[Mb-civic] Jack Sullivan Response

[Michael Butler]

Thank You, Jack
Michael

Message: 4
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:47:40 -0000
From: "Jack Sullivan" <jack at visit.ie>
Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Violent America, schools !
To: "Harold Sifton" <harry.sifton at sympatico.ca>,
    <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Message-ID: <027001c5045d$b05901e0$0201a8c0 at jack>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

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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