Connections

My little hometown seems to be up in arms about plans to close the middle school there. The building used to be the town high school until the mid-90s, when the lack of children forced a consolidation with a nearby town. Now there's talk about shutting down the old building entirely, but I haven't yet seen or heard anyone talking about the root cause of it all: if you want your little farm town to have schools, start making babies again.

Update: And then along came Abp. Chaput:

The “next America” has been in its chrysalis a long time. Whether people will be happy when it fully emerges remains to be seen. But the future is not predestined. We create it with our choices. And the most important choice we can make is both terribly simple and terribly hard: to actually live what the Church teaches, to win the hearts of others by our witness, and to renew the soul of our country with the courage of our own Christian faith and integrity. There is no more revolutionary act.

At extraordinary speed

A disquieting article in the Telegraph:

Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise. The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily. The same with many of my reference books – and soon with most. Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities.”

"Seasonique"

I'm beginning to think modern society is trapped in a nightmare: read the Suburban Banshee's report about what she saw on teevee tonight. I think the hormonal poison/abortifacient she's referring to is Seasonique.

In my tribe

Kathy Shaidle keeps saying, "We will ALL default to our tribes when the time comes." Who's your tribe? Mine is basically small-town Midwestern WASPs, people who keep their yards mowed and research genealogy and take care of old forgotten cemeteries and raise big batches of kids.

Speaking of which, we went to a family reunion recently - our small branch of the Bragg family. One of the older ladies noticed our large crew - Lisa, me and four of our five kids, and noted with a bit of sadness that "there aren't many children anymore." It was a chilling moment. Our family reunions used to have more kids than adults, but at this one there were only five - our four and one other little boy. Things change so slowly it's hard to notice the changes day-by-day; but when someone stops to compare life today to life fifty years ago, the changes for the worse are shocking.

Somewhere around here...

...some Green lunatic is thinking, "now there's a good idea."