The Real Lance Brown

Two notable events in last night’s Colbert Report regarding capitalism/the free market and walking the walk vs. talking the talk:

1. At the end of his interview with Michael Moore about his new film Capitalism:  A Love Story, which focused on how capitalism is an evil, which causes the rich to do all they can to take money from the poor, Stephen Colbert asked Moore, “What happens if the market decides it doesn’t need a  ‘Michael Moore’ anymore?”

Moore’s smiling response? “Well, as long as people keep going to see my movies, I get to keep making them. That’s how it works.” (Colbert: “That’s how this show works too.”)

Early in the interview, I flashed on the irony of how capitalism (such as it is today) has made Michael Moore into a global megastar millionaire, and that every eye that has ever viewed any moment of his TV/filmography had that moment brought to it by (what we currently call) capitalism. Moore could not have played into that irony better with the way he closed that interview if I had scripted it myself–saying that his justification in the market is the fact that he keeps putting (paying) people in the seats.

(A Michael Moore fan might be defensively thinking, “Well what was he supposed to say?” He could have said any number of things, like: “I think that important messages like this should be out in the market, even if there isn’t financial support for it. So if the free market decided it didn’t need a ‘Michael Moore’ anymore, I would hope the federal government would have enough insight to provide funding for me to be able to get these ideas out anyway.” Isn’t that an approximation of what he supposedly actually believes in? Because it’s the total opposite of what he said.)

Just why does Michael Moore use the free market to get his ideas out there? Am I wrong to think there’s a conflict there?

2. A funny thing came up at the end of the main guest interview with author A.J. Jacobs. (Michael Moore was not the official guest on the show–he came in for a mid-show “issue” interview, which Colbert occasionally squeezes into the show.) Jacobs wrote a book about how he has tried all sorts of experiments on himself, one of which was to try “radical honesty” for 6 months. Colbert prodded Jacobs to give a “radical honesty” thing about him (Stephen Colbert), to which Jacobs replied, “Well I was a little sad that I got the small green room, while Michael Moore got this huge suite…” To which Colbert replied, “Thank you for coming!” (his standard guest sign-off line).

(Jacobs fades off…he may be saying “huge suite” or “huge, sweet…” It adds up to the same.)

Watch the interview here:

Jacobs’s behind-the-scenes leak illustrates that Michael Moore isn’t the only anti-capitalist who embraces free market values. In the structure of The Colbert Report, the mid-show interview/segments are subordinate to the main interview or segment at the end of the show. In most cases, the mid-show interviews are shorter than the one at the end of the show–they are more like the length of one of his other mid-show segments.  The way Stephen introduces the people also show that the real guest of the show is the person at the end. The mid-show guest is introduced most often like so: “With me tonight to discuss…” While the end-of-show guest is always introduced with: “My guest(s) tonight…”

A.J. Jacobs–clearly less recognized, valued, and exalted by the free market than Michael Moore–was  in fact Stephen’s “guest”, while Moore was merely “with [Stephen] tonight to discuss…”. Yet valuable Moore and his movie actually got more time than lesser-known Jacobs and his book. And as we now know, Jacobs also got the short straw when the green rooms were handed out.

It’s easy to see why Colbert and the show’s other producers would decide to invert their show’s guest hierarchy to accommodate Michael Moore–he is a giant global celebrity with a likely-to-be-blockbuster film coming out. But frankly, if not for the free market’s “valuation” of Moore, there would be no justification for him treating Jacobs that way. At least none that I can think of.

In case it’s not obvious, Colbert is bowing to the free market twice in this case. Once, by heeding the market’s insistence that Moore is more important than Jacobs, and at the same time, catering to the market’s signaling that more Moore will bring him (Colbert) more viewers. It’s a win-win-win all around, really, except for the fact that both Colbert and Moore conspired to short-change the small-voiced little guy (A.J. Jacobs) in favor of giving succor to the anti-god they both claim to despise. (Moore openly, Colbert in his subverted fake-conservative way.)

I guess I’m finding the concept of millionaire anti-capitalists a little hard to get my head around.

(Back when this was in the news) fellow Nevada Countyian Zuri Berry posted his concern about PETA’s reaction to Michael Vick being signed by the Philadelphia Eagles. I posted more than my fair share of response in the comments section of his blog. I’ve been meaning to mention it here for some time. Check it out if you want to see some of where I stand on PETA, redemption, and the obligation that Vick may or may not have to the rest of us.

PETA will never let Michael Vick be » Addi-Sports: The Addiction.

This is an Op-Ed piece I wrote in 2001 about Bill of Rights Day and threats to the Bill of Rights in the post-911 America. It was published in The Union(Nevada County, CA) on December 15th, 2001.

Today is Bill of Rights Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the first ten amendments to our nation’s Constitution. Since the Bill of Rights seeks to defend our freedoms from encroachment by government authority, that document’s birthday seems like the perfect time to examine those freedoms, and see how well they are holding up under the strain of 210 years of growing government (and 3 months of ballooning “wartime” government).

Take the 4th Amendment, for example. It’s the amendment that has been hit hardest, particularly in the past 3 months. The 4th Amendment was designed to ensure our right to be secure from “unreasonable search and seizure.” In the past, the government has tried to comply with the 4th Amendment by ensuring that only criminal suspects were subject to search and seizure. Aside from a few major exceptions, like asset forfeiture laws, and the surveillance of “subversive” activist groups, the government has largely taken steps to ensure that searches and seizures were reasonable. Until now.

The new “USA PATRIOT Act” has legalized the use of “Carnivore,” an FBI Internet wiretapping tool that searches the e-mails (and web surfing, and instant messages, and more) of thousands of non-suspects each time it searches the e-mail of a potential criminal. What’s more, the 4th Amendment requirement of “probable cause” has been ratcheted down to “reasonable suspicion” in many instances. And if that wasn’t enough, warrants that used to require a judge’s approval now only require approval from a state Attorney General or a federal attorney. In other words, instead of convincing an impartial judge that a suspect needs to be searched, police and D.A.s need only convince fellow law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

The 4th amendment has more to say. Aside from insisting that warrants are based on probable cause, it also states that they must specifically describe “the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized.” For the most part, the government has tried to obey that rule. Until now.

Carnivore, mentioned above, has the capability to scan the communications of every subscriber to an ISP, and search for keywords, names, e-mail addresses, or anything else that’s going through the pipeline. By its design, it doesn’t just search the communications of one suspect, it searches hundreds or thousands of people’s communications. A “real world” parallel would be if police were able to use a search warrant for one person’s apartment to search all of the building’s apartments, looking for anything related to their suspect. What happens if they stumble upon unrelated “suspicious” activity in the process? We’ll have to wait and find out, as the courts try to make constitutional sense out of the most significant and disturbing law-enforcement legislation of our generation.

Another major blow to the 4th Amendment is the notion of “roving wiretaps.” In the past, in order to obey the 4th Amendment, law enforcement was required to get a warrant for each phone line they wanted to tap. In other words, they had to “particularly describe the place to be searched,” as the amendment says. Until now.

The “USA PATRIOT Act,” that wolf in sheep’s clothing, gives the green flag to “roving wiretap” warrants— open-ended warrants which allow police to tap into any phone which can be associated with their suspect. That includes pay phones, friends’ phones, cell phones, pagers, faxes, e-mails- any medium which can be related in some way to the person they are investigating. This amounts to interpreting “particularly describing the place to be searched and things to be seized” as permission to say, “we will search and/or seize anything that the suspect comes in contact with, if we choose.”

Lately, the federal government is disrespecting so many of the limits imposed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that it can’t be covered in one column or article. I focused on the 4th Amendment because it has been disregarded the most. There will be hundreds of thousands of pages written about the aggressive “wartime” law enforcement measures being employed, and their impact— on our right to due process and public trial by jury, freedom of speech and the press, attorney-client confidentiality, the rights of non-citizens in our country, and many more issues. We as citizens need to get informed and join in the dialogue.

We should celebrate our Constitutional freedoms, on Bill of Rights Day, and every day— but we must also stand up for them, or they will continue to be disregarded, and eventually forgotten altogether.

May 28, 2003

There is no book which has had a greater influence on me than Atlas Shrugged.

I first read Atlas when I was 15. My favorite teacher ever, Jim Duquette, was a major fan of Ayn Rand — a rarity among high school educators, I believe. He was a rarity in almost every way possible — a truly extraordinary teacher. Fearless, funny, super-energetic, a little bit crazy, strict but soft, demanding yet understanding. He had such a zest for life, and for learning, and for, as he said, “getting at the meat” of things. He passed away last year, and I regret that it had been years since I had visited him or talked with him. He ranks as one of the top 5 influences on my development, and probably will hold that standing for the rest of my life.

A big reason why I treasure Mr. Duquette so much is because he introduced me to Ayn Rand. When I read Atlas Shrugged, it was like I was reading an epic permission slip for me to be what I had become — confident, individualistic, unrelenting in pursuit of my achievements, and unbending to the pressures and whims of others.

I had long been a bit of a self-imposed outcast among my peers — I was very smart, I was cocky and sarcastic, and I was unique almost to a fault.

An example (and you’re going to think I’m really weird): For most of my youth from 5th grade on, I wore button-down “dress shirts”. (Eventually this evolved to unbuttoned dress shirts with a t-shirt underneath, which is quite often still my major mode of “fashion”.) Anyway, in 6th or 7th grade I decided for some reason to start rolling one sleeve of my shirt up, while leaving the other down. If I had to explain it now, I’d say I was challenging the norms and expectations of my peers — a fancy way of saying I was just doing it to be weird, which is what I thought of it at the time.

I wore my shirt like that, every day, for quite some time — I can’t recall if it was weeks or months, but it was quite a while. When people would ask me why I had one sleeve rolled up and the other down — and they did ask me, regularly — I would usually respond with, “Why do you have both sleeves rolled down (or up)?” The answer was, of course, that they were conforming to the norm, and some would say something to that effect — “Because that’s how you’re supposed to wear them,”, or “Because that’s the normal way to wear them.” Most, however, would just express frustration, or say “You’re weird.”

That was not the first or the only time I was weird on purpose, but I remember it the best of all of them, because it was so overt, and because it was really a significant test. The pressure to conform is practically almighty in K-12 school, and at some level as a child, I recognized that I had no interest in submitting to such a thing. Which isn’t to say I never followed a trend, or felt embarrassment, or conformed to what my friends and peers wanted of me — I did each of those things sometimes — but more often than not I consciously or unconsciously resisted those pressures, and I sought to look, act, and speak up in a way that broke the norms, or challenged the expectations of those around me. I can’t begin to estimate the number of times I was told “You’re weird.” Or, for that matter, the number of times I saw the look in a teacher’s eyes that indicated that I made them nervous — not fearful of physical harm, but nervous because they knew they did not control me. Sort of an “Oh my God, what do I do with this one?” look.

And it was hard, being like that. Challenging people is either my nature or I learned it very young, because I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember — and most of the earliest stories of me are stories of me disobeying or resisting in some way. And if you’ve been through school, you must know how hard it is to not be accepted, or to stand up against peer pressure. I basically made an effort to not be accepted, and stood up to peer pressure every time I could. And it was hard. I’m not complaining — I’m just sayin’.

But then I met Ayn Rand, through a little huge book called Atlas Shrugged. And Ayn taught me that being unique, standing out, achieving and being smart, and resisting peer pressure were all good things. She taught me that pursuit of my happiness — in the broadest sense of the term — was supposed to be my main objective, and it wasn’t my job to do what others wanted me to do to make them happy. She gave me permission to be me — she showed me me, in the characters of her book, and she showed me the people who had tried to mold and control me as well. She laid out clearly what was wrong with what they were trying to do, and why it was right for me to do what I was trying to do.

But that was only half of the bargain, and the other half of the bargain almost certainly helped me more than the first. Part A of the bargain, which I had intuited all my life, was “you get to do what you want, you get to decide if you’re right or wrong, and being selfish is not just OK — it’s the right thing to do.” That’s the “permission to be me” part. But for Part A to work, you have to do Part B — you have to live morally. You get to decide if you’re right, but you have to actually be right. You get to do what you want, but you have to do the right thing. Being selfish is the right thing to do — as long as you are living a good and productive and moral life.

Part A of the deal went pretty quickly for me. I had already been training to be an utterly unique egomaniac for a long time. I got my permission slip, and just went back to being weird me, with that much more zest. And as you can tell, I never looked back. But Part B has become a lifelong journey.

Up until then, I was basically winging it. I didn’t have a philosophy to speak of — I just did what I felt like doing. I didn’t have much of a moral structure — I knew the basics, like don’t hurt people, etc., and I had honesty as a characteristic deeply ingrained in me, but that was about it. I didn’t have any rules for myself, unless you count “be weird” and “make trouble” as rules. ;-)

Ayn Rand didn’t so much teach me the rules — she showed me why there are rules, and why it’s important to figure them out and follow them. Ayn Rand’s philosophy is called Objectivism — it’s a whole school of philosophy that started with her — and its two main premises are essentially (I paraphrase heavily), “Reality is. Deal with it.”, and “Human achievement rocks!”

The extension of “Reality is. Deal with it.” is that there is a system to how things work, from the physical to the psychological to the philosophical to the sociological and so on. The system is a knowable and definable thing. That’s “Reality is.” Ayn Rand says it most often as “A is A.” “Deal with it” means that your job is to follow the rules of the system in the correct way. Not the rules that are handed down from people, or written in rulebooks and religions — the natural rules. In other words, doing what’s right — what you, as an entity in a system defined by rules, are supposed to be doing.

It’s not as lame as it sounds, because what you’re supposed to be doing is maximizing you — being the most you, the unique you, that you can possibly be. That ties into the other premise of Objectivism — “Human achievement rocks!” Ayn believed that mankind was pretty damn amazing, and that when unleashed — when let free — humans are capable of phenomenal achievements. She thought that when individuals work toward their greatest achievement — doing what it is they love best, and doing it the best they can — that the greatest good could be achieved. She thought that that was the proper moral system.

I couldn’t agree more. Practically since the first year I read it, people have been telling me that I would grow out of my “Ayn Rand phase”, and now as often as not people will try to look down their nose and say “Oh, I used to really like her when I was young/a teenager/in college, but then…” Fill in the blank — “…I grew out of it”, “…I got out in the real world and learned that it’s not always black and white like she says”, “…I grew to realize that sometimes you need to compromise…” , etc.. Well it’s 15 years later, I’ve read the book 4 or 5 times now (once every few years), and my “Ayn Rand phase” is getting along just fine — showing no signs of stopping. So as not to offend all the people who told me I’d grow out of it, I’ll continue to entertain the idea that it’s just a phase — but just between you and me and the world wide web…I think it’s permanent.

I don’t agree with everything Ayn Rand said or believed in, I don’t necessarily hold all the same values that she held, and her and I come from very different backgrounds and as a result see the world in a very different way — but I believe that most of the tenets of her philosophy are true. I think she was right a lot more than she was wrong. And I value Atlas Shrugged as much as or more than I ever have in the past. If someone demanded a one-book-only essential reading list from me, it would say Atlas Shrugged. I’d probably put a smiley face next to it.

(There’s a lot of clarification and explanation I’d like to stuff into here, but it will have to wait for another entry. I could go on at quite great length about this topic, and likely will in due time.)

On that note, onto the news that prompted this entry: it looks like Atlas Shrugged is finally going to be made into a movie. People have been trying to make that happen for over 30 years, and there have been three and a half failed attempts during that time, most recently in 2001. But it sounds like some pretty hardcore folks have hold of it now — people with money, names, and serious dedication to making it happen. The screenwriter has done bunches of big-name book-to-movie adaptations, and has read the book 4 times in the past 6 months. They’re talking about making it big budget, with known stars — the whole shebang. And they’re all into it because they are into Ayn Rand’s vision, and sharing that vision with as big an audience as possible.

I’m trying not to get too worked up about it just yet, but this would be pretty sweet if it pans out. Atlas is an enormously popular book — I’ll never tire of the fact that it ranked the second most influential book in an important survey, after The Bible. The idea of getting tens of millions of people all worked up about it via a big Hollywood movie makes me smile. I don’t want to start musing about the potential impact it could have until I see more confirmation that it’s actually going to happen. But, woo hoo! :-)

Some articles (each as good as the next, all with worthy tidbits):

The Objectivist Center: Film Company to Bring “Atlas Shrugged” to the Screen

Box Office Mojo: ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ Take Five

Box Office Mojo: ‘Atlas Shrugged:’ Who is James Hart?
(about the screenwriter)

And Miss Liberty’s Film and TV World has an Unofficial Atlas Shrugged Movie Homepage which has been following the development of the project for some time.

January 25, 2006

This story, and all those resembling it, should serve to highlight one crucial fact that we need to remember about our criminal justice system: when we incarcerate people, we are taking their life from them. Years of their life are essentially being snatched away from these folks. In a case like Alan Crotzer’s, that fact becomes especially clear when you think of his age. He was 20 or 21 years old when he went in, and he is 45 now. That is GIANT. His whole 20’s, his whole 30’s, and half of his 40’s. He was just past being a kid then, and he’s middle-aged now.

While Mr. Crotzer was found innocent, and thus the injustice there is absolutely stark, there are plenty of people spending the bulk of their lives in prison who are not the sort of “evil” people we all would expect to be kept locked away. The system – the laws, the police, and the courts – is ideally supposed to be designed to prevent mistakes, to arrest and enforce and prosecute fairly and equitably, to mete out punishments that fit the crimes, to assume people are innocent until proven guilty, and ultimately to do its job: to serve justice. But we all know that that’s not how the system always functions. (We do all know that, right? Can I see a show of hands?) In fact, I think I’m being extremely generous to say that the system might work that way 50% of the time. Maybe (and I mean that in the strongest possible way) half of the time our law enforcement and justice system acts, it serves justice fairly and equitably, without mistakes or corruption, with the folks being presumed innocent until proven guilty, and the punishment fitting the crime. Maybe. (I just had to get that in again.)

But that really is being generous, because in many cases, systemic inequities make sure that almost all law enforcement is tainted. Just look at how black people are arrested for drug offenses in disproportionate numbers, despite the fact that they do not do drugs in equally disproportionate numbers. (Translation: they get arrested a lot more than everyone else, even though they have not been shown to do drugs that much more than everyone else, if at all.) Look at how asset forfeiture policies have tainted police departments nationwide by using greed as a motivator for law enforcement prioritites. (Translation: Cops use seizure amounts, rather than public safety, when deciding what crimes to focus on.) Look at how asset forefeiture policies have resulted in corruption, and in folks being targeted simply because they have valuable property. (Donald Scott, R.I.P.)

Look, quite simply, at how police officers abuse their power with quite a lot of impunity, in the most basic ways: arbitrary enforcement, violation of due process, filing false reports, acting from anger and vengeance, to name a few. And don’t tell me it doesn’t happen, because I’ve seen all this and more up close and in person, and on more than one occasion, and in more than one jurisdiction. I realize that there are a lot of 100% upright police officers out there, or at least I assume that there are. But I also realize – and it’s important that we all realize — that there are a LOT of not-totally-upright police out there. Why is it important that we all (by which I mean you) realize this fact of our criminal justice system? Because of the topic that brought about this blog entry: 24 years of a man’s life, stolen.

In this instance it was a victim, who falsely identified Alan Crotzer, who would seem to be the main screwup. But how about the detectives who brought him in, and the prosecutor who decided to file against him (and presumably got up and berated a jury about how Mr. Crotzer brutally did this and and savagely did that, and presumably kinda coached that victim and his other prosecution witnesses, so that his case went smoothly, and presumably had the full aid of the police)? And how about that jury, and/or judge? Fools? Or are they even victims of the system’s failure too – unwitting accomplices, not allowed to have a full enough and clear enough view of the situation to make the right call?

That they all failed together is the true answer. The cops, the detectives, the prosecutor, his witnesses, the defense attorney, the jury if there was one, and the judge. And the appeals judge, assuming there was one.

That’s a little weird when you think about it. How could all those folks mess up in the same direction? Coincidence? Or does the system possibly have a tilt to it, so that things tend to slide a certain way? And are we going to sit here and pretend that a 20-year-old black man is likely to get as fair of a shake from the justice system as anyone else?

I’m not. Not when decades of people’s lives are at stake. We have to have a real and realistic view of how this system – which is, after all, acting on our behalf – really works. And part of being realistic is understanding that Mr Crotzer’s plight is not an exception – it’s an example.

DNA Exonerates Fla. Man After 24 Years

By MITCH STACY

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Alan Crotzer stepped into the warm sunlight outside the courthouse Monday and raised his arms to the sky, celebrating his freedom after more than 24 years behind bars for crimes he didn’t commit.A judge freed the 45-year-old Crotzer after DNA testing and other evidence convinced prosecutors he was not involved in the 1981 armed robbery and rapes that led to his 130-year prison sentence.

Modified from an article originally published at Liberty For All
June 20, 2003

I come from Massachusetts, the heart of the Democratic Party in many ways. Home of the Kennedys — and hardly a day goes by there when some reminder of that fact doesn’t come up. My mother is a Democrat — a Massachusetts Kennedy Democrat. That’s a special breed of Democrat — one who holds onto the romantic vision of JFK and RFK, and the whole Kennedy feeling, and wraps that around their view of the Democratic Party, then tops it off with pride in being from the veritable bastion of Kennedy Democraticism, Massachusetts.

That’s what I was raised under. I supported Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, when practically no one supported Jimmy Carter. I didn’t really know why — I was just a kid — but I supported him by default. I remember getting laughed at in school when I expressed hope that he would win.

But there was more to it than being raised to identify with the party — in fact, that was the smaller half of it. What’s more important is that I was raised to identify with the party’s values, as perceived by my mother. They were: helping people, especially the poor; representing the ‘working man’ and the ‘little guy’, and women’s rights; fighting the Republicans, who served the rich; and taking care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves. That’s what my mom thought was important, and still does, and that’s why she supported the Democratic Party, and still does.

I absorbed a lot of that. I grew up living within most of those interest groups — we were generally poor, my mom was a working single mother of three, and I lived with three women (two sisters and my mom). And with as little money as we had, my mother “adopted” a really poor family in Mississippi, sending them a little money and care packages each month. She worked anywhere from 1 to 3 jobs at a time throughout my upbringing, and we knew well that every week was a struggle to make ends meet. In many ways, we were deep in the heart of the target market of the Democratic Party.

All that I absorbed then is still with me — all of it except the Democratic Party. I still believe that the poor and the disadvantaged and the helpless and women and minorities and workers and anyone else holding onto the short end of whatever stick they’ve got should be represented, defended, helped, respected, and supported. I know what it’s like to be poor (I know it all too well), and I know what it’s like to work for too little money at a lame job, and to be unemployed, and to live below an acceptable level. And I know the struggle is hard — I know all about it. I’ve spent most of my life in one or another of the many groups that Democrats and “progressives” continually insist we all must help.

All this adds up to make me an unusual Libertarian, because I don’t scorn liberals. I identify with them. I care about almost everything they care about. I could be (and have been) called a “bleeding heart”. Right now, I’m advertising to greens via Google AdWords, because I believe that my vision of the future is very similar to theirs.

Libertarians who are reading this might be pretty worried by now, but I can explain. First, let me distinguish between liberals and statist/socialists, in my usage. To me, liberals are people who care about the things and people I’ve been talking about. I left out the environment (because my mom wasn’t huge on that issue), but that should be added too. They want those things and people protected, supported, etc. Statists are folks who believe that government should be the main means of accomplishing most anything, and socialists are people who envision a commune-like setup (enforced benevolently by government), where everyone gets an essentially equal ration of what everyone (altogether) has.

Statists and socialists are problematic — the former moreso than the latter. But I’m fine with liberals. People on “the left” can be one, two, or all three of those things, but they aren’t all necessarily intertwined.

For most people, it’s about the end, not the means. To most people the means is, well, just a means to an end. They just want the end — as quickly and cheaply as possible, please.

And there’s the rub. There lies the meeting place between me (and other Libertarians) and liberals — not to mention moderates, and many others in this country (because I think most people care about the people and things I’ve been talking about here).

Libertarianism — the view of an America full of free individuals — is the means that will deliver the end that most people envision. My vision includes help for the poor and disadvantaged. My vision is a world where people are not discriminated based on race, or sex, or anything else but their humanity and their character. My vision is one where the environment, and wildlife, are nurtured and protected. It’s a vision where workers get paid a living wage, and where opportunity is ripe for the picking, and jobs are prevalent. On top of that, it’s a vision of a world that’s virtually crime and terrorism-free, and where the “peace for all time” that John F. Kennedy spoke of can begin to take root.

Libertarianism is the cheapest and quickest means to achieve that end, and that fact doesn’t get discussed nearly enough. This is at least in part due to the fact that the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement grew out of the conservative movement, and the majority of libertarians are probably reformed conservatives. So they’ve grown up despising liberals, and you can read many a libertarian screed attacking that group.

I don’t attack liberals, though. I’ll go after Democrats, or statists, or socialists, and those in the Greens who align with those three groups, but I consider liberals to be my political kin in many ways. I want most of the same ultimate results that they want. I just know that we’re never going to get there as long as we continue to rely on government to bring us there.

It astonishes me that my liberal friends fail to see that, since almost all the liberals I know are wildly disgusted with our political system and our government, but that remains as the major difference between me and so many Greens and Democrats I talk to. They and I both see a similar goal, a similar desired result. They want to mandate it, or make it “free”, or achieve the goal through regulation. In other words, they want government to do the job.

To me, it’s so glaringly obvious that government is the wrong means to almost every end we desire — there are 1000 news stories a day with evidence of that fact — that I wouldn’t think of entrusting any job I consider important to its care. Most of my friends seem to recognize that as well, in large part — but they just can’t believe in or envision a world where this or that problem would be solved without government’s help.

Painting that picture — clearly, vividly, and credibly — is absolutely essential for Libertarians, if we want to achieve victory in America. It is far and away our biggest hurdle, and our most pressing challenge. Our proposed means are correct, I’m convinced of that — and if you ask around, the most positive thing people say about libertarians is “I respect their principled stands”, or something like that. Most of our infrastructure is in place, and we have roots and foundations across the country. Our ideas are good, our public awareness efforts are good, and more and more we are included in the political family of America. But our efforts at expressing a clear, thorough, positive, convincing vision of America — our efforts at painting a picture of the peaceful near-paradise that most of us actually do envision — have not been sufficient to the task.

I plan to do my part to change that, and I hope that others will follow my example, and the example of other people in the movement who see the same problem I do and are working to solve it. I think the transformation is underway, and it should be encouraged and fostered. We don’t need to sacrifice our principles in order to create a persuasive vision. (If we do, then we have a much bigger problem on our hands).

The good news is that projecting that vision is the only essential problem left for us to solve. The bad news is that it is essential that we solve it.

Salon.com has a decent story about Ralph Nader’s potential 2004 bid for the presidency, and how it’s causing a painful split in the hard left — between those who have utterly given up on the Democrats and who support Nader, and those who are scared enough of Bush madness (and trusting enough of the Dems) to say that the Greens should stay out of the 2004 presidential race so as to avoid a repeat of Nader’s 2000 “spoiler” effect. Many Greens are worried that if Nader runs it will make even more people resent the Green Party for “helping” Bush win, again.

The issue brings up a lot of thoughts in me. I don’t think Nader should run, but it has nothing to do with the “spoiler” potential. I don’t think he should run because I think he’s proven that he’s unelectable, and without some revolutionary new gimmick or campaign plan he’s likely to get even less votes than he did last time. I think that would be the case even without the spoiler worry, which will be much more acute this next time around. The simple truth is that Americans have had plenty of time to get to know Ralph Nader — he probably has almost 100% name recognition — and have decided that no way do they want him to be president. He’s likely to suffer a similar fate as Harry Browne, who ran for a second time in 2000 with virtually the same method and message as in 1996, and got a lot less votes the second time around. You can’t try to sell people something they didn’t buy the first time, without making any major changes to it or your sales technique, and expect to get a better response.

I think it must be hard for presidential candidates to see that from their first-person perspective, but it’s brutally obvious from the outside looking in. Ross Perot proved it, Harry Browne proved it, and Nader will prove it if he runs in 2004. Even if he could increase his vote capture a bit, it’s pretty much inconceivable that he could get it anywhere near the high-30% he would need to win against Bush and a Democrat. Of course, it’s highly likely that the same could be said for any other person who might run in his place, but at least a new face wouldn’t have a proven track record of having no chance of winning, as Nader does. He certainly isn’t going to win over any Republican voters, and I don’t think he’ll sway any Democrats either…so unless he’s got 30-40 million voters outside of those two groups who will rise up en masse, he is a 100% guaranteed loss as a presidential candidate. And I don’t see even a shred of a hint that Nader could find a way to invigorate a mass of that size into voting for him, unless he has some sort of really, really amazing tricks up his sleeve. Even then, I think it’s clear (as I said) that most Americans have evaluated Nader over the past 30+ years and simply don’t want him to be president. I kinda like the Greens, and I even kinda like Nader, and for both of their sakes, I hope he does the right thing and steps away. The Salon article mentions that folks have urged him to run for Senate or Governor — I think that would be smart, and useful. He almost certainly wouldn’t win those either, but he could actually do some good by running for one or the other. I don’t see any good coming from a 2004 Nader presidential candidacy, especially considering the anti-Bush nervousness on the left, and the spoiler resentment factor. Even an utterly unknown nobody Green would do more good than him in that spot.

That said, I think the “spoiler” whiners are just that — whiners. If the Democrats can’t field a candidate who can win in a competitive race, against whoever else wants to run, then they don’t deserve to win. Nader didn’t hand Bush the election — Al Gore and the Supreme Court did. If Al had simply won his own home state, nobody would be talking about Florida 2000, or the “spoiler effect”. During last year’s Minnesota Senate race, Working Assets (the liberal advocacy phone company folks) sent out an action alert urging people to press upon that state’s Green Party Senate candidate to drop out, so as not to “spoil” Walter Mondale’s bid for the seat. I found it pathetic, and I wrote them a scathing letter to that effect. If the Democrats can’t win races because a competing liberal party is “stealing” a couplefew percentage points worth of voters, they should just pack it up and quit.

Greens (and Libertarians, and whatever other parties) have every right — and it could be said, a responsibility — to run as many candidates as they can, and as hard as they can. Any votes those candidates get aren’t “stolen” from the Bipartisans — they are earned, and earned hard at that. They should be applauded, not castigated — and certainly not bullied out of the race. The word “pathetic” just keeps running through my head over and over when I think of folks whining about third party candidates earning votes that the whiners seem to think belong to the “major” party candidates. It’s not just pathetic, it’s backwards and wrong-headed. The proper conclusion to reach, when one sees that a Green is garnering enough votes to make a difference in a given race, is that lots of voters don’t want to vote for the old party sell-out politicians. If Democrats want those Green votes, they should work to earn them — not try to stifle or bully the candidate that is earning them. If the Bipartisan candidates are so great and wonderful, they should have no problem earning all the votes they need. The only reason people are worried about Nader running is because they know that none of the Democratic candidates in the field right now is likely to be able to beat Bush by a comfortable margin, if at all. That’s a problem with those candidates, and with the Democratic Party itself — it’s not Nader’s fault. Focusing on “winning” Nader’s electorate over by simply taking their guy out of the race is ignoring the real problem, and it’s lazy politics. And I feel I must say once more — it’s pathetic. It feels strange to pity a behemoth, half-of-a-political-monopoly major party that’s been around for over 200 years, but that’s what I feel. I pity the poor, dying, lost Democratic Party — the weakling giant that fears an unelectable, 3-percent-getting guy, while ignoring the problems and failures that have made it so weak.

I fear Bush and the Republicans as much as the next guy, but if the Democrats expect to ride in and save the day somehow, they better focus on figuring out how to do it on their own merits — whatever those might be.

November 10, 2003

Sashwat Singh is an honor student at Brookfield Central High School in Brookfield, WI. He’s a big music lover — he’s in the school band and choir, and he’s a big fan of local live music as well. And, like most kids these days, he’s good on the computer.

So 15-year-old Sashwat made his own rap CD on his computer, over the course of the past few months. 14 songs. And, not surprisingly, his rap CD contains obscenities and tough talk, toward his peers and authority figures in his life.

And — not surprisingly at all, I’m sad to say — he got suspended from school for it. In the assault on logic commonly called “zero tolerance policies” in schools, Sashwat’s CD — made outside of school — was judged to be on a par with a bomb threat, arson or bringing guns to school.

Not content with merely defiling the Brookfield High student body’s conception of their rights as individuals to free thought and free speech, and sacrificing Sashwat to the altar of Making An Example, the school district is considering going a step further and holding an expulsion hearing. To do so would give him ten more school-free days right off the bat, while he and his parents and lawyer spend time figuring out how to explain this kid’s right to make a rap CD to people who don’t already understand that he has that right. Presumably, if they fail to successfully explain that fact, Sashwat would be expelled from school. I’m not ready to believe they would actually expel him for this, but neither can such madness be ruled out as a possibility, as anyone who has read about the legions of idiotic disciplinary actions that have taken place under the rubric of “zero tolerance” knows all too well. If lemon drops, stick drawings of U.S. soldiers, and plastic silverware can be grounds for suspensions, then why shouldn’t expelling a kid for making a CD be a viable possibility?

I’ll tell you one thing that’s nearly certain — Sashwat Singh is going to have a much bigger problem with authority from here on out than he ever did before. My intuition is that he will not “learn his lesson”, as his school administrators — in the case of his principal, vengeful school administrator — surely wish he would. He’s too smart, and too far along in developing free expression. At least I hope he is. Making a 14-song CD is no small feat, and for a 15-year-old to do it all on his own shows a serious committment. And just from the slice of his life that I was able to find on the Internet, one can see that he has a very passionate interest in music — something that, in a normal world of sanity, would be encouraged and rewarded, especially if it showed in someone with Sashwat’s drive and ambition.

I haven’t heard the CD yet, but that really doesn’t matter. The news stories presumably gave the lowdown on the “bad stuff” — talking the proverbial shit about his mother and peers, and offering vengeful new Principal Mark Cerutti a beat down if he doesn’t get out of town. If there was worse than that I assume we’d have heard about it — and if there was worse than that, then so what?

“I got my twelve-gauge sawed off/I got my headlights turned off/I’m ’bout to bust some shots off/I’m ’bout to dust some cops off!”

-Body Count, “Cop Killer” (1992)

“Hey you ever get the feelin that America is turning into some kinda sit-com, lowest common denominator shopping mall marketing strategy from hell?/You ever get that feeling?/Well I got that feeling right now/And it’s kinda getting under my skin/Yeah, so I’m gonna get some gas-o-line, and/Burn down the malls”

-Mojo Nixon, “Burn Down the Malls” (1986)

“You know I’ve never visited Alaska/Where the oil was spilled/That drunken captain should be killed/An atrocity, he still walks free…”

-311, “!#$ The %&*!” (1993)

I post those lyrics — and you know I could go on posting the same or worse for a very long time — to help Principal Cerutti, Superintendent Gibson, and anyone else who’s confused, understand that “threats” and violence are not considered the same way when they occur in a creative medium such as music. Mojo Nixon was not prosecuted for his “plan” to burn down the malls (nor his plan, 9 years later, to take over a national armory and start a revolution); Ice-T was not jailed for the cop-killing spree he “described” in song (nor for the killing of his mother that he described — vividly — in another song); and 311 was never interrogated about their effort to get the captain of the Exxon Valdez killed.

Music — and rap even moreso than most music — is an effort in creative fiction. Or, to put it in a way that a high school administrator might be able to understand — the journey in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales never really happened. Dante never really went on a stroll through the levels of Hell. Holden Caulfield is not JD Salinger.

All that aside, this CD was created outside of school. Just as the school would have no cause for administrative disciplinary action if a student said “I’m going to beat Principal Cerutti down if he doesn’t get out of town” while at his or her home, they also have nothing to go on here. If Cerutti thought it was a real threat to him, then he had recourse through the police, but not through his own school-borne authority. The only possible cause for action (and it’s really weak) is that Sashwat was apparently distributing, in some cases selling, his CD on school grounds. So he maybe committed the selling or distributing of something that’s not allowed to be sold or distributed at school. But the item is a CD — not a weapon, not drugs. I find it improbable that CDs are considered contraband of some sort. (Though I won’t be surprised if Principal Cerutti makes an adjustment of that nature to the rulebook, so as to ensure that materials which demean him are only exchanged off of school property in the future.)

If my dramatic portrayal of Sashwat Singh’s unfortunate situation has fired you up enough to act out, click here for a series of easy steps you can take to help direct things toward a relatively happy ending. There are newspapers to be written to, Board of Education members to phone, meetings to go to — and a Mr. Cerutti and a Mr. Gibson that need to be told what we think of administrators who punish students for taking initiative and being creative. Take action!

Click here to read about my own suspension in 1988 for writing a poem, when I was 15 like Sashwat.

Oh, and in fairness to him, here’s a less humiliating picture of Sashwat than the apparent school photo that appears in the news article.

First, the backstory.

When I was in high school, there was a Geometry teacher, Mrs. Johnson. She was a teacher that few students liked, and the impression was that it went both ways. I was one of those kids that was “too smart for my own good”, as the saying goes. The kind of smart where people eventually tell you to “stop being smart”, if you get my drift.

(My answer to that, which I just noticed was more clever than I realized at the time, was generally, “I don’t know how.”)

Anyway…on certain holidays, Mrs. Johnson would have us kids engage in the strange practice of writing a poem that connected the holiday in question with math. And we could decorate it, in a sort of twisted throwback to grade school, and then if we wanted we could read it in front of the class and hang it up on that corkboard strip above the chalkboard. Well, on Valentine’s Day, I had some fun with that project, and I wrote the sappiest love poem ever, to my dear Mrs. Johnson — a teacher that everyone in the class, herself included, knew I couldn’t stand. Though I didn’t really understand what “irony” was back then, I knew how to use it, and I got to read my poem before the class, and we students all had a nice chuckle at how I smothered her with false kindness.

On St. Patrick’s Day a month later, I wasn’t feeling nearly so generous. (The incident with the improper test scoring that’s described in the poem had happened just the day before, and was the culmination of a series of conflicts between us two.) I wrote my poem during an earlier class that day, out in the hallway after having been kicked out for backtalking. The poem was called “The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre”, a loose reference to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, something I had heard of before (though I didn’t know what it was). Here it is, pretty much exactly as it was written (including the signature at the end). The rest of the story follows it.

["P.J." (in the poem) was my teacher -- Patricia Johnson. It's kinda obvious, but just in case. And there weren't any spaces between lines in the original -- though there probably should have been -- so I left it with no breaks. And yes, the poetry is really lame -- I was 15, and more focused on message than meter. ;-)]

———————————–
The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre

Another poem, this one for St. P’s Day,
All the kids are happy and psyched
Except the ones taught by old P.J.
Cuz she whips us and hurts us and uses her chains
She gets her enjoyment from inflicting pain.
Her only concern is to get her paycheck
Sometimes I really want to wring her neck.
Some kids have said I should
But only as a dare
She’s threatened to kick me out
But I JUST DON’T CARE!
Cuz as far as I’m concerned Mrs. Johnson’s unfair
And I realize I’m not the only one who doesn’t care
She don’t either
Well, that’s the impression she’s made
All she worries about is that the rent is paid.
“You mean you haven’t learned a thing?”
She screams and wails
I can just imagine her tears
Coming out in buckets and pails.
“You mean you got that right
And I marked it wrong?
Oh no, what a bummer
I’m such a ding dong!
That’s o.k., 10 points here and there
Won’t make a dif,” Yeah Mrs. J., that’s fair.
You know what else is fair?
Giving us a quiz that we have to take ’til each one of us passes
And not counting it for anything
What do you think we are, a bunch of asses?
Don’t answer that
We won’t hear you anyway
Haven’t you noticed
We don’t listen to what you say
Say what? Oh yeah.
This is a St. Patty’s day poem.
Some advice, Mrs. Johnson
Quit your “job” and go home.
Oh – Happy St. Patrick’s Day
I’m glad you wore green
Maybe that’ll cover up
The fact that you’re mean

Love,
Lance

———————————-

I actually got up and read that poem in front of the class and Mrs. Johnson. For most of the time I was reading, the class was in shocked silence, and so was Mrs. Johnson I guess. Once I finished, I went to hang my poem up above the chalkboard, as was the custom. Mrs. J. interrupted me and told me I could just put it on her desk.

To make the rest of a long story short: I was pulled out of lunch by a furious Mr. Farley, the Vice Principal, who told me I was suspended as we were still heading to his office (i.e., before I had a chance to explain or defend myself). I got suspended for 5 days, much like young Mr. Singh, who I’m writing about in my next entry. I also was kicked out of Mrs. Johnson’s class for good. My mom, who had spent many long years standing up for me against school administrators, stood up this time too, and supported my effort to involve the state Board of Education (whom I had called on my own as soon as I got home from being suspended).

There are three things that school administrators fear: public embarassment, lawsuits, and their bosses. In this case, playing the “boss card” worked quite well, and with my mother’s support (and the support of a Donna Wied from the Massachusetts Board of Education), my suspension was stricken from the record, and generally my punishment was removed. I wasn’t allowed back into Mrs. Johnson’s class, which was alright by me, except for the fact that she was the only teacher who taught Acclerated (i.e., “college prep”) Geometry. And my mom — perhaps the only person in the world who never wanted to stop or punish me for being “too smart” — would not stand to have her son put at an academic disadvantage for what essentially amounted to completing his assigned work.

In the end, I got moved to a different Geometry class, with various stipulations designed to preserve some of my dignity (at least in my permanent record). Despite moving to a presumably easier class, my grade in Geometry went into decline, and I got the first C in my academic life. I also got weird half-scared looks from the bulk of teachers at my school for a long while, and the “poem incident” was one of the things that was brought up when I was rejected from the National Honor Society later in my high school career.

And, of course, whatever little respect I had previously had for the authority figures at my school went for a long walk and never came back. I knew they had no respect for me, and that they had little power to control me in terms of my non-physical conduct. Those two guidelines ruled my behavior for most of the rest of my time at that school. I learned my lesson, as the saying goes — just not the lesson that anyone (except maybe my mom) was trying to teach me.

Too bad this happened in 1988, before 24-hour news and the Internet got so big, or else I could have gotten some national publicity for a day or two. I also ended up in a rift concerning the Pledge of Allegiance (though not over the phrase “under God”), right around the same time. I guess I was ahead of my time. ;-)

July 10, 2003

You’re not likely to find someone who’s more opposed to the modern American system of education than me. Technically, I don’t think you could, because I’m completely and utterly opposed to it.

There are two issues that I am more adamant and solid on than any others, I think, and those two would be the drug war (I’m against it) and the modern American education system. I say “modern American education system” instead of “public schooling” or “the American school system”, because there are defintely bright spots out there in the school system. But all of those bright spots — homeschooling, charter schools, vouchers, and Internet education — are things that go against the grain of the system I’m talking about.

I don’t think it’s necessarily confined to public schools either. I’m sure there are many private schools that are doing their own thing, but I’m also sure there are many who are doing much the same thing as most public schools — that being, dragging a bunch of kids into huge buildings with dozens of classrooms and hundreds of students, 20-30 to a classroom, and ringing bells every so often, and herding the kids this way and that, and so on. That is the modern American education system I’m talking about.

I’ve written at length about how the very structure and culture of schools leads to inevitable, deeply damaging problems, and I’ve written at some length about how the educational structure of a single-teacher classroom is essentially guaranteed to only tap into a tiny amount of any kid’s learning potential, if any at all — and how there could be a way we could get that amount a lot closer to 100%. So I won’t go into those issues too deeply — you can read either of those articles to see where I’m coming from. I’m really writing to introduce to you an article I just read — probably the best newspaper article I’ve ever seen about homeschooling (and unschooling). But I’d be remiss if I didn’t wax eloquent with some thoughts on it all, while we’re on the subject.

As I was saying, opposition to our “education” system is a big issue for me. I don’t have a single good thing to say about it — to me, it’s a fundamentally flawed model, if the aim is to produce educated, intelligent young adults who are best prepared for their adult lives. A lot of education scholars, particularly folks in the “opposition” like me, will tell you that that’s not what the modern model was intended to do — that instead, it was designed to produce a dependable flow of docile, obedient workers who could be easily trained to do simple reptitive tasks; and that it came along in concert (and partnership) with the advent of mass production and the factory boom.

Now, if that was the goal, then our system was perfectly designed, at least as long as it was keeping pace with the workforce needs of the economy. Of course, it fell out of pace, right about during my time in school, as the Information Age sent the Industrial Age packing. But that hardly matters — because that shouldn’t be the goal of our educational system. It still is, though the parameters have shifted a bit. Prepping kids for the workforce is still the plan, even though anyone who tells you they know what the workforce is going to look like when these kids are adults is lying outright.

Aside from that fatal flaw, the system is struggling urgently with the pains of bureaucracy — it’s this big national beast, increasingly micromanaged from the top, with so many layers of power struggle on the way down that it’s probably impossible to map. Down at the bottom, teachers and principals, with their metaphorical arms and legs chopped off by the many layers above, try to manage what is essentially a big, crowded educational prison — often with inadequate or shoddy materials, with little control over curriculum, and with each having anywhere from 60 to 150 kids a semester under their surrogate care.

And the mission of schools has gone far beyond readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, or even science, history, and civics. Because they are essentially acting as part-time parents of these kids, a whole host of non-curricular issues come up — sexuality, spirituality, character, ethics, hate, rage, violence, pregnancy, and so on. And what is it exactly they’re supposed to be doing for the kids? Do you think that any two people would give the same answer to that question? Are we trying to make them better learners, better workers, more likely to get into college, or are we trying to improve their character, or their physical strength and dexterity, or their social skills? Or all of those things? And what sort of workers was it we want them to be again? Tech workers? Medical professionals? Historians? Zoologists? Politicians? Wouldn’t each of those professions involve developing different skills and subjects, even before age 18? It did, for hundreds of years before the 20th century.

If I had stayed in high school for 12th grade, I would have been taking pretty much what all the smart 12th graders took — AP Math, AP Physics, AP English, and some filler stuff, plus Phys Ed. I had already taken almost every English class my school offered — I took two and a half years of English one year — and that was the only the only subject I cared for. Those “AP” classes were “Advanced Placement”, which is basically a dedicated year of teaching to a test — the Advanced Placement test. My AP U.S. History teacher drove herself nearly crazy year after year trying to prepare kids for that test, while trying to also teach them something about history.

So basically there was one class that I would actually have enjoyed at all, and that one was corrupted by being geared specifically toward a standardized test. I would have had one or two study halls a day. Utimately I only had some miniscule amount of credits left to earn, and (if I recall correctly) Phys Ed was my only class requirement that wasn’t filled. That’s what our public education system had to offer me for 12th grade. I had been out of my mind with boredom in school for 11 years, and it seemed like the last one was going to be the worst yet.

Thankfully, two different places with a little more sense took it upon themselves to get in touch with me, and I ended up going to the University of Southern California’s early entry program. My high school protested a bit, but not as much as they might have for someone else. Actually, most of the authority figures in my school were probably breathing record-breaking sighs of relief. I was an excellent student with a volatile attitude, and that can be a lot of trouble for teachers and school administrators. And it was.

But I digress, a lot. I wanted to respond to my own statement that I have not one good thing to say about the modern American educational system. Many people respond to that suggestion with something like “You must admit that some good things come from school — that some kids come out having added some value of some sort.” And yes, I’ll concede that. While my K-12 education probably amounts to less than 2% of my total education, I did learn a few useful things in school.

The way I see it, it’s like a glass of cloudy, muddy water, with a jagged rim. If the government went and gave all the country’s kids 8 cups a day of muddy pondwater in glasses with sharp, jagged rims, some good would come from it. After all, water is one of the best substances on earth, and even muddy and gross it has a lot going for it. My dogs drink muddy water just like it’s normal, and it doesn’t ever seem to hurt them. If any one of us was truly parched and had no other choice, we’d gulp down pond or puddle water like it was the fountain of life — and in all likelihood, it would be. It would do that good thing water does, and the mud and muck probably wouldn’t hurt you much, if at all.

And about that jagged edge on the glass. Well, first of all, not all the glasses would be totally jagged, per se — some would just have a chip or a little crack, or a sharp area or two that would be easy to avoid. And plus, kids would learn to be cautious and controlled — and cuts and scrapes are part of growing up anyway. And you can’t really expect a national kidwater system to be perfect, particularly when you’re using glasses as the delivery method.

Besides, kids need water — they’ll die without it. And the impurities in pondwater seldom cause any serious harm to internal organs. And parents can’t be expected to take time off work to follow their kids around all day and make sure they get water. Plus, making these kids stay at the water depot all day teaches them discipline and how to behave themselves, and standing in long lines teaches them patience.

See, there’s tons of good to a system like that!

In a certain twisted way, it’s all true. Not just some, but a lot of good would come from giving our nation’s kids 8 jagged glasses of muddy pondwater a day. Millions of kids would be internally cleansed and refreshed, and their young bodies would soak up that water like it was the fountain of life, which it is (to a body). It’s probably more water then they drink now, and it’s a good amount of water to drink. But it should be crystal clear that that would be a horrible plan — nothing that anyone in their right mind would choose. There’s so much negative and wrong about it that it’s not even worth considering.

Jagged glasses of muddy water could bring inestimable amounts of good, but no human on earth would choose one over a nice smooth cup of clear spring water.

The metaphor breaks down like this: Learning, or education, is water; the jagged glass is our educational system, after a century of wear and tear; the mud is the bureaucracy and anti-learning dogma that has seeped into almost every pore of the system; the government is the government; and the kids with bleeding lips and gastric problems are kids like the Columbine killers, and the teens who don’t know the three branches of our government, and the victims of “zero tolerance” policies, and the kid in every other sad school story that rides the headlines (or doesn’t).

So I’ll correct my statement. There are good things I could say about the educational system, but it would make no more sense to say them than it would to defend the benefits of mandatory universal pondwater for children.

If you somehow made it all the way through this, then you should enjoy a shocking contrast by reading the article below. It tells stories of learning and child development that you will seldom see coming out of the vast majority of youth learning institutions in this country. Actually, that’s not technically true, since there are now millions of home schools, each a unique learning institution in its own right.

If you are already into homeschooling (or unschooling), read this article and glow with recognition and pride. If you’re considering it, read this article and tip the scales. If you’re a skeptic, read it and have your skepticism challenged. If you intend to form an opinion about homeschooling at any point in the future, you should read this article.

Homeschooling: Teaching Thy Children Well