officers are far more sinned against than sinning, but that's why they're police officers, the ones with the badges and guns, the ones supposed to be the good guys. But it's a difficult job and indications are growing that many officers are not fit for it. Those indications -- largely the result of the new ubiquity of security and mobile-phone video cameras -- are getting scary. Several such indications have arisen from the recent rioting and demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., where a white officer shot a young and unarmed black man. Of course, many people have rushed to judgment about the shooting. It is more plausible that the officer shot the young man while the young man was charging at the officer than that the officer shot him for fun. But rioting and demonstrations are no excuse for police to go wild. To the contrary, that's when police conduct must be most careful -- and in Missouri it hasn't been. The other day in Ferguson an officer was videotaped pointing his military rifle at peaceful demonstrators and news reporters, cursing them and threatening to shoot them until another officer led him away. The first officer was suspended. Another Missouri officer was suspended recently after a video of a lecture he had given was publicized. In the lecture the officer described himself as an "indiscriminate killer," adding, "I'm into diversity -- I kill everybody," and, "If you don't want to get killed, don't show up in front of me -- it's that simple." He has been placed on desk duty pending review. A third Missouri officer was suspended for commenting that the protesters in Ferguson "should be put down like rabid dogs." All three officers probably will go back on the beat when the controversy fades. There's not enough accountability in government. But Connecticut residents don't have to go to Missouri to worry about police brutality and psychologically unfit officers. Two months ago two Bridgeport officers pleaded guilty to federal civil-rights charges for their stomping an unarmed petty criminal as he lay helpless on the ground following his disabling by a stun gun. The assault was captured on video by a passerby. The city will pay the petty criminal $198,000 in damages and the two officers have resigned and have promised never to seek police work again. Enfield's Police Department is dealing with the heavy-handedness of an officer who has been investigated on complaints of misconduct 17 times in seven years. In the most recent case, cruiser dashboard video shows him pummeling a man said to be resisting arrest. The state's attorney won't prosecute either man. And last week cell-phone and security-camera video recorded a Hartford officer using a stun gun on a young man who had obeyed his command to stop and was standing still, hands at his sides, 10 feet away. The officer continued to advance on the young man and shoting the stun gun at him from 4 feet away. Even Gov. Dannel Malloy, speaking to a meeting of concerned citizens in Hartford, said he was shocked. The Hartford Police Department is investigating. For their protection and the public's, all police officers should be videotaped all the time -- and this would be easy to do, as there are not just dashboard cameras, already widely in use, but small cameras that can be affixed to uniforms and can record as much as 45 hours of image and sound. The recent death of a man who was choked to death during his arrest in New York City has prompted the city's public advocate, Letitia James, to propose equipping all city police with uniform cameras. Connecticut law should require this. If Governor Malloy really was shocked the other day, he should propose such a requirement before the November election. His Republican challenger, Tom Foley, should endorse the idea as well. It is a matter of basic accountability in government. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.