If the Republicans are raking in more money than the Democrats, and they are both doing about the same amount of advertising, what are the Republicans doing with all their extra money? Maybe they're just stuffing it in their pockets, but how would that help them win elections?
I think I'm finally starting to understand what you have been saying about Cheboygan people getting along. Actually they do argue a lot, but probably no more than people in other towns. The reason our minorities don't cause trouble is that the only significant minority group we have is the Indians, and they have already gotten what they wanted, so they don't raise hell about it anymore. So what's wrong with that? Do you want to ship a bunch of your minority people up here just so we can have the same problems you have? I suppose we couldn't stop you, but I also suppose that, if they wanted to be here, they'd already be here.
I've got nothing against other people gambling, I just don't care to do it myself. Nobody is forcing those fools to squander their money in the casinos, they are doing it of their own free will. If the Indians are making money off of it, then good for them. I did vote against the lottery, but that was only because I knew it wouldn't lower our taxes one bit. The more money they get, the more money they will want. People are like that, and not just government people either.
You may be right about that abortion thing. Truth be known, I don't hear much it anymore because I seldom hang out with teenaged girls. I only talked to one of them about it, and I thought it was ironic that she still had to go Down Below to get one after all these years. I'm pretty sure there has never been an abortion clinic anywhere around here, seems like something like that would have made our local newspaper, but I don't know for a fact that none of our local doctors has ever done one. That would be hard to keep track of, because doctors tend to move in and out of the Cheboygan area a lot. I've been going to the same dentist for some 40 years, and now he's getting ready to retire and turn the practice over to his daughter, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
You may also be right when you say that poor people have the deck stacked against them and that everything is harder for them. So what's your solution to that? If you take all my money away and give it to some poor person, chances are they would quickly spend it, and now there would be two poor people instead of one. We have discussed this before, but I wondered if you have had any new ideas since then.
The schools were integrated a long time ago, but I seem to remember you telling me that they don't do the bussing thing anymore in Chicago. Does that mean that they have returned to the concept of neighborhood schools? If so, does the city spend less money on schools in poor neighborhoods, or is the money they do spend less effective because the poor kids are harder to teach? I suppose the children of the really rich go to private schools. We have a couple of private schools in Cheboygan but they're not necessarily for rich people. One is for Catholics, and there is a much smaller one for holy rollers.
Then there's the home schoolers, but nobody keeps track of how many of those there are. They are considering legislation to require parents to register their home schooled kids but, as of now, they don't have to. I don't think the regular schools keep a good track of their populations either. They have a counting day twice a year, and anybody who is not in school that day isn't counted for the purposes of state aid. It's just numbers, not names. A few years ago a school in nearby Pellston was criticized for their high drop out rate. The principal countered that all those kids weren't drop outs, some of them had just moved away. When asked how many, he said he didn't know. When I was driving busses, they told us to just pick up any kid we saw along the route. If a family with kids moved in or out of the neighborhood, it was the other kids who told us, not the school. If a new kid lived on a road that we didn't normally go down, the parents had to call the bus garage and tell us or we wouldn't know about it. I don't know how they can operate schools like that, but apparently they do.
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