Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez greets attendees during a town-hall style event in Seaview.

We’re doing the crazy again

Yes, by now you’ve all sprung forward. I sympathize. The politics in some parts of Arizona may be a bit questionable — after her failed election attempt, Kari Lake is still trying to be governor! — but at least they keep their clocks steady. (AZ clocks are locked on Standard Time.) So, as a snowbird, I don’t need to talk it all over again with Jackson, either about why it’s not dinner time yet as we did last November; or how to modify his feeding schedule by fifteen minutes a day until we both agree. Why we can’t as a country land on a time and stick with it is all part of the sausage-making mystery of the American Government.

There have been many recent articles about the brouhaha. Is Standard or Daylight Saving Time better for health? Which one kills more kids walking to school in the dark morning, or which kills more deer in the dark evening (one citation said 36,000)? Or the fact that the biggest lobby for permanent Daylight Saving Time is golf course owners — more daylight after work. (It’s always, “Follow the money.”) The debate goes on and we continue to get jerked around.

Our Marie

Meanwhile back at the ranch, our humble Congressional Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has caught the national spotlight again. Several recent articles have lauded her stances on issues that seem to cross the great divide between Dem and GOP politics — a veritable minefield. She’s a unique politician in so many ways: first of all, she’s not geriatric (she’s 34); second, she is a working-class mom from a tiny rural community. (She counted the times Biden said “rural” in his state of the union speech: once. Not happy about that.)

Born in Texas; father’s an immigrant from Mexico; educated at Reed College; degree in economics; lives in Skamania County; owns an auto repair shop: — it’s the kind of crazy-quilt life that makes her uniquely suited for our brave new world of politics and demographics. As she says, “Congress should look more like America. It can’t just be rich lawyers that get to run for Congress anymore. There should be more people in Congress with grease under their fingernails.” And she’s already making waves, not only for winning her election as a Democrat in our more recently right-leaning congressional district, but for her views on a variety of issues.

As David Firestone writes in the New York Times, “Some Democrats are still a little uncomfortable around someone who supports both abortion rights and gun rights, who has a skeptical take on some environmental regulations, and who has made self-sufficiency a political issue.” (His article here: tinyurl.com/yw64ajrn) I may not agree with everything on Marie’s agenda, but I can say I’m all for whatever it takes to get some honest folks with common sense back in government.

Some thoughts on the trades

So I want to follow last week’s insights about education from Temple Grandin with Marie’s congruent ideas. Not every high school kid is headed to Harvard. Some want to make things, or fix things; they want to do something with their hands. Back in the dark ages when I was in middle school, boys took shop and girls took homeEc. Not every kid liked that arrangement; in fact, I probably would have chosen shop. (I learned about cooking from my mom.) I would have loved to work with power tools! In fact, in my senior year at Penn, after one too many lit-crit classes, I signed up for machine shop and worked at a metal lathe. It was brilliant. The only girl in class, I got the highest grade. Take that 18th Century British Literature!

Anyway, why did we dump shop and homeEc and replace everything with STEM or computer programming? I guess because we cannot keep steady on anything — in our democracy we have to jig one way, go too far, then overcorrect and jag back. But, fortunately, there is a zeitgeist of opinion forming: it’s clearly time to reconsider what happens in our schools. As Temple said and Marie has reiterated, we need to put shop class and life skills back into education.

Our county has an 8.4 percent unemployment rate, compared to 3.4 percent in King County. So how can we support young folks who will need a viable livelihood but aren’t headed to a four year college? They need programs that can get them into the trades. And as Temple says, “We need visual learners, we need people who can fix things!”

Have you tried recently to get a piece of furniture recovered? Or to get a clock fixed? Or to find a competent plumber or electrician who can come on a Sunday and not charge an arm and a leg? Marie also laments the fact that so many things are made to break and not be fixed. When I lift the hood of my Volvo SUV, I don’t even know where to put the windshield wiper fluid.

Right to repair

And computers or iPhones? Apple has designed them to be basically “unfixable” unless brought to a “genius bar.” Our closest official shops are Seattle or Portland. (Often if you hire a local digital expert to fix something your warranty becomes null and void.) As Marie says, “Right to repair hits people on so many levels — their time, their money, their environment, their culture. It’s one of the unique things about American culture. We really believe in fixing our own stuff and self-reliance. D.I.Y. is in our DNA.” She’s promoting a bill that requires automakers to release diagnostic and repair information so owners have other choices beside the (generally very expensive) dealerships. (Could be a little self-interest there — after all she and her husband own a auto repair shop in Portland.)

At any rate, I think Marie is on the right track, both with her focus on how rural families live and ways that a political agenda can begin to address real-life issues. She says, “I don’t know anybody who stays up at night worrying about socialism. But they worry about a kid who doesn’t want to go to school anymore. Or, am I going to lose the house? Is there a school nurse? Those are the things that keep people up at night.”

Bravo. Let’s get back to the business of providing every precious young person an education that allows them to put a satisfying and rewarding life together. Let’s adapt to the times. Fishing, logging, employment in a natural-resource based profession may be waning on the Peninsula, but there are still so many services and opportunities for creative work here. Let’s help our kids stay home.

So what’s old is new again.