Over the past three weeks I have had one of the most amazing experiences in my life. I sat down with a good friend of mine at his music studio. At the end of this experience, the outcome is located at the following link: http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/15849222
Please have a listen and let me know what you think.
The U.S. Politicians would like us all to believe that education is on the top of the priority list in this country. Why then, is it the first item slated for cuts when it comes to budget crunching? What I find to be even more ridiculous is that the schools that are performing the poorest are the ones that lose the biggest percentages of their budgets. What reasonable human being would even attempt to justify this. Maybe I’m a complete nut-case but, in my mind, I think we should help those who need it most. While it is nice to help those in other countries when disaster strikes, it is more important to take care of our own first. Why is it so difficult to help educate our youth and so simple to criticize them for not being educated? The three-ring circus of an educational system in this country is our backbone. If we continue to neglect it, it will continue degrading. Unfortunately we can’t just take a pill to keep it from deteriorating. Teachers are no longer allowed to inspire children to think. Instead they are to stick to the state mandated plan in order to ‘prepare’ our children for the ensuing state mandated tests. The schools that score the highest on these tests get the least of the cuts. The results of this process culminate into a society that not only refuses to question authority, but one that is programmed to believe that our government runs our country. To the best of my knowledge, the phrase is ‘We the People’, not ‘We the small group of legislators that is funded by special interest groups’. While I understand that we need a formidable military, our defense spending is appalling. Pork-barrel spending and the good ‘ol boy system have run roughshod over education, health care, and several other necessary services. Why is it that we feel the need to build billion dollar fighter planes when we already have the technology to shoot a satellite out of the sky from twenty thousand miles? One airplane could pay for numerous educational necessities as opposed to one military nicety. There was a time when the United States of America was the greatest country on the planet. That reign is over and, in my opinion, it won’t be reclaimed unless and until we educate all of our citizens. The more we become educated as a society, the more we become able to make intelligent decisions as a society. I don’t think that anyone would disagree with me if I said that children don’t get a choice as to what family to be born unto. We owe every single one of them the opportunity to exercise their brains and stimulate their thought processes in a positive environment regardless of their social and or financial status. Our leaders have the means to make this happen. The question is, do they have the moral and ethical decency to do it?
