Try and Remember the Past this Time

We have a new president. Most of us look forward to the new person it marks the beginning of a new era in our country. Maybe it will mark a kinder gentler era. We certainly need that. It’s an cinch that Obama is trying to usher in a kinder gentler era. He started out forgiving a fellow Democrat (Lieberman) for backing his opponent in the election and he invited a preacher whose views are certain opposed too much of what he believes.

 

These signals haven’t been enough to stop those who ply the party out of power. They are continuing their vitriol through their stealth emailing. But worse than that they are starting to revise history. You can hear it on the Sunday talking heads programs as they start talking about the Bush legacy as they crow about the legacy of the last eight years.

 

First they talk about “No child left behind” as a successful program. You can asked almost any teacher and find the fallacy in that statement. Not only have the schools not improved during the Bush years, they’ve become decidedly worse.

 

Two, you keep hearing how we haven’t been attacked since 9/11. To believe that you would have to discount almost very other attack since then, plus discount the over 4000 people we’ve lost in Iraq. These people conveniently ignore the attacks against those who support us such as Spain, England, and India. They don’t count the less spectacular attacks that are meant to soften us up. They don’t count the years that we have been caused to live in fear of being randomly attacked. THEY ALSO DON’T COUNT THE ATTACKS AGAINST OUR CONSTITUTION.

 

Three, I’ve heard talk about keeping taxes low and growing the job market. Truth about this has been the opposite. The job market has shrunk and jobs have paid less and less money during the Bush years. Today most people have to have at least two jobs to supply their households with the goods and services. We are receiving less pay and fewer benefits.

 

Lastly, I would like to remind you that we’ve now had two Bushes and each has left office in disrepute and very low approval ratings. Each has left office with an economy that’s in trouble. Each has left office with a list of failures that make for a long list. With the first Bush history was rewritten and his time in office remade into a successful period. We shouldn’t allow this to happen with this Bush. And people ………. Lets never allow a third Bush into the office of president.

Change?

This month in this country we are going to witness a great momentous occasion. As a country we will swear in a man of a different ethnic origins than the tradition president has been. This will be the culmination of a struggle to change people’s ideas of what constitutes an American that has taken almost fifty years. Through out human existence two things have always been a constant. One is that human thought will mature and change. Two, is that many humans and many institutions will arise to resist that change and therefore slowing the new thoughts acceptance in society as a whole. Indeed even as Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,  it is difficult it is for people to change and people are resistant to change.

Among the leading institutions that are resistant to change are the religious institutions that permeate all societies.  These institutions are so completely resistant to change that often they maintain their dogma until this dogma causes the institution itself to wither and die. Often the older religious institutions don’t completely die off they just wane until they are unique pictures of past thought.

A second resistant institution of change is government itself. While the halls of government are many times populated brilliant forward thinking people, the engine of government is filled with narrow thinking bureaucrats whose main purpose in life is to ensure there personal place. To attain this they make sure that all change is resisted and discarded. The older the government is, the larger and more entrenched the bureaucracy becomes until that government stagnates.

I was a teacher for 35 years and I was proud to be on the first staff of the new school I opened. We were a shining light and people came from all over this country to see how we presented our curriculum. Young and competent teacher would apply to be on the faculty of this school and parents would line up early to make sure their child became students at our school.

I taught special education at this school for the first seven years. By the end of the seventh year I burned out as a special education teacher and took advantage of an opening that occurred that year. When the school was eight years old, I started teaching language and history. By that time the culture was set and I was seen as an outsider (special education teacher are mostly seen that way).  The real problem was that this established bureaucracy in the school had taken hold and innovation of any kind became discouraged. The same people remain in charge for the next twenty years. Consequently, the wonderful start the school had atrophied and slowly but at a quickening pace the student population of the school began the shrink. As principals changed, they would sometime try and change the schools culture but was largely unsuccessful even when they knew that the people in leadership positions were the ones causing this stagnation

What does this have to do with Obama being inaugurated the 20^th of this month? Well he promised us change. He will have to fight a more established bureaucracy than the one I just talked about in my old school. We people should be holding his feet to the fire about this change. We can see already that his appointments are mostly rethreaded Clinton people. This doesn’t seem much like change to me. He’s already modified some of his campaign promises. We all know that compromise is what makes government function. It doesn’t take much of a genius to see that he’s choosing function at the expense of innovation and tradition over redesign.

 

I hope that Obama is successful and that we as country are able to see our way out of this mess we’re currently embroiled. Perhaps his choices are meant to bring back competence in government. It a sure thing that after these last eight years we badly are in need of a competent government. Then I hope that he will start working on the reforms he promised us. For what its worth I’m keeping my eye peeled.