WEEKLY COLUMN:
JDM vs the WORLD

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FINE PRINT

Thousands of students walked out of publicly-subsidized classrooms nationwide today—March 5, 2003—in protest of the looming war with Iraq. They demonstrated under the banner of Books Not Bombs, carrying signs with cutesy slogans like “It’s the Middle East, not the Wild West” and “God Does Not Bless America Only.”

Probably “No Blood For Oil,” too, though I’ve yet to confirm it.

Meanwhile, a survey reported in National Geographic last November shows that only 17 percent of young adults can find Afghanistan on a map. I’d be surprised if 17 percent of young adults can so much as spell “Afghanistan,” or, for that matter, “map.” And these children are somehow supposed to be our future? Well, forget about the future. There won’t even be a future at the rate we’re going.

Why’d these kids walk out of class, anyway? College professors are devoted utopians. Public school teachers vote Democrat en masse. Much like the French, these kids basically just walked out on their allies.

They probably didn’t get marked absent for it, either, which bothers me because I remember going to school with kids who didn’t get the day off when their grandparents died. In fairness, though, I also knew people whose grandparents died 13 or 14 times apiece, and they were allowed to attend every last funeral free-of-charge. So, I guess it all works out in the end.

But I digress.

The point is, it’d be easier to accept what these kids are doing if only it appeared they knew what they were doing in the process.

An example: When asked on tonight’s episode of Hannity & Colmes if any war was justifiable, Karim Lopez of the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition said that any war which moves humanity forward is fine with him. Reasonable enough, right? Wrong. Here’s why: Mr. Lopez went on to note the Cuban revolution.

The Cuban Revolution!

You want to remind me why Elian Gonzalez lost his mom en route to Florida three years ago? You want to remind me why people risk their lives escaping from Cuba on rafts? Actually, I’m not the one who needs reminding—I know full well that the rise of Fidel Castro did not move humanity forward in any conceivable way. If you want to get in touch with Mr. Lopez and remind him, however, your help in the War on Stupidity would be much appreciated.

But this leads me to wonder: If the Cuban revolution is okay in this kid’s book, what the hell kind of books are these kids reading?

Another example for you: Amiri Baraka is my home state of New Jersey’s Poet Laureate and now an educator in Newark. This man so appreciates the noble pursuit of truth that he suggests two vicious Zionists by the names of Bush and Sharon planned the 9/11 attacks.

Yeah, exactly.

Look, I love the freedom of speech as much as the next guy, but the thought of this dude speaking freely in a classroom is almost as frightening as war itself. Next to Michael Jackson, I can’t think of anyone I’d want to keep away from my kids more than Amiri Baraka.

If he wants to preach his revisionist rhetoric in a park or on a street corner, fine. Not in a classroom.

And while I’m on the subject, New Jersey is the same state where the Department of Education thought so highly of history—social studies, if they still call it that—that it tried to revise its “history standards” last year to omit such meaningless world figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Who needs ‘em, right? What’d they ever do? Start the country? Bah. Big deal.

Look, like it or not, the American education system has been on one big Christmas Break for years now… or Winter Solstice Break, or whatever the NEA and ACLU are forcing us to call it nowadays. We’re about to enter an era in history unlike any other—an era in which students might write current events reports on clippings such as, “Another Nuke Hits Downtown Detroit; Tigers Drop 4th in a Row”—and it would seem to me that kids today are woefully unprepared for what’s to come.

I understand that rebellion is a part of youth. I’m only a few years removed from school myself, so I can sympathize. But do these kids even know what they’re rebelling against? Being that only 17 percent can find Afghanistan on a map, I can’t help but wonder.

Our society has come to the point where teachers aren’t even allowed to give failing grades. That’s become illegal somehow. If a kid can’t turn in a test deserving of an F+, though, then is it any surprise we’re raising a nation of paper tigers?

The children aren’t our future. The robots are.

God bless America. God save our schools.

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