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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | July 3, 2003 | Vol. IV - No. 8 | ||
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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | July 3, 2003 | Vol. IV - No. 8 | ||
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[ Editorial ]
In a recent speech Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "This Friday Americans will mark the 227th anniversary of our country's independence. We do so in a time of war, when our forces are engaged across the globe, defending our people against adversaries who have a desire to kill innocent men, women and children, and disrupt our way of life. And as we stop to give thanks for our freedom, we also give thanks for those who make our freedom possible: the men and women of our armed forces. ...On July 4th, a grateful nation stops to thank them all." His statement brings many emotions of this old soldier to the surface.
Laying aside the fact that we have no right to have our forces in Iraq whether they had WMD or not, we do have them there and it is the responsibility of every US citizen to pray for their safety and their soon return home.
While we watch our freedoms slip steadily away, we must at this time of year stop to ponder where we might be had our founding fathers not given us such a good start, and had thousands of dedicated young fighting men not been willing to give their life's blood to protect our way of life. If our founders had developed a globalist attitude and established a United Nations to settle our differences with England, and a free trade mentality to increase the global economic base for everybody's betterment, we would never have seen the peace and prosperity this nation has enjoyed. There would never have been the incentive to produce that created the wealthiest nation on the globe which in turn produced a life-style that most of this globe cannot even conceive in their dreams.
John Quincy Adams while speaking to a younger generation of his time said, "[Y]ou will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it." If it was true that the younger generation of his day would not know the cost, how much more true is that two hundred years later? And how much more likely is it that our following generations will not know the price paid for freedom, considering the revisionist history they are being force-fed in public schools under the banner of political correctness? Is it important that they know? It is absolutely imperative that they know. No one can appreciate the value of something without knowing the cost of its production and/or procurement, and no one will be concerned about the care and safety of something if they are not aware that the loss of it will be required at their hand.
The globalist society being produced by public education with no respect for national sovereignty or even private property has no concept of personal responsibility, let alone a notion of personal sacrifice. That society has no hope of making "good use" of the freedom Adams' generation bought for them. It was our responsibility to instill in them the knowledge of the high price that was paid, but we were too busy in our leisure to bother. We therefore passed off our right and responsibility to educate our children to the government, who in turn gave it up to the leftist teachers' unions, whose stated objective is not education, but shaping a global society for the future.
When a system of any kind works, and changes are made to improve it that actually degrade the final product, the first step in repairing the system is backing out the changes that were made. If that is not possible the system must be scrapped and a new one instituted that will produce the desired product. The more important the product, the more urgent it is to troubleshoot the system and make a determination concerning backing out the changes or starting over with a new system. In thirty years of maintaining large computer systems I have seen this process many times and it is often a painful process, but it must be done.
The government school system is broken. It does not produce the product this country wants or needs. When it broke, instead of backing out the changes, more changes were installed. This method of repair never works, but it has been the method of choice for over fifty years in government schools. Fifty years of changes on a broken system have only made the product worse and have taken the system to a point of not being repairable. It must be scrapped.
All education must come under parental control as was the case when it produced a good product. Parents must choose the curriculum, the teachers, the administrators, and control the finances of their local schools just as they once did. Parents must have full control over when, where and how their children are educated if we have any hope of returning the system to an operational status.
We must have an operational system of educating our future generations, one that will produce a product we can be proud of. The product we must have is a generation that will have some understanding of the cost that was paid for our freedom and make good use of that freedom.
Have fun this Independence Day.
Dr. David E. Marlett, Editor
If you were an employer or a teacher, how would you handle this? Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat and presidential candidate, has missed 47 percent of the votes taken this year in the Senate, according to a roll call tally published this week by the Republican National Committee. His fellow presidential aspirants ain't doin' much better. Sen. Joe Lieberman has missed 34 percent; Sen. John Edwards has missed 18 percent; and Sen. Bob Graham has missed 17 percent. But the king of absentee legislators is Rep. Dick Gephardt, who has missed a staggering 88 percent of House votes.
Actually, considering how they vote, this might not be such a bad thing.
The gun dealer whose store was the source of the rifle used in the Washington, D.C.-area sniper shootings last year has been revoked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Brian Borgelt, owner of Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Wash., is losing his license as of July 25, according to Kelvin Crenshaw, special agent in charge of the Seattle office of the ATF. The Bushmaster XM-15 E2S .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle allegedly used by Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad in 20 shootings in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., that killed 13 people last year was a gun missing from Bull's Eye's inventory.
The revocation seems more than a little hypocritical in light of a congressional report recently released. The report found that federal law enforcement agencies are still unable to account for 824 of 1,012 lost or stolen firearms issued to their officers - a full year after the weapons were determined to be missing.
TCN Comment: Shouldn't congress be even handed in this situation and also revoke the licenses of those law enforcement agencies that can't account for every weapon they have purchased? One report that I read claimed that nearly 200 of the missing firearms were lost by the ATF.... Pathetic.
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