Mr. President,
I am writing today to you today to express great concern and distress over your announcement of the new strategy for the Afghanistan war on this next Tuesday. It has been indicated in many news reports that you are planning to announce an escalation of the Afghanistan war, with up to 40,000 additional American troops being sent to that country. Now, admittedly, I am young (17 years old) and you are older (and the President) and therefore have the benefit of being wiser in the ways of the world. Nonetheless, I really think that this escalation of the Afghanistan war is an unwise decision to make, a decision which may compromise the success of your Presidency.
My greatest qualm with this Afghanistan escalation is that Afghanistan may become America's next Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson would probably be considered one of America's great presidents today if he had not made the decision to escalate the Vietnam War. I would certainly hate for your legacy to be compromised by an unpopular, endless, quagmire war just as Lyndon B. Johnson's legacy was. I can say, without a single doubt in my mind, that I would vote for you in 2012 if you didn't escalate this war and instead went about removing American forces from that country as swiftly as would be possible and prudent.
Mr. President, I don't really see what good end could be accomplished by American forces remaining there in harm's way. It seems to me that, just like Vietnam, Afghanistan is a war which can never be won. It will be, as Dexter Filkins called it, "the forever war". As far as I can discern, we are fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. Since terrorism has been with humanity from the beginning and with be with us 'til the end, and since terrorism is ingrained as a part of human nature which cannot be destroyed by any number of determined guns and armies, we will never be able to achieve a victory in Afghanistan if to fight and destroy the terrorists there is truly our goal. It seems to me that the only thing that can be done with the terrorists in Afghanistan is to contain them for an indefinite amount of time spanning infinitely off into the future, and, as I'm sure you will admit, that is not a feasible option. I suppose that is why you are attempting to lessen the corruption and uselessness of the Afghanistan government: you hope that someday they may take over counter-terrorism activities in their own country, and that the United States will no longer have to do it. But, Mr. President, please consider that the United States’s plan to get out of the Iraq war was to strengthen the Iraqi government and the Iraqi army over time, until the Iraqis could keep order themselves---and we are most certainly not withdrawn from that war yet. I'm afraid that the same fate may come to the Afghanistan war: indefinite guidelines for withdrawal spanning off into a distant future. If the goal is to stabilize the country of Afghanistan and its government, what tangible goals could there be to demonstrate the completion of this task? Are there any measurements of stability which are not purely abstract, considering that the stability of a country and of a government is an abstract concept? And are we to presume that we can stabilize a volatile Middle Eastern country which has been unstable and plagued by rarely-ceasing warfare and violence for the past several centuries? If you put these three questions to yourself, there may be created in your heart some creeping doubt about this planned escalation.
Mr. President, as I am sure that you well know, the United States army is already strained and over-stretched by these two ongoing wars; I don't think that the military should be further strained by an Afghanistan escalation. Many soldiers have been killed and many have been irreparably mentally or physically damaged. It is a terrible thing for our country that so many young people should be returning home, physically or mentally traumatized, from the ravages of war. A certain cousin-in-law of mine returned home from his tours of duty in Afghanistan so mentally disturbed that he ended up slitting his own wrists in an attempt to kill himself. He is now, fortunately, on some medication. And I am sure that my cousin-in-law is not unique in this sort of thing; I am sure that it's widespread in veterans across the country. Mr. President, it must be a great moral dilemma for you to contemplate having to send more of these young men and women off to war with the looming threat of their being killed or seriously injured, mentally or physically. It must create a terrible moral dilemma for you, just as it did for Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman and all of our other wartime Presidents, to remember that the buck ultimately stops at your desk; that it is you who will ultimately be responsible for further deaths and maimings of the young people in America's armed forces. I certainly hope that this moral dilemma will weigh heavily in your decision and in your announcement on this next Tuesday.
Mr. President, though I'm sure that you have already considered this, I would like to mention one last thing to you---one last thing which makes your indicated escalation of the Afghanistan war all the more distressing to me. Our presence in these Middle Eastern countries, our military involvement there, actually creates more terrorists than it destroys, for terrorist organizations can use the American presence (perceived as imperialistic, over-reaching, and infringing on the sovereignty of Middle Eastern peoples) as a recruiting tool. Our continued presence in Afghanistan is making us less safe, not more so; it is creating terrorists faster than we can destroy them. The National Intelligence Estimate of a couple years ago said as much, and I hope that you weigh this knowledge when making your decision on the Afghanistan war.
Mr. President, now that I have informed you of my personal viewpoint on the Afghanistan war, perhaps you can understand my great distress and concern upon hearing that it is a very likely thing that you will escalate this war. I know that my mother, my father, my grandparents, one of my uncles, and a few of my cousins feel quite the same way as I do about this: they don't want an escalation; they want us to commence withdrawal as soon as is possible. They don't believe that this war is a winnable war, and therefore see no point in escalating it. They, as Democrats or progressive Independents all, don't wish to see your presidential legacy compromised by such a war. They don't wish to see more soldiers killed and maimed, the American military more greatly strained, and at the same time more terrorists created. Mr. President, Harry Truman had a lot of guts; he refused to escalate the Korean War despite repeated requests from General Douglas MacArthur that Truman do so, by bombing the mainland of China. Harry Truman refused to escalate, fired the very popular General MacArthur, and was vilified at the time for it. However, today, Harry Truman is considered to be one of America's near-great Presidents. Truman stuck to his guns and his principles, and today he is honored for it. Truman considered what the reckless MacArthur did not: that bombing mainland China and widening the scope of the Korean War very well could have initiated a nuclear confrontation with Communist Russia and a World War Three. Mr. President, whatever your decision on Afghanistan is on this next Tuesday, I hope that in making it you will stick to your guns and stay true to your principles. Trust in your principles, your personal inclinations and beliefs, rather than your "expert" military advisers. Expert military advisers navigated John F. Kennedy's Administration into the embarrassing "Bay of Pigs" Fiasco; and Kennedy was wary of these military advisers after that, which perhaps may have given him greater success in diffusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Several expert military advisers in Kennedy’s Executive Committee wished to bomb the Russian missile sites in Cuba, which likely would have resulted in a devastating, chain-reaction nuclear war with Russia.) "Expert" military advisers came up with the "domino theory", which kept us in Vietnam for a number of long years; and in the end the whole theory was a flop and came to nothing. So, Mr. President, please don't necessarily trust the "expert" theories; trust in yourself and do what you think is right. I implore you, whatever your decision on Afghanistan, whether it be escalation or withdrawal or monotony, to at the very least stick to your principles and do what you think is right.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Cable
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Some of the most serious problems facing 21st century America
As we come to the end of this first decade of the 21st century, we may look back with gladness at all humanity has thus far accomplished, but we also may look forward with determination at the many problems which have yet to be faced down. Of the most serious problems facing the United States of America as we progress into the 21st century, I have chosen to discuss today those which I consider most pressing. These problems are: the Environment, Poverty, and Education. Each of these general problems contains more specific issues. Environmental problems include global warming, the use of dirty and polluting sources of fuel such as oil or coal, and strip-mining. Problems connected with poverty include the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor, an educational system which could be greatly improved, and lack of a living wage and adequate healthcare. Problems connected with the United States’s educational system are: poverty, lack of quality education, poor graduation rates, failure to instill intellectual curiosity, failure to instill a sense of civic responsibility, and lack of access to higher education. These three main issues, which we in the 21st century have been faced with to solve, are rather complex and sometimes interconnected. In my investigation of these problems, I will begin with the beginning: humankind’s haven, mother earth.
The most pressing problem presently facing earth’s environment is global warming. Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases can be added to the atmosphere by humanity’s automobiles and factories in quantities far greater than nature by itself could produce. These gases thicken earth’s atmosphere, and this thicker atmosphere causes more of the sun’s energy to be trapped within the atmosphere of the earth. As more of the sun’s energy becomes trapped, the earth heats up and its climate changes from colder to warmer. There has been speculation that a change in climate from warmer to colder is what caused the extinction of the cold-blooded dinosaurs and led to the rise of the warm-blooded mammals. What effect could this latest change in climate, produced by man-made global warming, have upon human beings?
The answer is not a pleasant one. Warmer temperatures could cause the great expanses of ice in Antarctica and in Greenland to melt. A massive influx of fresh water into earth’s oceans would certainly raise the water level of these oceans, and as a result many lands that human beings inhabit could become flooded by rising water. The millions of refugees that escape the floods will have to pour into the surrounding lands, causing a refugee crisis in many countries. The flooding will affect lands around the world, from southern Florida and New York City to Japan and southeastern Asia. Other effects of global warming are supposed to be stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms, an expansion of tropical diseases, an extremely unequal distribution of water (with some places suffering from devastating droughts and others from massive flooding), and the retreat of glaciers.
Obviously, global warming is a problem of utmost importance. It threatens the earth itself and calls into question the assumption that earth will be livable in the future. To prevent global warming from getting overly out of hand, action needs to be taken by governments and by ordinary citizens to find solutions. The best place to look to find solutions is at the causes. It seems to me that global warming is predominantly caused by human pollution and by human overpopulation of the earth. Overpopulation of the earth can be dealt with in a few ways, some of which are within human control and some of which are not. Pandemics of diseases, which can often be outside of mankind’s control, are a rather terrifying solution to overpopulation. Another solution is the limiting, by law, of how many children each person can have. Communist China, which is already plagued by over-crowding, has limits in place to control its population growth. However, the problem with this solution is that it is not compatible with the ideals of liberty and freedom espoused by western democracies. But something must be done to limit the uncontrolled growth of human beings, or we will eventually smother the planet and ourselves. A greater population of earth has created a greater amount of pollution. This pollution is the primary cause of global warming (and many other environmental problems). Some of the ways in which pollution could be lessened are: limiting the population of the earth, instituting a “carbon tax” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, increasing mileage standards for polluting automobiles, increasing usage of clean electric cars, and developing clean and renewable sources of fuel such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy.
The issue of energy is intricately connected with the environmental issue. Coal, oil, and other fuels that create hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases have the ability to destroy our environment, in addition to being an unstable source of fuel which we must import and which we must depend upon erratic Middle Eastern countries for. The use of coal and oil as our primary sources of energy threaten the United States’s national security in more ways than one. Over the next few decades of this 21st century, it will be necessary for the United States to transition to cleaner and more stable fuels. Thousands of wind mills will have to be constructed in North Dakota, in Texas, in Kansas, and in other windy states across the nation. Solar collectors and solar cells can be made more efficient and economical so that buildings and homes across the nation can be powered by almost unlimited energy from the sun. In Iceland, almost 80 percent of the homes get their heat and hot water directly from hot springs and geysers; can’t the United States work to increase its use of the geothermal heat of the earth? There are many clean options for energy and yet we continue to use the fossil fuels which may come to endanger our very existence. Despite an abundance of other options, mankind continues abusing its home planet with dirty pollutants.
Aside from pollutants and their effects (among these being global warming), a further manifestation of human abuses of planet earth is strip-mining, in which human beings plunder the earth for its precious resources, sacrificing natural beauty in the process. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., described the problem of strip-mining as an “Appalachian Apocalypse” because it primarily affects the mountainous regions of Appalachia, where there are plenty of resources to mine from the fruitful mountains. I have seen the strip-mining that takes place in East Tennessee, where in some places large parts of mountains are torn away; and the land of East Tennessee is not unique in that respect. Not only does strip mining tear apart the natural beauty of America’s mountains, it also impoverishes the people of Appalachia, who are having significant resources removed from them when strip-mining occurs. Mining companies and corporations come to Appalachia, strip away the resources, and then take these resources to be used in another part of the country. That is how things have been for decades, ever since the commencement of the Industrial Age. I think that (along with global warming and polluting forms of energy) strip-mining, and other types of wrongful exploitation of earth’s natural resources and wrongful destruction of earth’s natural beauty in general, is another problem to be solved during the 21st century.
Of course, if environmental problems are not solved and the earth is destroyed by global warming and human pollution, then every other problem that I discuss here will become absolutely irrelevant. No one would have to worry about those living in poverty and despair if there was no one living. As it is presently, there is plenty of worrying to be done about the approximately 37 million people who are living in poverty in the United States. 37 million people are about 12 percent of the entire population. Though no nation can ever fully eradicate the scourge of poverty from its shores, efforts can be made to lessen the terrible plight of those living a substandard economic existence in one of the richest countries on earth. As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Where there is plenty, poverty is evil.” We, as Americans living in a materially-rich country, have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves. The poverty situation in the United States begs for an answer to two questions. Firstly, how can both excessive economic extravagance and grinding poverty co-exist under this same national roof? And, secondly, how can those living in poverty be helped by the better-off segments of the population?
Excessive riches and exhausted poverty co-exist in the United States due to the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor. In the United States, the economic inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth, is startling. According to inequality.org and the Economic Policy Institute, “The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.” Additionally, the top 10% of the people in the United States own 71% of the wealth. That is a striking inequality and indicates the level of concentrated wealth in the United States. And economic inequality always leads to political inequality, due to the power that money has in our government. Inequality compounds upon itself; to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere. What can be done by those living in the 21st century to break up this dense concentration of wealth and power? Since I’m not a candidate for political office, I’m not afraid to suggest that perhaps the richest members of the population should have a significantly higher tax burden than other, relatively-poor members of the population and a higher tax burden than what they have presently. But, the focus of tackling economic inequality should not be bringing down the rich but rather bringing up the poor.
And how do we improve the conditions of our nation’s poor? Again, we need not look any further than the causes for the solutions to this problem. One of the causes of poverty is that the United States’s minimum wage is at such an insufficient level that those earning this wage can’t live off of it. The Democrats have, in the past five years, passed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $6.55 per hour. Despite this, the minimum wage today has less value than the minimum wage decades ago, and, despite this, you can’t live off of the minimum wage. The cost of housing, transportation, food, clothes, and other necessities in life is just too much. If you work at the minimum wage level 40 hours each week, and if you work 365 days in a year (an impossible number), basic math tells you that you’ll still only be making $13,624 each year. As a solution to this problem, the United States could institute a “living wage” (to replace the minimum wage), which would be certified by the Treasury Department that people can live off of it and not live in poverty. The probable level of an hourly living wage would be $12 per hour.
Another cause of poverty in the United States is lack of a sufficient healthcare system.
If a person is not provided with healthcare by their employer, then that can be extremely detrimental to themselves and their family. Lacking healthcare, Americans can become saddled with huge medical costs, aiding the establishment of poverty. As a solution to this problem, it could be mandated by the government that businesses must provide healthcare and all other such benefits for their workers, but that would be saddling businesses with a cost that would make them less competitive in the world. Perhaps a better solution would be a single-payer, universal healthcare system—provided by the government to protect its citizens and its industry, and extending benefits to all areas of health, from eyeglasses to dental.
However, the most important cause of poverty, even more than lack of a living wage or lack of decent healthcare, is lack of opportunity. Opportunity is furnished upon the population by its educational system. And the United States’s educational system, in many areas, is sorely lacking in both the quality of the education and in the quantity of students which graduate from this educational system. As for the quality of education, in some areas it is questionable. While visiting the state of Kentucky in August 2008, I observed a local newspaper article that stated that only 6 percent of Knox County high school seniors were prepared for college-level courses, and that only 17 percent of high school seniors statewide were prepared for college-level courses. That is a poor reflection upon the educational system of the state of Kentucky, for one, and I doubt that Kentucky would be unique in this matter. As for the quantity of students graduating from high school, in some areas these figures are very poor as well. In my home state of Georgia this year, there was a 77 percent high school graduation rate, one of the worst graduation rates in the nation. Consider the other 23 percent of Georgian young adults who failed to graduate from high school. Consider the other students across the nation who fail to graduate from high school. They are condemned to a substandard economic existence. High school drop-outs can only get jobs at McDonald’s or as ditch-diggers but not much anywhere else in this modern world of technology and computerized service industries whose need is skilled workers.
Education is important not only in the realm of economic opportunity and the attainment of jobs. An enlightened citizenry is essential to the continued existence of a democracy and the continued existence of liberty. Only an enlightened population can set about protecting their liberties from abuses by usurping Presidents and acquiescent Congresses (or usurping Congresses and acquiescent Presidents). As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and what never will be.”
The primary means of enlightening the citizenry is through education. In our educational system, there is not enough emphasis on civics and on the responsibilities of the citizen-student to safeguard their liberties and participate in their government. To remedy this, I think that it would be wise for civics classes to be mandated as a part of the curriculum in elementary school, middle school, and high school.
But education is not meant to simply prepare citizens for jobs or prepare them to protect their liberties; it is meant to teach citizens how to learn, how to be curious, how to think for themselves, how to investigate and question theories and ideas, both old and new. As John Adams said, “There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” Unfortunately, it seems to me, the United States’s education system has been fairly successful in the former type of education but has failed miserably in the latter type of education, which is the most important type of all.
In his 1996 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, Carl Sagan writes of the difference he sees between first-grade classes and twelfth-grade classes in the American education system: “[First-grade students are] curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm… But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize ‘facts’. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much wonder and gained very little skepticism…” What has happened in between the fifth grade and the twelfth grade? In between, I think that the natural curiosity of the student (however much there was to begin with would vary with each individual) was stamped upon by drudging rote memorizations of facts and figures, sacrificing intellectual curiosity for teaching to the narrow confines of a test or various tests. Teaching students how to think and how to question is sacrificed in favor of teaching the student to accept a group of repetitious facts which will help them improve their test scores.
Christopher Hedges, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, briefly criticized the standardized test system in a recent book of his. Hedges wrote that, after his son got a critical reading score on the SAT that was less than they had hoped for, he hired a professional SAT tutor for his son. Hedges writes, “The tutor told my son things like, ‘stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.’ [Hedges’s son’s] reading score went up 130 points…Had he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique it? ... Is it really a smart, effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over them?” In other words, Hedges was criticizing the tests (and furthermore the education system, which focuses on preparation for the tests) for the fact that they did not really allow for any intellectual curiosity or thinking for oneself and instead focused upon regurgitation of facts and figures.
Thus, the major problems that I see in the high school education are poor graduation rates in some areas, poor educational quality in some areas, and failure to promote civic responsibility, and failure to promote intellectual curiosity and thinking for oneself. As for college education, the major problem seems to be lack of access to that higher level of education. The main barrier for most high school graduates upon attempting to gain a college education is, naturally, the high level of expenses that come with tuition, books, and lodging. The high cost of college can make it impossible for poorer students to achieve a college education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just 27 percent of adults age 25 and over had a college degree in 2003. To promote college attendance, some states have instituted their own educational scholarships funded by the state lottery. The most notable of these states is Georgia, who provides the HOPE scholarship to all students with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. This scholarship pays the tuition for the Georgian students’ college, if the college is located within the state of Georgia. Tennessee is also experimenting with a similar system. The question is, why can’t a nationwide HOPE scholarship, or something similar to it, be adopted by the federal government? This would increase access to college education for the students who maintained a decent grade point average in high school, and this would help to improve the general condition of the United States as a whole.
Another solution to increase college access and graduation can be found in the workings of the United States military. A distant cousin of mine recently joined the military just so that he could attain the college education which he would have otherwise been unable to afford. The military, in return for the service, will pay for the soldier’s college education. The question is, why can’t a similar national program of public service be founded where there is no risk of getting killed in some Middle Eastern country thousands of miles from our shores? Participants would enlist in the service of the United States government, in programs where the participants would do many of things that the TVA and PWA and other public works programs used to do during the Great Depression (such as planting trees, building infrastructure, restoring monuments, etc.). In return for their public service (spanning a certain number of months), the participants in this program could then have their college education paid for by the United States government. To achieve funding for this program, other aspects of the federal budget will have to be cut. I’m not sorry to say that the funding for war and for armaments will likely have to be reduced from its present bloated state.
A mention of the highest level of education (college) ought to be followed by a mention of the lowest level of education: pre-school. There is an excellent government program, created by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, which is meant to give low-income children a “Head Start” on their education. This is an honorable goal. During the 21st century, to further aid our educational system and increase the enlightenment of our population, funding for this “Head Start” program ought to be increased and access to this program considerably expanded.
In the United States during the 21st century, we need to improve both the quality of education and the quantity of people whom education is successfully distributed among. We need to use the educational system to instill intellectual curiosity in American citizens rather than simply instilling in them a grudging respect for rote memorizations of various facts and figures that they will encounter on a test. We need increased access to college education for any American student who has the drive, the determination, and the grades to make it into college. Education in the United States is a complex problem, and, in this 21st century, Americans are going to have to grope for innovative solutions. Some of these future solutions (aside from those that I have already mentioned) may be: increasing federal funding to education, increasing the salaries of teachers, and building more schools so that classes may be of smaller sizes. However, it is beyond my ability to predict the greatest innovations in the future of education.
Now I have discussed some of the astounding problems facing the citizens of the United States as we enter and make ourselves comfortable in the 21st century: (A) the environment, global warming, human pollution and the necessity of human restraint and reform, exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and destruction of the earth’s natural beauty; (B) the terrible condition of poverty which has been shackles upon the bodies and souls of human beings ever since they first began their existence thousands of years ago; and (C) the educational system which fails to instill a sense of civic participation in students, fails to instill a sense of curiosity in students, condemns a significant percentage of students to a substandard economic existence, and is not at its higher levels fully accessible to American students.
The question that ought to be put to us living in the 21st century is: Will we be able to surmount all of these difficult obstacles, for the sake of the survival and of the physical and intellectual well-being of future generations? Personally, I’m an optimist. And I have an optimistic theory about what will occur in the United States during the 21st century. In the American generation that lived immediately after the turbulent events of the Great Depression and of World War II, there was a sense of their living in a post-heroic generation. I am sure that the generation living immediately after the Civil War, and the generation living immediately after the American Revolutionary War, would have felt much the same way: with an acute feeling of living in a post-heroic generation. Eighty-four years passed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the Civil War. Eighty-one years passed between the time of the start of the Civil War and the time of the start of World War II. Approximately every eighty years, a heroic generation of Americans has come up against and overcome the greatest obstacles that have yet faced the United States. It seems to me that, after the passage of this decade spanning 2009 to 2019, America’s next heroic generation is due to appear. What challenges that generation shall have to face, I do not know; it may be some of the problems which I have noted here, or it may not be. But, whatever the challenges, that generation must rise to the occasion, just as their forefathers did eighty or one-hundred-and-sixty or two-hundred-and-forty years ago, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of future generations existing in the 21st century and onwards, through all time.
The most pressing problem presently facing earth’s environment is global warming. Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases can be added to the atmosphere by humanity’s automobiles and factories in quantities far greater than nature by itself could produce. These gases thicken earth’s atmosphere, and this thicker atmosphere causes more of the sun’s energy to be trapped within the atmosphere of the earth. As more of the sun’s energy becomes trapped, the earth heats up and its climate changes from colder to warmer. There has been speculation that a change in climate from warmer to colder is what caused the extinction of the cold-blooded dinosaurs and led to the rise of the warm-blooded mammals. What effect could this latest change in climate, produced by man-made global warming, have upon human beings?
The answer is not a pleasant one. Warmer temperatures could cause the great expanses of ice in Antarctica and in Greenland to melt. A massive influx of fresh water into earth’s oceans would certainly raise the water level of these oceans, and as a result many lands that human beings inhabit could become flooded by rising water. The millions of refugees that escape the floods will have to pour into the surrounding lands, causing a refugee crisis in many countries. The flooding will affect lands around the world, from southern Florida and New York City to Japan and southeastern Asia. Other effects of global warming are supposed to be stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms, an expansion of tropical diseases, an extremely unequal distribution of water (with some places suffering from devastating droughts and others from massive flooding), and the retreat of glaciers.
Obviously, global warming is a problem of utmost importance. It threatens the earth itself and calls into question the assumption that earth will be livable in the future. To prevent global warming from getting overly out of hand, action needs to be taken by governments and by ordinary citizens to find solutions. The best place to look to find solutions is at the causes. It seems to me that global warming is predominantly caused by human pollution and by human overpopulation of the earth. Overpopulation of the earth can be dealt with in a few ways, some of which are within human control and some of which are not. Pandemics of diseases, which can often be outside of mankind’s control, are a rather terrifying solution to overpopulation. Another solution is the limiting, by law, of how many children each person can have. Communist China, which is already plagued by over-crowding, has limits in place to control its population growth. However, the problem with this solution is that it is not compatible with the ideals of liberty and freedom espoused by western democracies. But something must be done to limit the uncontrolled growth of human beings, or we will eventually smother the planet and ourselves. A greater population of earth has created a greater amount of pollution. This pollution is the primary cause of global warming (and many other environmental problems). Some of the ways in which pollution could be lessened are: limiting the population of the earth, instituting a “carbon tax” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, increasing mileage standards for polluting automobiles, increasing usage of clean electric cars, and developing clean and renewable sources of fuel such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy.
The issue of energy is intricately connected with the environmental issue. Coal, oil, and other fuels that create hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases have the ability to destroy our environment, in addition to being an unstable source of fuel which we must import and which we must depend upon erratic Middle Eastern countries for. The use of coal and oil as our primary sources of energy threaten the United States’s national security in more ways than one. Over the next few decades of this 21st century, it will be necessary for the United States to transition to cleaner and more stable fuels. Thousands of wind mills will have to be constructed in North Dakota, in Texas, in Kansas, and in other windy states across the nation. Solar collectors and solar cells can be made more efficient and economical so that buildings and homes across the nation can be powered by almost unlimited energy from the sun. In Iceland, almost 80 percent of the homes get their heat and hot water directly from hot springs and geysers; can’t the United States work to increase its use of the geothermal heat of the earth? There are many clean options for energy and yet we continue to use the fossil fuels which may come to endanger our very existence. Despite an abundance of other options, mankind continues abusing its home planet with dirty pollutants.
Aside from pollutants and their effects (among these being global warming), a further manifestation of human abuses of planet earth is strip-mining, in which human beings plunder the earth for its precious resources, sacrificing natural beauty in the process. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., described the problem of strip-mining as an “Appalachian Apocalypse” because it primarily affects the mountainous regions of Appalachia, where there are plenty of resources to mine from the fruitful mountains. I have seen the strip-mining that takes place in East Tennessee, where in some places large parts of mountains are torn away; and the land of East Tennessee is not unique in that respect. Not only does strip mining tear apart the natural beauty of America’s mountains, it also impoverishes the people of Appalachia, who are having significant resources removed from them when strip-mining occurs. Mining companies and corporations come to Appalachia, strip away the resources, and then take these resources to be used in another part of the country. That is how things have been for decades, ever since the commencement of the Industrial Age. I think that (along with global warming and polluting forms of energy) strip-mining, and other types of wrongful exploitation of earth’s natural resources and wrongful destruction of earth’s natural beauty in general, is another problem to be solved during the 21st century.
Of course, if environmental problems are not solved and the earth is destroyed by global warming and human pollution, then every other problem that I discuss here will become absolutely irrelevant. No one would have to worry about those living in poverty and despair if there was no one living. As it is presently, there is plenty of worrying to be done about the approximately 37 million people who are living in poverty in the United States. 37 million people are about 12 percent of the entire population. Though no nation can ever fully eradicate the scourge of poverty from its shores, efforts can be made to lessen the terrible plight of those living a substandard economic existence in one of the richest countries on earth. As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Where there is plenty, poverty is evil.” We, as Americans living in a materially-rich country, have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves. The poverty situation in the United States begs for an answer to two questions. Firstly, how can both excessive economic extravagance and grinding poverty co-exist under this same national roof? And, secondly, how can those living in poverty be helped by the better-off segments of the population?
Excessive riches and exhausted poverty co-exist in the United States due to the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor. In the United States, the economic inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth, is startling. According to inequality.org and the Economic Policy Institute, “The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.” Additionally, the top 10% of the people in the United States own 71% of the wealth. That is a striking inequality and indicates the level of concentrated wealth in the United States. And economic inequality always leads to political inequality, due to the power that money has in our government. Inequality compounds upon itself; to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere. What can be done by those living in the 21st century to break up this dense concentration of wealth and power? Since I’m not a candidate for political office, I’m not afraid to suggest that perhaps the richest members of the population should have a significantly higher tax burden than other, relatively-poor members of the population and a higher tax burden than what they have presently. But, the focus of tackling economic inequality should not be bringing down the rich but rather bringing up the poor.
And how do we improve the conditions of our nation’s poor? Again, we need not look any further than the causes for the solutions to this problem. One of the causes of poverty is that the United States’s minimum wage is at such an insufficient level that those earning this wage can’t live off of it. The Democrats have, in the past five years, passed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $6.55 per hour. Despite this, the minimum wage today has less value than the minimum wage decades ago, and, despite this, you can’t live off of the minimum wage. The cost of housing, transportation, food, clothes, and other necessities in life is just too much. If you work at the minimum wage level 40 hours each week, and if you work 365 days in a year (an impossible number), basic math tells you that you’ll still only be making $13,624 each year. As a solution to this problem, the United States could institute a “living wage” (to replace the minimum wage), which would be certified by the Treasury Department that people can live off of it and not live in poverty. The probable level of an hourly living wage would be $12 per hour.
Another cause of poverty in the United States is lack of a sufficient healthcare system.
If a person is not provided with healthcare by their employer, then that can be extremely detrimental to themselves and their family. Lacking healthcare, Americans can become saddled with huge medical costs, aiding the establishment of poverty. As a solution to this problem, it could be mandated by the government that businesses must provide healthcare and all other such benefits for their workers, but that would be saddling businesses with a cost that would make them less competitive in the world. Perhaps a better solution would be a single-payer, universal healthcare system—provided by the government to protect its citizens and its industry, and extending benefits to all areas of health, from eyeglasses to dental.
However, the most important cause of poverty, even more than lack of a living wage or lack of decent healthcare, is lack of opportunity. Opportunity is furnished upon the population by its educational system. And the United States’s educational system, in many areas, is sorely lacking in both the quality of the education and in the quantity of students which graduate from this educational system. As for the quality of education, in some areas it is questionable. While visiting the state of Kentucky in August 2008, I observed a local newspaper article that stated that only 6 percent of Knox County high school seniors were prepared for college-level courses, and that only 17 percent of high school seniors statewide were prepared for college-level courses. That is a poor reflection upon the educational system of the state of Kentucky, for one, and I doubt that Kentucky would be unique in this matter. As for the quantity of students graduating from high school, in some areas these figures are very poor as well. In my home state of Georgia this year, there was a 77 percent high school graduation rate, one of the worst graduation rates in the nation. Consider the other 23 percent of Georgian young adults who failed to graduate from high school. Consider the other students across the nation who fail to graduate from high school. They are condemned to a substandard economic existence. High school drop-outs can only get jobs at McDonald’s or as ditch-diggers but not much anywhere else in this modern world of technology and computerized service industries whose need is skilled workers.
Education is important not only in the realm of economic opportunity and the attainment of jobs. An enlightened citizenry is essential to the continued existence of a democracy and the continued existence of liberty. Only an enlightened population can set about protecting their liberties from abuses by usurping Presidents and acquiescent Congresses (or usurping Congresses and acquiescent Presidents). As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and what never will be.”
The primary means of enlightening the citizenry is through education. In our educational system, there is not enough emphasis on civics and on the responsibilities of the citizen-student to safeguard their liberties and participate in their government. To remedy this, I think that it would be wise for civics classes to be mandated as a part of the curriculum in elementary school, middle school, and high school.
But education is not meant to simply prepare citizens for jobs or prepare them to protect their liberties; it is meant to teach citizens how to learn, how to be curious, how to think for themselves, how to investigate and question theories and ideas, both old and new. As John Adams said, “There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” Unfortunately, it seems to me, the United States’s education system has been fairly successful in the former type of education but has failed miserably in the latter type of education, which is the most important type of all.
In his 1996 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, Carl Sagan writes of the difference he sees between first-grade classes and twelfth-grade classes in the American education system: “[First-grade students are] curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm… But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize ‘facts’. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much wonder and gained very little skepticism…” What has happened in between the fifth grade and the twelfth grade? In between, I think that the natural curiosity of the student (however much there was to begin with would vary with each individual) was stamped upon by drudging rote memorizations of facts and figures, sacrificing intellectual curiosity for teaching to the narrow confines of a test or various tests. Teaching students how to think and how to question is sacrificed in favor of teaching the student to accept a group of repetitious facts which will help them improve their test scores.
Christopher Hedges, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, briefly criticized the standardized test system in a recent book of his. Hedges wrote that, after his son got a critical reading score on the SAT that was less than they had hoped for, he hired a professional SAT tutor for his son. Hedges writes, “The tutor told my son things like, ‘stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.’ [Hedges’s son’s] reading score went up 130 points…Had he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique it? ... Is it really a smart, effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over them?” In other words, Hedges was criticizing the tests (and furthermore the education system, which focuses on preparation for the tests) for the fact that they did not really allow for any intellectual curiosity or thinking for oneself and instead focused upon regurgitation of facts and figures.
Thus, the major problems that I see in the high school education are poor graduation rates in some areas, poor educational quality in some areas, and failure to promote civic responsibility, and failure to promote intellectual curiosity and thinking for oneself. As for college education, the major problem seems to be lack of access to that higher level of education. The main barrier for most high school graduates upon attempting to gain a college education is, naturally, the high level of expenses that come with tuition, books, and lodging. The high cost of college can make it impossible for poorer students to achieve a college education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just 27 percent of adults age 25 and over had a college degree in 2003. To promote college attendance, some states have instituted their own educational scholarships funded by the state lottery. The most notable of these states is Georgia, who provides the HOPE scholarship to all students with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. This scholarship pays the tuition for the Georgian students’ college, if the college is located within the state of Georgia. Tennessee is also experimenting with a similar system. The question is, why can’t a nationwide HOPE scholarship, or something similar to it, be adopted by the federal government? This would increase access to college education for the students who maintained a decent grade point average in high school, and this would help to improve the general condition of the United States as a whole.
Another solution to increase college access and graduation can be found in the workings of the United States military. A distant cousin of mine recently joined the military just so that he could attain the college education which he would have otherwise been unable to afford. The military, in return for the service, will pay for the soldier’s college education. The question is, why can’t a similar national program of public service be founded where there is no risk of getting killed in some Middle Eastern country thousands of miles from our shores? Participants would enlist in the service of the United States government, in programs where the participants would do many of things that the TVA and PWA and other public works programs used to do during the Great Depression (such as planting trees, building infrastructure, restoring monuments, etc.). In return for their public service (spanning a certain number of months), the participants in this program could then have their college education paid for by the United States government. To achieve funding for this program, other aspects of the federal budget will have to be cut. I’m not sorry to say that the funding for war and for armaments will likely have to be reduced from its present bloated state.
A mention of the highest level of education (college) ought to be followed by a mention of the lowest level of education: pre-school. There is an excellent government program, created by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, which is meant to give low-income children a “Head Start” on their education. This is an honorable goal. During the 21st century, to further aid our educational system and increase the enlightenment of our population, funding for this “Head Start” program ought to be increased and access to this program considerably expanded.
In the United States during the 21st century, we need to improve both the quality of education and the quantity of people whom education is successfully distributed among. We need to use the educational system to instill intellectual curiosity in American citizens rather than simply instilling in them a grudging respect for rote memorizations of various facts and figures that they will encounter on a test. We need increased access to college education for any American student who has the drive, the determination, and the grades to make it into college. Education in the United States is a complex problem, and, in this 21st century, Americans are going to have to grope for innovative solutions. Some of these future solutions (aside from those that I have already mentioned) may be: increasing federal funding to education, increasing the salaries of teachers, and building more schools so that classes may be of smaller sizes. However, it is beyond my ability to predict the greatest innovations in the future of education.
Now I have discussed some of the astounding problems facing the citizens of the United States as we enter and make ourselves comfortable in the 21st century: (A) the environment, global warming, human pollution and the necessity of human restraint and reform, exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and destruction of the earth’s natural beauty; (B) the terrible condition of poverty which has been shackles upon the bodies and souls of human beings ever since they first began their existence thousands of years ago; and (C) the educational system which fails to instill a sense of civic participation in students, fails to instill a sense of curiosity in students, condemns a significant percentage of students to a substandard economic existence, and is not at its higher levels fully accessible to American students.
The question that ought to be put to us living in the 21st century is: Will we be able to surmount all of these difficult obstacles, for the sake of the survival and of the physical and intellectual well-being of future generations? Personally, I’m an optimist. And I have an optimistic theory about what will occur in the United States during the 21st century. In the American generation that lived immediately after the turbulent events of the Great Depression and of World War II, there was a sense of their living in a post-heroic generation. I am sure that the generation living immediately after the Civil War, and the generation living immediately after the American Revolutionary War, would have felt much the same way: with an acute feeling of living in a post-heroic generation. Eighty-four years passed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the Civil War. Eighty-one years passed between the time of the start of the Civil War and the time of the start of World War II. Approximately every eighty years, a heroic generation of Americans has come up against and overcome the greatest obstacles that have yet faced the United States. It seems to me that, after the passage of this decade spanning 2009 to 2019, America’s next heroic generation is due to appear. What challenges that generation shall have to face, I do not know; it may be some of the problems which I have noted here, or it may not be. But, whatever the challenges, that generation must rise to the occasion, just as their forefathers did eighty or one-hundred-and-sixty or two-hundred-and-forty years ago, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of future generations existing in the 21st century and onwards, through all time.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Egalitarianism
The Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal." But what happens after these people are created? Are they still provided with equal opportunities to attain the "inalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Egalitarians are individuals who are devoted to the proposition of keeping men (and women) equal long after their creation. There are various types of egalitarianism addressing different types of inequalities. It seems to me that there are a number of significant inequalities in our society today. Four types of inequalities which I consider to be apparent in the United States are economic, political, civil, and social inequalities.
In the United States, the economic inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth, is startling. According to inequality.org and the Economic Policy Institute, "The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent." The top 10% of the people in the United States own 71% of the wealth. That is a striking inequality and indicates the level of concentrated wealth and power in the United States.
Economic egalitarianism is based on the principle that each and every person in a society has equal standing and equal opportunity in the realm of economic wealth and power. In a more egalitarian society, the strikingly unequal distribution of wealth seen in our society, with an enormous amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of a very small minority of the population, would be much lessened. The poor would be helped and made richer, and the rich individuals and entities would still remain very well-off but not to the point of the present ludicrous concentration of opulence. The key, though, here is not to target the rich but to extend a hand to pull up and out those who are currently suffering from poverty, desolation, and despair. In an egalitarian society, no one would be poor to the point of desolation, and no one would be rich to the point of disgusting opulence, monopolizing a huge amount of the resources of society. I think that increasing economic equality will lead to a more generally healthy economy and nation (a greater number of people will be happy and content with money to save and spend); that furthering the cause of economic egalitarianism will help to eliminate both poverty and severe concentration of wealth and power.
Economic inequality leads to political inequality, the second type of inequality that I mentioned. I say this for two reasons: (1) the ones who can afford to donate the most money to political campaigns achieve the most influence in the government; and (2) political and financial elites are often the same people because of the connection between money and politics (and the need for millions of dollars to win an election), so financial elites often get elected to political office. Consequently, the wealthy and the corporations achieve greater influence in our government than the masses of the people. That is an example of political inequality, the disproportionate and unequal distribution of power.
Political egalitarianism is based on the principle that each and every citizen in a society has equal political power and influence. This indicates that, in a more egalitarian society, direct democracy, in which each citizen has just one vote, would be used. The United States is not a direct democracy. First of all, it uses an "electoral college" rather than a national popular vote to determine its President of the United States, and secondly, it is an indirect democracy in the way that the citizens elect representatives who will make policy decisions for them (instead of the citizens directly making policy decisions themselves with such a proposal as the National Initiative for Democracy). I think that furthering the cause of political egalitarianism will do much to further this grand experiment of democracy in human governance that our forefathers embarked upon centuries ago.
But, as for the present, high-minded ideals give way to cold reality. Recollect the statistic that I quoted previously, that a mere 10% of the people in this nation control the vast majority, 71%, of the wealth. The bottom 90% only owns 29% of the wealth. And, as economic inequality breeds political inequality, so this bottom 90% mass of the citizenry has greatly lessened influence in the government and the wealthiest 10% of citizens and corporations have greatly increased, although decidedly undemocratic influence. This disparity in the influences of particular groups upon the government, I believe, makes it so that the priorities in government are skewed and wrongly organized. The civil and social rights of the People are neglected and destroyed, while the rights of corporations are closely guarded. I will provide a recent example of this. Last year, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 was passed by a Democratic Congress. This bill provided immunity for telecommunications companies which helped the National Security Agency and the government spy on telephone conversations. The bill ignored the civil liberties of working people while improving the civil liberties of corporations. One of these telecommunications corporations granted immunity by the FISA bill passed in Congress was AT&T; a couple weeks later, should it have been any surprise when the AT&T logo was emblazoned on the official bag of the Democratic National Convention? AT&T was one of the convention's corporate sponsors. The people within the government, using the system of government itself, have compromised individual liberty in favor of corporate liberty, and that is unacceptable, and all due to the influence of rich corporations upon the government. Corruption ensues. Money is power, and power corrupts, and so therefore money corrupts. Particularly when the money is concentrated in so few hands; and this has proved true in the case of the government.
Economic inequality produced political inequality, and, as I have illustrated above, with the gifting of civil liberties to corporations which removing them from individual citizens, political inequality produces civil inequality (or inequality in the realm of civil liberties). Inequality builds upon itself. Inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. Look back in history and you will see examples of how this inequality compounds upon itself. People shipped from Africa to America centuries ago (presumably not wealthy people, as it would probably have been troublesome to drag rich princes and such onto a slave ship) were ripped from their native lands and enslaved and made desolate by rich landowners in America. They had no political influence and were not granted freedom from slavery, let alone any other human rights, in the United States until a terrible civil war made it exceedingly necessary, for the survival of the nation, to abolish slavery. These individuals, in the difficult climb up from slavery and desolation, were still fighting for equal civil rights one hundred years after slavery had been abolished, and being equal socially in the eyes of American society would take even longer than that. Until then, African Americans suffered from the prejudices brought by social inequality.
Social inequality, the fourth and final inequality that I mentioned in the beginning of this article, is the inequality of persons or groups in the eyes of a society. This is different from civil inequality, as that is the inequality of persons or groups in the laws of a government. (One modern example is that of GLBT rights; civil unions only provide a measure of civil equality, as in the laws of government, while not providing equality in the eyes of the society itself by allowing GLBT individuals to marry just as heterosexual couples would.) Social inequality is much more fluid and much more difficult to lessen and eradicate than civil inequality. The entire enlightenment level of a society has to improve for social inequality to disappear; it can’t be dealt with by simply writing up a law to change it. Increasing economic equality will increase political equality, which in turn will increase civil equality and social equality over time.
I believe that these egalitarian philosophies of de-concentrating and making more equal economic and political power are good and necessary to advancing the progress of our nation, addressing increasing inequalities in American society, and creating a more equal and democratic society which truly exemplifies the principle that all people are created equal, with equal opportunities for self-betterment and contribution to their country and the world.
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