walrus51

Plenty of comments – supportive and otherwise – on Mitt Romney’s comments at a private political fund-raiser in May 2012.

Romney — who called President Obama to task for dividing our nation — himself divided our nation into two groups: the Makers and the Moochers.

47% of Americans, he said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

I think it’s useful to look back into history to see what we can learn from the past.

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954) was a seminal Supreme Court decision which ostensibly eliminated the ‘separate but equal’ education doctrine, yet ultimately drew a line in the sand, and created a truly apartheid K-12 education system across most of the U.S.

Add into that equation the impact of heavily subsidized highways which supported the automobile and which exacerbated ‘sprawl’; the prolific conversion of farmland into residential subdivisions; and the residual effects of HUD policies from the 1930’s which encouraged low-income households to exclude wage-earning males.

Pretty soon, we in the U.S. had a perfect laboratory from which to grow a sub-culture which favors 15 and 16 year old girls to make babies, leave school and go on public assistance. The boys? They might go to prison, or maybe die from a drug overdose or a shooting.

Who cares about them anyway? Certainly not Mitt Romney!

It is amazing to learn that this new model exists and flourishes in the Native American communities in New Mexico, in native villages in Alaska, as well as in most cities in the continental U.S.

Is this something Obama created or supports? There is no evidence to support that.

This model of exclusion seems to date back to many prior decades, even centuries — we might even say it began around 1620 when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth — and now, Romney wants to further polarize our citizenry with his bullshit incendiary commentary.

The real sadness here is that for the past 30 years, or so, there seems to have been no focus on encouraging or developing critical thinking skills for students in public schools.

It would seem that regular people who were challenged and encouraged to do some original research and thinking would be able to differentiate between pure unadulterated bullshit and a more nuanced and careful flowchart that traces back to root causes, and allows for informed conclusions which might result in solutions to our current mediocre position in the world landscape.

Sad. Very sad…..