HOW DID YOU LEARN to speak? How could you possibly recall the specifics? Infants hear and repeat and, for the lucky majority, the magic of growth does the rest.

A lot of factors govern that “magic” of early childhood development, things like nutrition and environment, human contact and, for most infants, sound. Not just crying, either. Hungry little kids have hungry minds too. Between birth and three years old most of what an infant does is eat and learn (yes, diapers, too, but thankfully that’s not the focus here).

Some parents have to spend a lot of their time doing their best just to provide safe homes and enough to eat for their families. Other tasks must be deferred—tasks like learning. It’s hard enough to cover the life-sustaining basics working two jobs or because the learning part was absent in the parents’ upbringing. Some parents may not have experienced how little it takes to engage in the learning process with a small child and how much a mastery of literacy can improve the lifelong prospects for almost every child. Read more…

THE NEWS FROM IOWA this week sounded a lot like a re-staging of last November’s Columbia County early-voting melodrama. The Iowa cast was larger but both productions left the political theater audience wondering whodunit.

Who or what was eating our ballots? In both cases early reports indicated that all was going well with new technology that promised to make the process of voting more accessible and transparent. That word “transparent” has become a required part of the modern political vocabulary. It’s shorthand for: “We’re so honest, we show you everything we’re doing.” The Iowa Democratic caucus system relied on a new “smart-phone app,” which party officials described as quite transparent. But it wasn’t transparent at all. It just didn’t work right.

The situation here was different in what seemed like a simple problem with ballots that were incorrectly printed. That could have been easily remedied. It was only when unofficial results were not available on the day after Election Day and for some time thereafter that the scope of the disruption became clear… but not exactly transparent. Read more…

IMMIGRATION IS A PROBLEM for states on the border, like Texas and California, which is to say, that other border that connects us with Mexico and, in effect, Central America, too. Our border is the one a few hours north of here. Why would Canadians want to leave their country for ours?

So you can understand why the news that migrants, most likely from the southern border, were going to be housed and cared for in the Town of Canaan drew a crowd of local residents to Town Hall last week. People wanted to hear what’s going on.

They learned that the federal Department of Health and Human Services is working with the Berkshire Farm Center and Services for Youth, which straddles Route 22 at the intersection with Queechy Lake Drive. The center will temporarily house migrants labeled by the federal government as “Unaccompanied Alien Children.” Read more…