Dying of Disinterest, Everywhere

People shouted bloody murder, justifiably, when the incompetent and clueless front person for privatized schools, Secretary of Education Betsy DuVos, showed up with a budget request nullifying any government funding of the Special Olympics to boot. The grant, I believe, was something like 25 million dollars.

Not a small piece of change. To wipe it off the rolls was an act of utter disdain for the challenged that stands as part of a slippery slope toward fascism, which curses and jettisons the underprivileged on behalf of those who dominate. When we lose compassion, we lose it all.

Fascism: Now there's a word schools need to pay more attention to. That's where we're going. We are going exactly where the Axis powers went before World War II--and which led to their utter destruction, led by the USA, which, at the time, didn't think such thinking would ever get here.

But there were vestiges built into our culture despite the upfront claims. My hometown of Grafton, Wisconsin, for example, was the site of a summer camp sponsored by the German-American Bund, which claimed hyper-patriotism to disguise its efforts to train quasi-fascists, not unlike the Hitler Youth in Germany--you know, train 'em early. It was exposed quickly by a free press, essential to democracy, and it disbanded after three years.

There was also the 1939 meeting of the Bund, 20,000 strong, in New York City, which featured an incident in which a protester was roughed up pretty badly when he got escorted outside (there is film of that moment). Does that remind you of any other rallies, far more recently?

We need to know this and to be reminded of it. It's part of our history. Too. Shouldn't a democratically-based government shell out a few bucks to warn everybody about what happens when people sleep through campaigns and elections? When they refuse to discuss it because it's too uncomfortable, which is happening more and more these days?

The request to eliminate Special Olympics from the education budget, given to a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, which handles all budget requests first, is dead on arrival, of course. It will never fly. They'll get their money, if only because media attention (note, once again, the role of the media) was quick and decisive. 45 quickly reversed course and put the money back in. He was just checking if anyone was looking so he could get away with it if he could. Once again, he's that awful, he's that clueless, he's that insensitive, he's that much of a fascist.

As pathetic as that was, though, that's not what I'm talking about here. There was another budget item that has also been proposed to conclude: one that funds history and civics education. That it was listed as another item to be scratched says a remarkably ridiculous thing about how the 45 administration thinks of the need for our children to understand the need for their participation--which is that it's not necessary, or that somehow someone else will take care of that.

As a former history and government teacher, I should be grateful, in a way, for that mentality (even though I am suspicious of its integrity). If 45ers are saying that we have that in our schools already and why the federal government should shell out yet more money for it, well, then, so much the better: we get what we need for nary a dime.

If that were true, we wouldn't be struggling to get 60 percent participation in a presidential election, and 25 percent for anything else. The students would get why their votes would matter, why following what their elected representatives vote for mattered, why voting, or not voting, has always mattered. If that were true, then, reportedly, 20 states wouldn't be absent from civics education.

Yes. This is a failure of our educational system, and of myself as a member of it. It would be the greatest folly for me to pretend that in all my 30 years as a classroom teacher, all my social studies students now vote in every election. The body language of too many in class, the anti-intellectual attitudes expressed, all suggested that regardless of my passionate urging (and if nothing else, I was passionate), regardless of being presented with plenty of facts to support its crucial import, plenty of them regarded voting as a waste of time. (There were others who did, indeed, pay attention. I thank them one and all, and I'm pretty damn proud of them.)

The simple percentages are revelatory, despite the efforts we've made to make it easy for everybody to vote. We let some do it online, we allow flexible voting dates, we've constitutionally lowered the age to 18. There is talk of making voting day a national holiday so people wouldn't need to leave work to vote (except, of course, the polls are always open until 7 or 8 at night). Nothing has worked because democracy is dying of disinterest.

Here's another indicator, though: Relative to Special Olympics, this item, history and civics education, as essential to our functioning democracy as anything else could be, was more or less a throw-in from the last budget: $4.6 million, or more than five times less. Chump change, in comparison. We had to make some tough decisions, DuVos kept saying, with her smile that wishes to win people over but doesn't. I don't think that was tough at all.

I don't recall anybody fighting tooth and nail for history and civics education, do you? I don't recall any headlines. I don't recall any vital conversations, on air or not. Indeed, I just found this little kernel of budgetary mention because a Facebook friend got it to my site (and thanks for that).

I'd like to know what that $4.6 million bought, as inadequate as it is in the first place. Spread out through the entire nation, benefits would get very thin in a big hurry. In other words, this is tokenism.

Federal contributions to Native Hawaiian and Native Alaskan education, which also found the original chopping block (and which will also be replaced, I predict), were over $30 million each. I think such education is important to those indigenous peoples so that they can learn, for instance, how the USA insidiously acquired their lands for profit and religiously-connected expansionism (the "manifest" in "manifest destiny") and undermined the native governments which caught on a little too late to stop it--resulting in Japanese attempts to attack both in World War II. History can be bitter, too.

The histories of those two states, their heritages, were worth more than $60 million in federal money. The spending for history and civics in the 48 contiguous states? More than 13 times less. Really? That's all we have?

This looks quite cynical from here, exactly the attitude most of those kids have chosen to take when considering their heritage, their history, and why that feeds into their participation in what is left of our democracy.

Yes. What is left of it. It dies of disinterest, a little each day, of the kind of tokenism and lip service which leads to cynicism which leads people to stay home instead of voting because history and civics, and the citizenship they are supposed to promote, get short shrift after the supposedly more essential 3 R's. The refrain from the play "1776" is telling: Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

I mean, beyond some washed up teacher writing a blog. After the Constitutional Convention, a lady asked Ben Franklin what kind of government the delegates had created. "A republic, madam," he replied, "If you can keep it."

Starting to look like a great big IF, if you ask me.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark