It’s been rough in Florida the last few weeks.
Hurricane season has hammered away at both coasts and much in between. This has increased both the frequency and fervor of the family outreach to my retired father and stepmother ensconced in the gated, golf course confines we affectionally refer to as Del Boca Vista.
The family pleas to evacuate are typically met with light-hearted bravado from the retired steelworker who has now been through five hurricanes in 10 years in the Sunshine State.
“I made the steel that built America. It’s only wind and rain,” my father says. “The people on television work everyone up.”
His evacuation record – 0 for 5 – is lower than Yankee Aaron Judge’s career playoff batting average. But his success rate – or, more accurately, his good fortune – is perfect.
“I told you there’s nothing to worry about here,” he said last week. “Just some fronds on the course. They’ll be cleared off by tomorrow.”
The Senior League teed off on schedule the next day. But hurricanes aren’t Florida’s only storm.
As tropical depression’s gathered strength in the Gulf of Mexico, the nonprofit PEN America released its annual report of books banned by school libraries in America. There were 10,000 books taken off the shelves of America’s schools during the 2023-224 academic year, nearly triple the amount banned the previous year. About 8,000 of those bans came in two states: Florida and Iowa.
Florida House Bill 1069, which took effect last year, is cited as the reason Florida leads the way. Under the law, any book challenged for sexual content must be removed as it undergoes review. In Florida book policing there’s no due process or presumption of innocence.
I’m not sure how Escombia County, Florida, fared during the recent hurricanes but its school students are safe from Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile,” Alex Haley’s “Roots,” “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, and “For Whom the Bells Toll” by Ernest Hemingway. The report didn’t outline the offending passages that led to their banning. I read three of those books back in the 20th Century in Bethlehem – where they remain legal today – and somehow managed to keep my life on a stable course.
This all seems especially odd and pointless in the 21st-century where a potpourri of explicit pornography is a Google search and a click away to any teenager.
It’s my guess that the statistics on the number of high school students that check out a book from the school library today would be more shocking than anything Agatha Christie wrote in 1937. If they read them, it’s more likely that they will get them online, the same place they find modern music with enough graphic sexual content to make The Rolling Stones blush.
In the end, library book bans are about as effective as taping plastic to the windows to stop 100 mph hurricane winds. It just makes you feel like you’re doing something to hold back the storm. I understand the quest for simplicity in a world changing faster than we can comprehend. It’s probably how it felt when people first learned the earth wasn’t flat and that we live on a planet in a solar system that revolves around the sun. Inconvenient truths don’t disappear because we ignore them.
Last week, I was part of a gathering of executives and human resource leaders of the Lehigh Valley’s life science, technology and research and development companies. It was held at the new Da Vinci Science Center in downtown Allentown, a place that aims to interest children in science and math and engineering.
The message was two-fold. The Lehigh Valley has a large and growing number of companies in the science and technology sectors, such as Evonik, Olympus, Shift4, OraSure and more than 200 others. But there is a shortage – both here and across the country – of skilled workers with degrees in math, science, engineering and technology to fill the growing demand for jobs requiring advanced skills and thinking. Companies are getting very creative and extremely engaged with schools and students at a younger level to develop the workforce of tomorrow.
A center like Da Vinci is not just a fun place to take the kids. It’s the first rung on the economic development ladder. It’s a place to generate interest at a young age in challenging subjects that require hard work and study. Technology and science are changing the world. It will dramatically change the way we work and the jobs that exist. For many of us, it’s happening too fast, but that toothpaste is not going back in the tube. Smarter is still better.
There are more hurricanes because the climate has changed, and the ocean is warmer. Denying that – or threating meteorologists or emergency workers – won’t stop the winds. Just as banning books from school libraries won’t stop what students see and hear.
Technology and intelligence will be tomorrow’s national security equivalent of last century’s being bigger and stronger and having more weapons. Wars will take place in cyberspace, possibly without weapons. Being smarter also will determine what regions and workers will thrive in the future. The Lehigh Valley is on the right course.
The answer to a problem is never to pretend the problem isn’t there. It may work for a while but sooner or later the duct tape and plastic give way and the luck runs out.
Don Cunningham is the president and CEO of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. He can be reached at [email protected].
This post was originally published on here
