The election has come to pass and that is a good thing. Americans have experienced a hard four years. Granted, there have been worse times, but the past is somewhat of a foreign country in itself. However, this does not suggest that the past is irrelevant: examining patterns of human behavior and causalities offer us, as a Constitutional Republic (this nation was not founded as a Democracy), an opportunity to juxtapose where we are now versus were we should be, as Americans and a nation.
The rub is, roughly two-thirds of fourth to ninth graders are functionally illiterate. This is most pronounced in metropolitan areas in which there is a minority-majority demographic representation (all or most controlled by, ironically, the same political party).
From that basic foundation of failure, the intersection of human behavior and causality do not offer an optimistic tone. Schools are microcosms of the larger society, and seeing as how it takes reading, hard reading at times, to learn, understand and appreciate the history of this nation, it is of no surprise that to see this nation where it is now (depending on the view, of course).
We, the People, have played a large role in allowing the advancement of the abolition of American Republicanism (not the party) and the American Ethos along with it. So easily, we have been swayed and guided by the nexus of political, commercial, technological and fractional agencies that have sought to eradicate that which represents the “Mystic chords of Memory.” Our lives, the human mind, have been transformed into something that is an anti-thesis to the American condition.
If you do not see this, then ruminate on why you have to have a smartphone, why you have to have internet, why many of you have to work multiple jobs (most times, not working for yourself), why you are not able to walk into a place of business and apply for a job in person, why a “free market” dumps on the worker, why you are forced to create “profiles” and acquiesce to the laws of the tech-gods in order to simply find a job, why we are all boxed into a realm of dependency and how much is taken from our pockets because of this, why has the “human element” been removed from many aspects of our lives…why are we living to work, and not simply working to live…are we citizens or are we simply consumers?
Why has it been allowed, for the government to merge, both directly and indirectly with corporate power(s)? According to Benito Mussolini, that is the purest form of Fascism: the merger of State and corporate power(s). If anything, having a citizenry that could identify this, along with the obvious signs of Socialism, Communism and Crony Capitalism, and their past and present causalities, would offer a more optimistic outcome. However, one needs to be able to read.
It seems public education (and the powers behind it) has made a concerted effort to produce Americans completely unaware not only of what is before them, but also a historical scope in regards to the status-quo.
Joshua Card