On a sunny and unseasonably mild first day of 2023, with peas simmering and a neighborhood walk beckoning, a columnist's thoughts turn to the tired but ever-hopeful concept of making resolutions for the fresh start of a new calendar year.
Therefore I resolve:
• To use Twitter differently, more productively, more healthily, both for myself and public dialogue.
I resolve to drop in on the social-media site less frequently and only for news and information, both received and imparted, rather than for engaging in argument and ridicule. That produces only agreement from those already agreeable and resentment from those already resentful. And that's our problem.
I resolve to engage less in the amusement of self with a penchant for Twitter quips, specifically in the context of purposely antagonizing Razorback fans.
Sure, these fans are irrationally optimistic before games, irrationally exuberant during them, irrationally hostile to referees along the way and irrationally downtrodden afterward when games are lost. But they simply embrace with passion their proud place and its symbols.
These Hog people are no different in that way from people all over the globe as demonstrated during, say, the World Cup.
There is no reason to poke and prod these innocent fans. There are far worse examples of irrational exuberance. A Trump rally, for example. Either major party political convention, for another.
• To give more consideration in my writing to those I disagree with--to explain their side, then reason my way to rejecting it rather than pre-emptively ridicule their view simply because it has ever been so that I reject it.
For example: I must acknowledge that it occurs to me that many in rural Arkansas will not object to vouchers for full school choice because they think their own schools are good ones that students won't leave. From that, it occurs to me that's the very point of the advocates: Vouchers for school choice are for those not getting a good or equal opportunity where they are.
That's not heartless. It is simply flawed in that it doesn't account for children left in under-performing schools that will be even less able to perform in schools students will be leaving.
The better model, one we shouldn't yet abandon, is the basic public education model that served us so well for so long. And it's to use charter schools, limited by number and location, for the purpose of showing these public schools better ways. And it's for public schools and teachers to be open to these better ways, especially so in the case of teachers because we will pay them quite a bit more because what they do is worth quite a bit more.
• To make a favorable comment regarding Gov.-elect Sarah Sanders if she ever deserves it, as in the case of two of her cabinet appointments that seem somewhat reassuring.
One is to keep Asa Hutchinson's director of finance and administration, Larry Walther. That indicates a desire to keep trains running more or less on time rather than blow up the tracks. Another is of former Entergy head Hugh McDonald as head of the department of commerce. A former public utility executive brings a background of intimacy in matters of public policy and economic development.
That said, let me not miss an opportunity to make the point that Sanders' nomination of Ron DeSantis' public school overseer as our state education secretary appears to be rubbing public education officials' faces in her 65 percent vote, and destructive.
But, to try to keep an earlier resolution all the way through to the end of the column, let me say I ought to withhold such certitude until this Florida import and the Republican Legislature actually do something destructive to education in Arkansas.
I don't expect that to be long.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.