This month LeRoy Collins Institute released their report The Double Whammy Facing Florida’s Counties outlining what the one-two punch of economic trends and state mandates is doing to Florida’s counties. That includes public safety spending dropping precipitously. Be sure to download a copy from the LeRoy Collins Institute website HERE.
It has now been 10 years since everything changed in America over the course of just a few hours on a September morning. Since the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve been fighting two wars, reeling from the security implications of a new normal at home and abroad, and suffering from a financial meltdown. These broad changes all have taken place with precious little real conversation about the course our nation has charted. On Sept. 13, The Village Square in partnership with Florida State University’s Center for the (more…)
Check out the season line-up and buy a season ticket HERE (buying tickets in a season are the best deal we’ve got).
Check out the fabulous line-up for the first dinner “9/11, The Heart of America, The Shadow of the Middle East” HERE. Early bird prices only good through Wednesday September 7th.
If you haven’t taken a look at this year’s Soul of the Community survey completed as a great public service to our community by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight complete these surveys in the 26 communities nationally in which they used to own newspapers.
Here’s a tickler:
The study provides empirical evidence that the drivers that create emotional bonds between people and their community are consistent in virtually every city and can be reduced to just a few categories. Interestingly, the usual suspects — jobs, the economy, and safety — are not among the top drivers. Rather, people consistently give higher ratings for elements that relate directly to their daily quality of life: an area’s physical beauty, opportunities for socializing, and a community’s openness to all people.
“[Martin Luther King Jr] would be very disappointed [in today’s politics]. We have such a lack of civility in our political life now. We are fixed on ideological poles and we seem unable to come together. Dr. King was always saying “can’t we come together, can’t we talk about these issues?” Our founding fathers argued with each other but they also knew that argument is part of the democratic process. But ultimately you have to compromise with each other in order to reach a consensus and keep the country moving forward. If all we do is remain fixed on these polar opposites of our political spectrum, the country will not be moving forward. And we’ve got to find a way through this. And it’s going to happen when the American people say: “Knock it off, stop it. We want to see a different attitude with respect to our political life. We want to see a different level of civility in Washington, D.C.” — CBS News, Face the Nation, Sunday August 28
(Photo credit: Black History Album)
“Lack of civility in words bleeds into a lack of decency in behavior, and so it goes.” –Kathleen Parker
(Photo credit: Michael Hashizume)
It’s on WFSU TV Channel 4 tonight at 7 PM.
It’s also on WFSU radio 88.9 FM also at 7 PM.
(An embarrassment of riches… learn more about the panel and program sponsors ASME & FSU CAPS HERE)
More from Farhad Manjoo in True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society:
“Investigating the rise of carelessness toward “reality” is, of course, the headlong purpose of this book. But I’ve been driving at a theory more pervasive than the peculiar psychology of one president, the transgressions of a single dominant political machine, or the aims of certain powerful players. The truth about truthiness, I’ve argued, is cognitive: when we strung up the planet in fiber-optic cable, when we dissolved the mainstream media into prickly niches, and when each of us began to create and transmit our own pictures and sounds, we eased the path through which propaganda infects our culture.”
(Photo credit: TJ Morton)
Dinner at the Square veterans know that at 7:30 we take a break for people who simply must relieve the babysitter, then we continue the conversation at 7:35 until 8:30. Well this time – with such an incredibly complex, dynamic and ambitious topic area as the consequences of 9/11 – after the 7:30 jump features a new panel and a new aspect of the topic: America and the Islamic World: Clash or Convergence? We’ve brought together a group of people with divergent experiences and opinions, all tied together in constructive professional relationships with our moderator FSU’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights’ Mark Schlakman.
Oh and check out the whole program and our first panel on Domestic Security Imperatives HERE.
Here’s the 7:30 panel line-up (uh, would you leave?)
Dr. Parvez Ahmed
Commentator on the American Muslim experience
University of North Florida, Coggin College of Business
(also attending the Interfaith Community Observance for 9/11 on Sunday 9/11)
Mildred Duprey de Robles
Conciliation Specialist, US Department of Justice, Community Relations Service, Miami Field Office
Dr. Adam Gaiser
FSU Department of Religion, Islamic Studies
Rabbi Jack Romberg
Temple Israel Tallahassee
Preston Scott
The Morning Show with Preston Scott
In reading up preparing for our September 13th program 9/11, The Heart of America, The Shadow of the Middle East, I found this powerful passage in The Looming Towers: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright:
“In so many respects the trade center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing 62 countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world: There was the ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic Chaplin of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Koranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.”
I’m not sure exactly where we went off track between ten years ago and now, but I can’t help but think that somewhere in this quote resides wisdom for how we get back on track.
(Photo credit: KzAkabueze – ONEin12)
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Apparently, according to Farhad Manjoo in True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, journalists live every day with the repercussions of the hostile media effect, where partisans view coverage through a lens that always sees it as unfair to their “side” and fail to notice aspects of the coverage that is favorable to their “side.”
It isn’t just politics that brings this out in us, it’s there with coverage of the world of Mac vs. PC. Alas, even operating systems have gone tribal. You’ve got the Apple devotees and then the people who just can’t stand the perceived snobbery of Apple devotees. David Pogue, who writes technology reviews for the New York Times, wrote a Vista review that brought out the worst in everyone.
According to Pogue: “The Mac people saw it as a rave review for Windows Vista and the Windows people saw it as a vicious slam on Windows.” Apparently Apple fans are consistently prickly about the slightest – well – slight. Over at the Wall Street Journal the technology reviewer Walt Mossberg even coined a term for this: “The Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.” (more…)
