Thumbs up to the folks in the West Mankato neighborhood who maintain an ice rink on their own to provide wintertime fun for area kids and adults alike.
Jed Falgren and neighbors Scott Peterson and Tom Hallet and others tend to the Dotson Park ice rink throughout the winter. The city of Mankato supplied some short dasher boards to contain the rink, but the neighborhood handles flooding and maintenance.
The group says they do it as a way to get back to simpler times when sports and recreation was more neighborhood-based than formal, and it’s a way for the community to do things together.
The idea of neighbors building a community is as fresh as a new sheet of outdoor ice.
East choir director shines
Thumbs up to Mankato East High School choir teacher Andrea Brinkman-Waterbury for her recent recognition as Outstanding Music Educator of the Year.
Brinkman-Waterbury has been teaching in the Mankato district for seven years after 14 years in Mountain Lake. Her enthusiasm for music shows in class as she teaches her students things like rhythmic movement and “body percussion.”
East and the Mankato Area Public Schools are fortunate to have teachers like Brinkman-Waterbury, but she notes that she believes many other teachers are just as good at their jobs and dedicated as she is and could just have easily have won the honor.
Her story is an inspiration for others. Her mother died when she was five and her father struggled with alcoholism and was in and out of jail. In those formative years, she found belonging and solace being in a choir.
Her students are in good hands.
Trump’s sleazy pick
Thumbs up to the House Ethics Committee for finally releasing its report on Matt Gaetz after Republicans on the committee and Gaetz worked to block its release.
Two Republicans on the committee voted to release the report in a secret vote.
Gaetz is the congressman from Florida that Donald Trump had picked to be his attorney general, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in America.
Gaetz’s reputation had long been known by those around him, but the details of a long investigation show the depths of his unfitness for any public office.
The committee’s report said Goetz routinely paid women for sex, taking advantage of poor young women. The committee found Gaetz committed statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl in 2017, and used or possessed illegal drugs on multiple occasions from 2017-2019, including ecstasy and cocaine.
That Trump, who has a long history of mistreatment of women, would choose someone like Gaetz to lead America’s law enforcement says a lot about the soon-to-be president.
Reverting to ‘Manifest Destiny’
Thumbs down to President-elect Donald Trump’s inexplicable craving for other countries’ land.
Since the election, the once and future president has talked of making Canada the “51st state,” suggested retaking the Panama Canal, and reprised a choice bit of first-term nonsense about acquiring Greenland, a semi-autonomous possession of Denmark.
None of these notions can be described as serious proposals. And, inasmuch as Canada doesn’t want to be part of the United States, Panama does not want to part with its most important economic asset and the Danes and Greenlanders (few as the latter are) aren’t interested in parting ways, none of them could happen without an act of war.
Such notions, frivolous as they may be, only add to the friction and chaos Trump seems to crave in international relations. The era of “Manifest Destiny” — the belief that the United States should continue to expand its territory — passed more than a century ago. There is no need to revive it.