The founding fathers, oh, how the right loves the founding fathers. They are, after all, their role models; rich white men who, for the most part, earned a living off of the sweat of someone else’s brow. Attorneys and ne'er do wells, some like Hamilton and John Paul Jones with checkered pasts, but one of their first acts while assembling this free nation was to establish a free educational system.
Even these slave-holding, money-grubbing, pot-smoking, hard-drinking, opium-sniffing, social-climbing white men had enough sense to understand that a free public education was vital to the success of the nation. The illegitimately born Hamilton was keeping the books for a shipping company at the age of fourteen. So amazed by this prodigy was the owner of the company that he paid to have Hamilton educated at Harvard.
The General Land Ordinance of 1785 set aside one section of land dedicated to public education in each thirty-six square mile township. The land could be sold or rented but the proceeds, all the proceeds, went to support public education. The founding fathers feared, and rightly so, that without a quality education we would become a country of nitwits, listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching American Idol.
Most of the founding fathers expressed concerns that we would degenerate into a nation of fools, without calling out Limbaugh by name. As bad as it is, is to become as bad as it gets. As bad as it gets, it can only become… worse.
In California, where the governor refused any attempts to raise taxes on industry or the wealthy, even refusing a tax on yachts, the governor will instead begin to dismantle public education. What does that great speechmaker Mr. Obama have to say about this? (cricket chirp) Silence, not a damn word; the terminator is free to terminate 2,500 teaching positions in Los Angeles alone. Soon 118,000 college-bound California students will have their grants terminated. But Mr. Obama has gone to the Middle East to see where our money’s gone.
Let’s see, $3,000,000,000 for Israel, $1,700,000,000 for Egypt, Jordan is getting the shaft at $361,000,000. Plan Columbia will send $1,000,000,000 tax dollars to eradicate the drug traffic. So successful was Plan Colombia last year, the coca production in Colombia was only up by 18%! So now the program has been expanded to send $470,000,000 to Mexico to fight drug trafficking there.
Why bother? Why not let the kids do drugs? They can’t go to college and they can’t find jobs. Why not legalize marijuana and take the market away from the foreigners? I mean, if the kids can’t go to college maybe they can learn to grow some kickass sinsemilla? They are going to have a lot of time on their hands and idle hands are the devil's workshop.
Besides, they will have a lot of issues to work through, like why this nation for the first time in two hundred and twenty four years has turned its back on public education. Were it me, I’d be pissed off. I was lucky; I grew up in a time when public schools were monuments to democratic freedom. Where communities were judged by their schools. The little town that I grew up in had the highest property taxes on the South Side of Chicago. The homes were overpriced for what they were because everyone wanted to get their kid into that school system, and through a full immersion into that quality, I learned.
I cannot imagine the pain of these kids who have studied hard and worked hard to better themselves and make something of themselves only to have it snatched away to keep the rich industrialists and agribusiness safe from tax increases. The $1.6 billion in cuts are draconian to education, and strangely I think I know where we can find that money.
We are buying peace in the Middle East to the tune of $6,000,000,000 per year, and what are we getting for it? Nothing but heartache. The Israelis are always unhappy; the Egyptians and Jordanians are unhappy. After fifty years and billions upon billions of dollars, we have bought an uneasy peace. Well, the cold war is over and Israel is fifty and it’s time for them to defend themselves. We've got kids that need schools!
It's time to right the ship of state. Plan Colombia? Plan on this, the check ain’t coming! And Plan Mexico? The only thing not crossing the border is our tax dollars; time to bring these things home. When America was the largest creditor nation in the world, it was our duty to aid countries in need. But now we are in need, and taking it out of the hides of school children is morally reprehensible. We are borrowing money to give away to people who don’t like us while we can’t provide for our own children. Does that make sense to you?
Education pays, it doesn’t cost. A nation that’s cutting its education is cutting its throat. It is a suicide and wrong on so many levels that it borders on the absurd. California's state universities expect a 30% rise in tuition coupled with the end of state grants means that higher education, for all but the wealthiest, will become out of reach.
But we still have money for a missile defense shield to protect…Europe; $4.8 billion dollars for a missile shield that has only worked when they’re told in advance where the missile would be. This is a system that has been thwarted by painting the approaching missile white. The lunacy, we spend $4.8 billion dollars on a missile shield and it can be defeated with $20.00 dollars worth of Krylon spray paint. The system won’t stop cruise missiles or short range missiles; the system is a boondoggle and it's time to pull the plug.
The days of taking it out of the pockets of the working class are over. How else would you describe a failed state but one that cannot properly educate its children? California expenditures per child will drop by $3,000 per pupil, placing California last behind Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Tennessee nine places behind Alabama. And they thought Caligula was crazy.
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