A Lost Generation

I am beginning to reevaluate my views on the right to vote or rather, why some people should even be allowed to vote at all. Once, it was only property owners and merchants who could vote. Women were, at the time, excluded. but no more. No problem there. Limiting voting rights to special interests could be defined as the ultimate example of capital cronyism. Examples of cronyism abound but the most egregious was the railroads, from the beginning of Americas industrial expansion and, as Railroads required iron and later steel, add the steel industry as another egregious example, but coal was king. It was the Robber Baron era.

In those days too, education was limited not by who could go to school but by who did go to school. Children, not totally dedicated as working units in mines and farms, were offered education of some type, mostly limited to reading, writing and arithmetic, while others, children of the merchant class, were offered higher levels of education in literature, history, and the classics. Americas desire for education produced such illuminaries as Mark Twain, Bret Hart and Edward A. Guest, just to name only three authors who all Americans read. But because Americans could read, newspapers proliferated as did education. Americans were becoming informed and their notions about everything changed, especially politics.

Politics were rough and tumble. No change there, and most everyone was engaged in it to some level but always with America and the Constitution in mind. Presidential candidates were selected after days of raucous conventions, torchlight parades, speech making, (without Teleprompters), to noisy, half drunk crowds of friend and foe alike and finally the party’s chose their standard bearers around whom all united until the election. People understood events of the day and that motivated them. The knew the issues, the candidates, who their parents were, their level of understanding and whether they were drunks or not. But, America flourished.

What has happened since? We have high school graduates who can’t make change, college grads with no idea about world geography, current events, or even who their congressman and senators are. They don’t know the great thinkers and therefore have not developed their own cognitive thinking skills. They know more about Hollywood actors than what’s written in the Constitution and, they don’t seem to care. Most believe wealth, food, housing and medical care comes from government and, if it doesn’t, it should.

We are turning out uneducated children who do not know where their “rights” come from. Some believe the Bill of Rights are the ten commandments brought down from Mt. Sinai on tablets of stone. Few can recite the preamble to the Constitution, as most of us were required to do in Elementary school. When asked what makes America “exceptional” they’ll babble about “freedoms” with no idea what freedoms have already been lost by eight years of an over- bearing, Progressive, out of control government.

We can thank Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon and Waters World for their street interviews near college  campuses that have revealed again and again, the tragic loss of a good American education wasted on brainwashed cretans. Most merely have a passing acquaintance with the reality they will soon experience. Too soon, I fear, they will face exactly what has left them bereft of the education they sought, indifference by socialism. They will miss the achievement they desired and the future they hoped for. They cannot even talk about issues that affect them without being offended. They are a lost generation and should be prohibited from casting their votes against America.

Remember, freedom is the goal, the constitution is the way. Now, go get ‘em!