While egos wander through the corridors of power, light years removed from a nation’s pulse they claim to understand, a cataclysmic shift in altering the landscape of our modern world. Alternate realities swirl through cyberspace, all vying for attention and advertising dollars. And as both sides, increasingly in love with their particular point of view, dig trenches and toss political grenades at each other, the fringes of our society have emerged from isolation and into the mainstream. Having been emboldened by the rhetoric from their sides, and no longer content to nibble at the edges of politics, they are entering and now devouring the humanity that was once America’s ticket to the world stage. In the process, dialogue has been replaced by diatribes, and technology has given outsized power to the few men or monopolies of men who control the stream of information fed to their increasingly isolated audiences. Misinformation, false claims and outright lies, guided by artificial intelligence, advertising revenue and devious minds intent on sowing chaos and discontent, are broadcast live into millions of homes and millions of minds, feeding us with a constantly shifting parade of images and sound until our minds are emptied of curiosity and filled with the certainty of our information stream.
Mix into this the education world, stabbed with a thousand wounds, partly created by the Republican political establishment trying to categorize our children like fodder into neat compartments of test scores, high, medium, low and throw away. On the other side, Democratic idealists have paved the way for zero responsibility parenting and accountability, as they have led the charge to remove all barriers to total access to our schools and offer parents and caregivers a full menu of responsibility free services to their children. Caught in the crossfire of an escalating political pissing match, our most vulnerable and increasingly disenfranchised and uninterested families are unwilling or unable to make any headway against the prevailing skunk driven winds blowing out of Washington DC.
As a teacher for 35 years, I have seen our schools transformed from a shaping force of society to a reactionary institute that primarily serves to babysit the poor and advance the wants of a politically aware and active middle and upper class. There is a straight line connection threading together the decline of our schools, the thriving technology of our times, political gridlock, societal divisions, our trillions of national debt and the overall decadence of our way of life in America. Self satisfaction has replaced self sacrifice and the old fashioned game of kick the can should be our national emblem as it embodies the approach to problem solving most prevalent today.
As I write this, 20% of America’s children live in poverty (it’s 40% for Black and Latino), one third of Americans are obese, huge swaths of our population believe January 6 was a hoax and that the 2020 election was stolen. Test scores in our schools are declining even as per capita spending is up. But numbers don’t have the same gut punch as face to face interactions and empathy will never be gleaned by reading statistics. In the face of dwindling face to face interaction, it will become even easier for the power brokers to manipulate information to maintain the status quo or to further the scale even further in their favor.
They will continue to mass produce and sell tainted highly processed food laced with chemicals and genetically altered grains because it’s good for business and will continue to give handouts to both sides of the political spectrum because it secures votes. What’s good for America has been replaced by what’s good for me.
We are caught in a slow motion death spiral, primarily because an increasing number of voting age adults have been neutered by the technological cocoon and alternate realities in which most of us live. We will continue to encourage obesity and poor health with our food supply and marginalize clean living and break down or take away opportunities for the disconnected. In other words we will continue to pour good money after bad money and call it policy.
Karl Marx once wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, and while I disagree with the core message, I understand the logic. Every society has (or had) a code of ethics by which most people live and work, and that code, for the most part, is or in increasing instances, was, modeled and reinforced first at the micro level of families, then communities and so on. Not everyone fits neatly, but for the majority of people, it not only worked, it helped them carve out their own successful pathways. Clearly, it is not always that straightforward, but in general, the further an individual strays from the family or the village, the more likely it becomes that they’d follow a distinctly difference code of ethics. The village approach to family and children has been weakening for decades, but technology has exponentially quickened its deline. No longer are young people, and increasing numbers all across the ages, interacting with family and community with open dialogue and conversations, but are interacting with a technological world that swiftly caters to their emotional needs and wants, and takes the place of real people and real world expectations.
This type of information isolation leads to dogmatic beliefs, and has manifested in our politics and national dialogues, and is responsible for the increased hatred of all things not us. We now live in a world where both sides are mocking the leading figures on the “other side”, casting them as solely responsible for any and all issues in America. Lost is the voice of reason, swallowed by the urges of vitriol, and chaos grows, much to the delight of the fidiots on both extremes of the political spectrum. After all, votes lead to more power and power is more important than progress. So lost are our leaders in this came of political chicken that I believe they believe their own points of view to be factual and therefore unalienable and intractable.
The most frightening part of all this – the generation of children in our nation’s schools have become experimental pawns in our national culture wars, and are subject to the same technology that either cocoons or kills a person. Concurrently, the struggle to strengthen or recreate a home school connection is failing, as greater swaths of our constituencies in public schools have either forgotten how to parent or have neglected to parent. To be blunt, parenting is hard and technology gives an easy babysitting service to parents, and increasing numbers of them have turned to TV’s, smart phones and computer screens to help raise children. The end game of this is frightening, and is a direct line to increased violence and even more alarming, an increased tolerance of violence.