marichiko

Wow! What's the program? I want to call up my voc-rehab counselor and see if it's something I might be able to do given my current limitations. Does the job command that much money for an inexperienced grad anywhere? Please give more details.

OK, I'm calling you on that one, Lookout. First of all it is a non sequiter to reply to a statement that the quality of public education is going down in this country by saying that the person making this judgement has "fallen prey to the cult of victimhood." If you disagree with the things I wrote in my earlier post, simply say so and then give the facts to back up your opinion. The only people who feel that it's acceptable to make a condescending statement which turns a debate into one of personalities are politicians, and look at how much respect we have for all of THEM.

Here's some facts for you: In New York City tuition at private schools, K-12, has reached $26,000 a year. Meanwhile just outside the Bronx in Mount Vernon there is a public school where 97% of the students who attend are black. One out of ten of these students live in a homeless shelter. Visit that school's library and try to find books about or by Langston Hughes, the great black poet. Nor are there books about Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, or Leontyne Price or any other famous black Americans. The newest encyclopedia in the library dates from 1991 and has the volumes "b" and "r" missing. There is no computer or card catalog in the library and almost all the books date from the 50's and 60's when the student body was mostly white. You want to tell me which child is going to score higher on his SAT's (if he even takes them)? The one from the private $26,000/yr school or the child who attended the one in Mount Vernon? These are FACTS* and have nothing to do with the "cult of victimhood."

Here's another fact: 44 MILLION Americans, eight out of ten of them in working families, are uninsured and cannot get even the most basic medical care from the "best system of medical care in the world." What has happened to the "American dream" for those 44 million Americans?

Fact: The gap between the rich and the poor in this country has become greater than at any time in the past 50 years. We have the worst inequality that way of ANY OTHER Western nation. The gap between the top 20% in income and the lower 20% has increased from 30 fold in 1960 to 75 fold today. Put this together with the steady dismanteling of public services like schools and health care and tuition assistance for higher education and this gap becomes an obscenity. Is this the realizatiion of the "American dream"?

I look around my country today and I sometimes feel something very close to despair. We are loosing something very precious and something that we should all cherish deeply - democracy and the "great American experiment" in order to satisfy the desires of the corporate world and a wealthy minority for ever more money and ever higher profits, be they deserved or not.

I am a realist, Lookout. Fate has forced me to open my eyes and see things that I never noticed back in my snug little middle class world while you are still singing yourself to sleep at night with the fairy tales the power brokers want us all to believe. I am a victim only in the sense that anyone who recieves an unlucky blow from fate is a victim. But I will be god damned if I allow my voice to be silenced by some foolish comment by a member of the complacent middle class I once belonged to. I'll see you in hell first before I ever roll over with my paws up and whine that I'm a helpless victim. Nice try.

*The facts I cite in this post can be found here:http://www.inequality.org/moyerstranscript.pdf