What's wrong with our country, and how're you gonna fix it?

POSTED BY: Cuda
UPDATED: Thursday, December 11, 2025 19:41
VIEWED: 28394
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ARAWAEN

Friday, March 12, 2004 4:09 PM

Quote:
As to my feelings on highschool and college, I wish that someone had offered opportunities to learn more about 'real world finance'. It is a crying shame that many Americans do not understand credit, basic accounting, mortgages, and their retirement savings. I didn't learn most of that until my twenties. Every kid coming out of highschool should understand money in a free market economy like ours. Their are way too many ways to lose everything.

If they had, I would never have been willing to sign for my student loan...

Wow, I would be a lot better off.

You are so right on this. I've had to learn from mistakes which while a valid form of learning, is not preferable to learning from other people's mistakes and hence not having to make your own.

Arawaen

Um, I'm lost. Uh, I'm Angry. And I'm Armed.

MAUGWAI

Friday, March 12, 2004 4:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Steve580:
English should focus more on reading than writting; perhaps two seperate classes are needed. And the writting they teach needs to be changed. English clas prepares you to be an English teacher; nothing more. It doesn't teach you to write business reports, or office memos, or scientific reports, or magazine articles, or novels. Not my English class, anyways. But boy, did we spend a lot fo time on poems. Damn useful stuff, that is. 'Bout as helpful as that ole' inequality graph.

Good. Keep that ciritcism. I am an English teacher, and I don't teach my students to be English teachers. But I do teach them to think. In high school, your reading should be more critical. Those poems taught you more than you know. By learning to analyze poetry, you learned to analiyze political speeches and episodes of Firefly.

I totally agree with the idea of taking history all four years. Way more useful than the inequality graph. But it has to be more than videos and worksheets. Half of our history department is coaches who know very little about history. They show videos and give out worksheets and make kids read the book and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. It's kind of appalling.

So I guess that's one of the things that's wrong with this country. Some of the older teachers teach the way they were taught without noticing that times have changed. So kids learn what their grandparents learned, which fits only the world in which their grandparents lived. So when they get out of high school, they don't know how to care about the world around them. Oh, if only I had a dime for every time I was in the middle of a rant about the travesties of sex slaves in Thailand when some kid interrupted me to ask what time we get out of class.

By the way, we in the US may be ignorant and self-centered, but most of us do not sell our daughters into slavery, and we do give a lot of humanitarian aid to the rest of the world.

"Dear diary, today I was pompous and my sister was crazy."

ARAWAEN

Friday, March 12, 2004 5:10 PM

Quote:
Well, since all of these political discussions seem to center around fixing what is wrong with your country, why not have people describe their perfect society?

The BORG! No, wait... Resistance is futile!

Honestly though, I think it is not about getting a perfect society, but an ideal to strive for and the need to constantly strive towards that ideal.

I am reminded of this saying:

"We have remarked that one reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is the only argument against being a conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all convservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone you will soon have a black post. If you particularly want it to be white yo umust always be painting it again; that is, you must always be having a revolution. Briefly, if you want an old white post you must have a new white post. But that which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old."
-- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I keep deleting everything I say after this point, so maybe I will just let G.K. speak for me.

Arawaen

Um, I'm lost. Uh, I'm Angry. And I'm Armed.

JEDIJOE7

Friday, March 12, 2004 7:25 PM

A lot. But there's a lot right too. Or at least until lawyers get involved. First to all the non-US citizens. FYI: the American citizen is as much a victim of their own goverenment as the rest of the world is. Yes, we have a republic playing at democracy. But the big corporations and special interst groups with the right amount of money can override the wishes of the majority by enfluencing members of Congress. It's a game that is played by a free enterprise society. Most citizens realize this on some level and that's why you traditionally see such a low voter turn out compared to other countries. Additionally most politicians are wealthy or planning to be so they all have their own personal agenda. As someone said, it's all simple human nature. How do we fix the stuff that's wrong? First, eliminate the Electoral College. Second, get the citizens to realize that a united population CAN effect change. Get people to be as attentive to the people running the US as they are to darn ball games flooding TV. Third: teach people to think about what they are told and question the source. God gave you a brain, now use it! The media in league with politicians, big business, their own agendas, political correctness are tainting the information presented to the citizenry. It is a propaganda war basically. And it is all designed to keep the powers that be in control and the average Joe in his place. People disgusted with the system and distracted by daily problems and a sunami of sports are not paying attention and the politicians and megacorporations are doing pretty much whatever they please and getting away with it. I work in government and see what is going on. The public is not using it's potential to force accountability and responsible behavior upon its own government. Government does not serve the people, it currently serves itself. Come on guys, pay attention and make your representatives BE your representatives and not the lobbiests'. This is by no means a complete solution, but its a good start.

Signature, what's that? Do I put my X here?

GEEZER

Friday, March 12, 2004 7:48 PM

What's wrong with our country?

One thing is that there are too many people who think they know exactly what's wrong with our country, and think that they should be able to tell me exactly what I must do to fix it.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

DYAIRVATREE

Saturday, March 13, 2004 12:34 AM

Gee CUDA quote me and then cut me out with your edit. See how you are and my quote was there for a day too then you decided you didn't like it for shame.

You said you put it their to get people started and now I'm disappointed in you.

Why is Ruxton talking about Ross Perot exactly?

It must have been my later posts.

Oh well this is what I get for talking about Skull and Bones I guess. A charming orginization out of Yale that graduates 15 members a year two of whom are running for president.

Well whatever I don't know about the rest of you but I'm voting Bonesmen!

Or maybe it was my talking about how Pat Buchanan won the right to speak at the 2000 presidential debates by law by getting 5% of the vote. And then had it taken away by the Bi-Partisan commission who when the next election came around said he now needed 15% of the vote. Once again making sure no third parties could ever win.

Posting a Democracy Now link was to leftist maybe?

Whatever!

CUDA

Saturday, March 13, 2004 1:25 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by dyairvatree:
Gee CUDA quote me and then cut me out with your edit. See how you are and my quote was there for a day too then you decided you didn't like it for shame.

You said you put it their to get people started and now I'm disappointed in you.

And now many comments like Cowards and Ruxton make less sense how sad.

Well sorry, I wasn't exactly trying to offend you. I just put it there to get things started, and then things got started. I was only trying to draw the debates from threads that began with subjects other than politics.

DYAIRVATREE

Saturday, March 13, 2004 1:59 AM

Quote:
...For God sakes let this thread die.

That was what you posted after my last post on the same thread you once quoted. For someone not trying to offend me your not doing a very good job.

Oh and the last post you quoted I was ironically in the proccess of altering while you posted it. I had no idea you post back so quick but it's not like you can really fault me for that I guess.

DYAIRVATREE

Saturday, March 13, 2004 11:22 AM

By the Cuda I was a little annoyed but I ain't really mad or anything.This is a really cool political thread I'm enjoying reading it.

RUXTON

Saturday, March 13, 2004 10:28 PM

Dyairvatree, I mentioned Perot because we discussed him at the beginning of this thread; and because it was an example of learning from history. Perot said there'd be a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving the U.S. if NAFTA went through. It did, and he was right.

I voted for Buchanan. He alone said to close the southern border, which is still wide open to ANYONE who wants to enter the U.S. It can be a "terrorist," Mexican, Israeli, Russian, you name it, they can walk in from the south. I've seen it. Yet no one but Buchanan has so much as mentioned it as a problem. Instead we get tripe like the "Patriot Act."

Didja notice how Dennis Kucinich was talked over by the moderators at a recent TV debate? Kerry was telling the viewers the truth, which wasn't supposed to get out. The moderators kissed Kerry's butt openly. I turned it off.

........Ruxton

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