I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

This is going to be a bitch session. Most sociological problems in our society don’t have solutions, let alone easy ones. Everything in life - from the time you rise until you sleep again - involve trade-offs. So bear with me.

It really hurts me to see that my children and grandchildren will never know the same freedoms I enjoyed growing up. Those of us who were raised and educated in the late 50's and the 60's actually learned basic skills in our schools. Were there gaps in our education? Of course there were - world history pretty much didn’t exist and whole chunks of our own history were either glossed over or ignored entirely. That we had slavery in our history was taught but not dwelt upon. Our dealings with the Indians got pretty much the same treatment. And no, most of us didn’t get our American History from John Wayne movies. Not the ones that paid attention, anyway.

The best thing I saw coming out of that era was the Civil Rights movement, but true to form, we fucked that up. Instead of actually working to bring those who had been discriminated against all their lives up to the same basic level as everyone else, the "Kumbaya" crowd decided, in the 70's and beyond, that it was much easier to dumb-down everyone else. Then the Civil Rights movement was taken over by the Perpetually Offended. No prizes will be awarded for guessing why we are where we are at this point in our history.

I’d love to know who came up with the concept of "hate" crime. Why is that only applied when the perpetrator is white? Why are all other races incapable of this? If crime in this country received the treatment it deserved, where all acts of brutality were prosecuted equally, would we ever have heard of this? Oh, yeah - I forgot - the Southern Democrats were not believed capable of playing nice. So we put judges on the bench that viewed stone-cold criminals as "maladjusted."

We have gotten to the point where it has become mandatory for our children to learn religion at their Public Schools. The Muslim religion is taught at Elementary Schools nationwide and UNC at Chapel Hill has made it mandatory for incoming Freshmen in the very recent past.

Of course, due to the Perpetually Offended - who are physically incapable of averting their gaze - anything which could be linked, however tenuously, to Christianity is to be stamped out because the First Amendment says that Congress (no one else, just Congress) can make no laws establishing a religion or restricting the freedom to worship. I’m so damn tired of hearing about the misuses of the First and Second Amendments. I’d love to hear a spirited debate about the Third for a change!

Where are we now? Let’s see - an announcer in an ad gets in the shit because he mentions "Cave Men"; freedom of association has become forced association with anyone or everyone.

Our children and grandchildren can’t be corrected by anything more stringent than a "Time Out." Every time I think of that I picture Dennis the Menace in his chair facing the corner. Sure works for him, don’t it? A friend of mine in the late 70's, early 80's had a wife who believed in "negotiating" with her 20 month daughter. The daughter believed in slapping the mother across the face. Guess who won that one? Yep - the daughter!

Our Nations schools still ignore most of the History which takes place outside our borders - especially if it happened in Europe and involves something good. Children are taught that all competition is bad - until they have to apply for a university or confront the real world. Any male children who show either a streak of independence or absolute boredom in schools aren’t to be challenged - they’re to be medicated. It makes life so much easier for the teachers and parents who really don’t want to be bothered with such things as instilling values and ethics into the widdle kiddies.

Have we still got real problems with race? You damn skippy, but the major ones right now involve making everyone universally stupid instead of universally smart, and the JacksonSharpton entitlement mentality.

Yeah, I got an attitude - but you knew that when you met me, didn’t you?