Late last night, I saw this post on Facebook that showed a gift to Governor Rick Snyder from the NCMC Fab Lab, a mobile digital fabrication lab that was on a downstate tour to promote awareness of STEM-related vo-tech applications (and most likely shake out some funding dollars in the process). Me being me, I immediately thought of some responses to that FB post that my wife wisely shot down, for fear of the repercussions of such spontaneous smart-assery. The cutting room floor had the following witticisms:
(a) "That's a nice paperweight! Was it used to hold down the anti-homosexual-adoption bill you recently signed, just like your signature was used to hold down homosexuals?"
(b) "That's a nice paperweight! The next time you shift funds from community colleges to corporate interests, remember who made that paperweight!"
Neither comment is really that literally and/or figuratively funny, sadly. Snyder and the Republican legislature, larded with money and privilege, has pushed a drug-testing program for welfare participants (a similar recently-ended program in Florida cost taxpayers over $1M with few positive results), raised taxes on pensions, dithered on infrastructure funding, refused to expand Medicaid, cut funding for the Michigan Film Industry, and so on.
But as all politics are local, it's the trotting out of the Fab Lab for political expediency that's the most immediately galling. By consistently and systematically adding to an economic and social climate that repels the young and the creative, yet by using the products that are best generated by the young and creative as a simple photo op and hashtag, Snyder is offering an archetypal example of hypocrisy in action.
Instead of pushing legislators to target, adequately fund, and promote STEM curricula for young men that ultimately feeds a digital fabrication program -- young men being the community college demographic that has shrunken most under Snyder's tenure -- Snyder offers soft platitudes and opaque pronouncements. Rather than leading industry to invest in populations that will stabilize Michigan's future -- as young men who become young fathers need work to support their nascent families -- Snyder is stewarding an exodus of the young and the creative out of Michigan.
But then again, the young and the creative don't consistently vote, do they?
(a) "That's a nice paperweight! Was it used to hold down the anti-homosexual-adoption bill you recently signed, just like your signature was used to hold down homosexuals?"
(b) "That's a nice paperweight! The next time you shift funds from community colleges to corporate interests, remember who made that paperweight!"
Neither comment is really that literally and/or figuratively funny, sadly. Snyder and the Republican legislature, larded with money and privilege, has pushed a drug-testing program for welfare participants (a similar recently-ended program in Florida cost taxpayers over $1M with few positive results), raised taxes on pensions, dithered on infrastructure funding, refused to expand Medicaid, cut funding for the Michigan Film Industry, and so on.
But as all politics are local, it's the trotting out of the Fab Lab for political expediency that's the most immediately galling. By consistently and systematically adding to an economic and social climate that repels the young and the creative, yet by using the products that are best generated by the young and creative as a simple photo op and hashtag, Snyder is offering an archetypal example of hypocrisy in action.
Instead of pushing legislators to target, adequately fund, and promote STEM curricula for young men that ultimately feeds a digital fabrication program -- young men being the community college demographic that has shrunken most under Snyder's tenure -- Snyder offers soft platitudes and opaque pronouncements. Rather than leading industry to invest in populations that will stabilize Michigan's future -- as young men who become young fathers need work to support their nascent families -- Snyder is stewarding an exodus of the young and the creative out of Michigan.
But then again, the young and the creative don't consistently vote, do they?
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