Miss: Prolific Protests
Let's start the history lesson over. How do you change government? Well, that's a tricky question that includes both protests like Black Lives Matter and angry stunts like the anti-masking revolt in Granite School District. Dissenting has become the way of the world, with one-in-five Americans participating in protests over the past three weeks, according to Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence and society. Protests, she says, are signals that people want change. "Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society," she says. The Granite parents, mimicking the Capitol Insurrection, were just wild and unsettled. Movements like BLM and inland port protests are having impacts, although maybe not immediate ones. Ultimately, the lesson for change is through voting. Parents burning a vaccine syringe in effigy is just adolescent, and its impact is up in smoke.
Miss: Lucrative Landing Spot
Utahns are well aware that business always trumps personal well-being in government. If you can frame an argument in budgetary bottom-line terms, you'll probably win. Kristen Cox, former director of the Governor's Office of Management and Budget (and no relation to current Gov. Cox), has parlayed that into personal gain, taking more than $350,000 in public funds to launch a new program with a full-time teaching position for herself, according to a well-researched story in The Salt Lake Tribune. Underlying her disdain for the public health, Cox indicated that the medical establishment "put our country in serious and avoidable crisis." Her bywords are low taxes and efficiencies, sometimes at the public's expense, but never at hers. And because lawmakers love the idea of a business model for government, expect the business magnates to benefit.
Hit: Reviewing Convictions
There is reform in the air, especially for the courts and police. Summit County just launched a "conviction integrity unit," according to the Park Record. It will look at a host of potentially wrongful convictions, some from 30 years ago, "for substantial justice and for factual innocence." While County Attorney Margaret Olson says there was not one case that sparked the change, it's clear that miscarriages of justice have long been endemic in the system. "Thousands of people have been wrongly convicted across the country in a system defined by official indifference to innocence and error," reports the Equal Justice Initiative. The Brookings Institute has studied the so-called war on drugs as a tool to target Americans of color. And while Olson talks about simply creating trust in the legal system, that may be enough.
