400 words column

[larryJ]

From Steve Lambert---------------

HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR FAMILY HOUSEGUESTS---

It's been said that house guests -- especially the familial kind -- are like fish.  After three days, they start to smell.

Which explains the funny looks directed our way as our clan of six celebrated the holidays at my mom and step-dad's place in Florida.

We're used to each other -- the four kids, my wife and I -- but are clearly an acquired taste to those who aren't exposed to our special kind of interaction on a daily basis.

That would include Mom and Mike, who got to experience the best and worst of grandparenting over those 10 days.

The best:  The quality time you get to spend with your grandkids, knowing that you can send them back to their parents once your patience has expired.

The worst:  When you're stuck in the same house as the little monsters even after you've returned them.

It probably wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to be.

The air mattress borrowed from a kindly neighbor would have blown a hole at some point anyway, even if all four kids hadn't used it as a trampoline.

And the punching and teasing in the back seat of the rented mini-van -- followed by the crying, the tattle-tailing and the always popular threats of grounding -- should have been no shocker to my mom, who raised four kids of her own.

Even so, as happy as Memom and Grandpa were to see us arrive, it's a scientific certainty that they were just as happy to see us go.

My own grandmother, she of old world Corsican descent, could barely withstand 10 consecutive hours -- much less 10 days -- of my siblings, cousins and me, but we never doubted her love for us.  Why else would she so cheerfully chase us around the house with a wooden spoon when we misbehaved?

Notice I said "when" and not "if."

Which again, is why grandparenting is usually such a great gig, or so I'm told.  When "when" happens, you don't have to be the disciplinarian, the bad cop, the crazed Corsican with a wooden spoon.

You can play the role my grandfather mastered -- the soft-hearted "Papa" who'd hoist us on his shoulders to pick apples and grapes in his backyard.

They don't have apple trees, but my mom and Mike are pretty awesome grandparents themselves.

They may even let us return .. as long as we keep our visit to less that three days.

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Larryj

[larryJ]

(While this column appears most Sundays, it may be more localized and not relevant to this forum.  However, it can be of interest generally.)

From Steve Lambert-------

GREAT EQUALIZER IS TOO COSTLY FOR MANY

"Education is the great equalizer in our nation.  It can bridge social, economic, racial and geographic divides like no other force.  It can mean the difference between an open door and a dead end.  And nowhere is this truer than in higher education."

No time has this been truer than today, eight years after two Republicans -- John Boehner and Howard "Buck" McKeon -- made their case in a congressional report they titled, "The College Cost Crisis."

And yet, even as higher education does its best to bridge rich and poor, millions of middle Americans find themselves underwater --unable to afford rapidly rising tuition costs, too affluent to qualify for free financial aid.

It's only just beginning, tool.  In California, proposed state budget cuts to higher education will drive tuition costs at community colleges up 30, 40, 50 percent or more this fall.  At Mt. San Antonio College, one analysis has in-state tuition increasing from the current $26 per unit to anywhere from $36 to $66.

Again, it's the middle class that will suffer the most, which speaks to one of two inconvenient truths when it comes to the 2011 version  of the college cost crisis:  Higher education remains an at-all-costs priority for families, even if it means mortgaging a young person's future with loan obligations that average  $30,000 upon graduation.  (my note:  Mt. San Antonioo College is a local junior college here in the San Gabriel Valley, and, $30,000 seems a bit low to me.)

The other uncomfortable reality -- that colleges and universities have little incentive to control their spending -- was discussed in the 2003 Boehner-McKeon study, which demanded that higher education be held more accountable for cost increases.

That's fine political theater, but the reality -- as we discussed here a few weeks back -- is that relaxed standards for student loans opened the flood gates to out-of-control borrowing and allowed colleges to raise their costs practically unchallenged.

Go to any campus, and you'll find loan programs being peddled like candy to -- you guessed it -- students from the middle class backgrounds who have no alternative.

Eliminating that option hardly seems fair.  Relaxing the income standards for free financial aid hardly seems practical.

What's left is an increase in tuition rates, which is neither fair nor practical given the competitive nature of our global economy.

No, the real fix -- and the one hardest to achieve -- will be for the university system to manage spending in a way that does not compromise classroom instruction.  Keep teachers. Hire more teachers, in fact.  But eliminate non-essential spending, in much the same way every business has had to.

For countless middle-class students drowning in debt, it may be the only lifeline left.

________________________________________________

Larryj

[larryJ]

(This column is not entitled "400 words" as it usually is, but it is written by the same person, Steve Lambert).

FABRIC OF MEMORIES ON THE 4TH.......................

Of all the moments in time a family captures through the years -- photographic proof of who we are and where we came from -- a few invariably stand out.

Me in a Tarzan suit at age 5, for instance (sorry, ladies, that loin cloth is long gone).

There's one picture, though, that gives me special pause this July Fourth weekend.

Taken years before I was born -- toward the end of World War II -- it shows my mom, her little sister and brother, their mom and dad, all standing proudly next to an American flag.

It's classic 20th Century Americana -- an immigrant man, his wife and kids, and the one thing, other than themselves, they could always turn to for strength and inspiration.

To them -- and to to countless millions before and after -- the flag was and remains more than just a symbol, but a beacon, guiding us through the turbulence of wars, economic calamities and out own imperfections and insecurities.

Digitally enhanced or on grainy old black-and-white film, its brilliant color palette in neither defined nor limited by technology, rather the lens we choose to see it through.

For my grandfather, who came to this country from Eastern Europe as a teenager, the stars and stripes represented the freedom and opportunity he'd dreamed of since boyhood.

He became a mechanic for the Army, ran an auto body shop, built his home and planted the seeds of a family that long after his death continues to honor him in the best way it can -- by believing, as he did, that anything is possible.

It's an ideal we struggle with as a nation right now.  We're too quick to assess blame, too willing to forsake responsibility -- compounding problems that are challenging enough in a world as complicated as this one is.

I'm sure those challenges seemed just as daunting to our grandparents' generation, but somehow they survived the Depression, two World Wars and a future every bit as uncertain as ours.  And in the midst of it all -- through the heartache and hardships -- they found time to appreciate what really mattered.

Family.

Freedom.

A flag and the hopes and dreams it continues to inspire.

Happy Fourth of July!

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Larryj