A thoughtful reader dropped a note the other day in response to my column about Save the Ozarks' successful (and personally expensive) efforts to halt the proposed 52-mile transmission line through the scenic Ozark Mountains of Benton and Carroll counties.
I wrote a few weeks back that this effort by a determined group of citizens "must be one of only very few times that concerned citizens anywhere united in common purpose to derail a power company's grand expansion plans."
The reader explained (a fact borne out by Internet checks): "In 1963-64, the Committee to Preserve Bodega Head and Harbor stopped Pacific Gas and Electric from building a nuclear power plant on top of the San Andreas earthquake fault at Bodega Bay, California."
Yeah, I'd say placing a nuclear plant on a known major fault line was another monumentally wrongheaded plan that badly needed to be abandoned.
What I now like to call the Bodega buffoonery also represents further evidence to me that everyday citizens such as those with Save the Ozarks can unite to successfully ensure the best right thing is done in the overall public interest.
Homeless count soars
A recent report says the nature and number of homeless people across Washington and Benton counties skyrocketed in only six years, as similar numbers nationally appear on the decline.
In 2007, there were about 1,200 homeless folks or those living with friends or relatives in both counties, a news story reported. By 2013 the number had doubled. About half of those were classified as children.
The nature of the homeless population has changed from the stereotypical older male to many younger people, including families with kids, and veterans. Some live, as they have for years, in an encampment in wooded areas of southeast Fayetteville.
The nonprofit Seven Hills homeless center, which receives considerable federal assistance, reflects the dramatic growth even more clearly. In only several years that facility has gone from assisting nearly 700 each year to some 4,200 last year.
John Woodward, the outgoing CEO at Seven Hills, was quoted saying, "It's a thing where the need has just grown and grown and grown" in correlation with the inadequate inexpensive housing. My only question: Is there any end in sight?
Weapons and schools
Banking friend David Morton of Harrison wrote to ask how I feel about educators being armed to protect themselves and students in the event evil men armed with weapons invade classrooms and begin shooting innocents.
I told him that for me, it's a complex question with no right or wrong answer. There are well-intentioned good people on both sides of this question that has been forced upon schools, churches and other places where scores of people gather with hopeful feelings of safety and security.
In 1970 America that kind of normality was the case. Things have and continue to change dramatically, as we all can see.
It was only the other day that Taliban invaded a school in Pakistan, brutally killing 145, including scores of students. Today, the Pakistani government is training teachers who choose to arm themselves for self-protection and the defense of their students how to properly use firearms.
One Pakistani educator who only a few years ago wouldn't have approved of weapons in schools said he now favors having some truly effective way to fight back if necessary until help can arrive.
"These are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary actions," is how he put it.
In Arkansas, Rep. Charlie Collins' bill on whether licensed private-carry citizens can have their weapons on college was defeated in committee this week.
Two other bills have been filed that would expand different aspects of concealed-carry weapons, including one that would allow courthouse employees with permits to carry them at work.
As for the facilities we've established to educate our students, well, after the massacre in the Pakistan school, and knowing there are evil elements that want us and our children dead, I'm inclined to say trained teachers would be best served to have weapons should this worldwide scourge (Heaven forbid) burst into their normally tranquil world.
This evil force has shown repeatedly that it has not one qualm about murdering innocents. In that regard, the Pakistani educator was right about extraordinary times.
If such horror should unfold here, those affected in the moment would be grateful to have an effective way to protect and defend.
Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver are distant memories of a bucolic time in the United States when arming educators and administrators would have been considered radical. We concede those days are gone, never to return.
The question facing us today in Northwest Arkansas and across the United States is what do we do to effectively change with the times and meet the harsher reality of potentially deadly challenges we never expected, or wanted, to face?
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 02/07/2015