WHO CARES? YOU CAN LEARN WHO

Who cares about others is a big mystery most of the time, but peeling back the layers shows who’s who.

Leaders, the people voted to lead, are elected to care. Isn’t that the idea?

When a state like Kentucky puts up winners like U.S. Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, you might wonder if there’s a problem? My question:

Is Kentucky ranked low in education?

It is?

This is my shocked face:

The Education Difference

This blog celebrates education.

Why? Because it’s good for people who care about others.

Once you learn how things could be better, that’s the direction to take.

And who doesn’t want a better life for themselves, their family, their community?

My dad showed the way when he became the first in his family to get a college degree. He left the Marine Corps, which he joined after living in a logging camp and a farm, to go to Central Oregon Community College.

COCC on the rock has a nice ring to it.

He went from COCC to SOC for the directional school finale at Southern Oregon College, now Southern Oregon University.

The family he raised were public school kids who also raised public school kids. All counted there are five diplomas from Southern Oregon.

That’s a pretty good haul, and a good investment.

Who Cares About Learning

Curious people want to know the ‘Who, What, and Why’ of everything they see.

After that comes ‘How’ and ‘Where’.

I’ve met curious people who can’t stop talking about their M.I.T. degree.

It’s funny to hear a sixty year old house wife get all whimsical about their college days. They make it sound like the best years of their lives.

Who knows, maybe it was their peak. If I went to M.I.T., and graduated, it would have been my peak.

Why couldn’t that happen? Because I couldn’t graduate from Southern Oregon, or Oregon, let alone a hard school. Finally Portland State came through with the goods.

Portland State? That’s right, the commuter school in the middle of Portland’s South Park Blocks, the state’s second largest four year college, and the final destination of serial drop-outs for decades.

I call it the Harvard Of The West for laughs. M.I.T. lady laughed.

Who Cares About The Low Baller Effect

The study found that Kentucky was the sixth-least educated state in the country overall and ranked 47th in percentage of bachelor degree holders.

I’ll do the math: that’s 47th our of 50 states. Then there’s this:

Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi were the only schools ranked below Kentucky.

No, I didn’t need to go to college to know where these states are on a map. The parents bought a wooden map puzzle of the states before first grade.

Having a large older brother helped the learning process.

I wanted to keep up, little brother and little sister wanted to keep up. That’s how families work.

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Wouldn’t you think Mississippi would want to keep up with Alabama and Louisiana? With West Virginia and Arkansas? Kentucky might be too big a jump.

I’m not digging a hole and tossing Mississippi in; I’m just following the evidence presented to one and all, and connecting dots. That’s my goal, and not being another in the chorus of shrill hot-takes.

So, under-educated Mississippi is governed by a man named Tate Reeves.

This is some of what Reeves believes on his wiki page.

Reeves is a staunch Donald Trump supporter.

In his 2019 campaign for governor, Reeves promised, “If I’m elected governor, I will work for President Trump.”

Amid the acceleration of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reeves undermined efforts to contain the spread of the virus.

When a COVID-19 vaccine was made widely available, Reeves opposed vaccine requirements.

In August 2021, Reeves argued that Mississippi Christians were “less scared” because “when you believe in eternal life—when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.” That month, Mississippi had the nation’s highest rate of COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita.

Governor Tate Reeves is a college man from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.

It’s a private college with a Methodist origin and named for local confederate officer Major Millsaps.

Millsaps employs 97 full-time faculty members. Of those, 94 percent of tenure-track faculty hold a PhD or the terminal degree in their field. 

This is where the notion of ‘Who Cares’ gets quiet.