When the news about Obama’s planned speech to school children raised the collective head of ignorance, I did my little Tweet of – “dumb” in a nutshell, waiting for sanity to emerge from the wild wilderness of political pundits. Now, I wonder! Why have people with such an incredible lack of knowledge been raised to the level of legitimacy?
Comments like brainwashing and indoctrination filled the airways. And there on the news, sitting at a slick desk with lots of colorful swatches of screen shots waving around in the background, a journalist sits tapping his or her cheek with a soulful look and comment such as, Well maybe they have a point there. After all, there was a lesson plan that asked children to write a letter to the president of the
Where does this stuff come from? It’s so nuts!
When I went to school, which was a very long time ago, Joe McCarthy hearings were on television, and even little elementary school children were expected to learn from them---and also from Meet the Press, Bishop Sheen, and William F. Buckley and dozens of others who had something intelligent to say---agree or not.
We were also expected to understand where we lived. We didn’t live in
Now, look at the hyperbole associated with the ridiculousness of Indoctrination and Brainwashing. When I grew up, we learned that brainwashing was a systematic form of abuse against populations who had no access to public libraries, open education, competitive newspapers, or free radio or television. We were taught that in the countries that did not have free and open access to speech and the press used very powerful social demands on their people, often forcing them to work in labor camps or minimally be ostracized from their families and friends. We were taught that punishments to the populations included deprivation of food and basic necessities. We were taught that those who obeyed the powerful were rewarded and those that disobeyed were chastised relentlessly. We were about seven years old on the average, when we were taught this and for some reason, understood the concept---intense, systematic repetitive indoctrination against one’s principles, without access to differing opinions, and while being subjected to repetitive torture, humiliation, and/or isolation, could cause someone to believe in something other than what he or she believed to be the truth.
After that initial debate hit the news, I waited for someone with a lick of sense to explain this, so I could feel a sense of normalcy again. No one did. In fact, I have been waiting for someone, democrat or republican, with real intelligence to say something about how low the intellectual bar has fallen in this country when people can scream insane nonsense, and the pundits, news journalist, etc., fail to offer much in the way of rebuttal. It’s as if they were scared---or never went to school. Today, Walter Cronkite is being honored. I wonder if he was scared by the screamers! I wonder who you can trust now!
I wish I were as eloquent as you are. Here is the text of a letter to the editor I wrote last week: Much has been written recently about the people who are afraid to have President Obama speak to the school children because he will be teaching them socialism. It sounds to me that they don’t really know what socialism is. I am an American who has lived in Canada for one year and Switzerland for six years because of my husband’s job. Socialism is simply public ownership of things. We really wouldn’t want private companies to own the roads, would we? Or the water supply, or the sewers? We all enjoy going to parks and beaches. Even airports are publicly owned. Are publicly owned parks a problem? We don't really want Social Security privatized, do we? Because if it is, and the stock market goes down enough, retired people will be left with nothing! Maybe socialism isn’t so bad. Living in Switzerland or Canada didn’t seem any worse or more scary than living in the United States. Although the Swiss and the Canadians would argue that they are capitalist counties, they have many social programs which make their citizens more secure than many people in the US. These social programs work well there and in many European countries. The problem is the word “socialism” has taken on bad connotations here in the US for some reason. It is really just a word for a system. I was just as free living in those two countries which have socialistic elements as I am living in the US. It was also nice not to have to worry about crime when you walked at night in a big city like Geneva, Switzerland. They didn’t have slums, period. Phyllis
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