We see comments like the above with some frequency here on Free Republic, and I agree. However...I am always surprised that our nation's system of socialist-entitlement and compulsory schooling is overlooked as a MAJOR reason for society's collapse.
Nearly all the current teachers in our nation's institutional schools ( government and private) were trained by MARXISTS!!!!! That will have consequences in the voting booth and for cultural stability!
And....Since the very beginning of compulsory socialist-entitlement schooling ( mid-1800 to early 1900) progressives have controlled teacher training and curriculum development.
Children who attend secular schools **WILL** learn to think and reason in a godlessly secular manner. They must just to cooperate in the classroom. And...They risk learning that any voting mob powerful enough to give them tuition-free schooling is powerful enough to give them lots of free stuff. One to three generations of this and we get Wilson and Franklin as presidents. Another 80 years and we have a full blown Marxist in the White House.
( Yeah! I am shouting and jumping up and down and having a fit. I am exasperated that so few people see the damage that compulsory socialist-entitment schooling has done to our nation and society.)
For all the right reasons. When schools were integrated, before the New Left used events to destroy the peaceful order that the schools had with fomented unrest (race rioting in schools, incited by communists), not only were the academic expectations for black children every bit the equal of those expectations for white children, but black children were expected by their teachers and often by their parents to excel in order to be respectable in the community at large.
The reason for that was indeed cultural, even societal in many areas, in that blacks often had to work to a higher standard in order to receive credit for their ability, in order to overcome a social inertia which had postulated they could sing and dance, and made reasonably good menial laborers, but which rarely gave credit for the doctors and scientists among blacks.
Such prejudices were seldom limited to racial parameters, we even see them today when snarky comments are made about political candidates graduating from a State College instead of an Ivy League University--the podunk State grad has to run rings around the person with the 'proper' degree to get the credit they deserve. The coastal urbane still look down their noses at flyover country.
Anyway, as racial unrest was incited in the newly integrated schools, at first there was resistance from the elders in the black community and school staff where I grew up. These people knew no good would come of this, after all, the children were at least as well positioned to take advantage of the means their parents saw as the ticket to prosperity: an education. That was the stated purpose of integration: to allegedly afford the same educational opportunities to blacks that whites had.
In typical Communist fashion, instead of bringing everyone up to the same level (and I'm not saying the black schools were not well staffed, many of the teachers were very good, by any standard), everyone was brought lower than before, to a new least common denominator, with the exception of a few schools where those in the local political power structure sent their children (before the flight to private schools).
Many of their parents had worked as field laborers, in kitchens, on the wharves unloading oysters, building piers, seawalls, roads, and houses, and knew the rigors of hard labor--and like anyone else, wanted better for their children. Better their children were doctors, lawyers, even secretaries, than scrubbing toilets and cutting tobacco (although the latter put many children through college).
But the New Left subverted that, they turned the High Schools which hadn't been gerrymandered out of being integrated into war zones. Those who had been raised to never refer to their darker skinned neighbors as "ni**er" learned the word when they were 'jumped', pummeled and mugged by groups of black youths and 'paybacks' went the other way. A fight that had little reason and no purpose quickly produced its own, and an era of unprecedented racial hostility was born.
Discipline fell apart as attorneys attacked school white staff who attempted to keep order as "prejudiced" against the blacks, and white students picked up the cry of 'we have equal rights, too'. Black teachers and staff were less than eager to punish white students because of possible racially based repercussions.
Order was lost, and with it, a generation.
Students who had achieved little were graduated to remove them from the ranks of the miscreants in the schools, if they were not hauled off in handcuffs by law enforcement.
Along the way, set-asides, quotas, "affirmative action" all moved the herd along, and entire neighborhoods changed to avoid the issue (essentially re-segregating the schools somewhat), but the goal of excellence in education was lost.
The Communists of the New Left prevailed, and for all their claims of 'looking out for their brothers', the damage done, the incredible setbacks continue, bringing the US closer to a race war than perhaps at any time in its history. Even the unrest of the '60s was limited to some areas, and often only the youths of that generation (The elders I knew wanted nothing to do with the growing unrest. One commented to a relative "We sent those folks home. They were down here trying to stir up trouble with our white folks, and we ain't never had no trouble with our white folks."
But now, with the exception of those who have not bought into the New Left victimhood anti-white (the man is holding you down) meme, the more pervasive attitude is one of 'the white man owes me'. The old guard, those elders who wanted better for their children, who saw hard work and educational excellence as the key to prosperity, is largely gone, at least so the media would have us believe. Unfortunately, the media would give the same perception to black people--that the gangsta lifestyle is the legitimate majority, and perhaps this has become a self-fulfilling prediction, enabled by the selective popularization/exploitation of "music" which glamorizes that fast track to cultural decay. That that decay has transcended cultural and racial barriers via popularization in the media, from movies to music and TV.
Are there angry black people out there? You betcha! Pull that on my culture (it's being done) and I'd be ticked off, too.
The real anger, though is being focused (by theNew Left's idealogical descendents, more communists) on the wrong people, naturally, as a means to hoodwink people who have been robbed of opportunity and prosperity by the very agents and agencies who claim to have their best interests at heart, but who only want to maintain control of a population by truly cutting off avenues to prosperity which might truly free that population, for their own personal prestige and profit.
Unless and until we all demand better, demand more, and rise to mutually defeat the destructive policies which continue to destroy the very fabric of Western Culture, the decay will continue. This begins at home with parents, parents who demand their children be better, learn more, excel, stay clean and sober, and morally straight, who will band together with other parents and other communities to demand better, not cheaper, not more funding, not more set-asides or mulligans but rigid standards which must be met.
Without this, there is a future full of lazy illiterates administering medical care to an aging population who can read the labels, and the collapse of the very civilization which relies on the very intelligence it eschews.