Off The Cuff

Our Country Is Going Down The Tubes: Who’s Stopping It?

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me? on Mar 17 2008

Welcome back!

Today is just another of the horrendous things happening in our country that is costing us dearly. The buy out of Bear Stearns is just another symptom of things that are putting us on a slide downward that we do not want. So, who is getting this trend stopped? Yes, I do see that the Fed is trying to valiantly stave off the financial crisis we are seeing here right under our noses.

With gas prices through the roof, the stock market going boing, the housing market that is headed down, down, down and so on. What are we doing about it? From my seat, there is not much going on. Yes, the President signed that stimulus package. I truly hope it helps. But with the housing market on the skids, the stock market going up and down like a yoyo, the Chinese sending us crappy products and the government telling them that it’s okay, the gas prices that will never see down again until our country skids so far that it has to fall too and so on.

I realize that this may be beating a dead horse since there is little going on to fix this problem, but then there are the school systems. How can anyone seriously think that they are doing well? In our area, and I do know that we are not alone in this, our schools might just as well take more snow days off for all the good it does to send them to school. Our state passed a law that says the kids have to stay in school until they are 17 now. WHY? The school teaches them almost nothing and we are expected to send them there anyway.

Recently, a California judge who must have taken a nap during the court time on this case, ruled that it was a crime to homeschool a child in that state if the parent or guardian did not have a TEACHING CERTIFICATE!!!! Are you kidding me?????? It takes several years to get that, even though there are some teachers in the schools that do not prove that by the way they teach.

I used to live in West Palm Beach, Florida. Actually, it was Riviera Beach just north of West Palm. If I say that, nobody knows where it is. Now, in those days, my daughter went to grade school. Third grade to be exact. That year, she learned almost nothing at all, was teased unmercifully about warts on her hands, treated like an alien of the “ID 4″ variety, left alone in the classroom by an incredibly incompetent teacher who sent home report cards with incomplete sentences and extremely bad grammar while she told me that my child could not learn from her. Wonder why???

I reported her to the board of education that year. She no longer had a job after that but the damage was already done. And by the way, before the bleeding hearts get all over this, she did NOT have a teaching certificate. Seems that the school forgot to check on that!!! Yeah that works. The result for my daughter? She did third grade over again in a private school that taught her so well that when we moved here, she was about two years ahead of her class.

That school system appears to be rather typical. And that is the dangerous part, don’t you think? Why? Because our kids score WAAAAAAY below the rest of the world’s kids, that’s why. Is there a solution? Not one you want to know about. The schools need to get a grip, start using the right curriculum, get better teachers, change the system to magnet schools and get some education into these kids before it’s too late. Yes, I know. It all costs money and our country is fast bleeding the money away.

Bleeding the money away? Yes, on to the problem with our esteemed Air Force who is jobbing the contract out to a foreign company that could go to an American company instead of killing off about 40,000 jobs in another country. That gives our hard earned money over to another country while ours is bleeding out. Yes, I have heard the argument that our companies do not put out a good product. Then the next step is to get into that company and fix the problem, hire people who actually want to work instead of those who are so lazy they only want the coffee breaks and all the benefits. Get some people who understand a work ethic, something truly missing these days. That, of course, is yet another problem with our country. We have no work ethic. People simply want to get a paycheck but do nothing to actually EARN the paycheck. Sigh.

And the wheel goes round and round and round. Are you kidding me???

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