Works @ MindSay

 


By Naomi Wolf
Sunday, November 25, 2007

Is America still America if millions of us
 no longer know how democracy works?

When I speak on college campuses, I find
that students are either baffled by democracy's
workings or that they don't see any point in
engaging in the democratic process. Sometimes both.



Not long ago, I gave a talk at a major university
in the Midwest. "They're going to raze our meadows
and put in a shopping mall!"
a young woman in the audience wailed.
"And there's nothing we can do!"
she said, to the nods of young and old alike.



I stared at her in amazement and asked how old she was.
When she said 26, I suggested that she run for city council.
 Then she stared at me-- with complete incomprehension.
 It took me a long time to convince her and her peers in
 the audience that what I'd suggested was possible,
 even if she didn't have money, a major media outlet
 of her own or a political "machine" behind her.



This lack of understanding about how democracy works is
disturbing enough. But at a time when our system of government
is under assault from an administration that ignores traditional
checks and balances, engages in illegal wiretapping and writes
 secret laws on torture, it means that we're facing
an unprecedented crisis.



As the Founders knew, if citizens are ignorant of or complacent
about the proper workings of a republic "of laws not of men,"
then any leader of any party -- or any tyrannical Congress or even
a tyrannical majority -- can abuse the power they hold.
But at this moment of threat to the system the Framers set in place,
 a third of young Americans don't really understand what they were up to.



According to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics,
 only 47 percent of high school seniors have mastered a minimum level
of U.S. history and civics, while only 14 percent performed at or above
the "proficient" level.

 Middle schoolers in many states are no longer required to take classes
in civics or government. Only 29 states require high school students to
take a government or civics course, leaving millions of young Americans
in the dark about why democracy matters.




A survey released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in September
 found that U.S. high school students missed almost half the questions
on a civic literacy test.

 Only 45.9 percent of those surveyed knew that the sentence
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
 is in the Declaration of Independence. Yet these same students can probably
 name the winner of "American Idol" in a heartbeat.




The study also found that the more students increase their civic knowledge
during college, the more likely they are to vote and engage in other civic
activities. And vice versa -- civic illiteracy equals civic inaction.




Here are some actual quotes from otherwise smart, well-meaning young Americans:


"I show my true convictions by refusing to vote."

"The two parties are exactly the same."

"Congress is bought and paid for."

"Elections are just a front for corporations."

"My teacher says you shouldn't believe anything you read
in the newspapers at all," a 16-year-old from affluent
 Menlo Park, Calif., told me last week.




Even those who are politically engaged don't have much faith in
 our system's potential. "I was taught that it's set up for the elites
 and for old white men and that there's not much you can do about it,"
said Christopher Le, 28, who works at a suicide hotline in Austin.

Le's mother was a "boat person" who fled Vietnam with her 4-month-old son
so that he could be raised in freedom.

 But few Americans in the under-30 set have her kind of faith in the
United States. As Le put it, "No one taught us that democracy was
this shining, inspiring thing."




The United States has been blessed with more than 200 years of a strong
 democracy, so it's easy to yield to a comforting -- and lazy -- conviction
that it's magically self-sustaining and doesn't need to be defended,
 an idea that would have horrified the Founders, who knew that
our democracy would be a fragile thing.




In recent years, the trend away from teaching democracy to young Americans
has been at least partly a consequence of the trend of teaching to the
standardized tests introduced by the Bush administration.

 Mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the tests assess chiefly
math and reading comprehension. Basic civics and history have suffered.

 As a result, teenagers and young adults often have no clue why the United States
 is different from, say, Egypt or Russia; they have little idea what liberty is.




Few young Americans understand that the Second Amendment keeps their homes safe
from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world;
 few realize that "due process" means that they can't be locked up in a dungeon
by the state and left to languish indefinitely.




This dangerous ignorance is confirmed by the Knight Foundation, which has found
an alarming decline in student support for the First Amendment.

In a 2004 survey, more than a third of the student respondents thought
that the First Amendment went too far in guaranteeing freedom of speech
and of the press. By 2006, the number who held that view had swelled to half.




In the absence of strong civics training and in the presence of a
"war on terror" that insistently portrays freedom and checks and balances
as threats to national security, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
 have become controversial for today's young people.




But this distressing situation isn't just George W. Bush's fault.
Young Americans have also inherited some strains of thought from the left
that have undermined their awareness of and respect for democracy.

When New Left activists of the 1960s started the antiwar and free speech
student movements, they didn't get their intellectual framework from
Montesquieu or Thomas Paine: They looked to Marx, Lenin and Mao.

 It became fashionable to employ Marxist ways of thinking about social change:
not "reform" but "dialectic"; not "citizen engagement" but "ideological correctness";
 not working for change but "fighting the man."




During the Vietnam War, the left further weakened itself by abandoning
the notion of patriotism. Young antiwar leaders burned the flag instead
 of invoking the ideals of the republic it represents.

 By turning their backs on the idea of patriotism -- and even on the brave men
who were fighting the unpopular war -- the left abandoned the field to the right
 to "brand" patriotism as it own, often in a way that means uncritical support
 for anything the executive branch decides to do.




In the Reagan era, when the Iran-contra scandal showed a disregard
 for the rule of law, college students were preoccupied with
 the fashionable theories of post-structuralism and deconstructionism,
 critical language and psychoanalytic theories developed by French philosophers
Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that were often applied to the political world,
 with disastrous consequences.

 These theories were often presented to students as an argument that the state --
 even in the United States -- is only a network of power structures.

This also helped confine to the attic of unfashionable ideas the notion that
the state could be a platform for freedom; so much for the fusty old Rights of Man.





In the 1990s and the early years of this century, theories that globalization
is the ultimate evil found their ascendancy on college campuses.
Young people, informed by movements against sweatshops and the World Trade Organization,
 have come to see democracy as a mere cosmetic gloss on the rapacious monolith of global capitalism.




All of these legacies have left the young feeling depressed, cynical and powerless.
And yet our democracy needs them more than ever now. Young people are always in the
vanguard of any movement to sustain or advance liberty.

Students led the charge for freedom in Prague and Mexico City in 1968,
 in Chile in 1973, in Beijing and throughout Eastern Europe in 1989.




Young people helped lead the way in the U.S. civil rights movement,
 white college students joining with African Americans to sign up voters
in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

 The feminist movement was revived after half a century of dormancy by a cadre of young,
 idealistic and politically savvy women. Same for the antiwar movement: Abbie Hoffman,
 Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden of the Chicago Seven were ages 17 to 22 when they were charged
 with conspiracy and inciting to riot while protesting at the 1968
Democratic National Convention in Chicago.





When I ask young people today whether they've been taught that immense positive changes
 have come about because small groups of people engaged in democratic practices, many
look at me with puzzlement.

 They need a crash course in democracy -- and a crash course in how easy it is
to close down an open society if steps are taken such as those we see our government taking now.



Earlier this year, I helped co-found the American Freedom Campaign to call for a
 national democracy movement to restore the rule of law.

 In response, some citizens called a national strike this month on behalf of the Constitution.
 It was a shaky beginning -- people showed up with their flags and their petitions, but the
 groups were sparse and shy and out of practice.

In New York's Union Square, the sound system failed to carry one new young freedom activist's
 reading of the Bill of Rights very far. And yet it didn't matter.

"For the first time in a long time," said Barbara Martinez as the wind whipped her scarf,
"I feel hopeful."
















Keith Olbermann - Special Comment: Rudy Guiliani

Is it just me, or is the singer from The Darkness the mortal reincarnation of Freddy Mercury? I mean, the guy was...well, to put it lightly, he was a fruit cake, and he litterally paid for it with his life, but still...he was SO COOL!

 

So Jour Shitte is occuring rather mroe frequently than I feel like putting up with recently, and I've kind of run of out of places to turn. I can't talk to my mother (I never could) and Dad can't understand. I'm sure he would listen if I asked him to, but he's always so goblaam happy, and has always been able to force himself to be so. I mean, who else could I turn to? Hannah? No. She tries, but she's never around, and is probably sick of all my emotional bullshit by now anyway. Alisa? All Alisa cares about is her stupid comic. Unks isn't any help; he's always bitching about his problems (of a rather menial nature) or else he's busy, or else he wants to check his email and then go off by himself.

 

Sammie? I guess I could talk to Sammie, but she wouldn't get it. She couldn't get it. I have no hope for any genuine emotional connection with her, which makes me wonder why I got myself into this mess in the first place...oh, right, because Amanda told me to...and told me to, and told me to...and again, she told me to.

 

So I get to bitch into this screen, constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure that my mom doesn't come in and then scream at me for my lack of tact and self-censorship. Her condescending insensitivities have become so grevious that I just don't care to talk to her anymore...about anything...

 

Enter Mettalica,

Megadeth,

Linkin Park,

Yngwie Malmsteen,

Dream Theatre,

Fallout Boy,

Dragon Force,

Celtic Frost.

 

Days like th -

 

Oh, and Hammerfall.

 

Days like this are the only reason I keep c..CRAP like that around. (I'm going to be censoring myself a little more. I hope to ween myself back to 2005 spekum by mission time). Not to suggest everything on that list is CRAP, but all of it functions fairly effectively to soothe my bitter, angry, cynical streak.

 

I need to do something about that streak, too. I'm using language and intonations that I swore I would never say to Hannah, and the fact that I have makes me sick. There are some things that just aren't Hannah-appropriate. I know that she's a big girl, and that she takes much worse from her daily life than from me...but...after everything she's done for me, it just seems disrespectful...blasphemous, almost. It's almost like setting out to offer a prayer of gratitude, and instead spitting off curse after curse against the being that died for my sins. That's an extreme compariosn, it's true, but it's the best I can do. After all, religious implications aside, my creator is the only one that I revere to an extent that makes the analogy applicable. He's the only one that means quite that much to me.

 

And yet, for as much as I care about these people, I put their council so far aside, I loose track of some of it completely. Hannah would be horrified if she knew some of the things that go on in my life, and I get a good sense that omniscience betrays me. I tell Taylor that my conscience doesn't bother me anymore, but it's a lie. I'm still in my scriptures and on my knees every night (hence the recurring guilt), and my oppologies must worthless by now. I can't even say that I'm going to try and do better tomorrow, because I know that I won't. Like Huckleberry Finn, I don't see much point in lieing to God.

 

Still, I don't want God to have to settle for, "You were right when you told me that Wickedness never was Happiness, and I'm not reaping any satisfaction from my sins" either. I don't think God gives a wooden nickle for my misery. In fact, i'm quite sure He'd rather I just lived good and had a happy life.

 

Still, though, this has got to be better than getting a deluded counterfeit of happiness from sin.

 

I'm not Alisa, and I'm not my sisters. I'm not going to turn my back on God just because he isn't making my life especially convenient or easy. I'm going to own up to my own actions, no matter how unpleasant that prospect may seem. Sure, I may not have the best attitude, but I'm no quitter.

 

I'm not pulling any stunts that might damage my standing in the church or my personal worthiness, but this hole I'm digging begrudgingly for myself is getting a little dark, and it smells like shit. No number of hours with my nose in The Bible is going to drag my saggyass out of depression, but calling on some divine grace might not be a bad idea to at least point me back in the right direction, and I trust Bishop, probably more than I do my parents. A few priesthood blessings, and a little less time around Taylor may do me some good. This may be a good time to think about a Patriarchal Blessing, too. I wonder, although it would be highly irregular, if I could still get it from Brother Roberts.

 

Point being, if I have to be depressed, I'm not going to let it become an excuse. There are no excuses, not this close to mission time. I don't care if I have to wait until Kingdom Come; I'm going to fulfill what's expected of me. I may be a wicked and a slothful servant, but I sure as hell aint no failure, not completely anyway.

 

 

i wanna be lazy...but i gotta works soon...heres some pics to pass the time..? i really love there pictures...i have tons more like these, but that'd take tooo long to upload 'em all. so sorry!

Tracing through 3 or 4 blogs, I forget where I started but I ended up at mrsminer  's blog.  It was 120% my speed, she got my juices flowing so I took the time to reply, it did take a little while but I enjoyed every second of it, this is the kind of abstract alphanumeric meaning of what you desire. 

 

DON'T BOTHER READING THIS UNLESS YOU READ mrsminer BLOG ON workplace mathmatics FIRST.  IT WON'T MAKE ANY SENSE IF YOU DON'T!!! YOU CAN READ THE FOLLOWING AS MY REPLY ON HER BLOG OR RETURN HERE TO READ IT... ENJOY

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Why is there a need for one-up-man-ship? I don't know.  Sometimes, though, some folks feel the need to say that their particular brand of Christianity is TRULY God's own true plan for practicing the faith. 

In reality, what God wants is not debate, but fruit.  Not discussion so much as action.  For the man who sits in a tower, looking down his nose -- and the tower walls -- at the rest of the world, when he is capable of doing something constructive, is not producing fruit in accordance with his faith.  He is claiming the title of Sanctified, but he is not giving evidence of the great joy that such a title should bestow upon him.

Is his faith a saving faith?  The debate will rage on until Jesus returns and referees.


The purpose of this Scripture is not for debate, friends and neighbors. It is to prepare us.

Eventually all people, those who claim Christ's salvation and those who spurn it, will come to a time of judgment.  A time where they will have to face the Creator of All and give an accounting of themselves.  Those who did not believe in the Almighty beforehand will have come to a startling awareness of their error. Those who did claim such belief will still be held speechless, at least for a few eternal moments, at the realization of just Who the Lord is.

When you who claim a faith in God come before him, he is going to ask you what you did with what he gave you.  Have you been gifted with health? How have you used your body's health for God?  Have you been granted wisdom? How have you used that to further the Kingdom of  God?  Have you been blessed with resources?  Charisma?  Special skills?  How have you used what you were given?

Faith without works will stand you before your judge, God Almighty, with empty pockets. An empty shelf.  An empty portfolio, devoid of evidence for your convictions.  Do you want to face God, look him in the eye, and tell him you thought your belief was enough for HIM? 

Jesus said a tree is judged by its fruit.  What have you produced lately to show what kind of tree you claim to be?  No, I'm not asking you to show ME. I'm just a teacher.  But keep in mind that God himself will show you what you have produced for him.  Don't let yourself be found wanting.

Yes, God loves you.   Intimately. Deeply. More than you can possibly comprehend.  That isn't going to change.  If you believe that, live like you do.  Seek to bear fruit.  Show that your faith has feet.

Get out of your tower, if that's where you are, and get your hands dirty.  Walk a mile or five.  Take inventory of what you have, and use it.