Worse Times for America?
The reason that Dan Rather can’t remember a worse time for the United States is simple: there has never been one. Nowhere close.
Even worse, it’s likely that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
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Greenland Says NO! to U.S.
In Are you telling me that only 3 out of 1000 Greenlanders want to see their country annexed by the United States? How is that possible?
Well, for sure, government services like free healthcare and education will vanish. And yes, their new leader will be a man hellbent on becoming the world’s most powerful dictator, who will, if necessary, attack them militarily.
Actually, now I think I understand.
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What Children Learn at School Differs Greatly According to Region
In a recent post I mentioned that Denmark puts its schoolchildren through a course on empathy, where they’re taught that other people should be treated with kindness and decency. At left we have another element of what kids in this region of the world learn at school: how to distinguish misinformation from truth.
The funny part of all this is that the Scandinavian countries need this the least. Their entire culture is built around an ethos of community and fairness.
My request: bring some of this over here to the United States, where it actually is needed. Desperately.
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Free Education, Pros and Cons
I had a conversation earlier today with a woman from Melbourne, Australia who lamented that her country recently ceased providing free education to all her country’s citizens.
“It’s a shame,” she said, “that we couldn’t have followed the developed countries around the world that make that investment. Most folks don’t want to live around ignorant people. Also, an educated population does better in the workplace, and that lifts their nation’s place in the global competitive market.”
All of this is absolutely true. So why is the United Stated systematically destroying its public education system, while it remains a million miles away from offering its citizens free college? Well, there are problems that educated people pose to the billionaire class, one of which is that they are capable of critical thinking, which means they can see how thoroughly they are screwed by unbridled capitalism. Another is that they are unwilling to elect sociopathic criminals to lead them.
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Privilege As It Applies in American Society
The In this regard, we all have our own stories to tell. Here’s mine:
I was adopted by two sane and productive white people who sacrificed greatly to put my brother and me through private school, college and grad school. First and most obviously, because I was an unwanted pregnancy, I could have been aborted, and I’ll never know why I wasn’t.
But more to the point, I could have just as easily been adopted by people who simply didn’t value education, or honesty, or any of the other virtues that surrounded me as a child.
My aging mother knows that she’s not going to be around forever, and so our conversations tend to become more philosophical and personal as time passes. Recently I brought up this topic, i.e., my profound luck, and she said, “Oh Craig, you would have shone in any circumstances.
I had to smile. This is what mothers do. They find reasons to stay behind their children in all cases, even where, in fact, there are no facts to support what they’re saying. To mothers everywhere!
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Red Meat and Ultra-Processed Foods
The meme here presents a grossly stupid and unfair comparison.
A diet that consists of too much snack food hurts one person: you.
The beef industry, by contrast, exists by 1) destroying vast areas of rainforest that formerly was absorbing CO2 out of the atmosphere, and 2) murdering approximately 300 million cows per year (9.52 per second), most of which lived in inhumane conditions (factory farms), and all of which were capable of feeling pain and distress.
That causes agony that far transcends you and your life of Pepsi and Doritos.
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The U.S. Economy Is in Trouble, but What Exactly Did We Expect?
To me, the funniest part (if there is one) of the fiasco we Americans are experiencing is that somehow, voters elected a president who has no training in economics to make decisions that are having enormously destructive effects on the U.S. economy.
Keep in mind that we’ve had presidents in the past who weren’t exactly rocket scientists; take George W. Bush for example. But he was smart enough to leave policy-making on subjects like this to people who actually knew what they were talking about.
Child Labor
U.S. child labor laws were put into place in 1938 to protect the educational opportunities of youth and prohibit their employment in jobs that are detrimental to their health and safety. But, as shown at left, today’s mass deportation of immigrants under the Trump administration has put pressure on businesses to find new sources of unskilled labor, and children are the natural target.
It’s hard to think of a single element of life for the common American that isn’t worsening by the day by Trump and his policies.
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Why Republicans Are Getting into Trouble
When I was growing up in the 1960s, Republicans tended to be conservatives in some legitimate sense of the word. Their values, e.g., honesty, were written into each episode of television shows like Leave It to Beaver and the Andy Griffith Show.
Today’s Republicans are Trump supporters, and their values are as depraved as the president himself.
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“America First” Has Roots that Predate MAGA
American exceptionalism is a lowbrow concept, to be sure.
There are no special rules that apply to the U.S. that don’t apply to the other nations of the world. In particular, it’s hard to imagine that God blesses America any more than He does Japan, Spain, or Bolivia.
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