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Get back to ordinary

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There’s a lot to be said for being out of the ordinary. There may as well be, since those of us who fall into that category generally have a hard time passing for typical.

But ordinary is not an all-or-nothing matter. Every so-called ordinary person, when you get to know them well enough, will have some pretty unusual qualities, for better or for worse.

And most people who seem really, really different still have more in common with their fellow humans than not.

Take the case of the folks serving the Gallup-McKinley County Schools Board of Education and the superintendent. There appear to be lines drawn in the sand when it comes to resolving issues, and that’s not a good thing.

State Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, characterized the Aug. 16 school board meeting as something out of the “Wild West,” complete with “gun-slingers.”

Nothing is perhaps more damaging to the psyche of school-aged kids than grown administrators playing childish games. This is supposed to be about the business of education, but somewhere along the line, that reality got off track.

We could be here all day rationalizing the good and bad of decision-making and why certain individuals make the kinds of decisions they do, irrespective of profession. One doesn’t have to be a genius to see that the entire school-board meeting scenario, at least at this week’s session, has developed into something negative and not conducive to furthering educational progress.

It’s an “us versus them” mentality, when you go to a meeting and one group or the other doesn’t want to be told what to think or do or how to do it. Lost is the actual importance of education and the hundreds of school kids who, literally, attend class and play sports and do what normal students do on a daily basis.

“Navajos are in the same category as Jews, their language was taken from them,” Sandra Jeff, the newest member of the school board, said, in part, at the Aug. 16 meeting. That’s fine, Sandra. We respect that. But within that train of thought, can you get us to an even higher cultural level of understanding one another?

A middle ground must be found. Respect must be restored. Individualism is fine. Psychologists who study emotion have discovered that once we start thinking in a positive or negative light, we tend to continue looking at everything through a good or bad lens until something gets our attention to the point of making us switch gears.

Let’s get these school-board meetings back to being ordinary.

By Bernie Dotson