What Me Worry?

What are we so afraid of? Just sit back for about ten or twenty minutes and let what you've been seeing, but probably not looking at, for the last ten years or so flow through your mind. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Headlines about war and terror probably entered near the top, and they are both completely manufactured problems. Your chances of being killed by a terrorist is ; incredibly lower than an Iraqi being killed by an American; you have a much greater chance of being taken out by e-coli because the F.D.A. is a completely incompetent stooge for Agribusiness and Pharm.

At some point you thought about how unions are at the root of our problems, and how public employees make too much money and have far too many benefits. For real? Think back. Those were the people we made fun of because all they had to do to get a job was pass the civil service test. They worked for crap pay and got benefits, but we worked for a lot better pay and had a lot better benefits. In fact, even in private industry we had better pay and benefits than the workers who belonged to unions. Unions were for saps and we knew that; right up until the corporate hotshots got greedy under President Reagan and started to strip us of our pay and our benefits and now our jobs. Turns out the only ones left standing are union members and the public employees who still have crap pay and benefits but we're suddenly thinking they have more than us. All that time we were secretly worried we were losers and guess what? We were right!

Schools were probably high on the list. You're very afraid your children aren't learning and rightly so. So you got very involved with your children's schools. You and a bunch of the other well-meaning parents. You immediately saw the problem. Eighth graders. They were on the playground with your third grader and you knew the eighth graders because you were one. Eighth graders smoke cigarettes, they do and sell drugs, and they have sex. Real sex and not just kissing and stuff.  Home run sex.

And the biggest problem with schools? Teachers and the unions. Well, not really, I was just messing with you. The biggest problem with the schools are very involved parents. Think back, way back to when you were in grade school; if you're old enough you'll realize your parents weren't involved at all and the schools were, surprise, much better. Get uninvolved today.

If you really want to help your child's future, figure out who knows the most about how young minds absorb and assimilate information. Unless you're a primary school teacher, you don't. Primary school teachers spend years in rooms chock full of young minds watching them, figuring out how each one learns, learning the differences between minds, coming to the conclusion that there are way too many minds in those rooms day after day after day. Coming to the conclusion that it was a huge mistake to remove art and music from the curriculum. Coming to the conclusion that it was better when there were older kids that would help the younger kids learn on the playgrounds. Listen to them. Become involved. Lobby to get the teachers everything they need. This will raise your taxes, but it's your children and our future we're talking about. If we do this on the cheap, well, you figure out what you'll be giving your kids.

Here is what I worry about. I studied just enough history to be terrified by recent events. You see, down through the ages revolutions arise when a few people control a vast majority of the money. For a while the wealthy play a game very much like Three Card Monte. Everyone keeps looking for the Queen. But, eventually, someone in the crowd wises up. (That's where we are today, right now, in this analogy.) Pretty soon the entire crowd wises up and the Three-Card Monte dealer is legging it down the street, leaving everything behind, but his pockets are lined with cash; he absconds exactly the way the C.E.O. of Halliburton did when he moved to Dubai.

Now Dubai is a country that will not extradite you back to the United States, but you have to wonder why a loyal, solid American, a good Republican and conservative, a personal friend of Vice-President Dick Cheney, would leave the greatest country in the world, a country that stands for freedom and justice for all, to live in the desert with a bunch of Arabs that got rich raping every country in the world one barrel of oil at a time. What could they possibly have in common? What could they possibly talk about in their opulent mansions?