![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Well, I've got quite a few things dropped into my lap all at once. I've probably bent most of them to fit my narrative and my ideas. After all, I seek narrative in places it isn't, looking for threads that don't normally tie together, and try to put things next to each other that would rather be far apart. I could be completely full of excrement, but let's go down the rabbit hole together, hrm? Starting with the idea that American public education has never been about turning out intelligent people with knowledge, but instead molding them to become proper cogs in whatever machine they want to be part of. It used to be industrial, union, and factory jobs. Nowadays, it's service work with a smattering of technology, enough to employ you at Wal-Mart instead of Ford Motors. While most of us toil away to pay debts that we've mortgaged ourselves to for years upon end, unceasingly, until we are dead or too old to enjoy our freedom, the people at the top of the income bracket spend millions on politics to get themselves elected and then control coffers far bigger than their own person worth. Often for their own profits. They hire legions to make sure most of their income is sheltered from taxation and try very hard to convince the government they're paupers while they spend millions on their own lifestyles. And they play with money that isn't theirs and do risky things, sometimes which fail and cost the people they employ or the people that deposit with them the money that they've invested. Not them, of course, but the little people.
So what happens when you have a shortage of revenues, due to the rich cheating their way out and the poor having no money? You have furloughs of schoolchildren, you have the lights go out at night, public services get trimmed, libraries get closed, and the poor suffer. Infrastructure suffers. You get to see what a collapsing country looks like. And who could possibly help out? The federal government could help out, but they've been gridlocked by a minority that insists we must cut spending from programs to balance the budget and fellate the very richest by continuing to let them not pay their fair share of taxes. Despite the tremendous cost and demonstrated lack of stimulative, economy-recovering effect that such tax cuts have. We're shutting down streetlights, stopping the school year early, and cutting assistance to those who need it the most without demanding that wars be stopped and those who can afford more pay in more to balance the budget. Why aren't we doing this? Because we haven't been really informed about civics and politics.
Thus, we loop back to education. Most of us receive a less-than-basic primer in how the process works and what's supposed to happen in an ideal world on a national and state level. Very little is given to how that plays out in today's environment, or highlighting the ways that the minority party is protected, but can also abuse their minority status to prevent the functioning of government. On our entertainment boxes, we're usually treated to talking heads screaming logical-sounding but usually fact-devoid or fact-light statements designed to make us feel for what is right instead of investigate what actually is. We prize our emotions over our logic and in this particular case, it does us absolutely no favors. It produces opinion pieces that claim another religion is perpetually bloodthirsty and wants all of the people not them dead, a group dedicated to ensuring the law about state religion and individual free practice are enforced wants to eliminate all the practitioners of his religion, and that tolerance of another religious group is only weakness and cowardice leading up to them killing you. It's speaking without seeing or listening - the Constitutional guarantee of individual free exercise and against state religion means mosques get built in New York near attack sites and the ACLU does their best to stop government from favoring the dominant religion, consciously or unconsciously. The people killed were killed by a group that has an agenda - the victims were going to be spies and trying to convert the populace, regardless of what their real motives were. It's how that group retains power and influence and scares the people who would otherwise be helpful into being afraid. Kind of like how elements here at home kill and picket doctors and clinics and try to intimidate anyone who would use them for certain medical procedures. Most people won't make that connection. They haven't been taught how, and they haven't been exposed to a culture that encourages them to think these things through.
These are the simple things, really. Ideologues pushing our basic emotional buttons, generating visceral reactions that override our better judgment. Most of us never receive any formal logic training, and so we don't have experience spotting when people are pulling on the strings. If we can't manage to resist those things, then what happens when you try to graduate up to more complex and complicated things. Like analyzing politics, decisions, ideologies, philosophies, religions, and other systems of thought that have multiple possible outcomes based on inputs and rules that interact in complex ways if they want to stay consistent? Or that change over generational times?
For example, in a previous life, before adulthood, I was involved in cross-examination debate at my school. CX debate is nominally about making good arguments, defending a case and refuting your opponent's evidence with evidence of your own. More often than not, in the experience I had, it left those ideas by the wayside in favor of just speaking short arguments and evidence cards at speeds that were attempting to emulate John Moschitta Jr. Not as helpful as I had thought. Anyway, in my novitiate, there was an affirmative case that was for the legalization of marijuana as a way to balance the federal budget (the resolution that year, I believe, being that the Federal Government must enact a policy that would result in a balanced budget...). My partner and I took on the case on its merits and argued before the judge our best arguments about the policy and the plan. After the round was over, in giving us critique, the judge looked at us and said, "You missed an obvious argument. Legalization would create a country of potheads. If you had argued that, it would have been persuasive." At the time, we took it in stride but shrugged. It hadn't occurred to us to argue something like that, because we were told to argue against the case, whatever it should be. Looking back on it, I realize now that the judge had basically said "Appeal to my emotions. Judge me as an older person and assume that I am anti-marijuana, then appeal to my emotions that way." In an intellectual sport that was supposed to be about making good logical arguments, here was one of our instructors telling us to ignore logic to win. (Incidentally, this is why one asks if the judge has preferences or biases - you can lose a case for arguing something the judge doesn't like, regardless of how well you argue it. Any judge who says they're "tabula rasa" is lying.) That says something pretty horrible about education and how pervasive the idea of arguing to emotion is. (We Are Not Immune, certainly not. But we'd like to thine that presented with credible evidence, we can change our mind or have a discussion about the matter.) So, with that idea in mind, let's continue.
(And thus, we get into the interesting parts.)
What do you do with a philosophy that wants to empower women to be at least as equal as men, but is horribly discriminatory toward transwomen, transmen, has issues with people of color and with disabilities, and is frosty to explosively hostile toward women whose power and desire lies in things they consider to be perpetuating the problem? Feminism is a great example of a philosophy that changes over time. Suffragettes, the sexual revolution, real women have curves, the patriarchy, womyn born womyn. All aspects of feminism, to greater and lesser degrees and extremisms. What happens, though, when someone is accused of those things? Well, we're deficient in logical analysis and argument a lot of the time, so we can't fix the problem there or have a meaningful discussion about how we know that there are some shortcomings, but we still think it's a good idea. We start by denial. "They're not part of our group./That's not what I believe." Yes, they are. It's okay to have factions in an umbrella ideology. The idea that everyone has to be united in all ways is something not even the famed Reagan Republicans could pull off - after a certain size, it's almost a truism that the people in the group will differ on particulars, even if they agree on the overarching goal. Malcom X versus Martin Luther King is one most people get as a compare/contrast in schooling - same goals, different details. They may not agree with you on everything, but there's enough similarities for both of you to claim the label. This does mean that someone will use their definition of what the word means and not yours when you use it, though. That leads to the other initial denial - "That's not what it means." Unlike some countries, the United States does not have a grammatical authority doling out what correct pronunciations and official meanings of words are. It means what you say it means and it means what they say it means, too, warts and all.
Both of those denials usually are rooted in logical fallacies. They sound good, they help us feel like we're not part of the ugly bits of our philosophies, they provide cover, but they're not logical. And they're not helpful. If you deny that your philosophy has some fairly hard-coded discrimination against transpeople in it (womyn born womyn), then you make it very hard to figure out how to fix the problem and work toward the advancement of all women, trans or no. If you deny that feminists can be women who like to put on makeup, dress sexy, and work to please the men in their lives (but will take absolutely no shit from them about the supposed superiority of the male sex), then you miss out on a big group of people who would otherwise join up and contribute their ideas. If you deny that men can be progressive-minded and can hold enormous sway over how other men think, then you've lost a major avenue of getting your ideas to be accepted by men. Blam, blam, blam. You only have so many toes you can shoot off before you bleed out. The logic is fixable - the philosophy can grow and stretch and learn, but the education that we've received that's inadequate at teaching us how to argue and when someone isn't actually arguing and the prizing of emotion over logic make it unnecessarily hard to accept the faults and humanities and to get past them. In order to form a more perfect union, you understand...
Which takes us around to some of the shifts that happen in our language over time. Try this one on for size - it's a copy from archive.org in 2006 - political correctness, as it is slung about derisively, is actually the opposite of what political correctness truly is. What most Americans think of as "political correctness" - the usage of "African American" instead of "Negro" or "nigger", "Chinese-American" instead of "chink", to say that one has been hoodwinked instead of "Jewed", to celebrate "the holidays" instead of celebrating "Christmas" alone, to admit in one's choice of language that people are in fact people and deserve to be treated as such, instead of inferiors who don't know their place and should be put in it firmly if they get too uppity - is not exactly in keeping with the politics of our times. As the Proposition 8 decision reminds us, when you put the issue of whether a minority group should be treated like everyone else to a majority vote, the minority group loses, and the campaign is usually riddled with all sorts of horrible logic, emotional appeals, and advertisements that are substance-free but intended to push your buttons in such a way as to bury rational thought in favor of knee-jerk reactions. After all, if you let them be equals, then they're stealing what's rightfully yours, goddammit!
Nonsense. The idea that someone is coming to take away what is yours is more in line with what would more properly be called "politically correct", if we were going to use the obvious definition - politically correct is that which is in favor by the mainstream at the time. It is politically correct to paint Islam as the Bloodthirsty Religion, because they hate your freedoms and they're coming to take them away and kill anyone who resists! Never you mind all the peacefully practicing Muslims in this country right this very second and all the houses of worship they've already built. And be sure to ignore the documented bloody history of the Christians - it's politically correct to believe that good Christian men and women are flawless and those who did evil things in the past did them for justifiable reasons, making them good, or they weren't really Christians in the first place. It is politically correct to say that women who don't want to get raped should not drink, should not dress in anything more revealing than a burqa, should not say anything that might be interpreted as a come-on, which means they shouldn't say anything at all to any man (although that's considered a come-on, too). It's politically correct to say that tax cuts stimulate the economy and helping the rich get richer means that everyone gets richer. It's politically correct to say that unions are evil, socialism is evil, and that employees should grovel at the feet of their corporate masters and be happy with insufficient wages and benefits and the threat that anyone attempting to improve that condition will be fired and their job sent somewhere else. It's politically correct to say that entitlement spending is wasteful, the poor are there because they deserve it and shouldn't be helped, and that any money the military wants should be given to them unquestioningly. It's politically correct to say America is as close to flawless as anyone can get, and is tops in all sorts of things, regardless of what the evidence says to the contrary. It's politically correct to be Christian in America. These are the kinds of things that do not rock the boat, do not make waves, do not insist that minority people are just as deserving of rights, recognition, and certainly don't point out that the predominant way of thinking in this country is pigheaded, wrong, and contrary to the values spelled out both in the founding documents and in the Christian religion so many Americans profess to follow. It's politically correct to side with the majority against the minority, and to tell the minority to shut up and stop being so uppity.
Our education system is politically correct - it has had the controversies stripped from it or sterilized out of it. Helen Keller fought for the disabled and overcame her own - that's accepted as okay. Helen Keller was a socialist and advocated stridently for socialism. That part of her history has been left out, because it's not politically correct to ahve your hero figures be socialist. Dr. King was opposed to the Vietnam War, and he was in favor of immediate reparations to African Americans for all the shit that had been done to them in slavery, Jim Crow, and all the rest before the alw finally recognized them as equals. That's been stripped out because American political correctness demands that War is Peace and that civil rights legislation and integration was sufficient recompense for the wrongs done in the past. Political correctness says anyone who points out the American people can be bigots, have historically been bigots, tend to be bigots still, and that this is wrong, is a shrill elitist who hates the common person and doesn't trust them. Based on the historical record of how we achieve great social progress, I'd say they're pretty well right not to trust the average person to be in favor of expanding rights and including more people in the tent. Thirty-one times on this most recent issue we put it to the average person to decide whether people were people, deserving of equality, and thirty-one times it failed. The Emancipation Proclamation was not issued to make all slaves free in all states, it was issued so that all slaves in states still in rebellion to the Union were freed - it was a political decision, a military decision, and a damn brilliant one at that, designed to force the Confederacy to fight one war against the Union army and make sure that another war between them and their slaves disn't break out. It still took the passage of an amendment to the Constitution before the truth that black people were people was written into the law, and it took significant time past even that before all the dirty tricks, the underhanded tactics, and the taxes were all outlawed and black people were finally able to express their right to vote everywhere in the country. Now, we have Niggers With Attitude, N-word privileges, and a reappropriated slur into a power statement, at least between members of the in-group, but it used to be something that was said to them as a derogatory remark. Political correctness said that blacks were inferior and needed to be "segregat[ed] now, and segregat[ed] forever." Our education system glosses all of these things and more in its politically correct mission to make America out to be the shining city on a hill, one that has had occasional, unfortunate, stumbles along the way to its current perfection, but that is always perpetually perfect, even knowing full well that future generations will see this time as one of those unfortunate stumbles.
More often than not, it seems like what we should be reciting in our civics classes, based on our actions, is "We, the People, lacking the basics of logic and argument, in order to let ourselves be swayed by emotional appeals, establish bigotry, impose discrimination, and provide for the defense of the indefensible, do hereby abandon and renounce the Constitution of the United States of America." Our education system is at fault - it does not equip us for the rigors of thinking for ourselves, arguing our positions, and conceding when we're wrong and the facts prove it. Our political system is at fault - it does not insist that we become informed and argue the issues to elect the people who will run the country, the state, and our local areas best, through their actions and their appointments. We are seeing the decay of important things around us, but we are not focusing on those issues - we're over here, looking at the shadows and arguing over what they are and their importance, oblivious to the chains wrapped firmly around us.
I don't know if it can be fixed. Incremental change toward building a real education system is snared by the system and bloated down to ineffectiveness. Attempting to break through the dominance of the center-right party and the far-right party in the elections is laughed down and usually unable to muster anything important, because the system is rigged to prevent challengers from entering and succeeding. And for those thinking armed revolution will fix things, well, it might, but there's always the chance that the people who are in charge when the dust settles will not think highly of you and your ideas. It's depressing to look at a problem of that complexity and just see all the ways that it will stop whatever tries to change it.
"Running forward
Falling back
Spinning round and round
Looking outward
Reaching in
Scream without a sound
Leaning over
Crawling up
Stumbling all around
Losing my place
Only to find I've come full circle"
Of course, I was going to end this post on that sort of depressing point. And then, thanks ironically to someone complaining about it, I got the high school graduation speech and the intent to make education better from the student commencement speaker, and I realize that I have to have hope in the next generation as much as I strive to make this one better. There are pockets of good education, obviously, and there are people who can talk about complex ideas and generational concerns with accuracy and prove their points. There's an entire generation coming behind us that has been raised in that environment, and they've seen what works and what doesn't, and when they get to be in charge, they've got the potential to make it better. Or to convince the hidebound people in charge now to change it for the better so they can ride off into their retirements positively, instead of as "those bastards who resisted this necessary and beneficial change to the end". There will be plenty of them who have been raised in poor environments who reflect those values and will work against their own betterment, but the next generation should have bigger pockets of people who Get It and will do things right, in their own communities, in their schools, and perhaps if we're lucky, as elected or appointed officials who recognize the necessity of good education, perhaps so much that they'll cut the war budget drastically to make it work.
After all, we still have our dreams, even if everything else is rapidly being crushed.
"Don't stress,
Relax,
Let life roll off your backs
Except for death and paying taxes,
Everything in life is only for now!"
So what happens when you have a shortage of revenues, due to the rich cheating their way out and the poor having no money? You have furloughs of schoolchildren, you have the lights go out at night, public services get trimmed, libraries get closed, and the poor suffer. Infrastructure suffers. You get to see what a collapsing country looks like. And who could possibly help out? The federal government could help out, but they've been gridlocked by a minority that insists we must cut spending from programs to balance the budget and fellate the very richest by continuing to let them not pay their fair share of taxes. Despite the tremendous cost and demonstrated lack of stimulative, economy-recovering effect that such tax cuts have. We're shutting down streetlights, stopping the school year early, and cutting assistance to those who need it the most without demanding that wars be stopped and those who can afford more pay in more to balance the budget. Why aren't we doing this? Because we haven't been really informed about civics and politics.
Thus, we loop back to education. Most of us receive a less-than-basic primer in how the process works and what's supposed to happen in an ideal world on a national and state level. Very little is given to how that plays out in today's environment, or highlighting the ways that the minority party is protected, but can also abuse their minority status to prevent the functioning of government. On our entertainment boxes, we're usually treated to talking heads screaming logical-sounding but usually fact-devoid or fact-light statements designed to make us feel for what is right instead of investigate what actually is. We prize our emotions over our logic and in this particular case, it does us absolutely no favors. It produces opinion pieces that claim another religion is perpetually bloodthirsty and wants all of the people not them dead, a group dedicated to ensuring the law about state religion and individual free practice are enforced wants to eliminate all the practitioners of his religion, and that tolerance of another religious group is only weakness and cowardice leading up to them killing you. It's speaking without seeing or listening - the Constitutional guarantee of individual free exercise and against state religion means mosques get built in New York near attack sites and the ACLU does their best to stop government from favoring the dominant religion, consciously or unconsciously. The people killed were killed by a group that has an agenda - the victims were going to be spies and trying to convert the populace, regardless of what their real motives were. It's how that group retains power and influence and scares the people who would otherwise be helpful into being afraid. Kind of like how elements here at home kill and picket doctors and clinics and try to intimidate anyone who would use them for certain medical procedures. Most people won't make that connection. They haven't been taught how, and they haven't been exposed to a culture that encourages them to think these things through.
These are the simple things, really. Ideologues pushing our basic emotional buttons, generating visceral reactions that override our better judgment. Most of us never receive any formal logic training, and so we don't have experience spotting when people are pulling on the strings. If we can't manage to resist those things, then what happens when you try to graduate up to more complex and complicated things. Like analyzing politics, decisions, ideologies, philosophies, religions, and other systems of thought that have multiple possible outcomes based on inputs and rules that interact in complex ways if they want to stay consistent? Or that change over generational times?
For example, in a previous life, before adulthood, I was involved in cross-examination debate at my school. CX debate is nominally about making good arguments, defending a case and refuting your opponent's evidence with evidence of your own. More often than not, in the experience I had, it left those ideas by the wayside in favor of just speaking short arguments and evidence cards at speeds that were attempting to emulate John Moschitta Jr. Not as helpful as I had thought. Anyway, in my novitiate, there was an affirmative case that was for the legalization of marijuana as a way to balance the federal budget (the resolution that year, I believe, being that the Federal Government must enact a policy that would result in a balanced budget...). My partner and I took on the case on its merits and argued before the judge our best arguments about the policy and the plan. After the round was over, in giving us critique, the judge looked at us and said, "You missed an obvious argument. Legalization would create a country of potheads. If you had argued that, it would have been persuasive." At the time, we took it in stride but shrugged. It hadn't occurred to us to argue something like that, because we were told to argue against the case, whatever it should be. Looking back on it, I realize now that the judge had basically said "Appeal to my emotions. Judge me as an older person and assume that I am anti-marijuana, then appeal to my emotions that way." In an intellectual sport that was supposed to be about making good logical arguments, here was one of our instructors telling us to ignore logic to win. (Incidentally, this is why one asks if the judge has preferences or biases - you can lose a case for arguing something the judge doesn't like, regardless of how well you argue it. Any judge who says they're "tabula rasa" is lying.) That says something pretty horrible about education and how pervasive the idea of arguing to emotion is. (We Are Not Immune, certainly not. But we'd like to thine that presented with credible evidence, we can change our mind or have a discussion about the matter.) So, with that idea in mind, let's continue.
(And thus, we get into the interesting parts.)
What do you do with a philosophy that wants to empower women to be at least as equal as men, but is horribly discriminatory toward transwomen, transmen, has issues with people of color and with disabilities, and is frosty to explosively hostile toward women whose power and desire lies in things they consider to be perpetuating the problem? Feminism is a great example of a philosophy that changes over time. Suffragettes, the sexual revolution, real women have curves, the patriarchy, womyn born womyn. All aspects of feminism, to greater and lesser degrees and extremisms. What happens, though, when someone is accused of those things? Well, we're deficient in logical analysis and argument a lot of the time, so we can't fix the problem there or have a meaningful discussion about how we know that there are some shortcomings, but we still think it's a good idea. We start by denial. "They're not part of our group./That's not what I believe." Yes, they are. It's okay to have factions in an umbrella ideology. The idea that everyone has to be united in all ways is something not even the famed Reagan Republicans could pull off - after a certain size, it's almost a truism that the people in the group will differ on particulars, even if they agree on the overarching goal. Malcom X versus Martin Luther King is one most people get as a compare/contrast in schooling - same goals, different details. They may not agree with you on everything, but there's enough similarities for both of you to claim the label. This does mean that someone will use their definition of what the word means and not yours when you use it, though. That leads to the other initial denial - "That's not what it means." Unlike some countries, the United States does not have a grammatical authority doling out what correct pronunciations and official meanings of words are. It means what you say it means and it means what they say it means, too, warts and all.
Both of those denials usually are rooted in logical fallacies. They sound good, they help us feel like we're not part of the ugly bits of our philosophies, they provide cover, but they're not logical. And they're not helpful. If you deny that your philosophy has some fairly hard-coded discrimination against transpeople in it (womyn born womyn), then you make it very hard to figure out how to fix the problem and work toward the advancement of all women, trans or no. If you deny that feminists can be women who like to put on makeup, dress sexy, and work to please the men in their lives (but will take absolutely no shit from them about the supposed superiority of the male sex), then you miss out on a big group of people who would otherwise join up and contribute their ideas. If you deny that men can be progressive-minded and can hold enormous sway over how other men think, then you've lost a major avenue of getting your ideas to be accepted by men. Blam, blam, blam. You only have so many toes you can shoot off before you bleed out. The logic is fixable - the philosophy can grow and stretch and learn, but the education that we've received that's inadequate at teaching us how to argue and when someone isn't actually arguing and the prizing of emotion over logic make it unnecessarily hard to accept the faults and humanities and to get past them. In order to form a more perfect union, you understand...
Which takes us around to some of the shifts that happen in our language over time. Try this one on for size - it's a copy from archive.org in 2006 - political correctness, as it is slung about derisively, is actually the opposite of what political correctness truly is. What most Americans think of as "political correctness" - the usage of "African American" instead of "Negro" or "nigger", "Chinese-American" instead of "chink", to say that one has been hoodwinked instead of "Jewed", to celebrate "the holidays" instead of celebrating "Christmas" alone, to admit in one's choice of language that people are in fact people and deserve to be treated as such, instead of inferiors who don't know their place and should be put in it firmly if they get too uppity - is not exactly in keeping with the politics of our times. As the Proposition 8 decision reminds us, when you put the issue of whether a minority group should be treated like everyone else to a majority vote, the minority group loses, and the campaign is usually riddled with all sorts of horrible logic, emotional appeals, and advertisements that are substance-free but intended to push your buttons in such a way as to bury rational thought in favor of knee-jerk reactions. After all, if you let them be equals, then they're stealing what's rightfully yours, goddammit!
Nonsense. The idea that someone is coming to take away what is yours is more in line with what would more properly be called "politically correct", if we were going to use the obvious definition - politically correct is that which is in favor by the mainstream at the time. It is politically correct to paint Islam as the Bloodthirsty Religion, because they hate your freedoms and they're coming to take them away and kill anyone who resists! Never you mind all the peacefully practicing Muslims in this country right this very second and all the houses of worship they've already built. And be sure to ignore the documented bloody history of the Christians - it's politically correct to believe that good Christian men and women are flawless and those who did evil things in the past did them for justifiable reasons, making them good, or they weren't really Christians in the first place. It is politically correct to say that women who don't want to get raped should not drink, should not dress in anything more revealing than a burqa, should not say anything that might be interpreted as a come-on, which means they shouldn't say anything at all to any man (although that's considered a come-on, too). It's politically correct to say that tax cuts stimulate the economy and helping the rich get richer means that everyone gets richer. It's politically correct to say that unions are evil, socialism is evil, and that employees should grovel at the feet of their corporate masters and be happy with insufficient wages and benefits and the threat that anyone attempting to improve that condition will be fired and their job sent somewhere else. It's politically correct to say that entitlement spending is wasteful, the poor are there because they deserve it and shouldn't be helped, and that any money the military wants should be given to them unquestioningly. It's politically correct to say America is as close to flawless as anyone can get, and is tops in all sorts of things, regardless of what the evidence says to the contrary. It's politically correct to be Christian in America. These are the kinds of things that do not rock the boat, do not make waves, do not insist that minority people are just as deserving of rights, recognition, and certainly don't point out that the predominant way of thinking in this country is pigheaded, wrong, and contrary to the values spelled out both in the founding documents and in the Christian religion so many Americans profess to follow. It's politically correct to side with the majority against the minority, and to tell the minority to shut up and stop being so uppity.
Our education system is politically correct - it has had the controversies stripped from it or sterilized out of it. Helen Keller fought for the disabled and overcame her own - that's accepted as okay. Helen Keller was a socialist and advocated stridently for socialism. That part of her history has been left out, because it's not politically correct to ahve your hero figures be socialist. Dr. King was opposed to the Vietnam War, and he was in favor of immediate reparations to African Americans for all the shit that had been done to them in slavery, Jim Crow, and all the rest before the alw finally recognized them as equals. That's been stripped out because American political correctness demands that War is Peace and that civil rights legislation and integration was sufficient recompense for the wrongs done in the past. Political correctness says anyone who points out the American people can be bigots, have historically been bigots, tend to be bigots still, and that this is wrong, is a shrill elitist who hates the common person and doesn't trust them. Based on the historical record of how we achieve great social progress, I'd say they're pretty well right not to trust the average person to be in favor of expanding rights and including more people in the tent. Thirty-one times on this most recent issue we put it to the average person to decide whether people were people, deserving of equality, and thirty-one times it failed. The Emancipation Proclamation was not issued to make all slaves free in all states, it was issued so that all slaves in states still in rebellion to the Union were freed - it was a political decision, a military decision, and a damn brilliant one at that, designed to force the Confederacy to fight one war against the Union army and make sure that another war between them and their slaves disn't break out. It still took the passage of an amendment to the Constitution before the truth that black people were people was written into the law, and it took significant time past even that before all the dirty tricks, the underhanded tactics, and the taxes were all outlawed and black people were finally able to express their right to vote everywhere in the country. Now, we have Niggers With Attitude, N-word privileges, and a reappropriated slur into a power statement, at least between members of the in-group, but it used to be something that was said to them as a derogatory remark. Political correctness said that blacks were inferior and needed to be "segregat[ed] now, and segregat[ed] forever." Our education system glosses all of these things and more in its politically correct mission to make America out to be the shining city on a hill, one that has had occasional, unfortunate, stumbles along the way to its current perfection, but that is always perpetually perfect, even knowing full well that future generations will see this time as one of those unfortunate stumbles.
More often than not, it seems like what we should be reciting in our civics classes, based on our actions, is "We, the People, lacking the basics of logic and argument, in order to let ourselves be swayed by emotional appeals, establish bigotry, impose discrimination, and provide for the defense of the indefensible, do hereby abandon and renounce the Constitution of the United States of America." Our education system is at fault - it does not equip us for the rigors of thinking for ourselves, arguing our positions, and conceding when we're wrong and the facts prove it. Our political system is at fault - it does not insist that we become informed and argue the issues to elect the people who will run the country, the state, and our local areas best, through their actions and their appointments. We are seeing the decay of important things around us, but we are not focusing on those issues - we're over here, looking at the shadows and arguing over what they are and their importance, oblivious to the chains wrapped firmly around us.
I don't know if it can be fixed. Incremental change toward building a real education system is snared by the system and bloated down to ineffectiveness. Attempting to break through the dominance of the center-right party and the far-right party in the elections is laughed down and usually unable to muster anything important, because the system is rigged to prevent challengers from entering and succeeding. And for those thinking armed revolution will fix things, well, it might, but there's always the chance that the people who are in charge when the dust settles will not think highly of you and your ideas. It's depressing to look at a problem of that complexity and just see all the ways that it will stop whatever tries to change it.
"Running forward
Falling back
Spinning round and round
Looking outward
Reaching in
Scream without a sound
Leaning over
Crawling up
Stumbling all around
Losing my place
Only to find I've come full circle"
Of course, I was going to end this post on that sort of depressing point. And then, thanks ironically to someone complaining about it, I got the high school graduation speech and the intent to make education better from the student commencement speaker, and I realize that I have to have hope in the next generation as much as I strive to make this one better. There are pockets of good education, obviously, and there are people who can talk about complex ideas and generational concerns with accuracy and prove their points. There's an entire generation coming behind us that has been raised in that environment, and they've seen what works and what doesn't, and when they get to be in charge, they've got the potential to make it better. Or to convince the hidebound people in charge now to change it for the better so they can ride off into their retirements positively, instead of as "those bastards who resisted this necessary and beneficial change to the end". There will be plenty of them who have been raised in poor environments who reflect those values and will work against their own betterment, but the next generation should have bigger pockets of people who Get It and will do things right, in their own communities, in their schools, and perhaps if we're lucky, as elected or appointed officials who recognize the necessity of good education, perhaps so much that they'll cut the war budget drastically to make it work.
After all, we still have our dreams, even if everything else is rapidly being crushed.
"Don't stress,
Relax,
Let life roll off your backs
Except for death and paying taxes,
Everything in life is only for now!"
