From July 4, 2006. I’m really tired; please forgive the rerun.

There are many things that are wrong, in this country. Many, many things. Open a newspaper, listen to the news, all we hear about are the things that are wrong. We SHOULD be hearing about them, too; if we don’t hear about them, we can’t work to make them right. One of the many things this country does do right, is allow its citizens to talk about what it does wrong.

Making wrong things right is what we do here. It’s what this country was founded for. We’d still be a British colony if it wasn’t important for us to work hard to make wrong things right.

Any time more than four people get together for anything, one of them is going to want to do wrong. It’s the responsibility of the other three to help that one person do right. But it goes deeper than that.

It’s the responsibility of the other three to help that one person WANT to do right. Doing anything without understanding, and against one’s will, isn’t progress of any kind; doing anything without understanding, and against one’s will, is a kind of slavery. Uneducated people sometimes have to be dealt with in this way, and that is a shame, and that is entirely their own fault, too. Everyone has access to education in this country. Some schools are better than others, but any of them will at least teach a child to read if that child lets it. And whether or not a child lets it is the responsiblity of the child’s family, and a family that does not allow the school to teach its child to read is a bad, bad family.

This country has always valued education as the means to promote the understanding that would help a person realize that. It used to work, too, until education was forced to include things that the family unit is supposed to teach and provide, as well. We are fast becoming a welfare state, and that is a definite downgrade from being an education state.

And why is the family unit not providing what it is supposed to provide, these days? Most families still are, but many families prefer to mooch off the government rolls. They have chosen to give up their independence and become the permanent poor relations, supported by those citizens who do still work. This was supposed to be a temporary fix, and people are supposed to be just a little bit ashamed of being in this position. Welfare is supposed to be a somewhat embarrassing short-term episode in a person’s life, preceding a wage-earning job. We’ve removed the ’embarrassment’ thing in the name of self esteem, and that was a mistake.

But you really don’t want to get me started about the ‘self-esteem’ movement. Which, like most movements, is full of the same sort of fecal matter.

Every day, more and more people join the welfare rolls, and for many it’s not the temporary helping hand it was meant to be. For many, it’s a way of life. Some people believe that the welfare way of life is a right, and other people SHOULD be supporting them, sometimes forever. No. Temporary help, yes. Permanent? Absolutely not.

An uneducated, or undereducated population is a dangerous thing. It quickly becomes a parasite, not an asset, sucking the lifeblood out of resources that really ought to be aimed elsewhere.

Ronald Reagan, who was not perfect either but then neither are any of us, said “We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.” He was right.

This country was founded by hard workers. This country has as one of its foundations, education for the masses. It’s there, for free, for anybody who lives here to take full advantage of. To become an adult in this country and still not know how to read and write and support oneself is a disgrace, and that disgrace is not the country’s disgrace, it is a personal disgrace.

People made this country, people who wanted freedom and independence and education for everyone. We must never lose the desire for any of these, for if any one of them is lost, all is lost. At the same time, as free and independent and educated people, we must not forget to take care of those who honestly and truly can not care for themselves. It goes without saying, which means, of course, that it must be said.

Those who are able-bodied and able to work, should work, for to take charity when one is fully able to do without it, is a shameful thing indeed. No job is too menial if one is truly determined to do what is right. And what is right, is to support oneself. Any honest job is a good job if one has no job at all. Some of our immigrant ancestors were doctors and lawyers and teachers back in the old country; they came here and took jobs as janitors so their children could have the benefits this country offered. And since their children learned to speak the language, their job horizons were brighter than those of their parents. It is still so, today. Those who educate themselves, have more options. Those who learn to speak the language of the majority, have more options. That is because they deserve more options. They deserve them because they EARNED them.

People who take charity when they are perfectly capable of getting off their bums and getting a job, are to be despised for the societal leeches that they truly are. For every adult who uses welfare money to buy cigarettes, there is a little child somewhere NOT getting milk because there wasn’t any more money. The degradation of these adults is earned of their own free will, and they deserve every bit of the disgust they receive.

This country has a lot of faults, yes. Those who like to list them, one by one, on a regular basis, and yet do nothing to help fix them, are one of the faults.

There are many people living here who claim to hate this country, and who work to bring it further down. There are people living here who rejoice in the streets when bad things happen to this country. I suggest that those people leave and leave now, and live elsewhere and see if any other country would put up with their whines and violence and gleeful reactions when others get hurt.

Those who insist on living here, yet reject the education, the opportunities for supporting themselves, are not true Americans. They are parasites.

Yes, this country has many faults. I defy anyone to name any other country who would put up with some of yours, or mine.

Freedom. Independence. Education for the masses. Rights. Responsibilities.

That is what we are. Take advantage of them, if you have the guts and the brains and the heart and the decency. Ignore them if you don’t. That’s the freedom part.

Understand that the hardworking educated population is getting very tired of supporting those who choose not to work, choose not to be educated, and choose to not behave themselves properly. We are also very tired of supporting anyone who does not understand that the right to swing his fist ends where the other person’s nose begins.

And those who claim their rights had better be prepared to stand up to their responsibilities as well. You can’t have one without the other, and keep either for long.

This country has learned many lessons; slavery is gone, discrimination is legally gone, although many people still have some lessons to learn (EDUCATION! DECENT FAMILIES!). Europeans came here to an already populated country and took over, without regard for people who had lived here for hundreds of years and already had well-established civilizations. Think how you would feel if aliens landed in spaceships and took over this country, completely disregarding your prior claim to your home and demanding that you leave immediately so they might build their
culture on top of yours, and labeling and treating you as some kind of violent savage if you protested and tried to defend your property.

The point is, we made, and make, mistakes. Big ones. We must use our educations to help right those wrongs, and help the nation aim for other and better goals. Learning from the past is what educated people do; dwelling on the past, not so much.

Aristotle said, “Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men, as the living are to the dead.”

Those who care only about themselves, are not much good in any other circumstance. People who become accustomed to getting something for nothing become pretty much useless, too.

We must all get up, get to work, get cracking, get learning, get smarter every day. When we stop learning, they might as well bury us, as Lucy Maude Montgomery once said.

Nowhere in the world is there any other country as free as ours. Nowhere else can everybody be educated. Nowhere else can we all go where we want, when we want, wear what we want, say what we want. . . .

In some countries, even if you have the money you still can’t have some things or go some places; it’s all about social levels.

If I said we didn’t have social levels here, it would be a joke, because everybody knows that we do, even though we’re not supposed to. But here, our social levels are much about education and behavior, not who your daddy was, or wasn’t. Unless you’re a Kennedy, of course. (joke)

And after teaching at the college level for four years, I would have a very hard time indeed believing someone who tried to tell me that they couldn’t go to college, nobody would take them. I might have believed that before, but not now, not now that I know about all the incredible opportunities available for EVERYONE.

In this country, we have equality of opportunity. Opportunity does knock, but you have to be smart enough to answer the door when it does, and to recognize it for what it is when you see it. That’s the education part.

Everybody gripes about the state of the nation. You do, I do, everybody does. There’s a lot to gripe about. But I honestly believe that there is even more to rejoice about, and be grateful about, and to appreciate.

I am proud to be an American. God bless America.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

Well now, let’s see. . . tonight in class we discussed Madame C.J. Walker, societies that require your father’s best friend to father your first child, cultures that encourage little boys to beat up on their parents, men who offer their wives to overnight guests, tribes that stress equivalency and have no idea what “competition” means, the original meaning of the swastika, why FDR was usually photographed sitting down and why he would probably not be elected nowadays, the reason some cultures discourage sexual relations between a man and his breastfeeding wife for at least two years postpartum, how the Enola Gay got its name, possible reasons why Hiroshima’s population stuck around even after reading the warnings that were dropped all over the city via airplane a few days before the bomb was dropped, and how all these things had something in common and were relevant to us personally.

This is a far cry from “Some Kid’s Dog Ran Off And He’s Sad About It,” “World War Two In Three Paragraphs,” “Two Dozen Stories About Typical American Neighborhoods Featuring Life In Some Culture You’ve Never Heard Of Instead Of Your Own,” “Famous American Authors Except For Twain, Faulkner, Ferber, Wilder, Frost, Sandburg, Hemingway, Irving, Poe, Cooper, Emerson, Bronte, Dickinson, Miller, Alcott, Stowe, Keller, Bradstreet, Penn, Edwards, Franklin, Paine, Bryant, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Beecher, Whittier, Holmes, Dana, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Lowell, Wallace, Hart, Lanier, Bierce, James, Garland, Wharton, Henry, Herrick, Robinson, Tarkington, Crane, Dreiser, Dunbar, Cather, Lowell, Stein, Service, London, Anderson, Sinclair, Stevens, Keller, Teasdale, Wylie, Lardner, Untermeyer, Kilmer, Benet, Jeffers, Moore, Richter, Millay, Coffin, Buck, Thurber, Cummings, West, Smith, Warren, Stuart, Michener, Bishop, Williams, White, McCullers, Brooks, Asimov, Dickey, Lee, Updike, Elliott, Fitzgerald, or anyone who looks like them,” and “A Complete History of the United States from the Revolutionary War to the Present, the Present Being 1976 and With That Never-Explained Gap Between The Civil War and Vietnam.”

So there I am, Diet Coke in hand, discussing things that were a far cry from the bland dumbed-down culturally nonexistent textbooks being disdained and vandalized and lost right and left by bland, dumbed-down kids who figured, and rightly so, that if the penalty for chewing gum was the same as the penalty for standing up and really raising hell then why not go for the big time, discussing, sincerely and actually discussing interesting things, with students whose Big Macs, fries, candy bars, cokes, and, yes, gum, were not in the least distracting and, in fact, made them perk up and pay even better attention, and man that food smelled good but I had no money and couldn’t buy any but most people are smart enough to understand that that’s how it is sometimes and no, I was NOT tempted to nor forced by my cultural norms to reach over and steal someone else’s food because it was so not fair that they had some and I didn’t. . . .

What was I talking about? Oh yes.

We had a hella good time tonight, and when it was nine and the campus tried to close down, we were still there talking.

Not one of my students tonight had ever heard of Madame C.J. Walker. I was appalled. She lived less than a hundred miles from the campus and she was big-time, I’m tellin’ ya.

I love our textbook. It is absolutely CRAMMED with fascinating things. And it’s so well edited that the students think so, too.

Thank you, ABLongman Publishing.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly