This fall, my son started middle school.  We were told he would have all the supports available to him under his IEP and BIP that he had during grade school.  HA!  It became painfully obvious during his first week that he was pretty much being tossed into the deep end and left to fend for himself.  This despite all the assurances that we received during his final grade school IEP meeting; funny enough, I had the temerity to outright ask if middle school was even going to be an appropriate educational setting for him. 

 

During the first full week of homeschooling, I discovered that he had seen a dictionary, but didn't know how to really use it.  I learned such skills in second grade; my son is in the sixth grade.  He had a grasp on how to alphabetize, but had never really been pressed to do so.  As well, I noticed that division by anything with more than one digit absolutely threw him for a loop.  I learned this in the fourth grade (with some difficulty, but I mastered it).  Essentially, the question became one of what exactly he did with all his years at the elementary level.  My gut feeling told me that, with a special ed label, he was led by the hand the whole time instead of being instilled with any sort of independence.  In the absence of any real discipline in schools, he, like the other kids, learned to game the system in order to get out of work.

 

As ex-teachers, his mother and I are now charged with cleaning up the mess.  Thank God we went to quality schools of education.

I get really angry when I hear someone say, "Why should I go get some eight or nine-dollar an hour job when I can get more money on unemployment?"  Why indeed?  For starters, unemployment doesn't offer insurance.  Next, unemployment doesn't generate tax revenue; it is tax revenue that's being doled out to you.  Even when it's spent on items with embedded taxes in them and sales taxes on them, it's still not new revenue being generated--it's just being recycled.  Lastly, who on God's green Earth said you were entitled to a certain income and a certain lifestyle?  Get off your (backside) and get to work!

 

It also infuriates me when I hear people talk of the 'necessity' of two-working-parent families.  Excuse me?  If you have kids, you work around your children, not in spite of them.  It means you do without the latest and greatest gadgets, houses, and cars; you make do with what you have.  It means that one parent works part-time to help out with the bills and Mom and Dad do without so the kids can have everything they need, not everything they want.  It is far past time for people to learn to get what they need and not necessarily what they want.  How much house does a person really need?  How much car/van/suv does a person really need?  While I am all for people getting what they want out of life, I have seen so many marriages end and children grow up feeling unloved because their parents thought it necessary to 'have it all'. 

ESPN play-by-play announcer Ron Franklin was fired for making a comment to sideline reporter Jeanne Edwards.  The story goes that when Ms. Edwards requested to be allowed in on a discussion, Mr. Franklin said, "Why don't you leave this to the boys, sweet baby?"  Ms. Edwards' response was to inform him that she didn't care to be called that.  Mr. Franklin then reportedly said, "Why don't you leave this to the boys, (a-hole)?" 

 

Now, I can understand why a woman might take offense to being addressed in such a manner.  Nobody likes to be patronized.  What is not being reported is the fact that Ms. Edwards is not the person who brought this to the attention of management.  The honor of Snitch goes to another woman who chose to be offended at language she overheard which was clearly and obviously directed at another individual.  What ever happened to minding one's own business? 

 

If someone truly IS being harassed (as in, there is an established pattern of conduct on the part of one person which is clearly calculated to bring down the self-esteem of another), then it may be necessary to step in and stick up for someone.  Or, if the conduct in an isolated instance is so over-the-top, then it is necessary to report it.  I made a friend once because a customer was harassing this girl for simply asking her children to please put some of the fifty-odd books back before they took any more off the shelves and I reported it to her boss.  All too often, however, isolated instances are being treated with the same severity as patterns.

 

Furthermore, would the woman who reported this conduct have done so if she liked Ron Franklin?  Would she have reported this had the sideline reporter been a young man?  Would this woman have even thought about reporting such conduct had it been Ms. Edwards patronizing Mr. Franklin and then calling him an (a-hole)?

 

Experience and observation tell me she would not have.

Time was when a man could go into the office, shut the door, and get his frustrations out of his system.  This was destroyed by that great bastion of rubbish, 'Third-Party Harassment (3PH)'.  Busybodies have rejoiced ever since.

 

I don't believe that there is any more original frustration in the workplace than there ever was.  We still have idiots who can't understand what you want them to do, straw-bosses who stick their noses where it doesn't belong, and bums who run and hide at the first sign of actual work.  The new frustration stems from not being able to call a spade a spade, thanks to political correctness.  We can't call the idiot stupid; that might offend the 'mentally challenged'.  We can't tell the straw-boss to mind her own (expletive) business; that would be 'stifling initiative'.  We can't tell the bums they're being lazy; they'll claim some sort of discrimination under a convenient victim-status label.  Further complicating matters is the problem of 3PH.  If you are overheard grousing to a colleague about a subordinate and someone completely outside the conversation chooses to take offense at what you say, you can be 'subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination'.

 

Where does it say in our Constitution that people have a right to never be offended?

The most prevalent argument against pornography is that it degrades women.  This is true; however, it is only a part of the correct answer.  See, porn degrades men, too.  We are made to look like sex-crazed monsters when the fact is that the vast majority of us are not.  Most of us find the idea of sharing our partners with anyone else abhorrent.  Sure, we like sex, but most of us want it ONLY with our wives.  Yes, we look at other women.  Did you know that women look at other men?  It is part of our makeup to look.  As long as a person is only looking, no harm occurs.  In fact, as long as one doesn't look too long, it's all right.  We are wired to look.  What pornography truly degrades is sex itself.  What should be a truly beautiful expression of physical love between a man and his wife is reduced to animalistic writhing under hot lights with multiple partners. 

 

I don't have a problem with teenagers being taught about sex from a physical health standpoint.  Where schools fall short, though, is that they do not teach the facts about how it is to one's considerable economic advantage to wait as long as possible (preferably until marriage) before engaging in sexual activity.  Nothing changes your life like a child, even if you are married.  If the child is unplanned (as are sixty percent of all children born in wedlock, according to Dr. Dobson), this is even moreso.  Schools also fail to teach how sexual activity at a young age can distort one's outlook on what constitutes a healthy relationship.  A breakup is much harder to endure if the person who dumps you is a sex partner.  Why else are divorces so painful?  Think about it:  the other person has very likely seen you at your most intimate and therefore your most vulnerable moments.  It is very difficult to separate one's personal feelings from such moments of intimacy.  Porn creates the illusion that everybody wants sex at the drop of a hat and that neither the identity nor the personal feelings of one's partner matter.  Just put Tab A into Slot B and go to town.

 

Why is it, then, that feminist organizations fail to acknowledge this?  My guess is that, if they do, women will be forced to admit that they are not pornography's only victims.  If you have an agenda to support that is based upon victim status, victimhood shared equals victimhood reduced.

How do we get the vision of the Founders back?  This country was designed to be run by people who, in a sense, just walked in off the street.  It was made to be governed by people who wanted to help everyone "secure the blessings of liberty"; it was not envisioned as a place to be governed by people who simply had a desire to govern.  Public education was supposed to turn out people who, upon graduation from the free public education system, could at least make somewhat informed decisions about the problems of the day. 

 

I had the sad privilege of re-working a paper written by a high-school student the other day.  God bless that kid, but his paper was one of the most disjointed and fragmented documents I have ever seen.  Granted, the kid was in a special-ed class, but it made me doubt whether or not the kid had been taught anything at all.  As the saying goes, he may not have been able to synthesize a decent paragraph, but I'd have bet he knew how to use birth control, assuming he bothered.  Given that my son is in a special-ed program, the temptation was to say, "Screw this!" and remove my son from screwells altogether. 

 

Maybe this kid isn't representative of the broader cross-section of today's students, but my gut-wrenching fear is he is closer to the middle than I would ever imagine him to be (in my nightmares).  Are people too dumb to be informed voters anymore?  Is this how Soetoro got elected?  Thank God I was taught critical thinking.  Of course, maybe it was just in my nature to question why.  Is it something that is inate in every child?  Perhaps the unintended consequence of public education is that this curiosity, this desire to go against the grain and do one's own thing is inadverdently snuffed out. 

 

As much as 'elitism' is deservedly detested in this country, it is offensive to me that people in this country can graduate high school with a diploma they can't even read or compute the surface area of, yet they can go out and negate my informed vote.  It also scares the daylights out of me that, with just about half the country effectively paying no income taxes, that half of the country will vote democrat (they don't deserve the dignity of capitalization) simply because someone on the tube told them to do so.  This is the half of the country which has realized that they can vote themselves "largesse from the public treasury".  We know what happens when this occurs....