[Mb-civic] Violent America, schools !

[richard haase]

jack tell us more about living in Ireland etc
I understand writers are tax free there
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jack Sullivan 
  To: Harold Sifton ; mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 5:47 AM
  Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Violent America, schools !


  Friends:

  I seldom have time to respond to debates in our civic site; and I enjoy the free wheeling, but as a father of 12 children who moved away from America to live in Europe (Ireland), I have something to say about Harold's referred article about violence in schools and the quality of life available in the USA for families. 

  The article describes a child's stick drawing as an alleged felony! Story garnered from a TV news programme - only an example of something that has little to do with school.

  The Bush election strategy - successfully embraced by his minders - sought to not so much to correct the aimless drift in American society, as to capitalise it. 

  The paradigm of the generous impulse... nurtured by a noble history of the Democratic Party since the Great Depression among working American families...  was expansive for the imagination of the working poor, even the middle class, the immigrant or marginalized ethnic. But that historic political party misspent its prosperity and its social cohesiveness particularly for average families. How did it happen that schools - particularly urban schools - were left in the ha'penny place?

  Except as nostalgia and fond memory supports a person's identity and loyalty to the past, the Democrats have lost the social plot. Worse the Republicans hear the voice of lost sheep that missing fundamentals have cast eschew. So by inattention, and in the name of God, they caught our noble party on the back foot. 

  The Democrats offered opportunity to urban minorities and addressed the need for investment capital in non-traditional areas of human need and interest, but did so with centralised government structures that have run amuck, and bargain tired politicos in office longer than their service justifies. 

  THE IDEA of encouraging allegiance among diverse kinds of people in a caring America became an inspirational formula for Democrats to win elections, but it is now bankruptcy is the message they deliver to families that feel the need to understand what they live for. Desperate lives are too abundant. 

  American Liberalism that won elections for the Democrats asking widely diverse people to symbolically embrace  'e pluribus unum', a mythic philosophy that increasing trashed categories of traditional notions about God, about evil - even about what children ought to have to protect their innocence. It awkwardly took turns giving something to everyone so to stitch together edgy borders where people found emotional safety in mutually exclusive enclaves. So Blacks and Gays and Women equally were joined at the hip with only a vague ideology of aspiration. "Do no harm! Give something to every whine." Note: the Vietnamese! They just went to school with all the support of their extended family.

  Societal ennui is especially affecting children in urban public schools. 

  Curiosity fed by innocence  about science, languages and history has been replaced by the predominant appetite for violence and sexual images- ever available - as a loss leader to capture media audiences. Enough Kerry could have shouted in the name of children - instead he suggested an implication about Cheney's daughter. Who could elect such a policy maker?

  Ironically, in a society where God was inscribed on money, but forbidden in schools, we wonder why kids are acting out. 

  Moral authority needs an absolute that according to Plato is "One, True and Beautiful". America's public schools replaced God with something less capable of protecting them - never mind nurturing them. By politicising the schools with central authority, political policy, parents lost interest and get away without sweat equity in the most fundamental institutional extension of the family. 

  Noticeably, church supported schools avoid this trap and keep front and center the cohesive value system of their religious ethos. This attracts parents who are willing to give sweat equity and hard cash...to nurture their child's spirit, while protecting their innocence well into the teen years. There is a danger when such an educational system is so divided based on fundamentals and the meaning of "One, True and Beautiful". 

  In Ireland all schools of all religious persuasions: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and Muslim hire qualified teachers exclusively and directly paid for by the State, but who instruct the children in the values of the Faith based patron of the individual school. Thus, a Catholic teacher, a professional, can be hired to teach Muslim children in a Muslim school, the same standard curriculum as in all schools, but God as taught -as the Mullah decides - or the Bishop decides - or the Rabbi decides -or even for those who do not want God - as Educate Together decides! 

  I think that our civic membership group might consider if the Democrats needed a pruning of social excess - with an imagination of course.

  It is one thing to nourish respect for diversity and the principle of 'E Pluribus Unum' from a moral high ground, it is quite another to ensconce that no one's God can be mentioned or acknowledged - except the silent and politically correct god of  no name. 


  Just a thought about schools, commonweal and America's lost soul (fostered by) ignored by the champions of the Democratic Party. 

  We need a better paradigm that probably needs to find a place for a Supreme Being at the top table. 

  I will go back to my quiet lifestyle now and promise to keep still for another year...as Ireland continues to wrestle with tens of thousands of new immigrants for the first time in its modern history ...the schools struggling to honour the new comers with various religious approaches while washing off some of the hostile graffiti, that suggests to Africans. "No Niggers"!

  God Bless. 

  Dublinjack


  Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 1:34 AM
    Subject: [Mb-civic] Violent America, schools !


    Culture, Violence, America

    This is what is happening in the schools !

    http://www.local6.com/news/4130302/detail.html

    Why, in America, the free and just society, the self imposed leader in liberty and democracy? 

    Even though there is incredible violence in/around the World, America is the only community where it is in the schools with children!

    Later H




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