5/30/08: Let's invest ourselves in our community

Some readers may have felt I was calling them misers in last week’s column. For that, I apologize.

Unless you are one.

By miser, I mean someone who hoards resources without paying attention to what is lost in the hoarding. The items left unbought that would have improved quality of life or saved time are insignificant compared with what a miserly mind-set does to the miser and everyone else.

The miser’s focus is myopic and self-centered. As Charles Dickens pointed out in "A Christmas Carol," a miser cannot see "the true meaning of Christmas" — or of a life lived in community, to speak more to the point.

Think about the most generous person you know. A miser is the opposite of that.

But my column was less to castigate those focused on scarcity and self-interest than to point out that scarcity is best dealt with, and self-interest best served, when we remember we work together as a community.

Individually, we save for retirement by putting money into 401(k)s or IRAs, mutual funds or by playing the market. We pay into these accounts because we expect to reap the benefits later.

This kind of investment can provide a certain level of financial security, but it can’t lower the crime rates, ensure there are jobs available for American workers or make it safe for anyone to walk the streets at night.

Think of investment in schools as another kind of retirement fund.

If we want to live in the kind of society we can be proud of, we need to take responsibility for building it.

But if that perspective doesn’t help, consider this one.

If we want to be able to complain about children being noisy and sticky and whiny in public — if you want to be able to say "Get off my lawn!" from your porch without a twinge of guilt in your golden years — we need to give them every chance to succeed where it matters. Even the most curmudgeonly among us would admit that if we don’t teach children properly, we can’t expect them to act properly.

After all, "children are our future."

So let’s put our money where our platitudes are.

But not just money — they need our attention, too. Kids need tutors, mentors and opportunities to go new places and see things they wouldn’t otherwise see. Some of this need is filled by parents and some by teachers, but some can only be attended to by an entire community.

Political decisions, for instance, are the purview of the town, state or nation making them. We seem to invest collectively in decisions that affect our individual wallets, such as local board of education budget proposals, but less so in larger-issue legislation.

It’s hardly our fault. In the past few years, more legislation on education has been passed than most senators would know what to do with, let alone members of the public. And the sometimes-sinister implications of federal legislation are often difficult to ferret out even if we did have the time to read each sentence.

So among the pages and pages of legalese, here’s one thing that should concern us, from one bill passed several years ago — the so-called "No Child Left Behind" act: Federally funded schools, such as New Britain High, are required to submit the names and personal information of all students to military recruiters.

Next week, I’ll tell you why this should concern us.