Having reached my 75th birthday this past summer, and lucky enough to have my wife, children and their spouses as well as grandchildren willing to participate in a party, I continue to reflect, and thus this letter.
• I learned a new word and its definition. The word is “presentism,” and it means to put today’s values/standards on events and people of the past. This word always conjures up a phrase I first heard years ago and laughed at - “It is not the questions that change, but the answers.” I stopped laughing after a few minutes!!
• As a product of public education (although the teachers and staff would not have claimed me at the time) I eventually realized that one gets from an education and experience exactly what effort one puts into it. My children and grandchildren are also products of public school, five grandchildren right here at Cape. This fact brings me to another point. I read many fine articles in local publications about Cape students, events, teams, organizations, and realize how fortunate we are. My curiosity is awakened when I realize I don’t see any (or maybe very few) articles discussing the many and varied successes of Cape graduates in the real world. Most businesses (and education is a business) report on the status of its product (in this case alumni) so consumers and stockholders (in this case taxpayers who do vote on increases and pay the bills) have an idea of the success and diversity of the process. This sounds like a wonderful opportunity for a good PR person.
• On the subject of diversity, I find it perplexing, to say the least, in this day and age of media/society concerns regarding equal rights for the genders, that in the past two weeks, the two defending state champions in field hockey and the two finalists in last year’s championship game, played against each other, both teams with good records, but something was missing.
We have four TV channels in the area, two and about to be three, owned by the same company, and none of the four could bother to even report, much less cover, even one these games. I guess there is just not enough TV time allocated for daily news reporting. I also refer to my question above about which I stopped laughing at years ago, but reflect that maybe the reverse of “presentism” is also truly alive and well.
I view myself as being very fortunate in life, and intend nothing in this letter to be a doctrine, but rather just the musings of an old man.
Buzz Klopp
Lewes