A sick society

As horrible and destructive as the tsunami is, and as much as the victims need and deserve our help, do not allow it to take your eyes off the ball here at home. Bush is determined to manufacture a Social Security crisis where none exists. He is following the same strategy he employed to lie us into a “war” that was totally unnecessary, illegal, unconstitutional, and has turned out to be an utter disaster. Please allow me to remind you once more: NONE OF THIS HAD TO HAPPEN! Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Iraq had no connection whatsoever with the terrorists. There is no conceivable way any thinking person could have believed Iraq was a threat to the United States. It would not have been a threat even if it had had nuclear weapons or other WMD’s. Neither is Iran or North Korea a meaningful threat to the U.S. No nation is about to attack the United States with nuclear bombs – unless, of course, they want to be immediately destroyed. There could, of course, be terrorist attacks of one sort or another. Even serious ones. But this fear is no justification for a defense budget larger than all the rest of the world combined. The defense budged doesn’t exist merely for purposes of defense. It exists to insure obscene profits for Corporations, the military-industrial complex that we were warned about so many years ago but did not have enough sense to resist. It is a cancer on our country that is becoming so serious it may be too late to cure.

Our educational system is now under attack. The Pell Grants, which have allowed thousands of deserving students to attend colleges and universities, are being drastically cut back. The ultra right is insisting that there has to be a balance between liberals and conservatives on University Faculties (I’m certain they would prefer no balance at all but, rather, all out conservatives). Science is under attack and scientists everywhere are being replaced with political appointments that will simply follow the party line. Make no mistake about it, this Administration does not want an educated populace that would see through the absurd demands of the religious fundamentalists for biblical “truth.” How can there be so many people in the United States who believe the earth is only four thousand years old? That the bible is the literal truth? That Christianity is the only true religion? We have become the laughingstock of the world. This is a fatal failure of our culture, this emphasis on anti-intellectualism and denigration of education. Our shameful neglect of our schools and teachers has finally come back to haunt us and we are in clear danger of becoming no better than a third rate nation without the skills and knowledge to compete in the modern world. This is nowhere more true that here in Idaho where our Republican controlled state would seem to prefer to not have schools at all. Where they have resisted funding the school and, indeed, at one point thought about changing the State Constitution so they would not even be responsible for school funding. This attitude towards our children and schools is so reprehensible as to be almost unimaginable. But it exists, right here. It is not a question of simply providing more money, it is a question of emphasizing the value of education, just for its own sake. Our schools have devolved into nothing more than holding centers, offering mindless busy-work to keep large numbers off the unemployment lines. Then we argue the schools are no good. Why should we fund them. The answer is the schools are no good because we haven’t adequately funded or supported them for years and years. And we don’t value them. We don’t value learning and we don’t value teachers. Everyone knows that all them “pointy-headed intellectuals” have no common sense and the only people who teach are those who are unable to do anything else. Aristotle, Socrates, Galileo, Kepler, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Darwin, Einstein, Hawkings, Chomsky, come immediately to mind, people like that, useless figures who wouldn’t know how to plow or paint a house or cut hair or dig a ditch if their life depended on it. I hate to believe it, but I must. The United States, as presently constituted, is a very sick society with an extremely questionable future.