Fight hypertension: Ride the bus

   Back in my early 40s, my doctor presented me with a curious diagnosis: high blood pressure.

   This made no sense. I was healthy and active. My cholesterol was perfect, as was everything else save my hairline. The doctor said that lots of otherwise healthy people have the condition, and science has no ready explanation.

    Now I have an explanation: High blood pressure, and hair loss, are caused by one's brake foot.

    The discovery was made when I started riding the bus with increasing regularity to my new job as a college instructor. Riding a bus was not something I could do for many years in newspapers, because of the regular need to hop in a car and go to an interview or attend a meeting.

     I started riding the bus not just to save on gas and all it renders unto the environment, but because driving increasingly was a hassle. Where I live, particularly during warm months, nary an intersection is unadorned with barricades and orange barrels.

     Other considerations aside, I have a formula to tell you if you should be on a bus: It's if you spend more time braking than accelerating.

      Let's face it: That is true in most metro cities. Driving becomes idling — blowing exhaust into the face of the stationionary sucker stationed behind you — as opposed to having the breeze blowing through your hair. (Too often the breeze through your hair is another car's exhaust. No wonder mine fell out.)

    This is not to say I don't like to drive. I love it. I crave road trips. This is also not to say that I didn't first arrive at the bus depot without trepidation.

     The uninitiated might tend to view bus riders as the downcast, the losers, those going nowhere. I knew all along that was false, because I have a going-somewhere son who has used mass transit religiously while living in Austin.  Now that I'm riding the bus, I understand how false the stereotype of these commuters is. Many riders are simply smart consumers. They are smart not only about the dollars and cents they save when someone else drives, but are smart enough to use a low-cost system to their benefit.

     My son is smart. He doesn't drive, and has demonstrated in almost 10 years in Austin that he doesn't need a car. And I do believe that his reliance on mass transit makes him more mellow and better-connected to a city he loves.

     One key that can convince a person to start riding the bus is the realization that time spent driving is time wasted. For me, riding a bus means time to read the newspaper or a magazine, or to grade essays. I can do these when I let someone else ride the brake for me.

       True, you have to organize your coming and going a little better. You need to leave yourself a little more time. That can eat into a day. But if you utilize the time on the bus to your benefit, you've wasted none of it.

      The biggest discovery about riding a bus is that the stress I always imagined accompanying such commuters is not there. Getting to one's job through someone else's labor actually relaxes the body, starting with your overworked pedal foot.

      Not to get to technical, but your plantar bone is connected to your heel bone, which is connected to your shin bone, which is connected to your knee bone. And the muscles that keep each in a state of tension as a driver — grinding at a lifetime's supply of cartilage and tooth enamel — are connected indirectly to your neckbone and your cranial bone. All adds up to headaches, pulse rates that exceed speed limits, and the aforementioned high blood pressure.

       My doctor did not tell me this. My brake foot did.

       Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. E-mail: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Where the money went this time

    Oh, man, that fog of war. Sweat and smoke in your eyes. Not always sure what you're shooting at.

    One minute you try to nail the enemy — Barack Obama — as a Muslim who won't fess to it. Then your new commanding general, Glenn Beck, directs fire at him for liberation (Christian) theology.

    Obama, the enemy, is an inert job killer. Obama, the enemy, is a hyper-speed spender — and so what if a few jobs emanate?

    Well, guess what? A few jobs emanated — about  3 million — directly linked to the Recovery and Investment Act signed a year and a half ago.

    That's from an independent report in which one of the economists contributing, Mark Zandi (he backed John McCain in 2008), says the bill averted "Great Depression 2.0."

     Our jobless rate of 9.6 percent percent? It would be 11 percent otherwise, the report says, and 16.5 percent without the added rescue of banks.

      We switch you now to the nearest Tea Party rally, which wouldn't hear such a thing — couldn't hear it, anyway, with its bullhorns at jet-engine decibels.

     Ah, those anti-spending absolutists. I presume you heard the howls and screeches last week when another report came out: that more than 10 percent of the $50 billion spent on Iraqi reconstruction evaporated into desert dust. Our Tea Party types would not have stood for that. Right?

        Wrong. Most of these anti-spending sentinels were worse than silent in their red, white and blue vestments. They were patriotically pliant: on the off-budget funding of the Iraq incursion, on the Bush Pentagon's "cost-plus" approach for overpaying for just about everything contractors like Halliburton and KBR did in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters.

       No, from this volume-adjusted segment of society, not a peep was heard back then. Only when Barack Obama became the enemy did fiscal obscenities become — obscene.

       This is ironic, and odd. I mean, if our county is going to be extravagant with our money, you'd think most folks would want the extravagance to benefit our own children, our own highways, our own hospitals — rather than those of swarthy, sworn enemies.

        Well, Obama and majority Democrats set out to do the former, spend money on our needs, in a moment of dire economic peril and . . . behold, he became the enemy.

        The debt! The debt! So shout the aggrieved. You can't argue with the scope of the debt problem, except that if you are going to borrow, you at least ought to have a proper justification for it, and expect a payback — like 3 million jobs in not quite two years.

        At this point, we direct the assembled protesters to cup their ears and hum very loudly. Something else they don't want to hear is in the current Time magazine under the title, "How the stimulus is changing America."

         Where is all that money going?  Along with crucial domestic aims like highways, schools and hospitals (ours, not Iraq's), it's going to more innovation and far-sighted thinking than any American endeavor since the moon-shot mobilization. 

         The endgame of this innovation stands to be far more than a lunar footprint and a bag of moon rocks, however.

         In this case it's clean and more dependable energy: wind, solar, fuel cells. It's energy conservation, such as retrofitting three of four federal buildings (the U.S. government being the nation's largest energy consumer).

         Stimulus dollars are being poured into making the nation's electric grid more dynamic, making our electric meters smarter and increasing our means of storing and distributing wind and solar power.

         Oh, and while we're at it:

         Here's something else about where the money is going. As opposed to the no-bid contracts that by which Halliburton and Blackwater engorged themselves, the stimulus bill's allocations are based on real, honest-to-goodness, due-diligence competition among bidders. That form of fiscal responsibility, writes Time, is "the Recovery Act's deeper reform."

         Now, once again: It may bother you that we are spending anything at all, with a national debt exceeding $13 trillion. The bumper sticker says, "Don't tell Obama what comes after 'trillion.'"

       To those adorning their chrome with those words, let's try these words: Did ya see where those other trillions went?

       Former longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

 

Woe, Arizona

  PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Progressive, vibrant, inclusive, this northern Arizona city seems a refuge from the "them vs. us" rage rattling a state under the political control of hard-liners.

   And yet, even Prescott can't escape it. The race question. White vs. brown. Them vs. us.

  That's what it was when a mural painted on the side of an elementary school drew acidic darts from passersby and a city councilman cast his tongue into the turmoil.

   The mural, at Miller Valley School, features children of varied lineage in a motif that celebrates a new way of sustainability. If it has a dominant color, it is green.

    But recently the artist was working overtime on the mural, particularly trying to lighten the face of one figure on the sign, the dark face of a Hispanic child. The school district line was that he was asked to brighten all the faces. It said the matter was most definitely not about race.

    Maybe so, but that's not the impression artist R.E. Wall got from those catcalls.

    And then there was City Councilman Steve Blair, who complained on a radio show about a "black" face so dominant on the mural.

    Rest assured, Blair's discomfort isn't necessarily about black faces. In another setting, Blair lobbied to have a Spanish-language census street banner removed so that Prescott wouldn't be portrayed as a "Spanish" community. A recall effort has been launched against Blair.

    Too much can be made over a few reckless words. Prescott need not feel shame. However, with increasing regularity, hard-right leaders in this state are seeking to commandeer the multihued canvas which is the reality of the Southwest.

      In Tucson, school officials are refusing to videotape Mexican studies classes so that state officials can see what's going on in them. Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law in May prohibiting classes designed for students of a particular ethnic group and which stir resentment or thoughts of insurrection — you know, Mexican takeover.

      Tellingly, as with Arizona's SB 1070, which veritably guarantees racial profiling by police (while prohibiting it, of course), this policy is driven by hard-right partisan politics.

      Brewer may believe in her heart that SB 1070 is the right thing to do. If she had any qualms about what it might do to inflame Latinos, however — well, with a Republican primary coming up, she knew that vetoing the bill would have guaranteed her political demise.

     Ah, and a key driver of the Mexican studies controversy is state Superintendent of Instruction Tom Horne, who just happened to have been running for attorney general in Tuesday's primary, which he led by a narrow margin on the morning after.

     Brewer, victorious in the primary, and Horne are poised to reap their political rewards. Meanwhile, Arizona is a sea of open wounds.

     An exodus of startling proportions has thrown schools for a loop. The Arizona Republic featured a wrenching story about students returning to one Phoenix elementary school to find scores of their friends missing, as great numbers of undocumented families have fled the state. This might sound like a taxpayer bonanza. It also could result in school closings over time, particularly harming Latino neighborhoods. One sidelight of the story is the school's advisory that in addition to bringing school supplies, students also bring emergency contacts in case their parents should not show up at the end of the school day.

      Of course, it goes without saying that said provisions needn't apply to those students whose skin is pale.

      Whether it's over Muslims planning a community center in Manhattan, a school mural depicting skin deemed too dark, or Mexican Americans needing documentation to walk their own streets, our politics are taking an increasingly ugly and stratifying turn.

      As for Arizona state officials, with their prying concern about "divisive" classroom studies: They need to turn the video camera on themselves.

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. E-mail: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.