I found the blog site was still here and thought, why not write something new? No one reads this thing, but it is a way for me to put some ideas down in concrete form.
In the intervening years since my last post the world has steadily deteriorated.
The problem is one of inequality. There is inequality based upon race and there is inequality of wealth distribution. These are going to destroy the US without a huge amount of collective soul-searching and restructuring.
Note that these conclusions have not come easily to me. Politically, I have always been very conservative fiscally and liberal socially. I have never been a member of a political party. I have voted in each election considering only the actual candidates who are running. Today, we are witnessing trends I first saw emerging in the early 1970's. They cannot be sustained. The US could tolerate these problems when we were alone in our world. Other countries will get this right. Our national security, lifestyle, and way of life depends upon our ability to refranchise huge swaths of the population that are currently disenfranchised.
We have a vaguely libertarian society in the US in name only. It is widely believed that hard work and perseverance are all that is required to advance in our society. While these attributes are most definitely required, it is general only when one looks within the strata of specific subgroups. While the opportunities across strata may overlap, in truth, those subgroups that have political power receive far more than their share of the total. The government picks winners and losers to receive its largesse, and those that are in power favor their constituencies and donors. Sometimes our leaders at least try to be impartial. Other times they seem to wallow in displaying how partial they can be.
What is a country? A country is a group of people organized around a common legal framework, conceptual, language or ethnic identity who share many of the same desires for how to govern themselves and what kind of society they wish to live in. Most citizens, being human, share an interest to interact with other humans. In the modern world, though, we are dependent not only on our neighbors next door, but our neighbors thousands of miles away. There has become a disturbing trend equating personnel freedom with national freedom. They are not the same and often run counter to one another. To make generalizations about the US from the viewpoint of just yourself, or your local community is quite ignorant. This is a vast and heterogeneous nation that is very interdependent.
Example:
When thinking about alternative schools, the argument is usually made that suitable students do much better than they would at a generic school. I don't disagree. But I think this is the wrong measure to evaluate public funding for schools. The right measure, in my opinion, is to measure the change in performance of all students in the district under consideration.
Practically speaking, it is more important that the average American knows how to read, write, and these days, and determine when someone is trying to exploit them than it is for the AP student to be able to take courses that allow them to more successfully compete to get into an Ivy league school. A brilliant student will more likely find an avenue to achieve than a less than average student will to educate themselves. While often people talk about how a brilliant student is 'held back' by a poor school, I seldom see discussion of poor students might be 'pulled forward' by high achievers in their same school. Mind you, I'm not claiming that this is, or is not the case. It's the lack of this position that makes me suspect that we're so used to thinking of everything only from the viewpoint of the individual because we can longer agree on what the collective viewpoint should be.
It is a mistaken assumption that a good leader tells people what to do. In my opinion, a leader who spends their time doing this has failed. A good leader, first and foremost, needs to identify a collective destination of where we need to head, and then help us get there. Everything else follows from this. Putting out fires cannot be done out of context.
A COMPELLING VISION OF THE FUTURE IS WHAT WE NEED.
Why is there no discussion of THIS?
