Money for Afghanistan or the Inner
Cities?
The pundits have questioned our priorities. Why do we help Afghanistan while our own cities are in need? Someone demanded a Marshal Plan to eradicate poverty in the inner cities. Others reply that we have already spent five trillion dollars on the inner cities, and more money won't make a difference. Michael Medved of World Net Daily on December 31 writes: "It is vastly easier to rebuild a shattered factory than to reconstruct the broken institution of the family, or to overcome an epidemic of fatherless households." He calls for "the uncomfortable but unavoidable recognition that the dysfunctional values generating that misery lie indeed much closer to home – and will not yield to the efforts of even the most ambitious Washington bureaucrats or social planners." We thus have two sides of the debate. One, we have spent trillions of dollars trying to help the inner cities and we should spend more. The other, since the money doesn't solve the problem, money is not the answer; we must change the value system. How do we do that?
Years ago I got a job working for a prominent Jewish day school. The principal took the weak and failures from four grades and gave them to me. This disparate batch had only one thing in common: they were poor students. These children failed their whole lives, and now, in high school, were gravitating to real problems. I told the class that although they were high school students, I was going to give them a college level lecture, indeed one for advanced college students. I further said that any student who did not pay attention would be expelled from class immediately. Other threats that I made need not be stated here. I fed them some basics, and they eagerly grasped them. I added some more, and when it sank in, I went further. They loved it. In days, these students were fighting the good fights, challenging the lesson, providing their own answers for questions, and reviewing the studies carefully. They did well on tests. They went on to do well.
The Talmud tells us to "stuff student children like oxen." A child is an ox. Either he works big time, or he makes trouble big time. A child needs work, challenge and the knowledge that he better do it. A child needs a framework. Indeed, a child cannot thrive without a frame. If the frame is loose and not tight and demanding, the child does not succeed. Harry, who could not speak English, came into my class. What a pity, a foreign-born child who cannot speak English, amid American students. They were learning how to spell two syllable words. I had such pity on him that I told him, "You will learn to spell 'Mississippi.'" Harry did quite well. In fact, so did all of the students. The only complaint that the principal had was that the students refused to stop working when the recess bell rang. It was more fun for them to learn than to play. An ox likes to work. It hates not working.
Our society pampers minorities, especially children in public school. Wrong move. A child needs preparation for life, from adults. A child must work within a natural framework, sustained by a family and community structure, buttressed by basic beliefs and common values. Today a child is taught to create his own frame, and he thus destructs. A society that denies a child nurture produces children who slaughter their classmates in public school.
Today a child is taught civil rights before discipline. Teaching a child to be a big shot is a form of child molesting. It twists the innermost essence of a child. One thing no child should ever learn from an adult is to be angry. This is why blacks have failed in America, and why five trillion dollars could not change things. The Civil Rights movement is an important process, but when it got into the schools with its indignation and fury, and taught children that nobody can tell them anything, it took away from children the natural environment a child needs to thrive. Children do not thrive as vengeful revolutionaries. They must learn to be part of the world. It is a small step for a child angry at Whitey to hate his parents and teachers. The Civil Rights movement taught everyone to take and not to give. This, the antithesis of spiritual life, produced sensation seekers. It is in essence the drug and sex culture. It all began with idealism.
The Rand Corporation studied New York City public schools. It showed conclusively that parochial schools took the children of prostitutes and sent them to college, despite the paucity of funding. On the other hand, the public schools, gorged with every kind of funding, could not produce a learning environment, and students did not go to college. One public school Vice Principal said, "I don't know what we are supposed to do here." Of course, you are not supposed to provide a program of life, of responsibility, of love for others. It is all either confusing or hate. Angry children do not learn. Angry children go to the street and hang out with other angry people, and end up, not in college, but in jail. The slaughter of blacks by blacks begins with Civil Rights, and the idealism of the haters.
Look at the gay rights movement. It is a Civil Rights movement that spews hate and anger. Those who disagree with its goals are "homophobes," which means a mentally sick person. This term, used by the liberal culture, press and media, stuck in the public mind. Hate works. It is successful. It only kills children. At the end of 2,001, a website, usqueers.com, produced an appeal for the deaths of a living past-president and many religious leaders and opponents of gay rights. The New York Times refused to run the story, not did it run the story a few years ago of homosexuals who hideously murdered a young boy. The liberal news media is a major force in the effort to smear the "haters" as "untermenshen." The logical next step to the New York Times is usqueers.com. Indeed, there are two activists in San Francisco sitting in jail because they threatened the lives of the children of officials and reporters. You can start a fire, but it is hard to control it.
The female culture was badly damaged by the civil rights movement and feminism. Poor Gloria Steinem, who preached that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bike," and promoted lesbianism for two generations, finally threw in the towel and married a man at the age of 67. There is a limit to hate, after all. A college professor refused to allow boys into her class, and was fired. These are the logical outcome of the idealist civil rights hate. Women don't need men. Really? Tell that to the women who do need men. Tell that to the women who are terrified of being on their own with children, but must be tough-tough to their husbands to survive culturally. Hubbie doesn't have to put up with it, and he doesn't. He can find someone younger, thank you. How many women work all day in a male environment, become manlike in their talk and mannerisms, and return home to children who need a female mother? How many women dread going home because they simply have no physical strength after a long day at the office? Are these women happier because of feminism?
The gays have all types of terrible diseases precisely because of civil rights. If the gays had no civil rights, the first homosexuals with HIV would be reported and quarantined if he continued to infect people. There would be no HIV epidemic, and homosexuals would be healthy. Instead, the gays have civil rights, and they have hate, and in order to promote their civil rights that is really contempt for others they do their thing by infecting many other people. They live with hate, and it is their goal. This is the idealist revolutionary. If only the gays had a guillotine. How wonderful it was when the radicals took control, and spewed their hate in the vast slaughters of the Paris Commune, Communism and other "enlightened" places of higher reason and idealism.
Let's help the inner cities. Take away the guillotines.