Brick in the Wall

We are no longer making Americans in our schools.  We are making anti-Americans – people who think America is a bad place, based on a false principle, the principle of freedom.  Freedom breeds inequality.  Some people will get ahead of others if they are allowed to reach their potential, because, as we notice, but won’t admit, people's potentials differ. 

No Child Left Behind means No Child Gets Ahead, and that’s what they want, to level the playing field, even though that means the playing field is now in the cellar.  They would prefer nobody to excel than a few to excel.   

Sometimes, but not always, those who excel make money.  Money, though everyone wants it, has become a dirty word.  One of my readers suggests that we start with 3^rd graders and give them an education in “the meaning of money.”    

“The meaning of money?”  To you, that means “lessons in greed.”  But money isn’t about greed any more than cows are.  It’s simply a handier medium of exchange than cows.  Even city-dwellers can use it.  If money is such bad stuff, how come you want to take it from some people and give it to others?  Why don’t you just throw it away if it’s so awful? 

We have revisionists text books in which our former heroes are portrayed as scoundrels.  We have schools with special classes for children of other cultures, in which these children are taught not to love, but to hate, America. 

I know two kids who live 100 miles apart, both of whose Spanish teachers spend the class period talking down America, railing about unfairness.  The meaning of “fair,” as of a lot of other words, has been changed.  What it now means is “equal outcomes” rather than “equal opportunities.”   

I’m all for equal opportunities.  One of these is a good education.  Are you for that?  Then why don’t you tell Obama to let those D.C. kids out of their rotten schools, so they can get one?  Huh?  Huh?  Huh?  Why the hell don’t you do that?  Do you even know why they’re being kept there?  The teachers’ union won’t let them out. 

Your kids are being taught to be ashamed of their country, of their parents if they’ve made any money, of themselves, if they’ve got a decent standard of living.  They’re being taught that it’s not right for anyone to be better than anybody else at anything.  Everybody gets an A.  Everybody gets a trophy.  Everybody is an honor student.

The result?  We’ve got a stalled, watered-down citizenry in which nobody learns enough to make a difference, difference being unfair, while the rest of the world imitates what we used to be, because contrary to popular notions, we used to be great because we were free.  Our people were free to excel in school instead of being given busy work while everybody else catches up.  They were free to amass fortunes.  You know, if nobody makes fortunes, there aren’t going to be any fortunes to tax.  Does that boggle your left brain?

 

The country is being dumbed down.  The powers that be don’t want you to think; they want you to obey.  So they have stopped teaching children how to think.  By now, even the teachers don’t know how.  Thinking for yourself is an old-fashioned value.  

Blue Christmas

Yes, Elvis, it’s a blue Christmas.  The reds lost, the blues won.  And that means something for Christmas.  It means good-bye, good-riddance, you were nothing in the first place, just like America was nothing in the first place.  The founding fathers were all wrong, and Jesus Christ was even worse. 

The world over, Islamists are killing Christians for being Christians, and Islamists the world-over are getting outreach programs from America.  Islamists are the squeaky wheel that gets the oil.

The Blues have become very sophisticated.  They don’t need religion anymore.  They can be good on their own.  And see where it’s getting them?  Murder is everywhere. We’re on the verge of nuclear war for real; soon the man on the street will be able to start one.  Somehow, without losing anything material, the entire world is going bankrupt.  Cheating, stealing, lying, fornicating – that’s just the way the world goes round.

The people need something to keep them in check.  Hey!  That used to be religion.  Whether you had it or not, you and everyone around were informed by it.  It came with the cradle. It was in the grocery store and the school, for anyone who didn’t make it to church.  It was in the language.  Everyone was taught the teachings by osmosis.  Good and bad were clearly defined, and even though we don’t all know it, God’s definitions were used.  (God’s, his son’s, but not Allah’s. Jihad had no place in America.   Now Allah’s building mosques all over the place and calling his people to worship and obey, and of the major gods, only Allah is exempt from the shunning of the Blues, who are kicking out Christ and his old daddy to unwittingly make way for him.)  

You may not want to be a Christian yourself, but it was mighty handy having Christ around to tell other people how they ought to behave.  And whoever had the brains to write up the Ten Commandments – maybe he knew the nature of man a little better than you do, if you’re one of the people who called the cops on Mary and Jesus while they were resting in their manger in the town square.

“Get along, you two.  We never needed you in the first place.”

Wanna bet?

Packing Heat

Some of my good friends welcomed me back.  Others not so much.  Don’t you hate that phrase?  Next worst thing to “Whatever.”  Unless you remember the off-tone flat NOT, grotesquely appended to statements that say the opposite of what the speaker means.

In her sweet way, my old girlfriend’s trying to pick a fight with me.  She says at least I’m not for arming teachers. 

Arming teachers?  Certainly not.  I’ve been around too many.  I would not go into a school and willy-nilly give teachers guns.  Teaching is a voluble profession.  You deal with living human beings, often in an involuntary, captive situation.  There’s ancient hostility built into the relationship, and guess what? It sometimes explodes.

I would, however, allow any person, teacher or no,  who is already the legal holder of a gun permit, to exercise the right to carry a defensive weapon in schools, in post offices, in banks, just as in a restaurant or on the street.  Because life is also a hostile situation, and these people have been cleared to react sanely.  If this is too much for you, judges could confer special school-status to existing permit holders already in the school, much as they do with sky marshals. 

You people who think you’ll burn in hell if you set eyes on an NRA magazine have no idea how many lives are saved because the bad guy wasn’t the only one with a gun.  You don’t hear because “they” don’t want you to.  And you know who I mean by “they.”  They don’t want any of us to have guns because they, though not you, know that one of the prime reasons for the second amendment is to insure that a government doesn’t get too uppity.  Oppressed people in a dictatorial country rise up with assault weapons.  That’s why they are particularly anxious to get rid of those.  With assault weapons, it’s possible to hold off the government’s representatives when they come to take you out. 

You don’t need to be told – you can imagine for yourself – how different school vulnerability would be if they were not gun-free zones where monsters can get away with murder.  They wouldn’t have gone there in the first place, and if they did, they wouldn’t get very far. 

No, I don’t think the insane, the irresponsible, the cavalier, the temperamentally disabled, or women who blame PMS for unconscionable behavior, should have guns – teachers or otherwise.

The aforementioned NRA wants to put an armed policeman in every school.  I say “no” to that.   A lone policeman becomes the first target.  But if it’s known that inside the building there are a number of anonymous people with guns, that building will no longer be attractive to evil-doers.  Besides, police is a bad idea because people with authority tend to increase their authority.  The police would enlarge their in-school role.  Even you don’t want that.

If you are somebody who fears guns in the hands of other law-abiding citizens, I strongly recommend that you not have a gun. The gun-owners I know speak about the added responsibility, the change in your thinking when you know you’re carrying, the knowledge that you must remain level-headed or you’re a danger to yourself and others.  Not everybody would welcome such an imperative, and that’s good.  It means you can trust the ones who do.  

Keeping guns out of the hand of the crazies?  Keeping the crazies off the street?  Creating fewer crazies?  Vital, of course, but we can’t solve those problems overnight.   However, we can solve the problem of school shooting tomorrow by deleting the designation “Gun Free Zone.” 

Disarming for safety is only one of the liberal myths, akin to thinking that if we destroy our nuclear arsenal, nobody will bomb us. 

I'm Back

I’m back, because even if you hate me, you need me. 

Boner just offered (Oh?  Did I spell wrong?  I don’t think so.) exactly what the liberals want, what the Occupiers want, what every left-thinking person in America wants.  He offered to raise the tax on millionaires (real millionaires – that is, people who make a million dollars) and leave the tax rate for everybody else.  Obama rejected it.  Obama wants to raise taxes on his new definition of millionaires – that is, those who make $250,000.  He will only raise the taxes on millionaires if he is allowed to raise the taxes on your local entrepreneurs and other not-so-rich who have a good year – in short, a lot of the Middle Class.   

Did you know this?  Having heard it, does it matter to you, or are you incapable of grokking the fullness because you’ve got a block in your brain that says, “If Obama doesn’t want it, I don’t either.”  This is an important question to ask yourself.  Like pinching yourself to see if you’re awake.

I’m lying low in New York City. It's lower than I thought; we had a flood. And we had an election – same one you had so you know how it came out.

The local news is I can’t buy big sodas anymore.  A few seasons ago, I was down there in the trenches when the occupiers came.  Bought a few meals for a few kids to hear what they had to say. Since I came with teaching credentials, they talked education.  Free education.  For everybody.  For as far as they want to go.  That means you’ll need a PhD to be a greeter at Walmarts, and you won’t have learned much more than you need to do that, but I didn’t argue.  I don’t argue much these days.  It’s hard to get my dander up.  Lost the country, you know; it’s subdued me.  Still, I see that we’re living in parallel worlds.  Some people know what’s going on and others don’t.   

This has become obvious.  Time Magazine named Obama “Person of the Year”.  For “finding and forging a new majority.”  Even though he lost the independents, he got 60% of the under-30 vote.  He managed to convince a lot of those who don’t know a thing about issues, to vote for him for president;  they think he is outside politics, and they like him.  

Someone I really like, a musician, said he was voting for Obama because he had convinced him – he didn’t say of what – and that he was an honest guy.  As they say so often these days, “You can’t make these things up.”   Fortunately, his seventeen-year-old son, a Beatles-loving, vegetarian throw-back, was shocked, and said to him, “What?  Don’t you read the fact-checker?”  Made my day.  There’s hope yet.  And because there’s hope, I’ll be here if you need me.  

By the way Obama got the nod, beating out the Time readers' selection – another diminutive and imperial head-of-state: Kim Jong-un, North Korea's much loved, missile launching, supreme leader.

But be happy.  As I post, the solstice has come and gone, without the world coming to an end, yet.  What little of December 21 that's still left in California and Hawaii is becoming just another first day of winter.