You know, we go back and forth about the issues that really seem important in The Daily. Just this morning I looked at the picture of the pissant current dictator of the DPRK- hell, I will insert it here to show the quality of this surreal Virginia morning as the light is coming up at the farm:
How do they get hats like that? Do you recall seeing the pictures of the decorations on the old men of the North’s Stalinist army that go from top of the lapel to below the Sam Brown Belt? Oh well. This little man talks about nuking me in my house. Weird.
It is easy to think that these things are important, like the Bill of Rights used to be.
I had one of my old shipmates start me out with a note this morning that addressed some really amazing things. He noted that Mayor Bloomberg has triumphed over cigarettes and the 32-oz soft beverage, and with a glossy new campaign against earphones the kids wear, the millennium is at hand in the Big Apple.
My pal pointed out that the social issues may be vanquished, but there is something else happening in New York City:
“According to officials <http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/officials-80-percent-of-recent-nyc-high-school-graduates-cannot-read/> from City University of New York, a full 80% of high school graduates in New York City can’t read when they graduate. And that’s for the students who graduate. New York City has the lowest graduation rate <http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NY-GRADUATION-RATES-TRAGIC-FOR-BLACK-HISPANIC-BOYS-171043271.html> for minority male students in the nation, with only 37% graduating.”
That struck me as being as inconvenient a fact as the one that Al Gore’s physical appearance seems to induce Global Cooling. But my pal went on to point out that according to the Educational Trust-West, “…just one in twenty kindergardeners in some ethnic minorities will graduate from a four-year California college. Overall, a whopping 40% <http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2011/01/25/study-more-college-students-need-remedial-classes/> of high school students entering public colleges across the country require at least one remedial class in reading, writing or math.”
That about stopped me in my tracks, and helped me focus on something that is- I think- profound. You know me. I get curious and agitated and about the things that seem important right now. The Nanny State, Mayor Bloomberg and his ilk, and that oddity we know as the modern Two Party System, being composed either of dolts or idiots, take your pick.
Then it came to me in a wave. We are chumps. The battle was over a long time ago. The people in charge do not (at the moment) have the resources to come and get me. They are content to take a little longer view, and will allow entropy to take care of that. It is funny. You and I did right by our kids, we taught them critical thinking, scraped and sacrificed to get them ahead in life, all on the modest but honorable pay we earned doing the mundane things we all did. Solid but not handsome, we did the right thing.
Meanwhile, members of our Boomer demographic cohort went about destroying the very fabric of our society.
They succeeded.
The war for our society is lost. The underclass is permanent now, and rising in an inexorable number. Citizens who cannot read cannot possibly contribute anything meaningful to our future except the expectation- quite justified- that society will take care of them. The blatantly obvious issue is that the government will not do it very well, which is the essence of the whole problem.
Beyond the creation of a major class of citizens who are functionally illiterate, take an issue, any issue. Nukes, for example. The North Korean ranting this morning about incinerating us is a case in point. We are unilaterally disarming, the nuclear stockpile disintegrating even as whack jobs are permitted to build their arsenals in Pyongyang and Tehran. How could this be happening? Where are the prudent people who take this stuff seriously?
Pick another issue that is transparently criminal. Wall Street has the game rigged. They are the Masters of the Universe that Tom Wolfe wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities. We may be allowed to live out our lives on our terms, but the bastards have ensured that what is to come for our children- and theirs will be bleaker and less free. As a bonus, we may also share it in the gray days of our dotage. It will be run by Marxists who do not even know what the word means.
Not to bring you a downer this morning, I really didn’t intend to do that, I just had one of those minor revelations like the great Liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan revealed in his 1965 paper on what was coming with the disintegration of the African American family. I think he knew that everyone else would follow right along, and we have. The time for reasoned civic discussion about whether this is what we wanted is long past. Game over.
I was up early this morning- I recognize the above sounds a little fevered. I am stressed out by life in the City and the collective madness of a system that is….well, it is exactly what those who control it want it to be.
They want more. It appears they are going to get it.
I prefer this view, since it appears we have no real choice in the larger world but to accept what we have done to ourselves, and what we have lost forever:
Thus was it ever so, I suppose, the wisdom of age breeds a certain petulance against the impertinence of a future that has its own inexorable imperative. Life is good enough down on the farm- as long as I can hold on to it.
“O tempore! O Mores!”
– Cicero, First Oration against the Catalines
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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