As the calendar steadily marches toward Hanukkah, Christmas Day and — then — the new year, cheers to all who have embodied the holiday spirit with the real work of raising money for food, fuel and gifts for families who truly need their community’s support as winter descends.
The Salvation Army is seeing less money in its kettles, but there is clear evidence that the spirit of giving is intact and active in our communities.
The Auburn Fire Department delivered a truckload of donated toys early in the week, and will be making another delivery today.
The Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce and the Young People of the L-A Area packed a bus with toys and clothes on Wednesday, all of which will be distributed to clients of Androscoggin County Head Start, Advocates for Children and Tri-County Mental Health.
In Farmington on Thursday, the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce prepared and delivered 135 boxes of food to local families.
Throughout our readership area, we are seeing families strapped by their own financial constraints making great efforts, by donating money and time, to help their neighbors.
It’s compassion and generosity at work, and that work might be more energetic at this time of year, but Mainers’ level of compassionate volunteerism and hands-on generosity remains high throughout the year.
It’s part of what makes Maine great.
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The RSU 10 board of directors made the right decision early this week in recommending to keep “Stuck in the Middle: 17 Comics from an Unpleasant Age,” on library shelves.
The book in question is a graphic novel; graphic in its hand-drawn story-telling presentation and also in its content.
The book is intended for a middle school audience, and several parents objected to its foul language and sexual content. It’s hard to imagine that any novel, no matter how graphic, could possibly top periodicals otherwise available to middle-schoolers online and elsewhere.
American culture can be graphically sexual and explicitly foul and it’s important that young people learn how to navigate that world in a responsible way.
The best possible way, of course, is for parents to steer their children through that process, but not every parent does and many children are left adrift.
So, the next-better place to learn is the school library, where a responsible adult can help educate children about their hormone-charged emerging feelings in a confusingly sensual culture.
It’s not ideal. But, it’s also not mandatory reading.
The book is just one tool among many available to educators to support young teens through what can be a very unpleasant age.
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Sooo, when Gov. Paul LePage told a SAD 58 audience Wednesday that a senior editor at Forbes magazine recommended Maine address the structural program of its “welfare” in order to boost its business climate, the governor was referring to Mainers’ welfare in general, not the welfare “system.”
An editor at Forbes would suggest Maine’s general welfare is a structural problem?
Even for those Mainers whose “general welfare” — meaning well-being — includes good health, home ownership, solid family structure and a plentiful bank account?
We need to fix that, too?
Come on, guv.
Truly?
It’s bad enough for the governor to fictionalize what an editor, at a conservative financial magazine, no less, said to him, but then to compound that ignominy with a suggestion that the public didn’t understand what he meant?
We know exactly what he meant. He wants to trim welfare expenses and he invented a conversation with a faraway business editor to bolster his case.
LePage’s administration has already demonstrated a real commitment to halting welfare fraud and prosecuting welfare crooks, and we welcome and support that stand.
We also support his commitment to carve welfare programs down to the solid safety net they are intended to be, but it will be far easier to enact these changes on the strength of fact. Not fiction.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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