Dear Mr. president
Friday, March 27, 2015
I have heard you hold forth on the subject of infrastructure on
several occasions. Your thesis, at least as I registered it, was the wisdom of
moving money we are spending on the military to repair what you refer to as “our
crumbling infrastructure”. You detail our infrastructure as bridges, highways, updating
buildings with new technology, like windows, and energy efficient heating and
cooling systems, implementing water savings architecture, using sun and wind to
generate energy and so forth.
Besides the huge positive impact on the deteriorating
climate conditions these upgrades would make, you point out that they would generate
millions and millions of jobs.
All of this is totally “right on”. Not something that would be
nice, it is an imperative if we expect to avoid the darkening future towards
which we are rushing. However, while it is an imperative, it is not enough. Neither is it the most essential
of the infrastructure collapses.
Far more deadly and serious than any bridge collapse is the ongoing
collapse of our educational systems. This system is the seed bed that generated
and the base that sustains our country and democracy as a governmental form the
world around.
Talk about crumbling infrastructure! There are on your staff
individuals who could provide overwhelming data regarding the many nuances of
this catastrophe. If we do not prepare our children through decent educational
experiences to cope with the onslaught of retrogressive and exclusive thinking
that has for over thirty-five years now targeted these systems, we will slide back
socially well past 1776. (Visualize Dowton Abbey with modern technology)
Retrogressors are interested in “training” children for
jobs. These are not educational goals. These are goals to produce a docile “working
class.”
Our brothers and sisters need to know how to think. Any thinking
person will insist on “working” on participating in some useful manner in the
expansion of the Common Good. It is only reasonable that one would do this. It
is what free, thinking human beings do.
Please focus more, a lot more, attention on this problem. I
know that it will resonate deeply with the vast majority of the non-one-percent.
Lots of love
-tom
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