Recently, local churches brought Greg Laurie’s Harvest event to Rapid City. Four contemporary Christian bands came with him to entertain the crowds. 19,000 people showed up to rock and roll and get with God.

According to local news reports, the event cost in the neighborhood of $400,000 to present. Local churches came up with about a third or $125,000 of that total. The Laurie home church, from what I can gather, put up the rest of the money, in the belief that the difference would be made up in collections from the audience and sales of goods like books, t-shirts, CDs and other ephemera sold by the promoters.

I heard from people at the show that buckets of money were collected. Buckets and buckets and buckets. This money went somewhere. I want to know, and you should want to know, where that money went. I hope it didn’t leave Rapid City and the surrounding area. But I think if the money were divvied up among the churches who raised the original money, they would be shouting it from the mountain top – Harney Peak maybe. However, I am guessing the money collected from the Black Hills audiences left on a bus for California never to be seen again.

Local news reports also indicated that although it cost so much money to present, Christian supporters believe the event was a success because 1,519 souls went forward to receive God and be saved. While I think this is a wonderful development for those souls, if it sticks, I personally have lived with God for as long as I can I can remember (although some parts of our relationship have sometimes been a bit rocky) and he is my rock and my strength, I can’t help but do the math. It’s in my nature.

$400,000 for 1,519 people to go up and receive God calculates to $263 per person. I entirely agree that it is well worth the money to save those souls if that is indeed what happened, but “I have me doubts.” Everybody can lay off cigs for a day, a week or a month, but in faith as in addiction, it’s the long haul that counts. I want records of past success. How many people came forward at last year’s Harvest? How many are still walking with God? Show me the money! Measure it in souls saved, fine, but let’s see your figures.

To put it in different terms, the United Way’s 2009-10 Rapid City area fundraising goal is $1.9M. $400K is 21% of that total goal. The United Way works for the betterment of local citizens year around, providing funding to get goods and services to the people who need them. If you donate to the United Way, you contribute to housing, feeding, and caring for local residents in a myriad of ways. Anyone who has taken a semester of human psychology, and paid attention, knows that until those basic physical safety and nutritional needs are addressed, people aren’t going to “get with God.”

Long story short, I think that putting on a show like Harvest is just that, a show. If the Christian people who supported this event monetarily would spend an equal amount of money in the local area, it would be money much better spent. Four hundred thousand dollars would fill the bellies of a lot of poor local children and we have plenty of them. It would heat a lot of local homes. It would pay for a lot of basic medical care. It would go a lot farther to fill the needs that need to be met before you can go about saving souls and it would be a much better proof that this is what Christians really care about.

In March, Custer School’s superintendent announced he would retire. This week the school board rehired him. What this means is the guy will draw his retirement out of the South Dakota Retirement system while the taxpayers of South Dakota continue to pay his already exorbitant salary of $91,000 and then some. What the hell is that board thinking?

Within the last year or so, the Black Hills Playhouse board of directors fired its director of decades. Controversy ensued. The usual things were said. People still don’t believe they really know what happened. This spring, the state has been kicking around the idea of not renewing the Playhouse’s lease in Custer State Park. They site the lack of a good business plan on the part of the new management as the main reason. The board and management claim that things are fine. Donations and ticket sales are up for the coming season, they say. Public sentiment seems to be mixed. There are those who are convinced that the theater’s hard times link directly back to the board’s firing of the long time director. I can’t say if this is true or not, I only know what they say about assuming.

The Black Hills Humane Society ran through four executive directors in the last year or so. Four executive directors! Come on. You don’t have to have a degree in public administration to know that something is fishy with a board of directors when they hire and lose four directors in less than a year. Nobody knows what the essence of the problem is, of course, because any questions from the media and public are met with some sunny almost nonsensical statement about how the board’s main consideration is the animals and that they plan to continue to do a great job of taking care of them. So, the public is left to speculate and we all know where that gets us.

Sometimes I think that public boards in South Dakota don’t know the difference between being a public board and being a public nuisance. This becomes a problem because while a public nuisance is generally self-funded, public boards are using our money (whether they get it in the form of donations, government contracts or payment for services rendered). Because, in one way or another, we pay for the activities directed by these boards, we have a stake in them.

We also usually care about the work or service the organizations ruled by these boards provide in our community. So, some of us at least are paying attention. The press goes to meetings and reports. The public goes to meetings and responds. Then all too frequently the board in question does something that makes no sense to anybody. Further, they won’t explain in any kind of fashion that makes their reasoning clear.

Public boards need to start being far more open and honest about what they are doing and why they are doing it. When the public sees a board doing something that seems intuitively wrong – running through executive directors like water, firing managers who appear to being doing a great job, not firing managers who have clearly screwed up – they need to be able to effectively explain why they made the decisions they did to the public they serve. If they don’t we are left to assume and speculate. When we begin to assume and speculate, we the public think they are lying or, at the very least, not telling all the truth. When we think these boards are lying, we learn not to trust them. When the public doesn’t trust its board, they are rendered ineffective and no longer serve the purpose for which they were elected.

There is probably not much the public can do to control these boards in South Dakota. Those in charge are those in charge, if you know what I mean. But, it does seem that these are the people who come asking us for money quite frequently. Maybe it is time for the money to dry up for these boards. I am a firm believer that money talks and no organization that can’t make sense gets my contribution. Of course, the school board is a different animal. Anyone out there know what to do about that?

On April 15, tax day, thousands of people around the country demonstrated in the streets, protesting high taxes and out of control government spending. They called it a Tea Party. Taxed Enough Already. And they probably are, but it’s their own damn fault.

Who are these people? I am sure there are a variety of types among them, but if you used a Venn diagram with two circles and in one circle you put the anti-abortion, anti-gay people and in the other you put the I-love-my-guns-more-than-you-love-your-mother people, the circles would almost completely overlap. They are the same people who are in favor of passing an abortion ban. Their president, some bumper stickers say, is Charlton Heston and they vote. These are the same people who have voted us into this mess.

These are the people who have been tricked by the Repooblican Party into voting against their own best interests for the last 30 years. It’s a shell game. People who care about virtually nothing except getting money (no matter how they do it) and keeping money have fooled a bunch of poor working and middle class fools into voting to let them do it.

This element in society, much of it born with money, some of it comprised of people who want to rub shoulders with those who were born with money so bad they will screw anybody to reach that goal – will use any means possible to achieve its goal, which is acquiring and keeping money.

They have tricked, bullied and screwed the rest of us into a corner. They have done it by stirring up passions – religious, sexual, racial – and getting us to vote for other poor suckers or evil cretins, whatever the case may be, who go to state legislatures or Congress and proceed to make bad law.

Here’s what happens when we send a simpleton, who really believes that it is the government’s right to control people’s personal sexual decisions, to make laws. Bad laws are made. Good laws are dismantled. No one responsible is watching the cookie jar, because everybody is looking through the keyhole into the bedroom.

For thirty years, these people have been going to Congress and attempting to legislate sexual morality and ignoring the fact that a whole other area of morality – financial morality – was being completely deregulated. By the way, regulation is a fancy word for laws. So, while the country fretted over other people’s sex lives, the financial systems at the very foundation of America’s economy were deregulated to the point that they have unraveled. We left the rats in charge of the bread box and we have been left with crumbs.

The people demonstrating in the streets in support of the Tea Party are the very people who voted us into this mess.

When I heard that Circuit  Judge Lori Wilbur had ruled that school children in South Dakota have no constitutional right to a quality education, I have to confess that while I wasn’t particularly surprised by the ruling, I was surprised by the language. No right to a quality education?  No right to be prepared for college when they graduate from high school? That is so pathetic.

Why in hell would it seem reasonable to anybody that her children have no right to a quality education? The only possible explanation I can concoct at this moment is that any parent who thinks an “adequate” education is an acceptable outcome for her child is a parent who received the poor education that is created by the expectation of adequacy (and, it bears mentioning, didn’t have parents who were motivated enough to fill in the gaps). People and systems that only seek to be good enough never achieve excellence or even, generally, adequacy.

As disturbing as I find it that there are parents who consider a poor-t0-adequate education good enough for their kids or worse yet, parents who don’t know the difference, I know they are out there. I have sat at school functions with them. I have overheard them talking. I have seen their letters in the paper. They are out there and they vote. They are also in the majority because, sadly, too many of our smart kids grow up, go to college and leave the state in their dust on the way to good paying jobs, often just over our borders.

A bigger problem in this state is our governing body — a bunch of people who prove again and again that we are not necessarily concerned with sending our best and brightest to represent us in Pierre. If these people would do their jobs even “adequately” this issue would never have become a court battle. They do the same crap year after year. But, as my husband says, we get the government we deserve. These people debate banning or further restricting abortion every year. I wonder if anyone ever told them that better  educated women have fewer abortions. So, there’s one reason to provide a better education, abortion prevention.

Those things being said, there is one big mental block– for lack of a better word– that we are going to have to overcome before we can have a rational, progressive discussion and modification of our educational funding system in  this state.

We are going to have to wrap our heads around the truth that teaching is not less valuable than the work of other professionals. We have this mindset because traditionally teaching, at least here in SD, was the arena of women and we always have paid women less (this, unfortunately, is a worldwide problem, I blame St. Paul). And since women were either married or looking to get married and so have a man provide the main income for the family, that was okay (not, but we did it anyway). News flash! Teaching is not just for the girls anymore and, even married women are expected to bring a meaningful paycheck to the table. We need to start paying and treating teachers like college educated professionals or eventually the majority of teachers will be people who can’t sell insurance.