Maybe this is obvious, but, in the midst of my real anger against Bush, in my quiet still center, I do know he's just a symptom of a huger problem: in my country, wealth and our claim (sometimes dubious) to vast natural resources--however unequally the wealth and the profits from those resources have been distributed--has made us short-sighted, selfish, and willing to believe that we can do everything on the cheap and without paying for it.
It's not just Bush who is like that, and not even just Republicans. We are a tax-cut and spend society, a credit-card society, and chickens are coming home to roost all around. I wish it were just a Bush problem. It's much bigger.
And I don't see a single event like this as sufficient for awakening on some mass scale--education is almost always a longer, slower process, requiring focus, attention, and time for reflection. In my experience as a teacher, enlightenment does not come from out the blue. It's a kind of tip of the iceberg, or something that happens at some critical point after evidence and reflection time has amassed and can only then, suddenly, crystalize. We're failing the job pretty miserably. Bush's "no child left" policy isn't helping, but the bigger problem is that as a society we have largely been able to bumble along on our wealth, and shut out, blame, or marginalize any voices outside, and shield ourselves from painful parts of reality. And we have access to more and more cool toys to distract us even further.
There is such an obvious failure of imagination in those Bush phrases, "No one could have ever predicted the levees would burst" and Condi's "No one could have predicted" that someone would slam a plane into skyscrapers. But, fact is, most of my students at this point feel no call, no urgency, no sense that it's possible, and imperative to!, in fact, plan for and work together on a broad social level to create and maintain a liveable world.
And so we don't value the very things we most need now to move forward. And so, here we are, with so much of our infrastructure--never fully funded, never fully solid, never really "caring" even at the best of times--sold down the river for a mess of flashy weaponry and SUVs in every garage (dreams of rags-to-SUVs, for the garage-less). |
