More Culture, Less CrimeSunday morning must have been a slow sunup for me, for I decided to take a crack at watching some of the network’s ideologically leftist parlor games they call "talk shows". On Sunday’s This Week on ABC, where, as typical, three leftists – Cokie Roberts, George Stephanopolous, and Sam Donaldson – take on a lone neocon (George Will), something struck my Rothbardian-coated nerves, and caused me to explore a recent tragedy in California. One of the topics, of course, was the recent shooting at Santana High School, a publicly-financed dungeon of academic sorrows where kids are forced to comply with state mandates biased toward non-achievers, and are put on the honor roll for learning their ABC’s and memorizing chemistry symbols. Stephanopolous, in his typical "centrist" fashion, purported that the sole reason for this tragedy, as well as other school shootings, is that the availability of guns is just too darn easy. If the guns weren’t so easily obtained, he remarked, we would not have these shootings. Sam Donaldson chided that if no gun were available to a potential shooter, what would they do, pull out a toothbrush? Mr. Will ignored the absurdity of the toothbrush remark, and followed with a short, but explicit answer by stating that guns aren’t any more available today than 150 years ago. He pointed out that these gun sprees are a product of a cultural change that has been taking place in America. George Will is very much on the right track, for starters, but the leftists don’t want to hear that their utopian society framed by egalitarianism, diversity, anti-religion, and equality of outcome is not working, and that it will never give the desired results they covet. The startling cultural changes society is enduring are part of that which is to blame for these types of tragedies. For what we are observing is the collapse of culture, morality, and virtue in society, courtesy of the State and its era of entitlements. One of the major players in helping to develop this collapse is the world of academia, which starts with the public school systems that capture our young at five years old, and catechizes them with relativist training, Ebonics, self-esteem pedagogy, and bilingual education. Meanwhile, students are walking into school buildings and taking lives for the heck of it. They are turning into ruffians and ne’er-do-wells, and they are underachieving within the confining limits of a corrupt and politically influenced environment. George Bush has an answer to this. He is calling for more money, in his education plan, to go to the same school systems that turn out these hoodlums. So who is to blame for these modern tragedies? The leftists blame the it all on guns, and the hysterical masses blame it on the fact that skinny kids with funny-looking glasses get picked on and called names. Only the conservatives, at the risk of being tagged as religious fanatics or moralists, are willing to look at society as it really is: a place where cultural depravity is the norm, and too little emphasis is placed on virtues and sound moral codes. For starters, blame the schools, which are too busy teaching a socialist form of political correctness that is not honest or beneficial, so that they can turn out a parade of subdued robots that fall in behind newly established leftist cultural norms. Business attorney and author James T. Evans, in his book Educrisis!, calls this state nurturing of children in public schools the gateway to the underclass. He points out that in the 1940’s, the student infractions that teachers fretted most about were: talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, and getting out of turn in line. In the 1980’s, however, he remarks that teacher worries progressed to drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, and rape. Add the 1990’s, and you have to be worried about freaks, gay culture, general incompetents, trenchcoat gangs, and murderous shooters in addition to the 1980’s norms. What the conservatives like George Will do forget to tell us is that the State is where the root of this evil lies. The State is that foundation upon which government power is harnessed into the hands of an elite cluster of individuals and agencies who are collectivist planners disguised as democratically elected "public servants". In order to rule, the State has to maintain its grip on the masses through need via free services like welfare benefits and most definitely, education. The public school systems help to breed these terrorists that shoot down teachers and other kids. After all, healthy indoctrination starts with shaping ideologies and controlling the environment for learning. Instead of kids learning Latin, Greek mythology, or Medieval philosophy, they are learning how to slip condoms on bananas and why Kurt Cobain’s lyrics were truly poetic. Of course, cultural degeneracy also has its roots in the home, and the teachings within that environment. We have a modern society of parents that, in general, no longer place emphasis on reading, verbal skills and communication beyond the early formative years. Parents don’t have "the time" to spend with their children, and they much prefer to have the burden of education lifted from their shoulders and shoved off to a "freebie" public school system. When the schools don’t babysit the kids, it’s the daycare center or the legion of electronics at home that keep them in a trance, and out of the parents’ hair. PlayStations, Gameboys, computer games, TV, and videos are the chosen mind mentors for the young. One must wonder what will happen to a young brain that goes from daycare to public schools to the TV set to the latest dark computer game. We live in a culture of misplaced priorities where children become a burden to parents who would rather work two jobs than have Mom stay home with the children. Naturally, this is to be able to afford the two new cars, the all-inclusive 100+ channel cable TV system, all the latest electronic gadgets, dinner out four nights a week, the nail parlor, the tanning booth, and the big house with the huge mortgage that they find so necessary in order to live. Seeing that children get properly educated seems to be on the back burner for many parents. This lack of parental attentions because of self-absorption clearly leads to a perversion of culture. In case Mr. Stephanopolous hasn’t noticed, the welfare state currently breeds Gothic images that apply black nail polish, black eye makeup, body piercings, and dog collars – complete with the leash – to showcase some invalid sense of individuality. Kids listening to Marilyn Manson and walking around looking like freaks have no sense of individualism, as they purport. Rather, they are feeble examples of the communitarian mentality, where they hang out in limited networks of relationships with those who share the same beliefs and values. This is typically not the lifestyle that breeds intellectual or creative ability. This is the lifestyle that breeds a love of the state and its entitlements. Studying Aquinas, logic, physics, and literature fosters civilized life. Pink mohawks and nipple-rings give birth to a subclass of inferiority. Heck, kids aren’t even willing to read much anymore, and if they do, they are pointed toward the kind of literature that typically does not enrich their lives. However, the recent Harry Potter craze got kids to sit down and read 700 page books about magic, triumph, and human redemption. Before long, the denizens of the feminist movement assaulted the Harry Potter mania because of its supposed emphasis on the male characters as heroes, and the females as supporting cast. Another example of the socialist agenda at work. After all, anything that these leftists cry out against has got to be meritorious. Bookworms are no longer chic. Boys and girls, nowadays, are more concerned with their $100 haircuts with frosted tips, $300 tattoos, $200 Hilfiger jackets, and a pocketful of condoms (that a public school showed them how to use properly), yet they can’t even do the simple mathematics required in their cash register jobs at Burger King. Education and knowledge, for many of these kids, is not even of the slightest importance to them. For it is the next navel or eyebrow piercing for which they have given high priority status. And yet, when these warped young minds go off and kill, the leftists purport that guns are to blame, and guns are too available, and guns are the evil of the universe. The left-liberal message is: don’t blame the welfare state, the public schools, inattentive parents, or misplaced priorities in family life brought on by a life attached to the Big Nipple in the Sky, but rather, blame guns and those who fight to protect the right to own guns. The message should be that our kids are lacking established cultural values that public schools have slowly worked to destroy. They lack a value system inherited from the family, church, and friends. Instead, this generation of students have been force-fed by the modern age of entitlement, a status quo which helped to bring into being the poor parenting of the previous generation. The answer, of course, is the rescission of the nanny state, and the privatization of schooling, whether it be homeschooling or carefully chosen private institutions that are subject to performance standards from tuition paying parents.
March 16, 2001 Karen De Coster is a politically incorrect CPA, and an MA student in economics at Walsh College in Michigan. Copyright © 2001 Karen De Coster |
The
final message should be that public schools do not work, and that
families who refuse to sacrifice for their child’s education are
only widening that gateway to the underclass.