The Ennis Daily News (Ennis, Tex.), Ed. 1 Friday, November 29, 2013 Page: 4 of 22
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Opinion
Page 4
Friday, November 29,2013
Ennis Daily News
More options
are good for
our students
Our
Point of
View
Ennis has a history of sending its
students to make a splash in areas far
and wide, like many a small commu-
nity, once they graduate from our local
school district and contemplate post-
secondary education.
We love the stories of students head-
ing to places like Harvard. What com-
munity like ours wouldn’t? This was
the home to Ed
Whitacre, after all, the
man behind the recov-
ery of GM, the AT&T
genius, a CEO who
our students can con-
sider with the rent-
able knowledge he
walked the same
streets they do.
However, not every person is meant
to move mountains in this life, and we
as a community haven’t had a reliable
option for some young men and
women to pursue other avenues for
self-enrichment and improvement.
Enter Texas State Technical College
and the campus forming a quick hike
to the west over in Red Oak. With the
addition of that campus, introduced
through bills written by local legisla-
tors and approved by the governor
during the summer, Ellis County will
soon have another outlet for of the
kind of training and workforce educa-
tion students need to live productively
when hitting the four-year university
outlets is not realistic.
We all dream of sending our chil-
dren off to college. Sometimes our
modest finances and student achieve-
ment make that option less viable
than we’d like. Instead of the diffi-
culty that some students face in find-
ing quality training after high school,
hopefully we’ll have another option to
be able to keep them in Ellis County as
they learn trades that can serve them
and the families they hope to build for
the rest of their lives.
With the costs of university educa-
tion rapidly growing unsustainably
high for many modest families, career
and technical schools, two-year col-
leges and other higher education op-
portunities become more and more
important. The trick we see facing the
system now is helping the culture un-
derstand that such opportunities are
not “second best” alternatives, but
sensible approaches to creating good
lives that are well within the reach of
most, if not all, of the students in our
district.
© Contents copyright 2013 and cannot be reproduced
without the written permission of the publisher.
Tre Bischof ■ Publisher Tammy Fry ■ Advertising Manager
Nick Todaro ■ Editor Teresa Watson ■ Office Manager
Jared Massey ■ Production Manager
Nikki Cohan ■ Circulation Manager
Melissa Honza ■ Composition Manager
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Loss makes it clearer
My great aunt Dee died
Wednesday morning around 3:30
a.m., and I’m wondering why I’m
not currently a weeping mess
right now. She’d been in ill health
for months now, as
people at the age of 92
tend to be.
For a lot of you I’m
sure “great aunt”
sounds like a fairly
distant relation, but
Aunt Dee practically
helped raise me. Dee
lived either with or
next door to us my en-
tire life, and helped
raise myself, my sis-
ter Sara and my
cousin Robert. A lot
of people I‘ve met since leaving
home don’t understand that con-
cept: For them family means im-
mediate family and far-flung
relatives across the state or coun-
try Not so with mine; we all just
sort of clustered around in East
Texas. If anything I’m the weird
one for moving to the “big city”
and “going to college” and “not
having children by the time I’m
25.”
Having extended family nearby
made for a crowded home life, but
one brimming with love.
I know I should be crying right
now. I should be having to excuse
myself from the newsroom to go
sit in my car and weep into my
shirt sleeves, but I’m not. Instead
I’m just writing this.
When my father died, I was sad
but not exactly
shocked. He had his
first heart attack
when I was in the
fourth grade, and
from then on his
health was a roller
coaster of specialist
visits, long stretches
of hospitalization
and terrifying mid-
night phone calls
from my mother in
various Dallas hospi-
tals telling me “you
need to be here, this might be it.”
By the time he died in 2003,1 was
prepared for it. I was still devas-
tated, yes, but at least I saw it com-
ing.
It’s hard to feel that bad about
a life of 92 years. As I say often
when I see the obituary of a long-
lived person, that’s a good shift.
There’s a lot of people out there,
including myself, who’d be en-
tirely happy with 92 years of life.
As I plan to spend Thanksgiving
helping my mother plan a funeral,
I’m thankful the world got 92
years of my Aunt Dee.
It’s been a tradition for the past
two years to make the column I
write this week about Black Fri-
day; exhorting you to stay home
with your families and skip the
ridiculous lines and demeaning
consumerist free-for-all. I’m skip-
ping that this year.
If you think waiting in the bit-
ter cold to save $50 on a new tele-
vision is more important than
spending time with your friends
and family, I’ve got nothing to say
to you, except that there will come
a day when you will have wished
you spent another Thanksgiving
with someone as opposed to wait-
ing in line for the newest gadget
of the day
One thing about “adulthood”
I’ve always struggled with is that
I’ve never really felt like an adult.
I go to work, I pay my bills, file my
taxes, but all the while I feel like a
teenager playing dress-up in his
father’s work clothes.
It’s not until these situations
that I really feel old, because I
think this is what being an adult
is about: it’s about shoring up the
edifice of your family as the del-
uge of time rapidly washes it
away Sooner or later the kids are
all that’s left.
Phil is a staff writer for the Ennis
Daily News. He can be reached at
phil@ennisdailynews.com.
Letter to the editor
Developers
too key to lose
As my husband Jim Grant
said two weeks ago that Ennis
must step up and move forward
with the opportunity that has
been presented to our city as far
as the redevelopment of our
downtown. I am disappointed
that our city officials were un-
prepared to negotiate with the
developers.
This was a small amount to
give up for a big reward for our
city. Always in a business trans-
action, you need to be flexible. It
is my hope that our government
will find a way to support and
fund the transformation and re-
vitalization of our business dis-
trict. Let us try to make this a
city wide project — everyone
help!
Beverly Grant
Ennis
TV or not TV, that is the question
We were a Nielsen family last
week. We received little diaries
to fill out, marking when and
what we watched on TV for a
week. If we recorded a show and
watched it later, we
wrote that down, too.
The first thought
that runs through
your head when you
start filling out the
diary is to give the
shows you love a
boost, even if you
went to a movie that
night or to a friend’s
house. Should I write
down what I would
have watched? Then I
realized, no, it’s my
favorite show’s job to
keep me from going to the
movies when it’s on. Or at least
get me to record it. So we were
very scrupulous with our di-
aries.
It turns out that other than
the nightly news, we don’t really
watch much TV at all. I imagine
every family watches TV differ-
ently: Some people leave it on all
day long; others just watch cer-
tain shows. We are the others.
Sue watches a lot of football; me,
I can barely sit through the
Super Bowl. Sue watches college
football on Saturday, the pros on
Sunday and I watch stuff I’ve
recorded on Sunday night.
There was space at the back of
the diary where we could write
notes about our viewing habits
or comments about television in
general. They even said we could
use extra sheets of paper if we
liked. So I told them this:
Most of what is on television
is not just bad — it is toxic. Re-
member the Miley
Cyrus blowup a few
months ago on the
MTV awards show?
The one that did ex-
actly what a public-
ity stunt is supposed
to do — get her tons
of free publicity?
Ninety-nine percent
of the country didn’t
even see the show,
but that didn’t stop
the professional
blatherers (all on TV,
of course) from giv-
ing her all the free publicity one
person could stand. There was
not a word about the MTV show
that aired right before the
“awards” show. It’s called “16
and Pregnant,” a long-running
series on MTV which, if you go
by the lack of outrage, is just
hunky-dory.
Doesn’t anyone find it odd that
if we ran a transcript of the
dirty jokes and double entendres
on last night’s prime-time sit-
coms in the newspaper, people
would cancel their subscriptions
in droves? Why is it that TV can
get away with things print can’t?
(Not that we’d want to.) Because
money.
It is all about advertising
money. But let me ask you, when
was the last time you bought
something because you saw it ad-
vertised on TV? Is that why you
bought your car? Because you
saw it doing figure eights is a
desert? Is that why you bought
the food in your fridge? Are you
really going to decide what kind
of beer to drink because one
company’s ads have cute horses
and another one’s ads don’t? Do
you think there’s a man alive out
there who hasn’t heard of Viagra
or Cialis? Why are they still ad-
vertising? But if advertisers
want to throw their money away,
television is happy to let them.
It turns out a lot of us barely
watch television on TV. We
watch Netflix movies on our
computers; we watch three-
minute clips of the late-night
shows when our friends post the
links on Facebook. When we do
actually sit in front of the set, we
do it alone, watching something
we recorded a month ago. Sitting
in the living room watching one
show that’s “fun for the whole
family” is an idea that went out
with floppy discs and mix tapes.
And why is it legal for cable
and satellite TV to sell us “pack-
ages” that charge us for channels
we don’t watch? Maybe cable TV
companies haven’t noticed what
the Internet did to the record,
book and newspaper businesses
the past few years. But they will.
After it’s way too late to save
themselves.
Contact Jim Mullen at Jim-
MullenBooks. com.
Jim Mullen
The Village Idiot
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Todaro, Nick. The Ennis Daily News (Ennis, Tex.), Ed. 1 Friday, November 29, 2013, newspaper, November 29, 2013; Ennis, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth771079/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Ennis Public Library.