Making most of a hollow shell

     Looking back, I must have written 10,000 words about that old building on East Waco's Clifton Street. It was a decrepit nursing home at one time. Then McLennan County converted it into a makeshift juvenile detention center.

     In the '90s it got upgraded and expanded. That meant young detainees would have recreation and classroom opportunities, and wouldn't have to, among other things, relieve themselves in plastic jugs after hours. It was a disgrace.

     Ten years later, the county acknowledged that demand had outstripped the renovated building. It  built a new place where children in trouble could get some counseling and intervention this side of the Texas Youth Commission.

      For years, the old building sat vacant while some of us suggested ways to use it, like providing juvenile drug treatment.

     Then two years ago, good people — and I mean the best — found a use for a hollow shell: establish a triage and respite center for people with psychiatric emergencies.

      Long before this was possible, I had watched these people push the boulder up the hill, straining on behalf of a voiceless constituency. At last, they stood at the top of the hill, sweat-stained but rewarded.

      Now, in a case of mountaintop mining for budget dollars, the state of Texas is threatening to take the ground out from beneath their feet.

      It would happen if Gov. Rick Perry and state budget writers dynamite away 10 percent of spending from the Department of Human Services and subordinates like the Waco-based Heart of Texas Region Mental Health-Mental Retardation.

      Barb Tate, executive director of HOT MHMR, is the very last person from whom you will ever expect hyperbole. So when she uses "devastating" repeatedly to describe the proposed cuts — more than $1 million for her agency over the biennium — believe it.

     The first victim under her watch, she said, likely would be the psychiatric crisis center established in 2008 with a grant from the Legislature and much local collaboration. 

      This would be — yes, devastating, and costly. The on-site respite serves an average of 28 people a day, keeping them out of mental hospitals, and emergency rooms, and jails. Anyone who deals with any of those entities knows how much they cost all of us.

     The other function of the center is to do triage for people brought by police or family when someone is talking suicide or conversing with phantoms. The center handles six to 10 such cases daily. A person might need hospitalization. Or he might  just need to get back on his medication and then into a clean bed, maybe his own.

       The really scary thing about the proposed budget cuts, said Tate, is that in addition to $90 million that would be yanked from community mental health centers like hers, $44 million would be stripped from state hospitals, where beds routinely are at a premium.

       The sad thing about this is that most policymakers, and Texans, simply shrug their shoulders and say nothing else can be done. The economy, you know.

        That rationalization could not be more false.

        Texas is a state of great resources with pitifully little social spine. Its policies are captive of players like the Texas Business Association and the national Citizens for Tax Reform. If Rick Perry is a little less tan than normal when returning from an out-of-state jaunt, understand that he is fresh from another blood ritual with CTR's anti-tax high priest, Grover Norquist. Earning national street cred as an anti-tax crusader has been one of Perry's chief missions as governor.

         We are told that Texas faces a $21 billion budget deficit next biennium. Considering the state of the economy, none should be surprised. But critics have pointed out for years that the state operates with a structural deficit based on a regressive tax system that barely reflects its economy or taps its immense wealth. 

         A few years ago, under the guise of "school finance reform," the state managed to make things worse. Republicans pushed through a one-third property tax cut without sufficient ways to offset it. It was typical blue-sky policy by people who would never plan for a day when skies would turn unforgiving. In agriculture, such foolery is called eating the seed corn.

        We've seen the same thing in Washington. Politicians who borrowed to pay for two wars led us into a near-Depression. Now that the need for federal action at home is great, debt accumulated in the best of times prevents us from meeting crucial needs in bad times.

         In Waco, they did a magnificent job doing something with that hollow shell on Clifton Street. Now they are at the mercy of fiscal stewards who have sculpted a hollow shell of a tax system. If Texas had a social spine, it would finance good deeds that serve people in need and save money in the long run.

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

         

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.