HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Saturday, May 28, 2022
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.
MAUREEN DOWD
America’s Human Sacrifices
May 28, 2022, 8:00 a.m. ET
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
WASHINGTON — Once, when I thought of
child sacrifice, I thought of ancient shibboleths.
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon lures his
daughter, Iphigenia, to a spot she thinks is for her wedding, as the chorus
urges: “Hoist her over the altar like a yearling, give it all your strength …
gag her hard.” Agamemnon agonized but felt he had to sacrifice his daughter to
appease a goddess and be granted favorable winds to sail against Troy. Small
sacrifice to get your fleet moving.
In Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus kills
his daughter, Lavinia, at the dinner table, after she has been raped and maimed
by attackers. “Die, die, Lavinia!” he cries. “And thy shame with thee.” Small
sacrifice to save your honor.
On “Game of Thrones,” Stannis Baratheon
orders his sweet child Shireen burned at the stake, as she cries out for the
father she adores, so black magic will melt the snows. Small sacrifice to get
your starving army on the march.
Now, however, I think
of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this
country. We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those
who watch and those who fear the future.
Children having their tomorrows taken
away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns. Why not let every deranged loner
buy an assault weapon?
America is not a mythical kingdom ruled
by fickle gods or black magic. Our fate is not in the stars. It is in
ourselves. It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.
We have simply decided not to do it.
The shooter in Uvalde slipped into a
fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School, ominously announced, “Look
what we have here” and fired more than 100 rounds.
The local police did nothing to stop
the human sacrifice. Nineteen officers loitered in the hall for as long
as 78
minutes as
children died. How can you justify
keeping assault weapons on the open market when police officers don’t engage
with them, even with kids’ lives on the line?
As the officers waited, not bothering to break down a barricaded door, the 19 lambs went to slaughter, trapped in a blood-soaked classroom with an 18-year-old madman. In a haunting tableau, one little girl smeared herself with her dead friend’s blood to appear dead.
Meanwhile, desperate parents tried to climb over a chain-link
fence to save their children. The police, doing nothing more useful, kept busy
by handcuffing at least one parent trying to get into the school.
A slain teacher’s husband died of a
heart attack after he took flowers to her memorial at the school. They had four
kids. Who will take care of them?
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas coldly said
of the massacre, the sixth mass shooting in his seven years in office, “could
have been worse.” Donald Trump, who once told me if he were elected president,
he would get in his limo and drive down to the National Rifle Association and
bargain with it until he could get agreement to some common-sense solutions,
spoke to the N.R.A. convention in Houston Friday evening and spouted gun lobby
talking points — small price for the tens of millions it spent to get him elected. What
a sociopathic jellyfish. It was sacrilege for him to make it seem as though the
N.R.A. cared by reading the names of the dead children and teachers, with a
bell gonging after each name.
What is wrong with this country?
Republicans think they’re showing their toughness by preventing curbs on guns.
But it’s a huge American weakness.
When a gunman killed 35 people in
Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government passed such common-sense gun laws
six months later that there has been only one mass shooting since. More than a
million firearms were destroyed.
When an anti-Islamic extremist in
Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019, the New Zealand
government banned most semiautomatic weapons 26 days later. There have been no
mass shootings since.
As the inspiring New Zealand prime
minister, Jacinda Arden, said at the time, she could not have faced the
surviving victims and told them “our system and our laws allow these guns to be
available and that is OK.”
The political debates
here are empty and soulless, with Democrats dodging the issue and Republicans
hardening even on mild proposals like universal background checks, which
has overwhelming public approval.
“Most Republicans in the Senate
represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred
privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon
no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the
country,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times.
Republicans throw up a fog of
nonsensical suggestions. Before speaking to the N.R.A. Friday, Ted Cruz said
schools should have only one entry point, with an armed guard. Guns don’t kill
people. Doors do. During his speech at the N.R.A., Trump suggested turning
schools into virtual jails and letting teachers pack pistols in class.
“Meaningful policy discussions over
guns or voting or public health have left the room,” said my colleague
Elizabeth Williamson, author of the new book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy
and the Battle for Truth.” “Spewing conspiracy theories and bench-clearing
nonsense around mass shootings, elections and coronavirus is becoming a tribal
signifier for some on the right.”
The Republicans are doing everything
they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing
nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party
symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.
America is stuck in a loop on guns —
and it’s a fatal one. This country always cherished its frontier image, Gary
Cooper in “High Noon,” shooting it out with the bad guys. But now when the bad
guys start shooting, lawmakers just shrug.
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power
of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
WONDER WHY COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES AND GRAD SCHOOLS COST SO MUCH AND TUITION KEEPS RISING????
Administrators now outnumber faculty at some universities—Yale employs 5,066 administrators and just 4,937 professors—and law schools haven’t been spared the bloat.
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN
Why Your Kid Isn't Going to Princeton and a Bunch of
Other Top Schools
The
odds against getting into elite universities have never been higher. But maybe
it's time to recalculate the value of a college education.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Many of us likely forgot one of the most
striking things about the last great college sports scandal - I'm not referring
to the illegal early recruiting stings, the under-the-table payments to
incoming athletes and their parents, or even the many perverts caught in the
locker and training rooms. It was a revelation from the Varsity Blues
scandal, where fancy, famous, and affluent parents bribed coaches and other admissions
officers and used fake resumes to get their mediocre offspring
admitted to prestigious colleges through the locker room door by claiming that
they were serious jocks.
As the stories slowly unfolded, what became
apparent is that some of the kids involved didn't even want to go to college.
In each case, the main driving force was a clever con artist named Rick Singer,
who combined his mastery of the college admissions process with his ability to
manipulate and stroke the pathetic parents' egos, their competitive social
concerns, and their desperate need for bragging rights. These folks may have
gone to inferior schools or none at all, but their kids were going to the moon,
and they'd tell the whole world about it. Talk about living vicariously through
your kids. Of course, this isn't exactly unexpected or difficult to understand.
No one associates famous TV or film stars with healthy and happy childhoods or
with being great parents. In truth, though, you don't know what you're capable
of until you have children.
But that's all yesterday's news. There's a
major new storm on the horizon that suggests bad news for millions of
late-Millennial parents with high school aged kids, even though their own
aspirations are far more modest than those of the bi-coastal cheats. From here
on down, it's all uphill. These aren't people seriously looking to get their
kids into Harvard or Yale; they'd be pleased as punch just to be sure that
their kids got into a "good" school - one like they attended
themselves. Ideally, one that was at least as well regarded as their own alma
maters. But their kids most likely won't be headed anywhere near their folks'
old stomping grounds.
The sad realities that will be playing out
over the next several years for millions of families are: (a) as the parents
often sarcastically say, they themselves would no longer be accepted and
admitted to the colleges and universities they attended since the entrance
criteria have been radically raised; (b) the upper middle range of schools (not
Ivy League, but certainly Big 10), which would have been largely "socially"
acceptable for their kids to attend, are now so selective and difficult to get
into that their offspring will have to "settle" for schools in the
next tier down -- not necessarily in academic terms, but certainly in the media
and reputational sense; (c) many of the schools are finally limiting or
discarding legacy admittance criteria, which used to be another sneaky way in,
as well as reducing or abandoning their reliance on standardized tests; and (d)
there are no longer any such things as safety schools for most students where
there is an absolute assurance of acceptance - even including state
universities.
Getting into the top 25 private universities
and maybe another 10 well-regarded state schools has always been difficult, but
it's never been this difficult or as likely that highly qualified students with
exceptional academic results, superior test scores, and extensive
extracurricular and charitable activities would be consistently rejected by top
universities. But that's what's happening. And the clear cause isn't that the
kids’ credentials have changed, it's that the colleges and universities--
trying to meet diversity and equity goals --have moved and changed the goal
posts and literally pulled the rug out from under these kids' futures. The switcheroo
is so patently obvious that the Supreme Court, before the end of its current
term, will be ruling on cases brought by Asian-American students who claim that
they were denied entry based on the admitted fact that seats were given to
other, less qualified but more highly prioritized applicants.
There are other explanations for the increased
student and parental anxiety and concern, including three primary drivers.
(1) The elite colleges refuse to
increase their class sizes and continue to exploit, market and pride themselves
on their exclusivity and the ridiculously small percentage of applicants
accepted each year. They are not too proud, however, to accept costly and
material application fees from tens of thousands of students each year who have
zero prospects of being accepted. Princeton's class of 2025 had 37,601
applicants and offered admission to 1498 students. The
class size issue will be exacerbated by the fact that many students who
deferred or interrupted their studies due to the pandemic now plan to enter or
return to college.
(2) Colleges across the spectrum are
under increasing pressure to increase the diversity of their student
populations and they are setting aside larger numbers of seats in each class
for applicants meeting diversity criteria, who may or may not meet all of the
other admission criteria as well. Assuming that every other criterion is the
same, it's theoretically "no harm, no foul"-- except to the thousands
of aspiring students who didn't make the cut, which is no different in that
regard than at any other time. There's obviously never been room enough for
everyone. But the pending lawsuits allege that the scales were more than a
little tilted in order to preference diverse applicants. This will be the
central issue for the courts to decide.
(3) Financial aid has turned into its
own crazy, sweepstakes-like process with high schools encouraging their
exceptional students to apply for as many scholarships as possible and then the
schools brag and solicit media about the aggregate dollars which these few students have
accumulated. The net effect of these stupid, self-promoting
stunts is to prevent or preclude other qualified students from accessing some
of these awards in a timely fashion, which makes it more difficult for them to
apply to certain colleges and universities without the assurance of financial
support to attend if they were accepted.
So, Sonny or Sally won't likely be going to
old Faber College where Dad was president of the Deltas or Mom was a student
leader. But it's possible that there's a silver lining in all this drama and
angst and, of all things, there's even a lesson to be drawn from the Varsity
Blues scandal itself.
It's far more important to prepare the kids
for the path and its alternatives than to try to prepare the path for the
kids. Maybe the best and biggest favor parents can do right now for their
college-bound kids is to lower the heat, reduce some of the stress, temper the
level of expectations, and then ask their kids what it is that they really
want to do. They may not have a clear or obvious answer, but they are entitled
to a choice.
Maybe they don't care to go to some expensive
four-year school, study whatever, end up with long-term college debt along with
their parents, and graduate with a degree in nothing employable so they can
become the best barista on the block. Maybe they want to explore some high-end
vocational training - learn some real substantive and technical skills -
graduate and jump right into a job paying a solid six-figure income and never
look back at what they allegedly missed. Or they may want to become an
apprentice for some union job that will be here forever, not be exportable to
China or India, likely be based in their hometown, and provide an assured path
to a middle-class, solid and protectable income. In the future, far more
mechanics will be working with keyboards and computers than wrenches and
soldering irons and making $100k plus.
The lesson here is pretty simple. Much like
the fantasy tale of the 80's and 90's that everyone needed to own their own
home, it's increasingly clear that not everyone needs to mortgage their future
to attend a four-year college to obtain a degraded degree in whatever which is
becoming a less and less important factor every day in the successful search to
find gainful and satisfying employment.
Just because we've always seen for centuries
that becoming a college grad was the be-all and end-all in the movies and on TV
and that it was something to be devoutly wished and hoped for doesn't make it
true or even desirable any longer today.
MAY 24, 2022
The
opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of
Inc.com.
Monday, May 23, 2022
.webp)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)