Spending our Inheritace

America is a very screwed up country. Most people already know this, but we still have pride and thump our chests when people put us down. We are aloud to criticize ourselves, but gods help anyone else who does so! What makes me bitch today? News items from all over the country, that because of budget problems in various states, education takes a hit while politicians continue to initiate new spending! Meanwhile governments from counties up to the feds are adding to the list of required subject matter and testing standards. Just exactly how are these schools supposed to do more with less? Not only less money, but less hours, and in some cases even less days! Is it any wonder that American education has become such a joke around the world? I have always believed that teachers are generally underpaid. Not withstanding certain locations where there are exorbitant union contracts. They deal daily with who knows what, from homicidal teens to abused pre-schoolers. They have to make due with decades old text books and resources that are stretched so thin that they have probably snapped in many cases. Even in fairly upper crust suburbs the public schools are strapped for cash, to such a point that they send home lists of supplies that the parents are responsible for buying for their children. Not only general supplies but the supplies that they need for art class, and various projects throughout the school year. Schools can barely provide heat in the class rooms half of the time and now the tax money that public schools depend on is being rerouted to some other idiot project. Why is it that cities and sports teams are getting tax money to build stadiums for professional teams?

Professional sports teams charge exorbitant ticket prices for million dollar players who feel so entitled that they act barely human. They have nearly no manners or morals and treat the people who actually make them stars like idiots. They lie, cheat and kill then expect special treatment because they get outrageous salaries to play a stupid game for a few hours each week. Whether they win or lose the game that they play has no bearing on the course of history, or the develolpment of the human race. But they get tax money that could actually go towards education. Education that might uncover and encourage the next great mind of our age, the one who might develope the first viable human colony on Mar, or the one who will discover the secret of hyper space. Not every sportsman is an undereducated oaf, but there are far more of them than there are of the thoughtful, educated type. You get my point though. I know that in many cases increasing funds to schools seems like simply throwing good money after bad, but even in those cases do you simply give up on them?

I have to believe that there is a reason to try. When there is a resource to educate, somebody will use it. Maybe not every kid will use everything offered to them. We don't know why, some will feel lost no matter what is done to help them, and some will think they know it all and that the teachers are out to get them. There will never be a perfect system for educating the masses, the individality of the human race is both a blessing and a curse. But there will always be those who not only benefit, but stand out and excell. They will find what they need if it is there for them to find, and they will run with it and become great. They will become doctors and lawyers, teachers and business people, they will becomes astronomers and physisists, and any other field of endevour that you can name. They are out there now, struggling to learn in a hostile environment, where they are searched as they enter their schools and passed through metal detectors. If they are lucky enough to get to school they then have to try and survive each day, but they do it, and a small number of them learn that they can escape the cycle and maybe get a better life for not only themselves but for their children too. Granted when the time comes and their children get old enough they will be resented and rebelled against and they children will try to go back to the life that their parents tried so hard to escape, but at least they start out with the chance to go on. Right now that chance is being written off.

Our future lies in educating the youth, and not is paying the politicians who waste money year after year. They pay lip service to education, with slogans like "No child left behind." and "It takes a village." but when it comes down to it, they will take money from schools before they will take money from a sports team or take a paycut themselves. I know what the solution is, but sadly I will never be able to convince enough people to care to make the difference. But If I can convince a few people maybe they can convince a few more, and there is hope that eventually enough will care that the difference can be made. The solution is for the people themselve to call, write and visit their politicians, and not just the ones you know, but all of them from the President of the United States all the way down to your local councilman. Remind them that education should trump all else. Before they get raises, before they build stadiums, before they build monuments and parks, they need to educate the youth who will carry on the country and make it worth living in. Perhaps it is their plan, because when you think about it, an uneducated populace is much easier to convince of lies, because they simply don't know any better. You can take their rights away because they are unaware of what they are.

To save democracy and freedom, we need to be educated. It's as simple as that.