February 24, 2009 · 1 Comment
Wow. That’s all I can say. I just finished doing our taxes and then my son’s FAFSA to qualify for financial aid. And like millions of Americans, I now know for sure that I have no money to send this child to school.
So like President Obama being stared at by John McCain, I’m looking for ways to cut our budget. And two things in particular caught my eye: my public radio membership and my three newspaper subscriptions.
I downgraded my memberhip to WBEZ last year so I don’t donate more than the cost of a cup of mocha at Starbucks each month. And NPR is my daytime buddy. I would feel terrible guilt if I listened without subscribing. (I am Catholic after all.)
But my newspaper subscriptions add up to more. While I read all of those papers, do I really need them all when every penny will count? For right now, the answer is yes.
Newspapers are almost disappearing faster than retail stores. Sure, you can read a lot of the papers online, but it’s just not the same. I bet the small story in our regional paper about a wife committing puppetcide wasn’t online, for example. (As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.) You also don’t get all of the ads, and while I don’t really have any money to go shopping, I like to keep up with trends. And for every subscription cancelled, the cuts at the papers pile up. Recently, my husband’s friend who was a research librarian at a Chicago daily was let go after years of service. Reporters and editors now have to do their own research. I guess they do this instead of sleeping since I know how much time it takes to do the reporting and writing for a good story.
So something else will have to get rubbed out by my pencil. I still believe we should all pay to protect our free press. It wouldn’t be America without it.
Categories: General Info
Tagged: budgets, free press, newspapers, public radio
I dig Space. I always have. As a grade school student, I would take my transistor radio to the bus stop so I could listen to Mercury capsule launches. I wrote letters to Mission Control and got pictures of the original Mercury astronauts. I was nuts for astronauts.
Why did this ancient history come to mind now? In today’s I.N.K. blog, Tanya Lee Stone writes about her upcoming book, Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream. Unlike me, these women pushed for their dream of going to space even though it was never fulfilled. I abandoned mine after I realized even leaving the earth on carnival rides made me queasy.
But I never lost my admiration of astronauts. In high school, I used the assignment in Speech class to write about a career to discuss astronauts. Of course, I had a wealth of information and was no stranger to the library to gather more. My grade: C. My teacher Ms. Streusel (really, that was her name) said being an astronaut was not a career. NOT A CAREER?! I felt like Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We both had C’s, our dreams dashed, and our teachers were nuts.
While Ralphie eventually found out that the gun he wanted for Christmas could actually shoot his eye out, my admiration for astronauts has remained as men and women make a living (definition of a career, right?) as astronauts. But the real modern day message to me after seeing Ms. Stone’s book was that as children’s authors, we really have a duty to give children information to pursue their dreams. There may not be a parent, teacher, or older sibling who has the time or ability to support that child’s dream. But if a child can read a book and know her goal is possible, we’ve given someone hope and perhaps made the impossible seem possible.
Categories: General Info · Gobble This Up--Food for Thought
Tagged: careers, children's nonfiction, Tanya Lee Stone
