John Webster

Who could have predicted, 40 years ago, the effects television would have on our society - in politics, relationships, entertainment, commerce, values? Today, it's the Internet that's being hailed as a revolutionary force. Now that we've learned to respect technology, it's tough to question the grandiose rhetoric surrounding the World Wide Web. But it will be important to distinguish between gadgetry and value.

A year ago when legislatures convened, their new Republican leaders looked admiringly to the radicals in Congress for political inspiration. This year as legislatures convene, Capitol Hill is a political disaster area and the states are still waiting for Congress fully to answer crucial questions. For example: How much federal money will states receive to run numerous programs? And how will Congress change the rules that govern those programs? The chaos in Congress, and the growing public disgust toward it, ought to provoke second thoughts in this election year if any state legislators feel tempted to tie their own capitols in knots.

A touch of modesty would do wonders for the House Republicans who claim only they know how to produce a balanced budget seven years from now. A recession, or a different Congress, can demolish their plans. The only sure thing is this year's non-existent budget. Yet the Republicans seem miraculously sure of themselves, and of their cures for 60 years of democratically established policies. So much so that they touched off a government shutdown rather than make a deal with the devil, also known as Bill Clinton, president of the United States.

Nothing improves education like a skilled, inspiring teacher. And no amount of money or curriculum reform can make up for a teacher who alienates students and deadens the subject matter. So the public has to consider it encouraging news that Spokane School District 81 is attempting to discharge a middle-school teacher for unprofessional classroom management. Only the slow, inordinately expensive teacher-discipline process can determine whether this particular discharge is warranted. Outsiders are in no position to judge. Regardless of the case's outcome, what the public can applaud is the school district's evident commitment to professional standards and accountability.

A year ago, the insurance industry hired telemarketers from Kentucky to mobilize Washington state's business people. Employers were threatened, the telemarketers warned, by government health insurance mandates. Free of charge, telemarketers tranferred the business people to legislators' phones to file protests. Next, insurance industry lobbyists joined the Legislature's closed-door negotations and helped write a law, quickly passed, repealing most of 1993's health care reforms. Afterwards, an insurance lobbyist crowed that "We took a law that didn't work and made it into one that did." Legislators added that 1995's reforms should keep health insurance costs down, just as 1993's reforms had begun to do. So, how's it going?

Spokane County has 1,200 lawyers, 710 physicians and a dozen editorial writers. That's probably enough. There remains a demand - seriously, now - for skilled laborers. Machinists, for example. Contrary to the thrust of our school system, not everyone needs to aim for the sometimes dubious benefits of a university education (see the Maureen Dowd column at right).

When a Fortune 500 corporation needs to cut, the boss gets a big fat bonus and the workers get layoffs. But the Spokane public libraries don't "run like a business." They are a public service agency - and a fine one. So, when a financial crisis hit, the library's employees, from top to bottom, devised a sacrificial plan that saves money and minimizes harm to the community they serve. For all who missed the story, here it is: City revenues have sagged; there wasn't enough money to cover next year's projected costs. For the library, the shortfall exceeded $170,000 - even after other cost-cutting moves, such as an early retirement program.

Holidays without home cooking would be like Hanukkah without menorahs or Christmas without the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2. But cooking seems to be a dying art. A generation ago, grocery stores sold mainly raw materials: flour, sugar, meat, potatoes. But today, grocery stores smell like kitchens, and home kitchens smell like microwaved cardboard. You even can buy frozen pancakes, for crying out loud. Perfectly intelligent adults profess total incompetence with measuring cups and mixing bowls. We all know why. The problem isn't competence. It's fatigue. After a long day at the extremely productive modern workplace, we rat-racers just don't have what it takes to chop vegetables or bake cookies. Right?

What else does the Spokane City Council not know about the budget it adopted Monday night? That question hangs over City Hall like a sword in the wake of the council's discovery that City Manager Roger Crum had tucked into the proposed budget a pay raise for himself and 15 other top administrators. He failed to tell the council about the raise. Council members learned about it from the newspaper, hours before the budget was to be approved. In response, the council did the right thing - sort of. It suspended the administrative pay raises until a committee can discuss how such raises should occur. Instead of percentage increases, merit pay is a possibility.

What do middle-income Americans care if Republicans in Congress cut holes in the nation's social safety nets? We're not poor. We have jobs. We'll be fine. Guess again. Suppose you grow old. Suppose modern medicine keeps you alive so long you need to enter a nursing home.

It's easy to be insulting. It's harder to be influential. And it's harder still to maintain a responsive, credible democracy at a time when much of the political dialogue resembles the rude mouth noises heard in the back rows of a junior high school English class. Consider, for example, the televised public forum the Spokane City Council conducts in the first 30 minutes of its weekly meeting.

Washington state boasts one of the nation's more generous welfare programs, its least accessible college system and a notoriously hostile business climate. Our government is sending the wrong message. Republican legislators want to get started on a course correction, redesigning the state's welfare system. Public opinion should, and will, applaud the effort. The state cannot continue business as usual. Federal block grants will shrink the supply of welfare dollars, and for the recipients' sake, not a cent can be wasted.

Thanks to a resilient, diversifying economy, Washington state's treasury holds a larger-than-expected, $700 million surplus. What to do? Back in the 1980s when Democrats ruled and revenues boomed, surpluses became an excuse to enlarge state agencies and invent new spending programs. And sure enough, Gov. Mike Lowry wants to enlarge the payroll of the state's most bloated bureaucracy, the Department of Social and Health Services. More to his credit, he also has spoken out for education funding. Meanwhile, Republicans want to give the revenue back, via tax cuts. Who's right? The wise path lies between the partisan poles.

When the family budget gets in a jam, the choices aren't that different from the ones Congress is debating. You can cut spending - on dental checkups, charity, clothes, cars, cable TV. And if you change your mind, well, it's easy to start spending again. You also can unload possessions - sell part of your yard, if it's wide enough. But if the new owner builds a cheap house and rents it to motorcycle gangs, you've made an irreversible mistake. Same goes for Congress. Yes, the curtailing of federal outlays might wind up hurting like a postponed visit to the dentist. But an unwise cut can be restored.

Suppose a neighbor dropped by and asked your support for a new charity. Roughly 60 percent of the money would cover the education of local young people. The rest would run area law enforcement, help the poor and elderly, and more. Care to make a contribution? Trick question. You already do contribute, of course. By paying state taxes. Yet most of us hate paying taxes. At the same time, we firmly support most of the services our taxes create. This creates dilemmas. Weak tax support is driving some of the state's most popular institutions - universities - to work harder at private fund raising. Private givers, however, expect their gifts to produce a direct enhancement, beyond cushioning the blow of state-ordered budget cuts. There's a political disconnect between public support levels and the legislature's budget priorities.

As federal government scales back its discredited social programs, who will fill the void? For part of the answer, many look to the religious community, whose prominence in American society seemed over the past 30 years to decline - while families and inner cities crumbled, and taxes rose. So far, though, the loudest voices from organized religion sound like priests for the Republican Party. At the beginning of religion's fall from grace, the late 1960s, the loudest voices from organized religion sounded like priests for the Democratic Party. Today in Spokane, a prophet speaks. One who challenges churches to escape the divisiveness and manipulation of secular partisanship, and reclaim their potential as a force for personal and societal regeneration.

Remember the hand-wringers who said U.S. forces would suffer bloody debacle at the hands of Saddam Hussein? They were wrong. Remember the isolationists who said Hitler's blitzkrieg wasn't our fight and that his Holocaust wasn't our concern? They were terribly wrong.

Last spring, Americans jolted horribly awake to a reminder that government workers are human. They have families. They coach soccer, volunteer for Meals on Wheels, gripe about the boss, loan tools to their neighbors, pray. And when a bomb goes off at their place of employment, they die, leaving loved ones and the nation to grieve and cope with the loss. The bombing in Oklahoma City showed how easy it is for government-bashing, a long and rowdy tradition in American politics, to get so overheated it sprouts the seeds of terrorism.

A year ago, delivery trucks crammed downtown Spokane for The Crescent building's reopening. It was a thrilling scene, and a time of nail-biting transition. This year, downtown business people could smile, with growing confidence in the core's still-unfolding future. As shoppers flooded in for the biggest retail season of the year, Crescent Court was fully operational. Across the skywalk to the south, the Spokane Transit Plaza supplied this year's new ingredient: the local vendors of Spokane's Marketplace sat at booths throughout the handsome building, offering unique wares not found in cookie-cutter mall chain stores: baked goods, produce, spices, crafts ...

These aren't easy times. There's something in the air, and it's not just the smell of roasting turkey. It's economic uncertainty, and whether you work for a government that's cutting or a corporation that's downsizing, it gives all of us with turkey on the table more reason than usual to say thanks. Thanks for jobs if we have them, homes however humble, people who care, great music, promising kids, good football, a faithful dog, a splendid natural world, a day off ... And a gracious Creator who provides all things - and provides them, usually, through imperfect human instruments. We're not in this alone. If we have something to be thankful for, someone else's generosity is the reason. Even your favorite nose-to-the-grindstone, I-can-do-it-alone workaholic can't get by without customers, a friendly banker, a tolerant family and a cardiac surgeon.

Late one night while a square dance occupied the residents of Spokane, three wagons creaked out of a gully and launched the political traditions of county government. It was 1890. Men with revolvers on their belts and gunny sacks covering their boots crept into the wooden courthouse at Main and Howard. They scooped up the ballots from a recent election along with the government's other records, loaded their wagons and rattled back into the gully and off into the night. They were from Cheney, Spokane's rival in a raucous election contest over which town would be the county seat. One year and another election later, Spokane won the title of county seat for good - or ill, depending on how you look at it.

Walk down the halls of a nursing home. Notice the white-haired figures in their wheelchairs and beds. One might be your mother, your grandfather, your first-grade teacher from long ago. One might be you, someday. These frail souls may not even vote, let alone understand the threat that's hidden in the propaganda war in Congress. Republicans are chanting that a slowing in the budget's growth rate is not a cut.

Which should have priority: Preventing crime or writing reports about it afterwards? The city of Spokane is in a budget crunch. DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, the popular anti-substance-abuse program for schoolchildren, is on the chopping block. Cutting DARE would save $550,000 in one fell swoop and reduce the need for scrutiny elsewhere in the Police Department's budget. So administrators want the ax to fall. Only public pressure and the City Council can save this program. DARE employs just seven, or 2.4 percent, of the Police Department's 287 officers. DARE officers teach sixth-graders about substance abuse and how to resist peer pressure.

It is truly an amazing feat: Congress has hammered out deep spending cuts, designed to balance the federal budget within seven years. What's even more amazing is that Congress chose to do it the hard way. Some details of its plan offend any reasonable definition of fairness. All of us know that deficits must come down. Yet the details bring discredit upon the effort. As a result, Congress and the president are loading political revolvers for a high-stakes financial shootout. Maybe that serves partisan purposes on both sides but it doesn't serve the public.