The State of the Union

That paladin of liberty Thomas Jefferson once famously informed his friend James Madison, "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical... It is a medicine necessary to the sound health of government." From wherever he is watching us now, our Third President can rest in peace knowing that the human race still remembers to take its medicine, for the flame lit in Egypt a week ago has spread like a wildfire throughout the Middle East, and has now arrived back in the country that originally lit it 235 years ago, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin- where teachers, police officers, firefighters, and countless others are banding together to defend one of the most precious rights to a modern, industrialized society- the right to form a union and bargain collectively.

It is far too easy for 21st Century Americans, complacent in our middle class lifestyles and all the luxuries that come with them, to forget what sacrifices earlier generations of Americans had to make to create the society of freedom and general affluence that we live in today. The aforementioned Mr. Jefferson and his comrades surely sacrificed a great deal to give us our Independence from Great Britain and, in their drafting of the Constitution, to forever protect us from suffering under the same sort of abuses at the hands of tyrannical government that they suffered under, and which the Egyptian people had likewise, until recently, suffered under. However, even the freedom passed down to us from the Founding Fathers was an incomplete one- for they did not and could not have foreseen the rise of a tyranny every bit as pernicious, autocratic, and hostile to human liberty as the monarchies of Old Europe- the tyranny of big business in Gilded Age America.

Within fifty years of Thomas Jefferson's death in 1826, his dream of an America in which every citizen could be a self-sufficient farmer dependant on no one, died with him. The nation was changing, business was booming, and sons of farmers were moving to the city to take jobs as meat packers, automobile manufacturers, construction workers, and yes- teachers, police officers, and firefighters. The allure of the city was hardly exclusive to Anglo-Americans however- it also attracted droves of immigrants, including my ancestors, to move to this country from places like Germany, Italy, and Ireland. History has remembered this era of the rise of industry and the exodus to the city as "The Gilded Age"- a reference to the process of gilding, by which a thin layer of gold is applied to an object in the desire of making it appear more regal and majestic-looking. The newly arrived immigrants' and industrial workers' dreams of cities paved in gold were elusive however, and were soon replaced by the reality of an overpopulated dystopia where men who were once free were now forced to choose between allowing their children to starve, or continuing to suffer the odious indignities of the 80+ hour workweek with no days off and at wages just high enough to keep them alive so that they may come in the next week to put in another 80 hours, all the while making the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, and the Rockefellers, richer. It was a disgrace to the name of freedom, and could not have been

further from what men like Jefferson envisioned for the country they helped create.

Luckily for us, the worst of that society has long been dead, slain by that conglomeration of regulations, government agencies, and tax codes that conservatives today derisively refer to as "big government", as well as the ultimate, albeit long-overdue, endorsement of the union movement by the Federal Government in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, one of the crowning achievements of the New Deal. Today however, those institutions which remain the only barrier between us and a replay of the dark realities of Gilded Age America, are under attack in a way they have not been since the Great Depression. In Wisconsin, the same state that served as the genesis for many of the programs that today protect us from a return to the dark days of Gilded Age America- including unemployment insurance, workers compensation, progressive taxation, the eight-hour workday, and the forty-hour workweek- the State Teacher's Union is under attack by the newly elected Republican Governor under the pretext of lowering the state deficit. Nevermind that the Wisconsin Teachers' Union has already stated a willingness for its members to pay more for their job benefits, as was originally the Governor's stated reason for attacking the union, Governor Walker continues to insist that the union not only be weakened, but busted- and legislation pending approval in the Wisconsin State Legislature will do just that. In brave defiance of the Governor's draconian powerplay, 14 Democratic Wisconsin State Senators fled their home state yesterday so as to prevent the Republican-controlled legislature from obtaining the quorum necessary to pass the Governor's bill into law, and bust the state's Teachers Union.

This is a critical time not just for Wisconsin, but for our nation as a whole, where we must decide whether our way out of the Great Recession and our current budget crisis will be to a future where we continue to build on the progress made by American generations prior towards a society where the fruits of industrialization and global capitalism are shared by the many, or a return to the era where they were horded exclusively by the wealthy few. If we choose the former course, we must recognize that unions, progressive taxation, and government regulation were solutions to a problem that still haunts us (though nowhere near to the extent that it will in the event of their dismantling), and reject outright the notion that any mechanism designed to protect workers from abuse by management is a form of "class warfare"- quite the contrary, the resistance to such mechanisms, I would argue, is class warfare. If we wish to stay true to the promise Thomas Jefferson saw in us, we will embrace both the legacy of and the continued presence in our society of unions, for the right to life doesn't mean much if you are forced to spend your life working 80-hour weeks, the right to liberty doesn't mean much if losing your job means starvation for you and your family, and the right to pursue happiness does not mean much when there is no escape from the social class you are born into.

March Like An Egyptian

It is often said, that "when the government fears the people, there is liberty; when the people fear the government, there is tyranny;" if it be true, then the entire region of the Middle East got a robust shipment of liberty today in the wake of the successful Egyptian Revolution. Truly, the despotic regimes of the Arabian Peninsula and Northern Africa, some supported by the United States, some vociferously opposed by us, have much to fear from their constituents- for following Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, the victorious European monarchies could exile him to Saint Helena and restore the Bourbon Dynasty to the throne of France, but they could not undo his abolition of serfdom, his rejection of theocracy, or his guarantee of due process and democracy, for the taste of liberty is sweet and addictive, and once a people have enjoyed the fruits of it they tend not to be hospitable to the concept of a return to their former servitude.

This is not to say that Revolutions are without their risks, however. Before Napoleon, there was Robespierre, and after him there was the Bourbon Restoration. Fledgling democratic revolutions are volatile and fragile, and require nourishment from those experienced in living with the dangers of democracy in order to avoid replacing an old despotism with a new one. As such, it is the moral obligation of the United States, as the firstborn child of liberty and its premiere spokesperson to the rest of the world, to do everything we can to assist the Egyptian people and any neighbors that may join them in the joys of Revolution in establishing free, democratic, and secular republics. Now some of my comrades on the left would have you believe that such "interference" would be a sign of arrogance on the part of the racist, paternalistic West to meddle in the affairs of a country with a different culture and set of customs than our own. To this, I reply that I can think of nothing so arrogant and paternalistic as the concept that it is an intrinsic aspect of one's culture to be told from birth how to live, worship, and think by the Saudi King, the Iranian Grand Ayatollah, or the Syrian President. Relativism has no right to ask for such a sacrifice on the part of the Middle Eastern people.

The United States has much to be ashamed of in our historic support for Middle Eastern dictators, there's no doubt about that- but such guilt does not absolve us from our obligation to the very people oppressed by such regimes to avoid the predicament of the Iranian people in 1979, who had their revolution hijacked by a theocracy that quickly outlived its welcome. The people of the Middle East and Northern Africa have every right to secular democracy that we have, and it is my sincere wish that in the coming weeks and months we will see all the oppressed populations of the Arab world rise up against their oppressors, and march like Egyptians.

Build a Budget Workshop

I've been considering a side career as a smartphone app developer lately. Not that I would have the foggiest idea how to write the programming or design the layout- I just frequently get ideas for applications that would manage to educate Americans while simultaneously captivating their attention with all the ferocity of that technological crack-cocaine known as "Angry Birds." One such idea is "Build a Budget Workshop"- an app which would allow the American people to tinker with the Federal Budget in all its bulk, and decide for themselves which programs they would like to see cut in order to achieve an ideal, balanced budget. Such an app would serve the purpose of both informing the American people of what is really in the budget, and what effect it would have on their lives if the Republicans actually passed the massive budget cuts that they seem to be under the impression they have the public mandate for. Alright, maybe it's no "Angry Birds," but it would educate an American public desperately in need of clarification on budgetary matters.

Take for example, a recent World Public Opinion poll conducted around the time of the election last November, asking Americans how much of the budget they believed went to and should go to foreign aid, the only part of the budget Americans consistently tell pollsters they would like to see cut. As Talking Points Memo points out, even here Americans aren't really sure what they want: "respondents guessed, on average, that foreign aid spending represented 27% of the federal budget. To trim spending, the same respondents suggested that, on average, foreign aid should make up a slimmer 13% of the total budget, surely delivering massive savings. The problem? Foreign aid is actually a miniscule 1% of the total budget. Even eliminating it altogether would do little to balance the budget or reduce the deficit."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/polls-show-americans-largely-clueless-about-where-us-budget-goes.php

It would seem that even those government expenditures Americans would most like to see cut, they value enough to say should take up 13% of the Federal budget- an entire 13 times more than what they actually do! However, Talking Points also points out that Americans lowball other parts of the budget that take up a much, much larger piece of the pie- citing a Rasmussen poll from just a week ago where Americans in one breath say that the defense budget should not be cut, and in another say that an adequate American military budget need not be 3 times larger than any other nation- despite the fact that our current military expenditures are a whole 7 times larger than our next highest competitor, China. Thus, to the degree that a public mandate for cutting the deficit exists in the country, it seems that Americans are most hospitable to doing so through defense cuts, and raising taxes on the wealthy (an idea supported by 65% of the public according to CNN and 59% according to Gallup in November and September, respectively, of last year), thus begging the question- why did they so overwhelmingly last November vote for the party that would be least hospitable to both of those ideas? 

The Kids Are Not Alright

I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different had I not gone to Catholic schools. No this is not just me waxing sentimental, a friend of mine recently showed me an article extolling the virtues of the American Catholic school system for turning out students with higher test scores, while spending considerably less per student than the Public School System. As a 13-year veteran of the Catholic school system, it is not at all surprising to me that the average student from an American Catholic school scores higher on their SAT's and/or ACT's than an average student in the same grade at a Public School- the question is whether or not this is due to the curriculum and structure of Catholic education versus Public education, or some other lurking variable.

Speaking from my own experience, I lean towards the latter answer. The size of my class between Kindergarten and my Senior year of High School generally fluctuated between 12 to 14 students. Among those, there were a few braniacs (including yours truly), a large "middle class," if you will, and a few who consistently struggled- just as I have heard that it is in Public Schools. The difference, however, is at the bottom. While some students in my class struggled mightily, their parents obviously cared enough about their education to send them to a Catholic school that they had to pay good money for. While these students may or may not have cared about their own education, their parents weren't about to throw the money they paid to send them to Catholic Schools down the drain. Therein lies the difference. Unfortunately for our society and our public school system, too many disadvantaged children enrolled in Public Schools have parents who are utterly apathetic about what kind of education their children get, or worse, feel threatened and demean children who strive to succeed where they may have failed. With no real motivation to put an effort towards their own education besides personal ambition, which is almost never matured fully enough in a grade school child to have much of an effect, these kids often fall behind their classmates in elementary school where study habits are developed, and never catch up- beginning a tragic trek to, at best, mediocrity and, at worst, crime, for a child once embedded with all the potential of an Albert Einstein, a Yo-Yo Ma, or a Barack Obama.

If there is a lesson to be learned from Catholic Schools' higher test scores than Public Schools', it is that children who have someone that cares about them tend to do better than children who do not. The students in my class at Holy Cross Catholic Academy in Amarillo, Texas, did not get higher average scores on the SAT than students at nearby Caprock High because we went to Mass every week and they didn't, or because we had to wear uniforms and they didn't, or even because we were 1 of 12 while they were 1 of 1200- we got higher average scores because our average wasn't brought down by kids who were never given a reason to try and thus never did. Until poverty is fixed in this country, education never will be.