Like any right-minded, hot-blooded, or God-fearing American that's scared of his own shadow, this weekend's Deadly Porch Collapse got me thinking about the frailty of human life, the disconcerting state of my own porch, and a joke the punchline of which would be something about Al Qaeda flying a plane into the deck. After all, the debacle happened not far from where I live, and one of the poor kids that died is from my hometown. Clearly I'm in the Poor Estimators of Porch Capacity demographic, and should remove the lathe and spinning jenny from my porch just as soon as possible.

It also got me thinking about the state of public education in America. Many of the Deadly Porch Partygoers attended New Trier High School -- a famously excellent public school that was featured in Jonathan Kozol's treatise on public education, "Savage Inequality." I read the book a long time ago, but as I remember the crux of the biscuit is Kozol's comparison of New Trier and East St. Louis. Perhaps I'm easily led, but after a couple hundred pages of discussion on the property tax system and loads of anecdotal evidence, the logical conclusion is that something's pretty well fucked up with this whole school thing. No ideas how to fix it, though. It's a bummer of a book, and well worth a read.

But after the Deadly Porch Collapse, I realize that even the best schools in our country don't teach some of the most basic things, like how many peeps on a porch is too many. That's one lesson only God and gravity can teach. I'm not religious and this shit's why.

Analogcabin @ 1:58 PM
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