Enough about me. Apparently, I can rant on all I want, and particularly with the country being the way it is, it's not gonna make a difference anyway. Suffice to say, though, that the money we don't spend on education is money we're going to end up spending on the criminal justice system; it's that simple. And from everything I've ever heard, education is a relative bargain compared to keeping somone locked up in prison their whole life. Do we see it that way? From everything I've seen, no, not really. For one thing, America has been busy perpetuating, seemingly for as long as it has been a free country, (make what you will of that whole concept,) its "-isms." Sexism. Racism. However else you care to see it. Yeah, okay, admittedly, we've come a long way with great numbers of these, having our first African-American president, I think, counts for something here. But c'mon, it wasn't until the 1920s that women had the right to vote, and for African-americans, although they were theoretically granted the right to do so with the abolition of slavery, the biases here continued into the 1960s. And in either case, it pretty much took social revolution to bring about change. Not that I'm advocating social revolution, generally speaking, it's messy, costly, and, well, as they say, results may vary. All I can say is, it's taken Americans an awfully long time, a ridiculously long time in some instances, to throw off the shackles of elitism. Although I will say one thing for people in the past who have precipitated such changes; they had the the presence of mind to know when it needed to be done, and the boldness and creativity to know how it should be done. Even, dare I say it, when it comes to the labor union movement. Henry Ford tried to beat the union sympathizers to the punch with the "$5 a day" wage; "look," I can almost hear Mr. Ford say, "you're making all this money, why would you wanna risk screwing it up with the mere idea of a labor union?!" The trouble is, of course, Henry Ford was, almost above all else, a raging anti-Semite and an epic control freak. Yeah, the possibility existed of you making $5 a day in a Ford plant, provided you were willing to play by Mr. Ford's rules. And in a lot of cases you couldn't, simply on the basis of who you were. And for all the progress we've made in obliterating "-isms," there's still one biggie out there that needs to be conquered, particularly now. Ageism. Whatever else I may be seen as being, or not being, my advancing age is still starting to make me iffy, I think, to potential employers. The usual line of thinking, as I understand it, is about older employees being too expensive, and not having enough energy to take care of business. On the up-side, the more miles you've got on the clock, the less likely you will be to be trapped by potential snares a younger person would very likely never see coming. And there's more. We've got a whole culture full of younger people who have either been fed all the wrong answers as a result of "political correctness," (God forbid we should crush their fragile self-esteem,) or just as many who have figured that music or professional sports would be their salvation. When you get through all the rest of the employees you could possibly have, there's going to be a very small group left who's not either incompetent or incarcerated. And relatively speaking, I can see where a group like this would rightly want what they consider to be their due reward for being hard-working, creative and intelligent. Gee, where have I heard that before? And I agree with those people who say that a lot of today's young people have "too much stuff," and lack the civility to know when it's appropriate to use it. I was in a classroom not too long ago, and when I politely asked a student to put a way their cell phone, their response to me was, "why?" Excuse me? Why? Why would I ask you to put away something you bloody well know I should never see in the first place? It's called civility, and you're not gonna get very far without it. Which is, perhaps, why elitism rose to the place it did back when knights were fighting The Crusades; being able to read and write is what seperated the "worthy people" from the riff-raff. Previous generations were also a lot better at being creative when it came to problem-solving. Being creative. That's something else I take issue with, the whole flock-of-sheep-conform-or-die mentality. But when your acceptance as an individual revolves around what kind of cell phone, what color iPod and what make and model your SUV is, guess what, people? That's called conformity. Real popular with groups like the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. And if you don't know about them, Google them, I'm sure you'll come up with something.

Our deacon in church yesterday was talking about the fact that prophets, whose main job in ancient times was not predicting the future, Nostradamus-style, but more simply acting as big, loud, moral compasses for the rest of humanity, were, generally speaking not very popular people. But humanity has always needed them, because without them, no one would ever know the right thing to do. We'd have seminars for kindergarteners about how to access all the things their high school counterparts have figured out how to. First-graders with tattoos. God knows I've already seen first-grade boys with mohawks and earrings. How bad is this gonna get before we snap out of it? Perhaps there's another explanation, one I've pondered lately. Things have now gotten so bad, and we as adults are so hopeless, that we're transmitting that to our young people. That's not helping us either. Cant find a job? Can't spend the day drunk because your money's gone? Fine, just be pi*sy, moody and less moral than ever. Yeah, that solves a lot. This is the time for creative solutions, and I know I'm not the only one who has them. Now stand up and do something.