It's interesting what a few minutes of cruising around YouTube can do to stimulate the mind.
This morning I have been thinking about our education system, and reviewing the statements made at the Fairmont Conference by Sutton, Sowell and Friedman. On the one hand, I think Sutton was being a bit short-sighted, but that's beside the point. Friedman was quite interesting in that he looked at a number of issues that are still remaining problems for the underclass, but at the top of his list was education. And yet our educational system remains fairly weak in many places and quite frankly inverted in other high places. This week, Boy went with the California Jr Scholastic Federation, in which he is a member by dint of being on the honor roll, to UCLA. And so now I have begun to think about the hundreds of thousands of dollars I will need to earn for my kids continuing education.
I take a moment to note that I make too much money to get a Cal Grant, and nowhere near enough to feel comfortable in spending 25k/year (times three) on my kid's tuition, room and board at UC. Also that the Pell Grant Program, which I'm also probably too affluent to qualify for, spends an average of about 12 billion a year, providing 5.3 million students with scholarships.
At any rate, I found this video by Thomas Sowell, in looking for other materials related to the Fairmont Conference in which he suggested rather pessimistically last summer, that it may take a military coup to save America from itself if our politics and educational systems continue in the miserable way they have in recent years. Sowell thinks we are cruising on accumulated capital which is bound to run out unless we get busy generating the sorts of wealth that keeps nations growing. I'm sure his is no idle speculation. He thinks Iran will go nuclear and that there will be hell to pay, but we may sit and twiddle our thumbs.
The idea has crossed my mind on several occasions that the most honorable folks in America seem to be the military brass, and that there's something a little bit freaky about McCain as President. More specifically 'War President'. I've also noticed that a number of 9/11 Democrats like Dennis Miller tend to be a little bit too obsequious at times. And I've already told you the story of
For some reason I cannot fathom, perhaps because of some similar interest by the person who posted the video, there was an associated video of a kid who is five foot nine inches tall, who does extraordinary dunks with a basketball. This kid, TDub is phenomenal. Like most folks, I am impressed by the skill and determination that goes into what this guy does, but I'll probably be more likely than most folks to call into question its value. You cannot look at what TDub does and not think to yourself, it's hard for me to believe a human being can do that. It looks like the stuff of video game and cartoon physics. And so I think to myself, what if this guy were a warrior?
Immediately I think of the novel and film 'Timeline' in which the author describes how quickly mideval warriors were with heavy swords on horseback. If you consider for a moment the extreme lengths to which people will train and push themselves it's not so amazing that a kid can dunk like this, or that a man could swing a 30 pound sword faster than you can blink. Why that's not the same kid is a question relating to what our society motivates us to do.
For a number of years I have been writing about the direction of black politics, but the subtext is how African Americans are or are not integrating into society. At a certain level there is no issue. We *are* integrated into society. Black culture is transparent (although perhaps certaing black churches are not) and everybody is more or less exposed to the same culture. But what our culture motivates us to do is often not in the national interest and that keeps us spinning out efforts into awesome, yet futile behavior. Today, we 'naturally' expect to find someone like TDub and we expect that they will display skills of a certain type. TDub and the dunk are indeed stereotypical. There's nothing wrong except that this sort of entertainment does not work towards our national purpose. I'm not saying that art and entertainment should, I am talking about the zero sum game of individual skill development. What kind of men and women are we to be, and how can we comport ourselves to not be dismissible in the grand scheme of things. One soldier, one doctor, one farmer can make the difference between life and death, one basketball dunker never will - or if he does, then we have come to a sorry state.
I am as bored with middle class achievement as anyone, and I would hardly wish it upon blackfolks and black politics that we all become accountants or soldiers 'for the survival of the race'. But I think we might all do a little more thinking about how we develop our skills for the sake of the challenges America is apt to face over the next 20 years, which might indeed mean war. I've seen the Underarmor commercial and I know the George Carlin bit - we are a warlike nation, we like war. In all of us there is a taste for combat, but that's a different thing than being prepared for it. Democracies in fact hate war and we always prefer to vote against it. But we must always be prepared for it.
Sometimes I get the feeling that we have a generation of men who are prepared to leap tall buildings with a single bound but only for the applause.
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