Veterans Day: Enough Sacharin Already!

Yep, Wednesday is Veteran’s Day. You can tell Veterans Day is coming because the editorials and “news” media are gushing with crappy, maudlin poetry and odes to remember our soldiers. How about some reality: To the vast majority of Americans, Veterans day is just another day off school or work.  If you go to church, shul, mosque, whatever, the service leader will probably make some sappy noises to “remember the soldiers”. Maybe we pay some lip service by reading one of those crappy poems or editorials, but probably not. If you’re REALLY motivated (meaning there is a veteran in your immediate family), you might go to a parade or a dinner.

Here’s an idea: instead of either ignoring the holiday or making some motions, how about doing something to remember the ideals that the soldiers are/were actually fighting for. Write you legislators about an issue you care about. Use the day make some sacrifices of your own, and go help out in a food pantry, visit the sick in a hospital, or visit a nursing home. Chances are good any one of those three activities will bring you into direct contact with a veteran. And it will actually mean something.

Our Veterans don’t need poems, sermons, or TV news people spouting crap about them, and little yellow ribbons are meaningless. We need the rest of the country to actually prove that he sacrifices that Veterans have, are, and will continue to make actually have a purpose. It doesn’t matter what your political views about the current or past wars are. Do something for the ideals that he soldiers stand for.

And while you’re at it, stop and think for a moment: in modern wars, more civilians and non-combatants are maimed and killed than military personnel. Remember the innocent bystanders as well.

The New Dark Ages

I’ve been noticing a lot of similarities in some recent news and some not-so-recent history. The dark ages were a fun time: ignorance, poverty, disease, and war were the norm. A powerful christian government work hard to maintain ignorance, as literacy and rational thought were considered to be major threats to the mindless dogma preached by the church. By keeping the masses ignorant, the church was able to maintain power, and use war as a tool to continue that power. Poverty and disease are natural elements in an ignorant, uneducated population, and also served to reinforce the church’s stance (if you were poor, it must mean that god doesn’t like you,so you must have done something bad). A random walk through some of today’s news events shows a remarkable similarity.

Ignorance. The dark ages were rife with ignorance, superstition, and church doctrine. The general populace was not only discouraged from learning to read, but in many cases, it was illegal for them to know how to read. The dominant government (the christian church) decided what was fact, and what was acceptable for the peons to know. The idea was that all law came from the bible. Of course, if the peons could read, they would be able to figure out that most of what was being taught as church doctrine had nothing to do with the bible, so reading was reserved to the “right-thinkers” in the church. This was also a method of ensuring that the church maintained its position of authority – science and critical thinking would erode the church’s “we talk to god, so we know the truth” dogma, so the church did its best to keep people ignorant (this is the same church that threw Galileo in prison, and refused to admit that the Earth rotates around the sun until late in the 20th century). The church as an entity had an official policy of maintaining the ignorance of the populace. Among other things, it made it impossible to do any sort of business without church involvement (and taxation) – the church was the only agency that was allowed to write, so things like keeping track of shipping, sales, and land records was wholly under the control of the church. This provided a handy revenue stream to support wars against those pesky foreigners and heathens that didn’t buy into the church myth.

In the modern world, the church has much less official power – we even pretend in the USA that the church is just another social group. But if we take a look at what is going on, we can find “christian influence” (read: ‘christian ignorance’) in many places. One of the scariest is the influence that the church continues to have on education. While most of the first world laments the fact their children are not keeping up with upstart developing nations educationally, the church is working to continue to stifle knowledge and free thought. With amazing effectiveness. Depending on the surveys, as much as 30-60% of the people in industrialized nations continue to believe that creationism is as scientifically valid as evolution. The majority of people freely admit that most technology and science is little more than magic to them – it is simply beyond their understanding. Of course, in places like India and China, it is very common to find people who not only understand technology and science, but are using it to displace the “industrialized world” as the leaders of new technological developments. The first worlddoes still have the major educational institutions, but a visit to any hard science or engineering graduate program will make it clear that most of the students there are from second or third world nations. A review of the scientific and engineering primary literature shows the same thing. Take a look at journals from 40 years ago, and the vast majority of authors will have anglo-european names. Take a cruise through the journals today, and most of the names are asian, indian, or middle eastern.

Of course, the Dark Ages did end. The church was finally overthrown by internal divisions, and by the influence of educated free thinkers from other cultures – most notably Asia, India and the Middle East. In the modern world, we are faced with many dangers – a much hyped example is the militant extremists from the muslim left that kill a few people every day. A much more insidious danger is the creeping ignorance and denial of science that is so strongly supported by the christian church. So next time the bible-thumpers are at your local library or school board lobbying to get Harry Potter pulled off the shelves (it has witchcraft in it, and the bible says that witchcraft is bad), don’t just sit by and assume that rational thinkers will simply ignore them. Show up, and speak out. Make sure they know that we recognize their idiocy, and that we won’t tolerate it. When you hear or read about a school district that is buckling to the local moral minority, and is pulling evolution and science from their curriculum, go to the school board meetings and make some noise. At the very least, go read some history, and decide if you really want to live through another round of ignorance driven dark ages. We can hope that the developing world will save us from our own apathy and ignorance, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could do it ourselves?

“service coach” – WTF is up with that?

For the third or fourth day in a row, I’ve heard references to school “service coaches”. Apparently, these people are supposed to help the kid’s figure out how to best volunteer to “help out the community”. ‘Scuse me?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for community service and volunteering. What I find a bit odd is that some bozo has decided that our schools are not only the place to teach the kids that volunteering is good, but also to teach them where to volunteer, and what to volunteer for. Remember, these are the same schools that rank as among the worst in the industrialized world. They can’t teach kids to read, write, or perform basic math, but they’re going to spend resources and time teaching them how and where to volunteer? Then there is the whole issue of government sponsored indoctrination brainwashing education. If it weren’t for the fact that the schools are so hopelessly incompetent, I’d be worried about what the agenda of these “service coaches” was. Call me paranoid, but this type of government sponsored subordination smacks of brown shirts and Orwellian “right-thinking”. Parents, it’s time to get off your butts and start being parents. This is YOUR job, not the schools. Get your righteous indignation up, write the school boards a letter and raise some hell. Take some responsibility for raising your kids, and insist that the schools concentrate on teaching the academic skills they’ll need to survive in the modern world. Or not. There will always be a need for mindless sheep. They make good cannon fodder, and are easy to manage and manipulate. They’re your kids. You decide their future.

Its been a bad month for the cops….

This post was prompted by observing that for the first time since I began blogging, posts about police misconduct have jumped to the #1 most-read posts on the whole site. While these posts are important and have always had a small number of regular readers, it is very strange to have them jump from the lower levels of the list to the top, so I spent a  bit of time trying to figure out why.

Turns out here are a lot of reasons.

• A “school Resource Officer” (A.K.A. “cop”) beat a special needs kids senseless because the kid’s shirt wasn’t tucked in, and it hit the press (it was caught on a surveillance camera).
• The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project released its monthly report, with some rather alarming statistics, such as the fact that cops are 8 times more likely to commit homicide than civilians, and four times more likely to commit rape. Of course, their sentences are only half as long when they’re convicted.
• This month, three more police departments are facing investigation for massive wrongdoing: Dolton, Illinois; Greece,  New York; and Spring Lake, North Carolina. In all three cases, the misconduct includes falsifying evidence, brutality, and perjury by police officers.
• “School Resource Officers” are also having their time in the spotlight, with 5 cases of school cops being involved in pornography and sex scandals with the students they are supposed to be protecting, and a case of a cop using a taser to prevent a kid from making a cell phone call in the hallway at school.

The scary part is that these are only the events that actually made the news. Considering how hard it is to get police misconduct reported by the press, I have to wonder how much more there really is.

So think about it: when a cop pulls you over, or approaches you on the street, what is your first gut reaction? Do you feel safe and secure, or are you afraid and nervous? So who’s protecting who here?