First Day of School

It is the eve of the first day of school in Texas, I go to bed early, and then I awake thinking that the Republican Convention is postponed tomorrow due to Isaac, but many of that state’s surrounding public schools are open. I think that is telling. I think that is symbolic. The Republican Party is delayed a day, their platform is delayed by a century, and the schools go on.

So, let this be the first day of school, the first day of learning. Thunder is caused by lightning which super heats air. As the air contracts it creates a partial vacuum filled with expanding air that creates a resonant crack or a rumble. It is not caused by anybody up there bowling. Got it? Perhaps not. The point is that we have advanced our knowledge through all the sciences (and I include sociology, psychology, archeology, etc.) to the extent that we really, really know a lot. Each day I am amazed that people hold ideas that are not grounded in truth, not grounded in knowledge, not grounded in fact. One of the truly remarkable attributes of our species of life is to believe something so strongly that reality has no chance. The only chance reality has is an education. So, let’s go to school tomorrow and hope everyone on the Gulf Coast escapes the storm unharmed.

We might learn that life on this 4.5 billion year old planet emerged about 3 billion years ago in single cell simple forms and gradually escalated and grew more sophisticated, (yes, Victoria, I’m talking evolution,) to become one of several species of humans about 2.5 million years ago. By about 500,000 years ago we were down to only a couple of species of humans, and 200,000 years ago those species apparently merged to become modern humans. The earth is not 6,000 years old. Humans did not spring overnight from dust in the hands of a supernatural being. We emerged and evolved.

There are a host of human holy books including the Torah, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Tipitaka, the Rig Veda, and the Kojiki. None of these books were written by deities. They were all written by human hands. Our knowledge has exploded since each of these books were written, though there are those who continue to believe in literal statements in each one of them rather than learning the true tenants of the belief. The central message in each is believe in the supernatural, love your neighbor, forgive your neighbor, and go forth and do good works.

Where were we? Oh yes, what we know vs. believe. We know trickle down economics, supply side economics, has never worked. Never.  It did not work for Reagan, or either Bush both of whom incurred massive debt.  We have seen what Europe has gone through with its austerity budgets.  That did not work either.  Supply side/trickle down/balanced budgets are Medieval, proposed by lords who want peasants to fend for themselves.  It is proposed by people who have something to trickle down and do not want to. They missed the point of all the books listed above. We know that the grand story of humanity is the spread of liberal thinking vs. the defensiveness of those who would conserve things as they are now or were in the past. Forever, governments were formed based on birth right, a truly scary notion, or by the physical defeat of one king at the hands of a stronger king, an even scarier notion. Then somewhere around the mid 1700’s some philosophers who were so out in left field in their day they were persecuted, proposed that perhaps the government could be of the people, by the people, for the people. These were extreme left-wingers! They had to fight to have their chance to set up such a government. They won. Welcome to America, home of liberal thought on planet earth.

We have always been a nation of immigrants. The people we call Native Americans immigrated here. The founding fathers immigrated here. Welcome to the land of immigrants.

We have been struggling for 200 years to expand the notion of civil liberties, that is the rights of all humans, not just a select few. At first, it only belonged to white male property owners. Lincoln, a Republican, gave rights to Black Americans to be declared people not property, and black males got to vote in the USA before white women. Finally in the early 1900’s women were given the right to vote. There are groups who would prefer to return to some day where people are declared illegal immigrants so they cannot vote, sorta like Native Americans and our Founding Fathers who entered the country without documentation. I know a few husbands who would prefer their wives not vote and are scared to death their daughters will. I know men who believe women should not have decision making authority over their own reproductive systems because they find a line in one of the holy books mentioned above that seems to make conception a miracle. Sexual reproduction on this planet existed millions of years before humans appeared. Process is pretty simple if you ask any kid in FFA. The female bears the young. If, in fact, there is a deity that created all the life on this planet then surely we should refer to the deity as feminine, so as not to insult Her Holiness.

It is also very interesting to me that those who learned great truths (Galileo, Newton, etc.) were punished, and persecuted by those who were belief-based. That trend continues today.

So, simple truths: learn economics, learn biology, learn anthropology, learn chemistry, learn math, learn astronomy, and absolutely learn the language to learn those areas listed above, and you will become educated. You will have great potential based on knowledge, not belief.

Wonder why on the first day of school there is a political party hell bent on keeping the masses from learning truth in the public schools, would like to see it dismantled, would like to see it face less funding, would like to see it become an institution of faith based learning, would like to shift funds from public schools to private and/or competitive schools. Wonder why?

God bless all the children going to school tomorrow to learn the truth.

Amen.