The country is currently divided, angry and incapable of civil exchanges with people of opposing thought. While multiple opinions are healthful in a free, functioning society, the loss of civility, respect and willingness to stop and consider another point of view has become to many, an impossible task. I lay much of this at the feet of media but also education.
It was always the goal of communists to break down the family structure by inserting women into male roles leaving the rearing of children to the State. In so doing they rightly calculated that once children are indoctrinated with what the State wants them to think, they will carry that thinking into adulthood. The two areas of most interest to communists was controlling media and education. When children indoctrinated by the State populate the teaching and media positions, the Marxist ideology could be easily be spread throughout the population at large.
I would argue that this has been the goal of communist sympathizers who infiltrated the Democrat Party and slowly took positions of power in higher education, the entertainment industry, broadcast television, and later into all of education and main stream media where today it has locked arms with unions, and executives within big pharma, big technology, and government. We also see it has taken a foothold in our justice system where fair trials and fair application of our laws is almost impossible. This was by design and not accident. Everything has become weaponized, politicized including reality itself where our entire society has been turned upside down. Good is bad, right is wrong, up is down. It’s visible everywhere and everyone knows it.
We are on a course meant to destroy the greatest country that ever existed. In my opinion the way we need to start maneuvering the ship of State away from our certain demise is a multi-prong approach. We must first be concerned that people have the right to determine their future, not political parties. We need to limit the size and scope of politicians, NGO’s, lobbyists, dark money etc. That starts with the federal funding of all federal elections with set limits for all qualified candidates running for office. Making somthing like C-SPAN available to all citizens and have this the only venue for candidates to discuss set issues back and forth like the old program Point-Counterpoint. No gotcha questions, no canned responses, nobody able to make money from biased moderators creating a hostile environment. Politics shouldn’t be a business for anyone. It should be a calling for those interested in public service, not wealth creation or power. It should not be corrupted by commercial interests.
We cannot allow political parties to start planning moves for the next election the day after the last election. This is how gridlock starts in Congress. Too much emphasis in on party vs. idea. What if each politician, on the first day of each new congress draws a D or R from a hat and must sit with the others who drew the same letter that year? If that were done, party labels would be less important. Ideas would be the currency of each Congressional body. The best ideas would come to the surface. If money were out of politics this is more likely to happen. Term limits would be easier to enact and people would go back to private lives not stay in power to become wealthy. The old boy network and revolving door between the military industrial, pharmaceutical and technology complexes need to stop.
Education is next on the list. What our children learn impacts society. We need our children to once again become critical thinkers. We need our schools to teach how, not what to think. I’m a believer in exposing students to a wide variety of jobs, professions and ways they can fulfill themselves. Our lower schools should teach the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic but starting in middle school students should be able to view what people do in the world and how they make their living between grades 7-10. Then, if they are interested in a specific job or passion give them the opportunity to work as an intern in those areas for a small stipend to allow them to see and feel what it’s like in grades 11-12.
Technical and trade schools should be better utilized to help students learn the skills that will enable them to step into a good paying job immediately or learn how to start their own business if desired. If they choose, they would enter the military or spend a year in something like the Peace Corps or Volunteers to America. The bottom like is to encourage our students to think and act responsibly early on. To think about their future and give them the opportunity to discover an unknown talent. Move our kids away from their cell phones and into hands-on things that they might never have known about.
College and Universities should be restructured to facilitate advanced specialized training rather than 4 years of useless, expensive curricula that does little more that create a lot of indebtedness. Encourage businesses to partner with community colleges and universities in fields where they need skilled people to hire. In other words, all upper education should be for the advancement of students futures. There should be limits put on schools so that they are not political indoctrination camps. Personally, I’d ban any major like political science, gender studies, minority studies, etc. which does nothing but create political activists to divide the country. With a smaller government, politics should be reduced in importance, replaced by societal needs for critical thinkers.
The net result should be a society with a sense of purpose and freedom to critically think about what they need for themselves, their families and their country. They should be armed with the skills of personal management, communication, goal setting and planning. They should be able to advance well thought out ideas to others and be willing to listen to ideas not their own and discern whether they are sound or not. Nothing should be politicized or weaponized, especially our laws. Only then will civility take root again and peace become a national desire.