Not that I've been posting much lately anyway ... but I'm out of town during the first half of this week. Maybe by the time I resume what passes for my "normal" life, I'll be a little more talkative.
Meanwhile, I still think the usual things I write are true. In no particular order:
1. Killing people, unnecessarily and purposefully, is a brutal and hideous wrong. Calling it "war" doesn't help. Hiring youngsters dressed in German-style helmets and wrap-around shades doesn't help, either. To hell with it -- all of it.
2. America is increasingly specialized in consumption, being entertained, and borrowing. There's not much future in it. Having some sort of alleged super-mega-hyper army, navy, etc. doesn't help. At best, it allows us to make a temporary living as pirates. When you have to get foreigners to lend you the money to buy the bullets and pay the killers ... well, as I said, there's not much future in it.
3. We could actually start educating ourselves (as opposed to operating the circus/prison system in which we warehouse our kids now), learn how to make something that someone sane might want to buy, and make it. Really, we could. We won't ... but we could.
4. George W. Bush is a murderous, imbecilic child -- and a spoiled one at that. None of his potential 2008-and-up replacements looks like much of a bargain, either.
5. Our 1.002-party political system is about as broken as it can be. I see no actual hope of recovery there, short of a general collapse, or the Lord's return. Voting certainly isn't going to fix anything. I'll vote anyway, though. It's a bad habit, and low entertainment ... just the sort of vice for which I'm a round-heeled pushover.
6. Based on my experience, I estimate a probability of about 0.7 that tomorrow's sunrise will be breathtakingly, eye-poppingly gorgeous. Enjoy!
3 comments:
How many generations of kids do we have to lose to the school system, at the top, at the bottom and in the middle?
After all, any idiot can teach. I shouldn't be paid all that much, despite my degrees because, after all, I'm only in the classroom for six hours a week per class...
I think I have a little more hope for the future than you do. And I think many people for generations to come will actually come to thank George W. Bush.
His inane policies and somewhat evil advisors are educating new generations of voters and politicians on what we need to avoid from this point on.
Lemming: I know you're just being funny there, with the "six hours per week per class" thing. I have just enough instructional experience to have a rudimentary grasp on the sheer, butt-numbing amount of work that underlies those classroom hours.
But about the school system: I obviously have no answer for the question you pose. Even though the "school" system may have worked better, by some notions of what "working better" means, at some time in the past, I have to wonder if the whole "school" idea isn't fundamentally unsound. I mean, a "school" is a collection of fish, and I have to wonder if schooling isn't basically inappropriate as an activity or status for humans. I wonder if we don't need to find some wholly-different basic model for the process of transmitting learnedness from those who have obtained it to those who aspire to do so. I don't have the ghost of a specific proposal -- just the intuitive feeling that there's one out there, somewhere.
Robert: thanks for checking in! I daresay you do have more hope for the future than have I. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I can't imagine anyone who has less hope for the future (always apart from the possibility of divine intervention, that is) than I have. My hopes, such as they are, require things to get substantially worse before they can get better again.
Don't be a stranger!
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