Recycled Perspective

Those offering their op-ed perspectives should occasionally review what they’ve written to see how well it comports with reality. While basking in the glow of a weekend trifecta – gridiron wins by my nephew’s prep school team, my wife’s beloved Georgia Bulldogs, and the Patriots – I looked back at some of my Weirs Times essays to see how I’ve been handling the ball. I wish the Impending-Climate-Catastrophe-You-Must-Stop-Eating-Meat crowd would do the same, given that their team has been fumbling the ball for decades.
I’ll let you decide how I’ve been doing, based on a few clips from 2015.

School-to-Prison Pipeline? (March): Displaying the childlike quality of being simultaneously simplistic, self-aggrandizing, and just plain wrong, the author adds to the long list of essays claiming that our schools are throwing kids into the maw of the prison system. {She claimed that] funding cuts, high-stakes tests, and stressed-out teachers moved little Johnny from middle school to Cell Block 3. Never mind the well-documented breakdown of families and the declining roles of civic and religious institutions in children’s lives; today’s education establishment would rather claim complicity – and then ask for more funding.
We’re to believe that with more money public schools could solve so many of our social problems. One wonders when they have time for the Three R’s these days, with all the counseling, child-rearing, and instruction in social justice going on.

Data Mining with Minors (August): Now imagine a future where information on how you run your home and raise your children is added to a government database for sale to anyone with the cash… using information provided by your child in a school survey. In March, middle school students in Fulton, MO, were led by teachers in an activity called “Claim It.” In this live-action survey, students were told to step forward when a statement applied to them. It started innocently enough [but quickly escalated to] statements such as “You or someone in your family has been raped or sexually assaulted” and “You have ever been physically abused by someone who said they love you.” This was an activity conducted in open class, with a teacher requiring young teens to “claim” incredibly personal details of family life. Recent events have shown us that even highly classified data can end up in strange, unprotected places. What privacy expectations can we have about our personal information collected, analyzed, and permanently stored by government and private agencies? Opt-in should be the only option for schools collecting personal data from children.

Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe…(September): If we are our choices as Sartre taught, then we can be shaped by those seeking to limit our range of choices. Beyond the “Thou shalt nots” and the laws that protect our human rights, we are constantly challenged by rules and regulations imposed on us by those who want to substitute their choices for ours. People who try to dominate others through restrictions on choice rarely put it that bluntly. Usually they cloak it as helping the less fortunate or fighting for some common good. But regardless of the smiley-faced emoji they use to punctuate their edicts, the result is reducing choices for others to some “acceptable” range. Just as our choices show us what we really are, using the regulatory state to limit other people’s choices shows them for what they truly are.

Where Have All the Adults Gone? (November): It took less than a year for these college students (adults by some measures, but too child-like in their actions to be taken seriously as grown-ups) to go from protesting the “epidemic” of sexual assaults on campus to the purported use of feces as instruments of oppression. At least the feces were real. The sexual assault “epidemic” turns out to be less real, more scripted reality show. In the most notorious case, the script-writer was outed eventually, but not before officials at the University of Virginia were made to look like fools and the men of a fraternity maligned. Despite its culpability, Rolling Stone rolls on, though without a certain managing editor.

Who Elected Emma Lazarus? (December): The liberal-progressive Slate magazine’s recent article, “Obama: The Statue of Liberty Lays Out Some Pretty Clear Guidelines on the Whole Refugees Thing” provides a window into the President’s mixed-up thinking. The idea that a poem, written more than a century ago and affixed to the base of a statue presented as a gift to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, should have any sway over current immigration law boggles the imagination. We are a nation of laws, not poems. We are also a nation that has seen significant changes since Emma Lazarus penned “A New Colossus.” Sadly, it does seem that our federal government’s policymakers have been guided by poets these past seven years. In addition to Emma Lazarus, they seem to be drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss.

I think those held up rather well. But that’s just my opinion.