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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (December 18, 2014)

I am happy to report that Cookie’s baby weighs, as of this writing, four pounds. Cookie is my friend who works at the Ballinger’s gas station and convenience store at Cooper and Union in Midtown. I first mentioned her on this page several months ago, as someone who helps make my day almost every day when I stop for coffee on the way to work.

Since that time, Cookie and her equally awesome boyfriend, Terrance, had a premature baby boy. And a movement started.

I guess many of the customers there are regulars who also love Cookie and Terrance, and since their baby was born, there has been an outpouring of support for them. It’s been kind of like a reality television show, only not disgusting and idiotic like 99 percent of the ones that are on television now. Well, I say that having never really seen any of them, except for Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles and Chopped, two of my secret guilty pleasures. But I’ve seen commercials for the other ones. Over and over and over and over and over and over I have seen the commercials, especially about that closet queen millionaire and his nouveau-rich family in Atlanta. Chrisley something or another. Ugh. It makes me ashamed to be a human being.

No, Cookie and Terrance are real. And it has been a journey. Things didn’t look too promising at first, but now the baby has been moved from an incubator to a crib and might even get to go home Christmas Day. All of this has been very expensive for Cookie and Terrance, and they’ve had a little collection box at the cash register, where all of their regular customers and friends have been able to pitch in a little bit to help. And every morning when Cookie is at work, she updates everyone on the baby’s progress. And on Terrance’s shift, he does the same. All the while, both of them have huge smiles on their faces and can make anyone’s bad day turn into a great day.

I hope one person is reading this. At one point, this unknown person stole the collection box with the money in it. Whoever you are, I hope you are reading this, and I hope you get shingles. I hope you are forced to watch the Chrisley show 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with shingles, for the rest of your horrid, putrid life. And you know what? You didn’t ruin anything. You just made all of us want to cheer that baby on even more and get even more excited. You are nothing. We hope you change into a better person.

I best stop now or I’m going to embarrass Cookie and Terrance. Oh, but one more thing: Cookie asked me one morning if I would do her a favor and thank the nurses at Methodist Hospital in print if I got the chance — all of the nurses who have been so wonderful to her, Terrance, and the baby. So THANK YOU, Methodist Hospital nurses. You might not ever know how much you made this situation better than it could have been.

This is the only thing that has happened to me in more than a decade that made me feel any kind of holiday season spirit. It is making up for all of the over-commercialization of the holidays that annually makes me feel like I am losing my mind. The consumerism, gifts that are “trending,” people waiting in long lines on Black Friday, and at their computers on Cyber Monday, looking for deals on crap no one needs, all of it. It makes me nuts every year.

Take, for example, a recent survey that was featured on the Today show. It was a sampling from Consumer Reports of what people voted on as the worst-ever holiday gifts. The top four worst-ever holiday gifts were listed as 4) books, 3) home décor, 2) flowers and plants, and, coming in at number 1 for the worst gift: booze.

Who the hell are these people answering the questions in this survey? Books? Booze? What is it that they want? How could you not want a great novel and a bottle of champagne for the holidays? Would you rather have the latest contraption that allows you to fluff your bed pillows from work with an app on your iPhone because that makes you feel so much hipper? See, this is where I have the problem with everyone saying they love Christmas because it’s supposed to celebrate the birth of Jesus, even though they probably didn’t even have calendars back then and no one really knows the date. If you are all so into Christmas because of this, why don’t you lie down on some straw and stop it with the social media and shopping?

Personally, I want to start my own reality show for the holidays: Cookie’s Fortune. I sure hope that baby gets to come home from the hospital by Christmas.

Categories
Opinion

School Merger: Too Many Cooks and Nobody “Chopped”

patton.jpg

The schools merger needs a General Patton, or someone like him, to take command and give orders.

Maybe you remember the scene in the movie where George C. Scott as Patton comes upon a bunch of trucks and tanks gridlocked in the mud, and he wades into the mess, directs traffic, and pretty soon we’re back on the way to beating the Germans.

“I don’t want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We’re gonna go through him like crap through a goose,” Scott says in one of the great motivational speeches in moviedom.

Or maybe you’ve seen “Chopped,” the Food Network program in which four chefs compete before a panel of judges that chops one of them after each course. The chopped chef smiles in resignation and goes home.

And if cooking shows are foreign to you, then watch this clip from YouTube of variations of “sit down and shut up” in 70 movies.

We don’t need the menace or profanity, but the command and authority would be nice. This is not a drill. This is not a consultant’s report that can be put on a shelf and ignored, thank you very much. There is no do-nothing option and no going back to 2010 and separate city and county school systems. This is about payroll, school lunches, school bus schedules, attendance zones, and all the minutia of running a system that could potentially have 150,000 students and maybe 25,000 employees and impact everyone in Memphis and Shelby County as much as anything since the court-ordered busing and subsequent white flight of 1973. This is a big deal.

If the Transition Planning Commission’s plan isn’t accepted, then the unified school board will have to come up with something else, and that is like saying the students will decide what they want to do for the rest of the year. The 23-member school board is unstable, not mentally but structurally. There will be an election for seven positions in August, and in 2013 the board will shrink to the newbies and then possibly expand to up to 13 members.

The Tennessee state attorney general? Just another lawyer with an opinion, in the minds of some legislators and TPC members.

The superintendents? Neither one has been promised the job, and Kriner Cash is on the move.

The state legislature? A majority would vote for Tennessee seceding from Shelby County.

The Shelby County Commission or Memphis City Council? Please.

Our best hope is the TPC, with fresh guidance and affirmation from U.S. District Judge Hardy Mays via appointment of a special master — someone who can say, politely but firmly, get these trucks moving, you’ve been chopped, or sit down and shut up.

The TPC is facing a bear of a month of meetings in May to come up with a plan for a unfied system in June.
Most of these good and smart folks are volunteering their time, or their employers are donating their time. But it is the unified school board, according to Judge Mays’ ruling, that has the power for “making all transition decisions, operating the two separate school systems, and providing information to the Commissioner of Education.”

So far the special master that Mays spoke of in last order has not been appointed, and the TPC does not have the power to ask for one. I won’t pretend to understand the fine points of special masters, but it sounds to me like a good thing right now, or else we’re stuck in the mud.