House of Eratosthenes

One of the things I find particularly enjoyable about Neal Boortz’ program notes is that when he gets excited about something, his grammar, punctuation and spelling just start to go to hell. Well lately, I notice I’ve been slipping in that department myself, and now Neal and I are neck-and-neck. It gets worse. Today, he’s absolutely in a lather. Boy, the words are so angry they just leap off the paper or out of the screen. And near as I can tell, everything’s perfect. Perhaps I’m biased in this case because I agree with the sentiment a hundred and ten percent.

As is usually the case when I find something so precisely dead-on and accurate that I couldn’t have said it myself, I have nothing to add to the core message, but I do have a few things to bolt on to the end. Which I will do after giving proper credit/linkage, and quoting verbatim. Enjoy.

Those of you who are constant listeners know my feelings about government schools and teachers unions. I firmly believe that in the long-term this country has more to fear from teacher’s unions than we do from Islamic terrorists. I fully believe that Islamic terrorists will once again strike this country, and they may well manage to kill ten thousand or more, but at this point I don’t think they can kill the dream of our forefathers. We recognize (I hope) the terrorists for the enemies that they are. We don’t recognize government education and teacher’s unions for the enemies that they are. Because we are so unaware and asleep at the switch, the education establishment can bring us down, where the terrorists probably cannot.

There is a level of ignorance in this country that the word “stunning” does not even begin to describe. Not only are we producing high school “graduates” who cannot read and comprehend the most basic of writings, they have no understanding of American government or our true history. These kids couldn’t even begin to tell you the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy. They have no concept of the differences between the rule of law and the rule of men. They cannot tell you that our founders feared a democracy, nor why a democracy should be feared. They’re ignorant as to our culture, our history and our form of government … not to mention basic math and science.

And then there’s economics. Our typical high school grad has no clue as to how a free enterprise economy works. He couldn’t write a cohesive paragraph on the law of supply and demand or the difference between a profit and a profit margin. This, of course, makes the high school grads just lumps of clay ready to be molded into whatever their union officials or teachers want them to be.

I was listening to my pal Sean Hannity do an “I hate Hannity” segment on his show last Thursday. Several callers began slamming Hannity on, believe it or not, the Wal-Mart issue. They just couldn’t believe that Sean wasn’t joining them in their hatred of Wal-Mart. It was clear, of course, that these were uneducated, union-oriented people. They would come up with lines like “Well, if the unions aren’t for the workers, who will be?” Duh … how about exercising that responsibility for yourself! At any rate, one caller really caught my attention. He started out with this “Republicans are for big business and rich people” nonsense. Then somehow he got into the subject of income taxes. Everybody knows, he said, that rich people don’t pay income taxes. Sean reminded him that the top 10% of income earners in this country pay about 70% of all personal income taxes collected by the federal government. The caller said “That’s only on paper. They have all these write-offs so they really don’t pay anything.”

That conversation was four days ago now, and I can’t get it out of my mind. How, in this country, can anyone possibly be that completely and absolutely ignorant? How can they actually believe such nonsense? One answer — government schools. There is no excuse for this level of stupidity, and it must be turned around or this country just flat-out isn’t going to make it. The most immediate answer? Get rid of teacher’s unions. Across the nation job one for teacher’s unions is to fight school choice. Parents must be denied the opportunity to chose where their children will go to school at all costs. In Florida the teacher’s unions recently managed to kill a voucher program in the courts. Only children who went to government schools that failed to get a passing grade for two years in a row were eligible .. but the teacher’s unions declared war … and won. One teacher-plaintiff even said that competition is not good for schools, and it’s not good for humans. This is the lesson she’s teaching someone’s son or daughter right now.

Wake up folks. This country was handed to us on a sliver platter. Now it’s up to us to save it, and we’re not doing all that good of a job.

I particularly like those last three sentences. If I were condemned to relegate my gravestone epitaph to the pet peeves that had upset me in life, and I were allowed to choose only two, my top two pet peeves would have to do with our ancestors: 1) We commit sacrilege against them by comparing our contemporary challenges with the problems that had been faced by those ancestors, and pretending that the two were somewhat equivalent; 2) we take for granted the gifts we were given, by them, failing to treat those gifts with the protection and respect they deserve.

We have the luxury of waking up, stumbling into the kitchen to grab a bite to eat, invading the refrigerator and pantry, and discovering — Surprise!! — that we’ll just have to go to Carl’s Jr. because we forgot to go shopping. A hundred and fifty years ago that would have been a fatal screw-up. FATAL. In those days, if you wanted to eat in January, you had to be thinking about your January empty belly in the previous freakin’ March. No harvest, no eat; no sow, no harvest; no seed, no sow. Rich man, poor man. Grab that plow in the spring, and get those veggies planted — and that’s whenever you’re finished with your “real” job, representing your constituents in Congress, or building horseshoes, or cleaning stables — or else you starve.

And now? If you want a belly full of food, you can get one. If you want to get it through hard work, by means of a job, you can have one. If you want to have it given to you, and someone else’s expense, you can have that done too.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the phrase “separation of church and state,” which was not yet used verbatim anywhere, meant that if you were a Quaker and had been voted into public office, you could take your oath of that office by “affirming” instead of by “swearing.” Now we get to debate whether our government is obliged to deny the existence of God. Therein arises a deep constitutional schism, because our Founding Fathers failed to anticipate this. Why did they fail to anticipate this? Atheism just wasn’t taken seriously. Not that it was personal or anything. There are no records of atheists being forced to use back entrances, or to use different drinking fountains; persons known to us, or suspected by us, to be atheists — were actually treated fairly well. The principle simply wasn’t taken very seriously.

Try living in an agricultural society for five years solid, in which there is a good assortment of diseases that will almost certainly kill you or your children once those diseases set in. Try being an atheist. Just try it. You’ll be praying every day before Month #20. Maybe even before Month #3. Today, atheism is much more “important” simply because it is much more plentiful…and atheism is much more plentiful, simply because we can afford it. We have gained perspective technologically, and in so doing used science to explain things that were formerly attributed to God. But we have lost perspective spiritually. We get out of bed in the morning, and we don’t really know what we need to do that day to survive. Where did this food come from? What makes the electricity? Why is the water hot? A lot of people don’t know…but back in the day, Joe Six-Pack got out of bed, and he knew exactly what he needed to do to survive. And he knew exactly what kind of help he needed and from whom. So, naturally, he maintained his relationship with Almighty God, just as he would maintain a piece of critically-important, life-sustaining farm equipment. And taught his children to do the same.

It was a matter of survival. We think of it as a matter of personal preference, because our limited capacity for understanding precludes us from thinking of it in any other way. Stripes versus plaid. Sunroof versus soft-top convertible. Chocolate chip mint versus Rocky Road. That is our prevailing sentiment about the question between spiritualism and atheism…and the word “foolish” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Some of us who live in a city that is about to be flooded, are fortunate enough to receive word from the Government that we should get out. And when those fortunate persons ignore the warnings, they get to tell stories of their ensuing adventures from their government-funded hotel rooms and act as if their “civil rights” have been violated. Mass communication makes it possible for their stories of misery to reach tens of millions of sympathetic souls, in a heartbeat; it also makes it possible for the money to come pouring in, from great distances, as quickly as you could physically carry a golden coin, say, across a small town. For a farmer struggling with a flood crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this would have been such an abundance of miracles that any one of them would have been beyond imagining. “Miracle,” to that farmer, would have meanth he could get sufficient help from the twenty or thirty souls it was possible to contact, that his family wouldn’t starve. And staying put, after he was told to leave? It would have been unthinkable. Or suicide.

The point is, the things that divide us today, are things we can afford to have that divide us. Atheism. Secularism. Nihilism and apathy. Going through life as a “Yang”, concerned with the perpetual stimulation of your own emotions and the emotions of those around you, above the fulfillment of previously defined objectives. Like Jack Nicholson said in “A Few Good Men,” “you have that luxury.” Perhaps these perspectives on life would be somewhat valid…if that luxury had been free.

The school student body that Boortz is using as a warning signal, letting him and the rest of us know that something is terribly wrong, could be given a precious education about all this pretty easily. A simple timeline of human history would show with crystal clarity that something is going on here…perhaps a roll of butcher paper all around the classroom, with little push pins demonstrating when exactly we could start being assured of our right to vote. When we could start refrigerating our food. When we could start surfing the “innernets”. To say nothing of where. Why are so many push pins crammed into this one small space, right where we happen to be?

What does this say about how lucky we are?

What does this say about our purpose for being here? What does this say about our character, if we consciously conclude that we grew here like a fungus, as opposed to being placed here by a Higher Power, and therefore have no compelling purpose in life?

And if my skin happens to be darker, do I really have a “civil right” to have a certain number of points added on to my college entrance exam, so an equivalently-qualified white candidate will be arbitrarily dismissed in my favor? If so, is this “civil right” on par with my right not to be forced to work in a cotton field for someone else’s benefit eighteen hours a day?

And what does it say about how many people toiled throughout their entire mortal lives, for little-to-no material benefit of their own, just to provide more opportunities to their children and grandchildren? Is there not some injustice to be observed, knowing these ancestors died generations or centuries before it could be confirmed that this objective had some measure of success?

Some will think Neal is being pretty hard on the teachers’ unions. But I’ll guarantee you this; you’re not likely to see those teachers’ unions provide sanction to the lecture I’ve just outlined. And that’s a shame. A student who attended a lecture like that, would never look at the bellyaching about what passes for “civil rights” nowadays, quite the same way again.

Nobody’s being forced to ride in the back of a bus now.

Nobody’s playing games to try to keep groups of people from voting. Minorities, women, the handicapped, urban people, rural people.

Our social safety nets, should they fail, fall back on other social safety nets.

Nobody has to think about an empty belly in January, during the previous March.

There is no such thing as a “local” famine anymore. If the riverbeds run dry during the spring, and that summer is light on sun and heavy on parasites — produce will be trucked in from somewhere else. Economic injury results for those who have an economic stake in the local produce market…but it doesn’t qualify for what your great-great-grandfather would have called “economic injury,” by any means.

And when we safeguard our liberties against the tyranny of government…more than half of us think that means bellyaching about the administration of a President who will be out on his ass, no matter what, on January 20, 2009. Only when our mass media instructs us that we should be vexed and frustrated about this issue, or that one. And we have little, or no, vision of what to do after that. Just bitch about Bush. That’s it.

Unbe-freakin’-lievable.

Thing I Know #7. A lot of what passes for bad news in a technological society, wouldn’t be discussed in an agricultural one because it would be a waste of time.

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Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IVMonday, February 20th, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IV
Monday, February 20th, 2006