Posted on 02/13/2022 6:49:16 AM PST by karpov
On a mild October night in 1962, a frightened housewife, eight months pregnant, climbed into bed in Yonkers, New York, with her two-year-old daughter. Her husband was at work on the West Coast and not with his family on what she felt certain would be the last night of their lives. Laying down in the dark holding her child, she cried and prayed until sleep overtook her.
Morning came and they were both still alive, not incinerated in bed as she had feared after President Kennedy shocked the nation with his televised address on the Cuban missile crisis the night before.
I was born five weeks later. Days before my first birthday, Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. By the time I started kindergarten on Long Island, nearly 30,000 American GIs had been killed in Vietnam. I learned to read in Mrs. Bobrowitz’s first-grade class the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; race riots tore apart Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities the summer before I started second grade. My elementary-school years were marked by levels of domestic unrest and political violence that in retrospect stagger the imagination. There were more than 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone. Airplane hijackings were common. My dad flew for American Airlines.
My parents made no attempt that I’m aware of to shield me from the turbulent events of my childhood years. I thumbed the New York Daily News every morning after checking the Mets box score; I plucked Newsday out of the mailbox when I came home from school. The television was rarely turned off in our home. I watched Eyewitness News at 6 p.m. and, once I was allowed to stay up late, again at 11.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentary.org ...
I read this a couple of days ago. Really good article.
I was in 8th grade on that day in 1962 and was scared to death that I was going to die a virgin.
So as pathetic and whiny as this article starts out it gets better?
What more ‘pathetic & whiny’?
Or sort of normal?
LOL! 👍👍
I remember hearing the story of a young monastic who was having struggles in his spiritual life and went to an elder to talk about it. The elder listened for a while, and then got a book off the shelf and handed it to the young man. The young man, seeing it was a volume of Dickens instead of some great theological work, thought the elder had picked the wrong book. The elder said, “No. You need to read this, so you can learn how normal people live.”
The culture of the Left, which is the culture of education, emphasizes the abnormal. Part of the fallout of the Bible being banished from schools, and often not being read otherwise, is that people miss the good counsel of Philippians 4:8.
I am a little older than the writer. I also grew up with JFK and Vietnam and social unrest and the nuclear threat. I was an early consumer of news too. But there were also bastions of normality in my life that more than balanced that out: home, community, church, and even school.
I was in 8th grade on that day in 1962 and was scared to death that I was going to die a virgin.
A movie, ‘Matinee’, I think, pretty accurately captures what teenagers were really concerned about during the Cuban missile crisis.
public schools, especially those that have poor families, a high percentage of single-family homes, high welfare recipients, etc... lack strong parental involvement and are the pure playthings lab rats of destructive leftist ideologues.
“Readers unfamiliar with the folkways of American education, teacher training, and colleges of education may well wonder how an obscure Brazilian Marxist became one of American education’s most influential theorists, how developing “critical consciousness” became an explicit goal of its teachers, and how the methods and mindsets of those charged with providing a core government function—educating the nation’s children—drifted into an oppositional relationship with the institutions, traditions, and norms of a nation whose taxpayers pay for its existence and continued support. It is an excellent and largely unasked question.”
Could it be because most of us were asleep (and still are) while the termites, aka, Marxists, were, and are, busy eating away at our foundations?
Until we start fumigating them, they’ll continue with their destruction.
We have to wake up and start taking action.
The other side has had such incredible success because of their strong activism abetted by our total passivism.
Remember when we used to laugh and dismiss Obama for just being a community organizers? Well, now, the joke is on us. The community organizers, or as I call them “the community agitators”, aka, the “activists” are the ones that control our lives now.
Until we wake up from our slumber and become purposeful, organized acivists, the termites will be in control.
There’s a great poem by Rudyard Kipling that puts all of this in perspective.
It’s called “The Gods Of The Copybook Headings”.
https://www.poetry.com/poem/33442/the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings
I’m starting to hear their footsteps.
Otherwise it was drab brick buildings. Cynical administrators. Mostly mediocre teachers. Troublemaker students totally in control.
For me, public school was about survival and not learning.
But an early love of reading instilled in my at an early age saved me. Every Saturday I would go to the public library and borrow four books. Every Saturday. A habit I maintain even to this day.
For my own children, I was able to get them educated in the suburbs, where the schools are exponentially better. But I refused to send them to college, which is nothing but Communist indoctrination.
One of them did get an engineering degree on his own dime.
But learning a trade is best. I would not recommend college to anybody unless you intend to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer.
Yep. And we are a hundred years after that.
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