September 2007 archive

The new Iron Range century

The modern Iron Range “started” in the late 1800s, but our region is really from the 20th Century. Our biggest years of growth occurred during that century and you’ve probably noticed that many of our local towns are celebrating centennials. We’re seven years into a new century, however, and it’s time to take stock of where we are. I’m talking about our economy, but only because in the north woods of Minnesota the economy is as necessary for survival as fire, food and shelter. 

For almost two decades, the rallying cry on the Iron Range has been “jobs, jobs, jobs.” This slogan represents both the articulation of our biggest needs (jobs) and our most used strategy in getting them (repeating the word three times, like in “Wizard of Oz”). The problem with job creation is that it’s very complicated. 

Strangely, something about Iron Range economic development reminds me of my brief time on the Cherry High School FFA farm management team. I figured running a farm couldn’t be that bad. Buy low, sell high, right? In practice, however, you’ve got to know your soil, your region’s water and weather, your seeds and then – when that’s done – you have to run a business as big as most of the manufacturing companies in an Iron Range industrial park. Importantly, you can’t keep doing things the exact same way and expect consistent results. You must not only adapt to conditions, but anticipate years down the line.

We still rely on iron mining as the cornerstone of our economy here. Since the last new taconite plant was built on the Iron Range in the 1970s we’ve seen a gradual decline in population and the availability of good jobs. Two major taconite plants have shut down completely, with the rest experiencing temporary shutdowns or slowdowns during bad cycles in the steel market.

In response, the Iron Range is modernizing its century-old traditional industries to compete for the new century; just as taconite lifted us out of the natural ore age. A push for biofuels and new wood products has relieved our up-and-down logging industry. Recently, officials announced that an iron nugget plant on the East Range and a taconite mine and steel plant on the West Range could begin construction within a year. We shouldn’t overlook the fact that these projects will be built on the exact sites of our region’s two major failed taconite plants, LTV in the east and Butler in the west. In effect, the “new’ jobs created aren’t new at all. They are modernized versions of old jobs we lost. We should welcome these advancements but again our fortunes lie with steel industry, not our own ingenuity.

The new Iron Range century must begin with small business development and growth. Look around at the larger companies that have shown the most loyalty and given back the most to their communities. In many these companies started in our region and grew alongside it. Tax incentives and multi-million dollar grants and loans have their place, but on their own these strategies will never foster the regional depth and the healthy public/private relationship we need. Homegrown success will better survive economic hardship. Companies that rely heavily on the Range’s unique public funding sources are less likely to succeed when the money dries up.

I see this sentiment in a report by the new nonprofit think tank “Minnesota 2020,” detailed in a Sept. 12 Business North story by Paul Lundgren. Entitled “Chasing Smokestacks, Stranding Small Businesses: Rural Minnesota’s Crisis,” the report says that state government should shift its resources to create an environment where small businesses can start and thrive.

The fundamentals of growing corn and modernizing the Iron Range remain about the same. Create an environment conducive to growth and plant many small seeds. We need to shore up our roads and schools on the Iron Range, both of which are declining but remain central to the success of any economic projects. The economy of the future relies on ultra-fast, affordable Internet and we aren’t even close. The debate in the Hibbing area over a sanitary sewer district highlights another important infrastructure issue. IRR and state dollars should focus on infrastructure and local school district solvency first. After that, businesses will grow because of the good environment to do business, not because we paid them. Every Iron Ranger will directly benefit from the public spending, instead of just the businesses that receive aid.

Innovation saved this area before and must do so again. In many ways we’re on the right track but are failing to build for the long haul. Remember, we’re working in a new Iron Range century now. New conditions require new strategies.

Midweek update

Hormones in uniform

(This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007 edition of the

Every few years the topic of school uniforms bubbles into the public discourse, usually right after the widely observed gyrations of teen pop stars or fashion trends involving tiny tight skirts and glitter. The more gyrations and the tighter the clothes, the louder the uniform talk.

This time around I’m a parent and I’m supposed to be outraged over inappropriate fashion. Well, I’m not outraged over the clothes the kids wear these days. Baffled, maybe. But not outraged. I am concerned for my three boys’ future ability to pay attention during their physics lectures. At their current rate of increased skimpiness, teenage girl fashions for 2019 will rely on the strategic placement of 8 foot lengths of medical gauze. If the retro trend for boys continues they’ll have to talk to these girls wearing blue leisure suits.

School uniforms solve several problems. Naturally school administrators wouldn’t have to measure the length of skirts or use calipers to gauge the appropriateness of low-rise jeans. Teachers wouldn’t have to send a six-and-a-half foot 11th grade Neanderthal to the rest room to turn inside out a t-shirt that uses the f-word as a noun, verb, adjective and conjunction. Uniforms would also help bridge the gaps between rich and poor, cool and awkward that dominate today’s elementary and secondary schools. 

As a public school student from the Iron Range, I wasn’t required to wear school uniforms. That didn’t stop me. Almost every day in high school I wore khaki pants and a polo shirt. I still wear some of these shirts today. I wish I could say that I was just ahead of my time, acting on a premonition that school uniforms would one day arrive, but in truth I was just a nerd. That’s one nice thing about uniforms. Every kid gets to spend these awkward, confusing years in clothes that are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. Sure, some will fill out the clothes better than others and there remains no peace for the funny-looking people with big ears, but these inequalities will be reduced.

A friend of ours enrolls her daughter in a private school on the Iron Range that just implemented uniforms this year. She says her daughter actually likes the uniforms and, best of all, school shopping only took 10 minutes. That’s where school uniforms benefit parents. “Mom, you need to hand wash this skirt and line dry this blouse” becomes “Go to your closet, young lady, and put on the shirt and the pants.”

The Hibbing Daily Tribune conducted an online “quick poll” this past week about requiring uniforms in public schools. Early in the week, nearly half the voters (or perhaps one determined voter with a lot of free time) said “yes,” while about a third said that current dress codes should be better enforced and only 17 percent said “no” to school uniforms. This may not be an overwhelming mandate for uniforms but it shows that the topic begs discussion.

Not everyone would like school uniforms. Stores that sell tiny and/or ridiculous teen clothing, for instance, might fear massive piles of unsold “thongotards” (the thong and leotard combination would have been this year’s top new fashion). They shouldn’t worry. After school, uniformed teens will no doubt leap into their more fashionable outfits, bearing skin, lifting and separating. But maybe by then they’ll have learned more in school, calculating the total skin area exposed within a fraction of an inch. Watch out, international students, we’re back! U-S-A!

More columns
 

Brown goes 'downtown' with Saturday essay

Gales of November come early

Excelsior asks for third party; I ask for more booze

• Too expensive (costs passed on to customers)
• too risky (technology has failed or underperformed at other sites)
• funded with inappropriate public backing and no public protections (highlighted by $9.5 million in Iron Range Resources loans used for public relations and consulting when the company had nothing to show for itself but nice suits and a computer generated model).
• the implied 50-year commitment to coal as our primary energy source when renewable energy technology is developing by exponential rates.
• Inappropriate site
• Misleading promises about jobs and environmental benefits
  

Wind power project moving forward

Damn, can a brother get an essay done?

Hillary on health care

Minnesota's Fightin' 3rd

Talkin' baby talk blues

(This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007

Your job often defines how people see you. My dad has worked as a mechanic and building maintenance worker for decades. Therefore, when something breaks at a family event he is the one asked to put down his plate of seasonal holiday food to unclog pipes, tighten bolts or check belts. No one ever asks me (for good reason). I once saw a relative ask a dentist to look at a tooth as the dentist walked past his yard. Again, not something I am asked to do (for equally good reason). 

I’m a writer and college speech instructor. That means people ask me to write pro bono press releases or “say something” at most social functions. That’s OK. I’m glad to help and it’s harder for me not to talk than it is for me to talk. But lately I can’t help but feel a bit like a poser. After all, I’m supposed to articulate important thoughts on paper and teach others the finer points of communication; but I live in a house where I can be overheard saying: “Do you need to poop? … oh, yes, that’s a tree … oh, you mean you’re hungry. Never mind.”

For those scoring at home we have three kids: a two-year-old boy and twin boys born this past summer. Life with three kids creates many interesting communication challenges that never seem to find their way into any college speech curriculum. 

I’ve already noticed one thing about having three kids compared to just one. Instant street cred. Sure, I know a lot of people have three or more kids and that the actual act of producing three children is as easy as, well, you know. But three is the magic number where child superiorists leave you alone. (Child superiorists: my new word to describe people who use the developmental progress of their multiple children as a blunt weapon against your eardrums).

But as proud we are to have survived our time as “parents of three” (as of press time, anyway) we still struggle to understand the little humans who live in our house.  

Henry, our oldest, is a big fan of heavy equipment. Trucks, bulldozers and back hoes all enjoy special affection. Of course, to him, they are twucks, boo-dozas and bag-os. Henry’s favorite verb is “play.” (On a side note, wouldn’t the world be great if everyone’s favorite verb was “play?”) So we often hear the H-man say things like, “Pway twuck?” or his recent favorite, “pway bag-o?”

Now if you heard someone say “pway bag-o” you probably wouldn’t think he was asking you to hold a toy digger while he operated the boom. You might think he was saying “free bagel?” to which someone might say, “No! Bagels cost money!” It takes a lot of trial and error to learn the true meaning of “pway bag-o.” This can be quite frustrating, both for the adults who try to understand and encourage their kid and the kid who desperately wants to move sand with his bag-o. 

It’d be a lot easier for us if the babies spoke the same language, but they still rely entirely on nonverbal signals. “Waaa,” for “I’m hungry.” “Waaaaaaa,” for “I’m hungry and wet.” “Waaaaaaa, URP, blech, waaaaaa …. Mmmm” for “I was feeling kind of bloated but then I barfed on you and now I feel much better. Oh, look, is that a moving object. Jolly good!”

Soon enough these boys will speak like grown-ups, perhaps even flex their rhetorical muscles to achieve objectives. By then I’ll be no use to them. I’ll have emptied my brain of everything I learned in college to make room for a language of goos, gaas and the abbreviated names of heavy equipment. Play bag-o, anyone?

Brown on the air

America (hearts) quagmires?

Wednesday aftermath

Bell and Ness

A heaping helping of Tuesday

The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) claims that the 400-page study needs to include information about global warming gases that will be produced to power the planned Minnesota Steel plant in Nashwauk.

Odd year Primary Election Day Eve

Boom times on the Iron Range?

When nature and civilization collide ... literally

(This is my weekly

The other day Christina were shopping in downtown Hibbing after an appointment (hear that, merchants? Worth a coupon for the free plug, right?) We were just stepping inside a store when – WHAM! – a chickadee slammed into the window right next to the door (through no fault of the merchant, whose prices were competitive and shelves copiously stocked with only the finest wares).

The little bird, who survived the trauma, was doing this stunned Stevie Wonder back-and-forth bit with its head. We stood over the feathered victim asking an important question: What IS the right thing to do with an injured bird on someone else’s property? If it were a dog or cat that ran into the window and suffered a concussion I’d bring it to the vet. But as one-time bird owners we knew that some local vets are, or at least were, somewhat baffled by the ailments of tiny birds. (We once paid someone to poke our late bird and shrug). The store had no need for a wounded bird and we were in no position to care for the bird ourselves. So we merely propped the bird up in a sitting position, much the same way you’d prop up a hobo who fell face-first into a gutter. Not much, but something.

We told the storekeeper inside about the bird. She walked to the door, looked at it and said to us, “You know that old saying about birds and windows?” No, we said. All our old sayings about birds involve two in the bush and something about hands. Well, she continued, apparently her grandfather taught her that if a bird hits your window you or someone in your family will get in an accident. If the bird lives, you or your family member will live. If the bird dies, curtains for you and/or your family.

We were alarmed until we remembered that this particular bird hadn’t struck OUR window. Also, the bird lived, so even if the bad mojo rubbed off on us it wasn’t bad enough to put us six feet under (at least, according to a stranger’s grandpa’s irrational superstition).

Like most northern Minnesotans, however, we see many a bird plow into our windows at home. In fact, just a few weeks before the incident in town a bird punched a hole in the screen of one of our living room windows. (It lived, which I assume is why I’m still here to write this). Naturally, despite our concern for the bird, the household consensus was, “Awww, why’d he have to hit THAT screen. That’s the window with the good view.” Not a proud moment for empathy.

Another time, during the 2004 election, mysterious holes kept appearing in a candidate sign I put up in our yard. And in case you’re wondering we vote straight-ticket Whig in our house. Naturally, we suspected neighborhood hooligans or saboteurs from the other side (Tories have no class) but then I saw the true villain. One day while home for lunch I saw a bird swoop down and land its beak into the sign, knocking it down. The bird yanked its beak out of the sign and moved on, presumably to collect a bounty from the dirty political boss who gives the orders. If one of the major presidential candidates out there falls to his or her knees in pain during a debate while flailing bird legs kick from his or her eye socket we’ll know something’s up.

Birds are some of nature’s finest work: thinking, social creatures that can fly across the world and build things without any carbon emissions. If anything, seeing them collide with our artificial world only reminds us that we humans are strange aberrations in the natural world.

Brown on the air

Osama dyes his beard, experts observe

The week in progress

• In all likelihood the Twins are out of the playoffs. I could try to find a playoff team to cheer for, but it's too soon. It's ... just ... too ... soon. (weeping, weeping).
• John Edwards got the Steelworkers and United Mine Workers endorsements over the weekend. Maybe he's got something left in the tank? He's my guy, but I'm having an ideological "affair" with Barack Obama. (All metaphorical, OK). The media, in the human form of George Stephanopoulous, has decided that if one candidate wins both Iowa and New Hampshire that person will be the nominee. Hell, we could end up with Edwards vs. Romney under that system. That's too much pretty!
• I'm no child rearing expert, but when a kid says "I pooped ... again," in a cute exasperated voice. I think it's time to start training them. Just a theory we're working on around the house.

Summer's song fades out

September brings a comfortable coolness, the excitement of a new school year and the chance to wear my favorite clothes – layered, but not yet puffy. But the month also brings a dose of reality to those of us still living in a summer fantasy.

Have you ever landed on a great song while tuning the radio, begun to enjoy that song only to realize that you’ve been jamming to the last verse right before it fades out? That’s what this summer has been to me. Summer over? But it was just getting good! No, Bruce Springsteen, don’t gratuitously repeat the gibberish at the end of “Dancing in the Dark.” Go back to the insightful ruminations about the frustrations of life set to a powerful drum beat and saxophone solo! Aaarrrgh! And then, a commercial.

But that’s how it goes. You can waste time but you can’t stop time. For me, this summer has existed in some other undocumented dimension. We had twin boys in early July, following a long pregnancy that put my wife on bed rest for months while our first son learned the mischievous possibilities of turning 2. The experience is comparable to traditional parenthood challenges stoked to the gills on powerful, easy-to-detect steroids – the kind midlevel athletes take when they just don’t care any more. For the summer months, if we weren’t changing a baby we were feeding a baby. If we weren’t scolding a boy for poking his brother in the belly, we were comforting his brother who was just poked in the belly. And there wasn’t much sleep. And there wasn’t much money. And though the days and nights seemed long, the whole thing passed like a dream – profound, but hazy.

Now I look at the to-do list that was not done. I was supposed to write this summer. I did, but most of it could fit in the margins of a daily newspaper. All of it was carved out in paragraphs scrawled on the back of junk mail or a tiny notebook I carry with me. I was going to rework my class materials for my job at the college. That was scaled back. I only mowed the lawn when Ewoks built villages on the taller weeds. The clutter in my garage has unionized.

This was the first summer where our longest road trip was to Eveleth; the second in a row where we didn’t get to see a Twins game. The pounds gained during the twins’ pregnancy remain firmly in place. Efforts to improve my 5K run time were sporadic at best and ultimately unsuccessful. There will be other summers; The first of September is a time to mourn this one.

In the end I know this summer was full and important in my life, but fall always brings the realization of lost time – especially for those of us who work at schools and colleges. You only hope for a good year and another spring. Time marches on. Even the best songs fade out eventually.