F..k the police, the racist pigs, the oppressive force of an oppressive society!
Watch the news and we hear this over and over in Baltimore and Ferguson. But the question is: do we want to perpetuate the narrative or do we want to closely examine the issues in our society and then honestly formulate solutions?
Do we want to be politically correct or do we want to get it right?
First, let’s give ourselves some credit. In the approximately two hundred-forty years The United States of America has existed, we’ve come from slavery to an African-American president. Not bad! We are the most prosperous nation ever and we are the most generous nation ever. In many ways we support the entire world, and even after wars, to a good extent, we help rebuild defeated enemies. We live in freedom, for the most part, unobstructed from being who we are and doing what we want to do. Really, you can’t ask for better.
I know! If you belong to one of the special interest groups or if your skin isn’t white you probably take exception to the paragraph above. Mainly that’s because things aren’t fair. Things have never been fair nor will they ever be. Even worse, many things in our society are wrong. But things that are wrong are now extremely complex issues and require calculated solutions, not simple adherence to and actions in accordance with an old, old narrative.
An example of this complexity is segregation. When segregation was legal it was simple because the lines of demarcation were clearly drawn. You stayed in your area or you broke the law and suffered the consequences. This is not to suggest in any way that segregation was good or right, etc. I’m only saying it was not complex. You knew quite clearly why you were segregated, what the law was and what the penalties were.
Shoot forward to 1992 when I started teaching in the Bronx, New York, a long time after Martin Luther King Jr. and “The Civil Rights Movement” and the onset of Affirmative Action and EOE Employers. The school I taught in was 99.5% Black and Hispanic and almost always I was the only white person in the room. The kids referred to where they lived as the ghetto. Why didn’t their parents move out of the ghetto? There were no gates locking anyone in.
Complexity! Today our public schools are more segregated than ever. Today is 50 years post segregation. Today is also 50 years after the war on poverty began. More than 22 trillion dollars has been spent on anti-poverty programs and yet the poverty rates in America and the demographics of the poor have remained virtually unchanged.
Why?
The answers are extremely complex. Again, using segregation as the example, the U.S. Supreme court will no longer touch a segregation issue since segregation is already illegal. Fait accompli! However, the de facto segregation of today is a result of economic freedoms, not something that can successfully be brought to the high court. Who is segregated now? The poor of all kinds are it, and actually they are a classic example of collateral damage.
To wit, President Obama has kept interest rates at 0%, or right there, for the past six years to help the economy recover. As a result of these low-low interest rates, the people with any money have put it in the stock market. The stock market has soared and those people have gotten richer and richer. The poor, even just the average guy with no money to invest, have lost ground. Obama hasn’t meant for them to lose ground. It was a side effect and they are collateral damage.
So, do we want to be politically correct or do we want to get it right?
The oppressive society narrative which pits black against white and poor against rich is too simple to be the cause or an answer to why, and it obfuscates the underlying issues of the matter. Does this narrative have any veracity? Of course it has some. But things have never been fair and they never will be. Ask that first person who didn’t get into medical school because of Affirmative Action. In this regard, ask a Jew who survived a concentration camp what a real ghetto is. In fact, ask that Jew what he/she ever did to be so persecuted.
My father-in-law used to say that human beings are by nature selfish and greedy. Looking at this statement would be a good start. Looking at politics is a subterfuge. Our politicians and the proponents of the oppressive society narrative perpetuate the problematic issues because they are innately part of them and the true benefactors of them. Look at their net worths, look at where and how they earn their income. Try to find anything they create in our economy that would benefit American workers.
Wait. Put on those hi-power binoculars. Nancy Pelosi, you know her, the “you have to sign it to see what’s in it,” lady, got 62% richer in net worth from 2008-2009, reporting a net worth of 34 million in 2009. Last year that net worth was about 198 million. How did she do this on a senator’s income? The quick answer to how she did it was Obama’s zero-interest stock market. And just to be fair, her boyfriend, Harry Reid, isn’t doing too badly either, nor is her nemesis John Boehner.
When all is said and done, are we courageous enough to really look at ourselves, to look deep inside ourselves for real answers? Are we courageous enough to look at our Civil Rights instigators, you know the non-tax paying Sharptons, like Al, or at our legislators, more than half of whom are millionaires for the first time in history? Are we courageous enough to see for real who they are and what they are actually doing beyond the 15 second sound bites they so calculatedly put out?
That’s where the answers lie to the questions which will truly determine our future as a nation and as a people, top down and bottom up.
So do we want to be politically correct or do we want to get it right?
The other morning as I was getting ready to go out I heard talk on the news, AGAIN, about the president’s push to have everyone go to college, which is stemming from his push to make community college free for everyone. My first thought was: why are we still having this conversation? A secondary thought was: if we pressed our children to learn what they were supposed to in grades K-12, they and their parents would be prepared to guide them after high school. But that is another issue.
Later, I heard that the top 20% of income earners in America pay more than 84% of all Federal Income Tax, and from what I’ve read in the past, I believe this is a kind number or an understated reporting. Nevertheless, by today’s report, the bottom 80%, which is most Americans, don’t pay any taxes. Some get refunds (whether or not they pay taxes) and many of this 80% are simply given things from the government. Since colleges must be paid, making it free to all is a misnomer because that top 20% will again have to pay.
But taxes, who pays them and entitlements are other issues too.
My colleagues and I at AE Stevenson High School in the Bronx pretty much knew that breaking the big schools into small schools would not “fix” anything and actually would not change anything much. In fact, it hasn’t. Stevenson now houses nine schools. Several have failed and are gone or in the process of being phased out and the ones remaining are hit and miss at best. The powers that be would have everyone believe they have done something wonderful in education and things are better. But the fact of the matter is that much of what actually occurs in the little schools is underground, hidden and kept so for the purposes of maintaining the illusion that schools are improving. The idea of fixing things was a charade being played upon the public by our leaders back then and it still is now, only now it goes all the way up to the presidency.
Back to everyone going to college. Why? Why is this being pushed at us? At Stevenson before it was broken up, we had an active auto shop. Students who were so inclined could graduate as auto mechanics or as ready for taking the state tests. The auto shop teachers boasted they had placed more students to work as mechanics in the Bronx than any other school. More than this boast, they boasted that the nearby repair shops relied upon the school for manpower. The last I saw, labor rates at the auto shops were about $100.00 per hour and mechanics make more money than mid-level teachers. Why go to college?
My colleagues and I knew that the small school movement would kill preparing kids for the trades, which it did, which launched the later debate over how to make kids job ready, which led to some development of job-prep high schools. I have a Doctorate in Education, but the carpenter, plumber, electrician, mechanic and all other trades people I use because I have no trade skills make more than I do and many of them make more than I did even at top salary as a teacher in NYC. Why college? Why push the people who don’t’ want college to head there?
Whatever happened to the idea that you could be what you wanted in America?
When I started teaching, we taught a curriculum that prepared kids to be useful, productive citizens. It encompassed everything from college prep to learning a trade, and the kids, with their parents, met with guidance counselors to discuss their future. Education now is merely a government control issue like most big programs are. Make no mistake. That is what the push is about: government control and power.
So we knew way back when that not everyone is meant to go to college. Not everyone wants to. We talk about the learning modalities—some kids are tactile and just great with their hands and want to use them in how they make a living. Typing on your computer hardly qualifies as using your hands. It is not politically correct to say that not everyone is suited for college because in our oh-so-careful world such a statement is construed as racist or sexist. In fact it is realistic.
Why are we still having the everyone-must-go-to-college discussion? Why is today’s Federal Government (and many State Governments too) insistent upon controlling more and more of our lives?
I believe we all know the answers if we look deep inside ourselves, and when we do this, we see that so many of the “rights” issues in effect take away rights and/or serve as cripplers to our individual initiative, creativity and well-being.
