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About The Commerce news. (Commerce, Ga.) 1???-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 3, 2016)
PAGE 4A THE COMMERCE NEWS WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2016 Editorial Views Success in school starts in the home The 2016-17 school year starts Fri day for approximately 1,500 kids in the Commerce City School System and 7,500 students in the Jackson County School System. There is no other institution in Jackson County that reaches so many people and is more important than our school system. As parents send their children off to school, they do so with the hope, pos sibly the conviction, that their children will be blessed with dedicated educa tors and institutions geared toward making sure all children succeed. Indeed, the administrators, teachers and support staff are just as interested in student success as are the parents. But here’s the issue: The success of any individual student depends more upon that student’s parents or guard ians than it does on school personnel. The educators are prepared to do their job, but it is up to parents and guardians to make sure the children are ready to learn and encouraged to strive for success. Schools have charge of students approximate ly seven hours a day 180 days a year; parents have them 17 hours on school days and 24 hours a day for the remainder. What happens in the home in terms of the environment is of paramount importance to a stu dent’s hope of success. If you want your child to have a suc cessful school year, be a successful parent. Expect your child to succeed, pay attention to how and what he or she is doing in school, make sure he or she completes assignments, send the child to school adequately nourished and clothed and well rest ed and let it be known your child or children are loved and valued. Pro duce for your child a stable home free from domestic disputes, substance abuse and physical violence. Teach your children to be disciplined and to show respect for their parents, their classmates and teachers. Pro vide them with reading materials, take them to the library, talk to them. Today’s schools face myriad prob lems, but the greatest challenge is to educate children burdened with dys functional or semi-functional parents and homes. A hungry child is not ready to learn; a child traumatized by domestic violence is ill-equipped for success. Factors beyond the con trol of teachers and schools have more impact on a child’s chances of success than most anything likely to occur in the classroom. Teachers and schools are not infallible, but most of the problems associated with the educational systems would disappear if every parent did his or her job. The educators are ready to teach the children, but education is a part nership in which parents play an important role. Educational success begins at home. Good parents make good students. They are the key in determining whether their children will succeed during this school year. Unless otherwise noted, all editorials are written by Mark Beardsley. He can be reached at mark@mainstreetnews. com. The Commerce News ESTABLISHED IN 1875 USPS 125-320 P.O. Box 908 Jefferson, GA 30549 MIKE BUFFINGTON CoPublisher SCOTT BUFFINGTON Co-Publisher Mark Beardsley. Editor THE COMMERCE NEWS is the legal or gan of the city of Commerce and is pub lished every Wednesday by MainStreet Newspapers Inc. Periodical postage paid at Jefferson, Georgia 30549. Subscription Rates Per Year: $25 POSTMASTER send address changes to THE COMMERCE NEWS, P.O. Box 908, Jefferson, GA 30549. Celebrating our nat'l treasures The National Park Service is celebrating the 100th anniversary this month, although the Unit ed States created its first national park — Yellow stone National Park — in 1872. The Park Service is responsible for maintaining and protecting the 58 National parks in America. By my calculations, I’ve visited only nine of the national parks, but you don’t have to visit them to realize what treasures we’ve wisely set aside. Chief, for me, is the first. I’ve been to Yellow stone twice, spending nearly two weeks in or in the immediate vicinity of the park in 1971 and returning with Barbara 10 or so years ago for a much shorter visit. Coming from Florida, Yellowstone in 1971 was a revelation. Sadly my focus was entirely on trout fishing and while my cousin Bruce and I managed to see a wide variety of animals and natural phenomenon in the course of fishing, we made little effort to see the park. Still, we encountered elk and bison even as we fished. Naturally, we saw Old Faithful and another geyser or two, marveled at the geyser basin around the Firehole River (our favorite fishing venue), witnessed traffic jams due to sightings of moose, elk or bears (no grizzlies) and enjoyed the endless western panorama visible beyond the tips of our fly rods. The later visit was shorter. Barbara and I drove the main circuits and explored some easy-to- reach and best-known sites and marveled at the construction of the Yellowstone Lodge, but in those two visits I could not have seen close It's Gospel According To Mark By Mark Beardsley to one percent of what Yellowstone has to offer. On the other hand, I did catch a lot of trout on that first visit. It is the most amazing place in the lower 48 states, one of the most geologically interesting (and important) sites in the world and is host to a biodiversity that boggles the imagination. I long to return. My son Steven recently sent along a copy of the May National Geographic Magazine featuring “YELLOWSTONE Battle for the American West,” perusing of which reminded me of what a trea sure the park is and depressed me by reminding me of all that I did not see in my two visits there. It also served as a reminder that there are 49 other national parks I need to put on my bucket list, 49 additional treasures preserved by national leaders much wiser, it seems, than those now employed. Interestingly, the most-visited national park in America is relatively close by — Great Smoky Mountain National Park. That was a destination for my family during summer camping vacations; Shenandoah National Park was another, and if I hold fewer fond memories of Everglades National Park in Flor ida, attribute it to mosquitos, swamps, snakes and my ignorance of the importance of the ‘glades at the times I visited. In today’s climate, we can easily become obsessed with what’s wrong with our country. The National Park Service and our national parks are examples of what this country does right. Protecting the natural wonders of Amer ica against development and exploitation, giv ing safe refuge to plants and animals that need the space, keeping large swaths of land “wild” yet available to the public are legacies from leaders dating back to Abraham Lincoln, who protected what is now Yosemite during the Civil War, Ulysses Grant, who created Yellow stone, the first national park, and Theodore Roosevelt, whose administration created five national parks — and 18 national monuments, four national game refuges, 51 bird sanctuaries and over 100 million acres of national forests. Those parks and wild spaces belong to each of us. Thank God we had leaders who saw the importance of protecting them for posterity. It would be nice to have such vision aries in Washington today. Mark Beardsley is the editor of The Com ma ce News. He lives in Commerce. A day of reckoning approaches Well, folks, here we are, less than 100 days from Election Day! A lot of us have watched the proceedings up until now with dismay: the far-too-numerous and mostly uninspiring Republican candidates lined up across the debate stage like the Rockettes; the mostly audience-free Hillary Clinton/ Bernie Sanders debates, scheduled by the DNC to coincide with national holidays or major sports events in order to ensure that no one would be watching; the outrageous, insulting, offensive words of the Republicans’ emergent nominee, Donald Tmmp, that got him so much media coverage; and the out rageous, insulting, offensive actions of DNC chief Debbie Wasserman and her colleagues, who conspired to undermine Bernie Sanders’ candidacy. The result of all this bad behavior is that we will soon have to choose between two major candidates when many of us aren’t entirely enthusiastic about either one. What’s a voter to do? The good news is that we have three months to ponder this. My candidate was Bernie. He was saying things I had waited 50 years to hear a politician say. I could hardly believe it. Here at last were the policies and principles that other industrial ized countries had put in place half a century ago. So why was Bernie getting so little media coverage? At one point I didn’t hear his name in the news for three weeks, and I had to A Few Facts, A Lot of Gossip II By Susan Harper turn to page 22 of the New York Times to find his photo. The miracle is that he managed to come as close as he did to a win or a tie, despite the media blackout and the fact that, as we now know, his own party was working against him. He ended up with just 359 fewer pledged delegates than Clinton, so some of his supporters may have trouble shifting their loyalties to her, knowing that her supporters subverted the democratic process to ensure her victory. Across the aisle, Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican heap went from sounding ludicrous to seeming inevitable. But there’s a “yuge” streak of “Hold your nose and vote for him” among Republicans, and quite a few can’t imagine doing that. Tmmp appears devoid of self-control, and according to his ghostwriter, he also has no attention span. Tony Schwartz, who authored Trump’s supposed autobiography “The Art of the Deal,” says that it’s “impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes.” Imagine that in a head of state. The bad news is that this election comes at a delicate time, when our economy is still in recovery from its worst collapse since the Great Depression. The lingering economic woes — unemployment, under-employment, and idle factories, for example—are part of the legacy of the Great Recession, and the Congres sional Budget Office projection is that we will overcome it in the next few years, if we stay on course. The choice we will face on Election Day is between a person with a genius for showman ship but no experience of governance, and a person with broad experience of governance but no great knack for showmanship. (Voting for a third-party candidate would be like throw ing something priceless down a well.) I plan to vote for the candidate with a law degree and a history of public service, who has been both a senator and a secretary of state. I just think that makes the most sense. What will you do? Hap pily here in America we each get to decide. Just be sure to vote, it may never be more important than it is this year. Susan Harpa■ is a retired editor, lecturer, and local library director who currently serves on the Jackson County and Piedmont Regional library boards. What color will Georgia be? What color will your state be? As the last of the two conventions finished its business of nominating a presidential candidate last week, the Clinton and Trump campaigns were quickly shifting into high gear. Before all of the balloons in Philadelphia had been picked up, Donald Trump supporters were already chanting “Lock her up, lock her up” at a campaign event. Meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton campaign was embarking on a bus tour of the key states Pennsylvania and Ohio. As the nominees fight their way through a grinding, nasty campaign, the question we’ve heard so much in recent years is again being raised: Is this the year when Georgia makes the transition from red to purple and becomes a battleground state? The answer to that question since 1992 has been no. That was when Bill Clinton became the last Democratic presidential candidate to take Georgia’s electoral votes. Clinton lost the state in 1996, finishing 27,000 votes behind Bob Dole, and Republicans have had a tight lock on Georgia ever since. Democrats expect things to be more competi tive this year and kept making that point through out their convention. Recent polls also suggest that the race between Trump and Clinton is close enough that the state could be considered a tossup. As with California, Texas, and Florida, Geor gia’s population is becoming more diverse. It was not long ago that Georgia’s pool of registered voters was more than 80 percent white; today it’s barely above 58 percent and keeps dropping. Basically the state’s percentage of white voters declines by about a percentage point each year while the portion of non-white voters increases by a point. Voter registration statistics and poll numbers are obviously indications that a state could be more competitive, but they are not a guarantee that it will be. The real marker of a state that has attained “battleground” status is that both of the presi dential nominees are battling for it. That isn’t happening here just yet. When Trump and his aides met with GOP congressmen in Washington prior to the nation al convention, they disclosed that the Tmmp campaign would be targeting a total of 17 states this fall. The remaining 33 states were considered to be either so Republican in their political leanings (like Utah and Oklahoma) or so Democratic (like California and New York) that there was no point in devoting campaign resources to them. One of the states on Trump’s list was Georgia. After going Republican in five consecutive pres idential elections, you would think that Georgia was one state a GOP candidate could safely assume would be in the red column again. The fact that Georgia is on Trump’s list tells us that his campaign is concerned about the state’s growing diversity or has seen polling numbers that show it really could be up for grabs. Other wise, why spend a penny of scarce campaign money here when there are so many other competitive states? Clinton’s campaign, on the other hand, has not yet committed to the possibility that Geor gia could be in play. If that were the case, they would be dispatching campaign operatives here and opening up field offices to work on get-out- the-vote efforts. So far, that hasn’t happened. The Tmmp campaign is planning to go to war over Georgia, but the Clinton campaign is hold ing back. Since you can’t have a battle unless there are two sides to fight it out, Georgia is still not quite a battleground state. Perhaps that will change in a few weeks. Tom Crawford is editor of The Georgia Report, an internet news service at gareport. com that reports on state government and politics. He can be reached attomcreawford@ gareport.com.
