I want to look at the truth without flinching...
...we are also in the midst of a bold maneuver by wealthy ideological foes to roll back as much if not all of the New Deal/Fair Deal victories: enough so that even if they lose badly two years from now it will have been worth it... They are prepared, I am convinced, to lose the "independents" and more... It is a strategy that in my more revolutionary socialist youth I was in favor of too. They have essentially created a new rightwing political party with a revolutionary agenda led by a wealthy vanguard. Curtailing democracy and misinformation are often essential parts of revolutionary ideology as they intend to undertake reforms that would not be possible under ordinary democratic procedures.
In short:
Public schooling may not in my lifetime be preservable. Something I was sure was untouchable, at the core of our nation. I am prone to short-term thinking these days. It is hard not to at 80. While I am not sure I will live long enough to see the undoing of 80 years of progress I do not regret having been on the other side of the barricades... But… it hurts. Of course, actually the reform era I am remembering lasted "merely" 50 years.
They have distracted us by a fight over school reform in the name of equity and civil rights while they have destroyed the playing field that might over time have produced such equity. For example,
"Chicago's unemployment rate for African Americas is triple the rate for whites — at 21.4%, and for every dollar the employed black Chicagoan earns, an African American makes 45 cents... The financial bust we lived through has undermined, above all, the last Americans who made it into the middle class: Black Americans... Despite Brown vs the Board of Education, we have more segregated schools in the North (at least) than we did in 1954! And if there ever was a reform designed to segregate schools—and not just by race — the charter school movement has the patent on niche schools for aspiring poor non-Whites — note that in NYC at least they may take a lot of the poor — but the target audience are the "reduced" not the "free" lunchers. We are seeing a flourishing new K-12 market for the smart/gifted/mostly White kids in the public sector...
No changes dependent on new habits of heart and mind can succeed over time without persuading the "changees."
But with enough money you can skip slow persuasion and fairly rapidly overwhelm what were once the norms of middle class American ideology. And it can last for longer than I would like to think given the lopsided media, and the enormous cost of running for "public" office... we have distracted attention from the forces that truly undermined both America's economy and democracy.
America's economy is "recovering" while the people of America and its democracy are sinking. Fear has been restored as the foundation of a "thriving" economic system, and "security" as something only the very rich have a right to value. And leisure is again a sin—for those who cannot pass down huge wealth...Get them pedaling on the treadmill early... It is a treadmill for, at best, staying in place,
because a true ruling class needs leisure and self-confidence, and encouragement to play outside the one right answer out of four...http://deborahmeier.blogspot.com/2011/05/looking-at-truth-without-flinching.html
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