PROGRESSIVISM

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." C.S. Lewis

I had a friend who, a few years ago, told me that since all I could do was criticize, I needed to get out of the way and let the new Administration roll up its sleeves and get to work.

Roll Up Those Sleeves!

Well, my friend, there have been lots of Progressive sleeves rolled up the last 2 1/2 years. We have a Progressive President who has been busy borrowing money to pay out a King Kong sized Progressive stimulus to just about everyone. We have taken 10 trillion in debt and increased it to 14.5 trillion in 2.5 years, based on promises that this would stimulate the economy.

The President and his economic advisers promised that by this point in time the economy and unemployment would have turned around. I'm afraid not.

The stimulus has failed. The economy stinks, unemployment stinks, government indebtedness stinks, and each is stinking worse every day.

Words To Live By.

Candidate Obama came into office because people wanted him to fix the economy. In every measurable way this Administration has failed to improve the economy. By his own campaign rhetoric, President Obama should be a one-term President. See the video.

In order to see the future under Progressivism, President Obama's ideology, let us look at one of the sectors of society where Progressives have been in control during the last generation: the American public school system.

A bit of personal history here. Eternal Optimist attended a small religious private school for part of his high school education. A college friend of my parents paid the tuition; I still thank him.

EO also attended a public high-school in Big Cold Town (BCT). Typically, far more money is spent on each student in public schools than in the kind of small religious private school I attended.

In the public school, EO's acquaintances did not spend time studying in the evening. Rather, they spent their time at a local shopping center, purse snatching and stealing car stereos.

During class, EO's acquaintances kept up a low-volume commentary on their sexual exploits. When they got tired of this, they would dwell on the alleged homosexuality of one of their favorite victims.

Periodically these acquaintances were excused from class on some sham or other in order to go get high. At the time I thought the teachers were idiots. Today I realize the teachers were just happy to have these fellows stoned. They were less disruptive that way.

EO tutored one of his fellows for a history exam. This fellow was by no means the most felonious of EO's acquaintances. During this tutoring session the fellow and his girlfriend were unfamiliar with the term "fascist." EO mentioned Benito Mussolini. Blank stares. Adolf Hitler: Crickets.

Benito Somebody, Dude From Italy.

EO managed to explain where Europe was, and that there had been a big war over there back in the 1940s. We missed a lot of nuances, such as Hitler's rise to power and the economic consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.

One conclusion EO came to while in high-school was that these mopes did not belong in school. They were openly contemptuous of learning and did everything in their power to make life miserable for all those around them.

Society (in the form of me and other students) would have been better served if some Marine had whipped their mope asses routinely.

Dean of Discipline, Parris Island School of Performing Arts.

The cause of all this misery was the idiotic system set in place to "govern" the students, which had done away with the idea of prompt, effective discipline, including expulsion.

By the way, not that it should matter, but the mopes about which I am speaking were all white kids. Progressives may need to re-read that fact, because by now all good Progressives have questioned whether I am a racist. That is what Progressives do when someone criticizes them.

Progressives go to places like Exeter, Amherst, and Brown. Must be nice. There Progressives murmur sweet Progressive nothings to one another and establish social policy for the rest of us, the consequences of which they avoid for themselves.

Brown University. For Progressives Only.

President Obama, in true Progressive fashion, does not send his children to a public high school, but does insist that the poor people living in Washington, DC, should be good sports and send their kids to public school. He scrapped the voucher system the people voted in so they could avoid sending their kids into the crapulous, pustulant, scrofulous DC public school system.

Republicans had to bludgeon the President into re-funding the voucher system in D.C. Oy vey. This hypocrisy keeps the NEA pushing millions into the President's re-election campaign fund.

If it sounds like EO maintains a chip on his shoulder, he does.

For a vision of America's future under Progressive ideology, you need only examine the raving success story that is American public education:

compulsory, hideously expensive, pathetically ineffective, impossible to jettison.

I'm just saying.