I Dare You.

A while back I bought a book written by Sarah Palin on one of my grocery missions to Fred Meyers. I just now got around to reading it. I started it this morning and now I’m writing another blog article because I just finished the introduction. To get me motivated to write anything that deals with American and her problems is monumental for me at least. We get all this bad news slung in our faces every day by an agenda driven, liberal, media spin doctors.

Oh I can hear some of the readers saying, “Dave is just reading Sara Palin’s book because he’s a sucker for a pretty face. Yeah Sara is a beautiful gal. Nobody will argue that. The media likes to hang monikers on people who because she’s pretty she’s stupid, uniformed, or just plain dumb. Well back up the old Japanese econo box folks. She’s none of those. Sara Palin is probably one of the best informed people about what’s really wrong with America and anyone in our current administration, and she’s not afraid to say so. She’s not afraid to say she likes to shoot, she’s not afraid to say she believes in God and says the Pledge of Allegiance in the old version. If you still want to think she’s everything the media has said she is then you are probably one of those folks who lets the media dictate who you vote for or some labor union telling you how to vote.  If you think she’s uniformed then I dare you to read her book, America By Heart.  I dare to say if you read this book you wont’ think she’s uniformed or stupid or just a good-looking bimbo for the Republican ticket.

Okay enough about her. Here’s what I really got stuck in my craw as my ancestors used to say. First of all I don’t like what’s going on in our schools these days. I don’t like them kicking God out of the class room. Who started this shit anyway? Nobody asks me or any  of my friends if it was okay to do this? All forward thinkers, and I am being way sarcastic here, say it’s not politically correct to “force our religion on anyone that may have different views.”  Wait a minute here Knute. When was the last time you know about when someone got sent to the principles office for not saying the Pledge of allegiance? Our entire country knows what freedom of religion means do we not? So why is it all of a sudden not okay for us to practice our own religion? I can just imagine what goes on in any school in muslim countries. Do they not stop what they are doing a few times a day and worship? They aren’t worried about any Americans near by in the markets being offended by their faith and the way they worship when they roll out their prayer rugs get down on all fours and pray to the east.

My high school class of 1965 turned out okay. I can’t say that about some of the kids I see coming out of our education system these days. If you don’t think that’s true go on You Tube and look at the comments posted there by some of our scholarly young folks. Most of them don’t bother with punctuation, they can’t spell, and haven’t the first notion of proper use of our national language. My Swedish friend Monica England and I were chatting awhile back and I noticed what excellent use of our language she has. She spells all the words correctly, uses capital letters and periods, and commas, what a concept and she’s Swedish! Her use of our language is better than our own children’s usage!  What’s wrong with this picture folks. Monica says English is required in their school systems. I have communicated with people in Russia and it’s a required subject there as well.

Ask most kids what a subject or a predicate is today and see if you even get an answer. I dare you. I’ll bet most kids have no clue as to what a predicate nominative is, or for that matter what the difference between a verb and adverb is. Most of them can’t do multiplication tables in their heads but instead whip out their cell phones, calculators and let some machine do it for them. And the schools encourage this!  At least the class of 65 can do addition subtraction , multiplication and division, and understand how to work a problem in long division to its conclusion. Can you imagine Mrs. George or Mrs. Busby in Grade School allowing us to use a calculator to multiply eight times eight? I remember learing the multiplication tables in my head. We were supposed to take it all the way to the 12’s but I never got that far. I made it to the 11’s which is easy.

Now days it’s considered politically incorrect to hold back any student. No matter if he hasn’t absorbed the contents of his class for the past year. Sure let’s just pass them on to the next class and let them become more hopelessly lost in the continuation of like math for example. I was never really very good in math, mostly because I don’t think it was explained to me very well all the way thru school. When I got into college I had a wonderful math teacher name Matt Hames. He was able to show me that Algebra was not the demon I always thought it was. What I’m driving at is this; Math is just one example of a subject that requires your understanding on one level before going forward to the next. That’s why it’s set up the way it is. Algebra, geometry, trig, calculus etc.  One sort of leads into the other. The idea that math is sorta optional these days is just an excuse not to try to teach it so everyone can understand it.

Passing students on who really should be held back is not doing them any favors. In fact I dare say it’s doing just the opposite. Now our schools are turning out kids who can’t write legibly, who can’t spell, who are grossly misinformed about history, the Constitution, Bill Of Rights, and lots of fundamentals our country was formed and founded on. Leaving no child behind in school also reminds me of another disturbing and disgusting brainwashing I see these days. It has to do with  winning and losing. Teaching kids that it’s unacceptable to lose and that winning is everything is setting them up for failure and a rude awaking in the near future. Drag racing is wonderful in this aspect. There’s no gray areas in this sport. You either win or you lose simple as that. The NHRA, ADRA, are sanctioning bodies that have went out of their way to make sure there are no gray areas that there is no such thing as “Hey we’re all winners.” If that happened in Drag racing it’d kill the sport. Nobody would try anymore. I could run my Olds against a top fuel car and win, no matter the actual physical outcome. Coming in second place or last is just a life fact. It’s the way the entire physical universe behaves. Nothing in the universe happens at exactly the same time because it’s just not nice to have one supernova event a million years later than the last one.  That’s like saying that eta Carinae should have exploded the same time as the Crab Nebula did.

Kids are going to grow up and leave the protective nest of the “everyone’s a winner” school they were in. They will sooner than later realize that they weren’t good enough to land that job or they didn’t excel as good as someone else did. This realization just sparks more of a desire to excel. It drives people to better themselves. The “everyone’s a winner’ mindset just does the opposite. Where’s the impetus to do better if it suddenly doesn’t matter any more? This type of brainwashing will produce a nation of people who are at best just mediocre. That’s not the America I know and love. It never has been. How did this sort of crap get into our school system to begin with? It’s a virus, and a disease.

People say violence is no way to deal with things. I’ll agree with that. The class of 65 had our own ways of dealing with problems between people. If you had a real beef with someone you had a fist fight. Oh horrors actually punching someone in the face with your fists. At least they’re not dead!  We never brought guns to school and if you did have a knife they took it away from you and it didn’t matter that it might upset you that they took the knife away. Our class of 65, never shot up the school, we never shot anyone over a pair of Nike’s, we never did drive bys, we never beat up our teachers or threw them out school windows. Instead we got rid of our bad feeling by having a fist fight. Yes it used up all that negative energy, taught you some respect for your advisary or him of you. I dare say that most of the few fights I was in actually made a friend of the guy I was throwing fists with. Yeah that’s right. I’m not saying to tell your kid to slug it out. Just saying that what’s being told nowadays sure as hell isn’t getting the job done otherwise there wouldn’t be any Columbines.  Which brings me to another point. Gun control. Michael Moore has made money off of this tragedy. He’s also a purveyor of gun control and spin doctor à la mode. The first thing the anti gun people love to do is jump on the old gun control bandwagon for every Columbine event that happens. Let’s dissect this a bit. What I want to know is how did this child obtain the gun in the first place? I used to have a Federal Firearms License, for gunsmith work I used to do. They don’t just hand these out to any Tom Dick and Harry. Record keeping is a huge mainstay of this license. You can’t just sell a gun to anyone like a hot dog vender in the streets of New York passing out guns out of his hot dog-cart. So the idea that anyone can get a gun like walking into a store and buying a candy bar is ludicrous. I venture to say that  the person with the gun at school probably got it from home. It was probably left in a night stand by the side of the parent bed for “protection.” That’s okay too, but if you are going to do that and you have kids in your household then the gun needs to be removed when you aren’t within one foot of it. The ammunition should be stored separately from the gun. A gun can’t go bang without ammo.

Instead of penalizing every responsible gun owner for the recklessness of a few who don’t lock up their guns then lets find out the real problem. Lets make it impossible for kids to get into their parents guns. That’s at least a start. We don’t need government people to inspect your own private gun magazine. The news media needs to be more responsible for follow ups on reporting these incidents and make sure the report contains all the facts and not some liberal, spin on what happened because they’re broadcasting company has a liberal agenda concerning gun control. You see where this crap comes from? They don’t want people to know that so and so shot so and so at school because he found his Dad’s handgun in the night stand unlocked and loaded with ammo. It makes their anti-gun agenda easier to pedal if people just hear how guns should be banned and that’ll end the problem. Like hell it would. I’m asking people to think for themselves, in fact I Dare you to think for yourself. Don’t let some organization like the media or some labor union do your thinking for you. They have an agenda believe it! So should you.

 

Dave