STEPHEN EDSON
Contributor
We teeter and test our balance just beyond the turn of a century, one that holds for the world great technological, economic and social shifts. The technological implications of the future are fairly straightforward: efficiency, fewer brain synapses (see “Idiocracy”), and the eventual eugenics.
Economically, we live in an increasingly competitive global market, one in which resources are becoming scarcer as poor nations industrialize — exacerbated by the cycle of consumer culture (on the up in China and India, declining in the United States). Superficially, the least important is the social health of a country. This is what we need to be concerned with, as social politics heavily influence overall economic policy and health of our nation.
Referencing the Roman goddess of justice, Astraea, the poet William Wordsmith aptly captures our dilemma: “But Truth inspired the Bards of old / When of an iron age they told, / Which to unequal laws gave birth, / And drove Astraea from the earth.” This may well have been that point at which Rome collapsed from within.
The emergence of a range of consumer and minority protection groups has been important to protecting U.S. citizens. Unfortunately, many of these groups have outlived their purpose or overstepped their duty and long since lost a sense of balance in their public indictments — consequently perverting justice by setting repeatable precedence in the courts. This is never committed without the aid of the plentiful revisionist judges, whose job is to interpret and not rewrite law.
Needless to say, it is not McDonald’s fault that Joe Bese’s decisions and lifestyle led to his corpulence and the accompanying medical complications. It should not be the neighbor’s fault that your kid was unsupervised and drowned next door. Why do criminals get away with suing their victims for injury while burglarizing that person’s property? Border patrol agents in Texas are sued by an illegal and incarcerated by the state while carrying out their duties to protect America and detain a smuggler trafficking drugs across the border.
The large number of idle trial lawyers in this country has been cause for the twisting of laws and a range of frivolous suits that derange the relationships between people. It has been no mystery that cigarette smoke ails and sometimes kills, but we have amply compensated those who plead ignorant.
The precariousness of conducting oneself within legal rather than natural bounds is becoming troubling. Resources spent to navigate an unnatural and technical book of laws has led to immense waste of prosperity on false settlements and excessive requisite legal council for social entities.
The over-emphasis on nurturing, rather than the raising of a competitive discerning generation, has become common practice. Some elementary schools ban competitive sports and grading in red ink, because they lead directly to low self-esteem. The school board of a Chicago suburb and state governor are named in a lawsuit sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union aimed at removing the scarring experience of a one-minute morning silence.
The ACLU is a well-funded and anti-American institution that has been perverting policy through the courts over the last two decades, and its philosophy is based on the socialist values of its radical founder at the turn of the 20th century. Remaining a competitive society is a social and federal education budgeting issue with economic implications.
Barry McGaw, director of education at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said the United States is best at applying knowledge to strengthen the economy, but that “education’s contribution to that economy is weakening, and you ought to be worrying.”
Unlike Europe, where university study constitutes some course of professional certification, the U.S. university systems succeed in merely recertifying a high school style of work ethic and writing ability before guiding the flock to the belated point of a professional degree. With a strong and equitable education system we would no longer have to prop up social inequities through inefficient constructs like affirmative action, which only debase our national competitiveness.
So often those atheists and left-wing zealots make issues of things wrong with our traditions or facts of life, in turn undermining what makes America free and strong. Prudence, purpose and motivation as an individual make you an American and not a neo-Democrat. How can an atheist who believes in Darwinism and wants God out of schools also stand for heavily progressive taxation that betrays the underlying principles of his or her own dubious belief set, survival of the fittest?
Beware contradictions and poorly placed convictions. Fostering a healthy culture in our society is tantamount to reaching the turn of the 21st century in a prosperous and geopolitically secure position — the same legacy that our forefathers gave us in the century past.
02-07-2008