Today's pictures are compliments of a couple of eucalyptus trees that I know...

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

We approach Tuesday’s election day with more-than-usual brash, short-sighted, uninformed citizens whose only expressed motive is to lower the amount of money they pay in taxes to support local, state, and federal government.  To many of them government is the enemy.  One particularly ill-informed candidate for the Senate delivered an NRA scripted rant before a generally approving group of potential voters and television cameras …declaring that she would not give up her guns because she might need them to protect herself from the government. 

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/433-2nd-amendment-rights/26562-joni-ernst-reserves-the-right-to-use-her-gun-to-defend-herself-against-the-government

More to the point, American, the land that I love, is in serious danger of becoming a nation of inadequately educated citizens in a global collection of countries whose citizens are being schooled to move through the Twenty-First Century adequately prepared to thrive in a global economy that favors intelligence and appropriate training.  Consider modern Germany (remember World Wars One and Two in the Twentieth Century): tuition-free universities are seen as investment in a future for all citizens, not just those at the top levels of an economic system.  In France college education, including graduate degree programs, is funded by the state.  The cost for a state university program leading to license (bachelor’s degree) is around U.S. $189 a year.  A student France can go all the way from first year college through a Master’s degree for under a thousand U.S. dollars in tuition fees. Education from preschool (age 3) through secondary school is tuition free, books and materials free.  There is no cost to parents for preschool programs in France no matter what the family’s income level.  In some places in the U.S. families with children living below the poverty level have no access a Head-Start program for their three- and four-year old children.  In America middle income families with both parents working sometimes have a difficult time making ends, so they delay early childhood education until kindergarten.  The value of preschool from age three is without doubt critical to the future school success of some children.  Obviously, not all human beings are the same; and some children are gifted to an extent that even living in poverty they manage to hook in and catch up when they get into a good kindergarten program, but the children with learning disabilities often never catch up if their needs aren’t addressed well before age five.

So, America, what do you want for a future… an ignorant, gun-toting citizenry easily persuaded by misleading political advertising to vote against their own interests; or do you want what the framers of Constitution had in mind for United States citizens?  Getting it right is taking a long time.  As incredible as it seems even to say it or to write it, the 19th Amendment to the U.S Constitution granting American women the right to vote wasn’t ratified until August of 1920… that was only five years after my Mother was born and only fifteen years before I was born. The last anti-miscegenation laws were struck down in 1967 by the Supreme Court ruling in the landmark Loving v. Virginia case.  The Voting Rights Act, legislation to prevent legal barriers at state and local levels in the U.S. wasn’t passed until 1965.  African American men were given the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), but until 1965 voting districts and entire states could legally block them from voting. Today’s BLOG writing isn’t meant to be a history lesson, but it can be a reminder that we should pay attention our past, and that we can look with expectation and hope to a better future for all our citizens if we pay attention to how and under what circumstances we educate them.