What Do I Stand For? Part 1 - For The Children
I have been awfully hard on the Democrats over the very nature that they seem to have no soul, no direction, aimlessly wandering about the political arena with their heads up their arses. Then it got me to thinking, why exactly is there no political party out there for me. Perhaps if I could define what I stood for then maybe there would be others out there who are in my same boat where I do not feel so alone, at least politically.
Childhood Obeseity
This is a growing problem among the children. In my apartment complex, my children have a total of 23 friends who I see quite often. All but 3 are overweight. 11 are quite obese. One poor boy often has red cheeks when he goes up the stairs and is out of breath just walking across the parking lot. Most of the children have parents who are also overweight. To boot, many of these kids are in homes with low incomes who border on the line between qualifying for welfare and the working poor who do not qualify for help.
As I have stated in one blog entry, one of the factors of being overweight is being poor because the inability to afford quality foods including fresh fruits and vegetables. The diet of the lower income classes are almost always higher in carbohydrates, bad sugars and bad fats because it is cheap food.
Lower income also means fewer visits to health care physicians who can better keep tabs on the children and their weight.
Health Care
When there are so many children belonging to low income families that have little or no health care and do not qualify for federal or state programs for help, they can often get in serious medical complications by having to ignore symptoms until they get so bad that a trip to an emergency room becomes necessary.
A national health care plan, such as the ones in the UK or Canada could work in the United States. Of course there will always be the options for those who wish to have insurance plans where they can have better control over whom they see, but as a safety net for everyone else without insurance, a national health care plan would help the most desperate. It could be set up with a sliding fee scale if necessary to allow those with no income or very little income to see a doctor free up to the regular fees to those with a higher income. Prescription costs for vital medicines for children should be free.
And along with a health care system, it should also involve preventative medicine. There should be more access to fitness centers where even the poor can get in some exercise. There should be provision to help families who cannot afford essential fruits and vegetables to obtain them.
Food Standards
There should be stricter standards on the foods we are allowed to sell in stores because part of the health problems rest on the dyes, chemicals, artificial products, corn syrups and other perverted sugars, perverted forms of fat, and other dangerous artifacts added to make a cheap product. Long term, this is what will kill us all and to feed them to children is allowing them to go to an early grave.
There is no proof one way or another that genetically modified food is dangerous. It allows food that can grow bigger, stronger and resistant to disease and insects. I think more research should be done in this field to satisfy the question of the long term nature of this proceedure. While it may be good in the short run, we do not know if this could backfire in a very serious way in the future.
The abysmal things we do to the animals we raise for food is also an issue of concern. The so-called Mad Cow disease came about basically by feeding vegetarian animals dead cow flesh. So wrong on so many different levels! We do that in the United States and have not had this happen here...yet. We pump them with steriods, antibiotics, and other unnatural chemicals while we keep them in cramped quarters in miserable conditions in order to maximize the profit potential and bring cheap meat into the market. The meat may be cheap, but it comes with a price to our health and especially the health of the children.
Day Care/After School Programmes
Not every family has the luxury of having one parent stay at home to watch the children. If most employers would pay a decent living wage, even a single parent could be able to work just one job and afford day care at the same time. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Some have figured out the black hole in a two parent family. Unless both parents are working jobs paying more than $15 per hour and have one or more children, they cannot afford to have one parent go in the workforce OR both parents could work with one or both of them working two or more jobs to make ends meet. Often it costs more for the other parent to go to work which defeats the point in working outside the home.
A single parent does not even have that luxury to entertain the notion of always being home for the children if they must work.
I think businesses should be encouraged with tax breaks, government contracts, and special perks for paying decent wages and benefits to their employees. Forget about corporate welfare for companies that use it for the CEOs and stockholders to use in their profit margin or to take jobs out of the country. Give this money instead to the businesses that truly love the country and the people who live in it. Give it to those who value their workers and their customers.
There should be more grants and loans for those wanting to start their own businesses, especially for single parents who may want to start a job they can do at home where they can be with the kids when they need them. Give these grants and loans to business minded people who want to create more local jobs which can hire people in the area who wish to be close to their home and families.
If more people could work decent jobs with decent wages, the problems with over inflated daycare cost would be decreased.
Violence And Outreach
Our society glorifies violence. This is wrong. People tend to act out more and it is considered socially acceptable. Movie and sports stars will get lots of press when they break out in a fit of violence sometimes with a pat on the back or with a slap on the wrist. The news covers so many paranoid stories without all the facts and whips people into a fear based frenzy. Is it a wonder that kids pick up on the fact that the world is not a safe place and violence is an okay way to vent your frustration?
Guns are not the problem. Video games and movies are not the problem. The problem is the embedded attitude that violence is cool. As with the anti-smoking campaign which has reduced the image of the smoker from being cool to being a social outcast, the same needs to be done with violence. It is not acceptable to vent out your rage on others. Children see this and imitate this as normal.
When children pick up these habits, they often get in trouble or become bullies. No one seems to take it seriously. Even if the parents beg authorities or government agencies to intervene, nothing will be done unless the child breaks a serious law and then there is no going back. They will not do something to prevent the child from getting to that point. This is wrong.
There needs to be a campaign against violence. Violence and rage are not cool. It is dangerous and socially unacceptable. We should not praise those or look the other way when people do such things. They should be called on their behaviour and made to see how foolish it is. If the children could see that those who participate in such actions get mocked instead of praised, perhaps they will think twice about venting their rage.
School Prayers
I strongly believe in the seperation of church and state. A public school is not a church, but an entity that is run and funded by the local and federal government and through taxpayers' money. It is not the job of such an institution to enforce or strongly favour any particular religion which is what having a school prayer would do.
That being said, I also strongly believe in freedom of religion. Just because one is not in church does not mean they must stop being religious and that includes being at school. While I would be fully against a school endorsed mandatory prayer during class time, I see no objection to students who wish to come together with or without a teacher or pastor when class is not in session on a voluntary basis. Let the Christians, Jews, Muslims, and any other religious group be able to express their religious freedoms, but do not enforce it or make it mandatory for the rest who do not wish to participate.
Pledge of Allegiance
I know some people are getting bent out of shape over the very nature of the pledge. It seems like a bad 50s conformist code forced upon the masses to prove oneself to be an American. The words "one nation under God" were not originally in this pledge, but added to verify that all Americans are in fact different from those godless Communists. So if you wanted to be considered an American and not a Pinko, you were wanting to be under this nation of God, implying a Christian god really.
There are other arguments to saying it other than the "under God" part. Others object to the fact that the nation was started where all states were more independent of the big nation and could seceed at anytime until the Civil War made that impossible. Still others object that this nation does not grant liberty and justice for all. While others still object to saying a loyalty pledge on the principle that they have nothing to prove to anyone. Should one be forced or even pressured to say a loyalty oath as part of a daily school routine?
There used to be a time for a few decades when both the Pledge and a prayer was the way to start off the school morning. The prayer was always of the Christian variety which would exclude anyone not of the faith who were forced to participate in a state run religious ritual. The Pledge was also considered a religious ritual with the added words, "under God."
I do not wish to say it myself. My children have come to their own conclusion that they would rather not say it. Most of their friends think it is a pretty stupid waste of time even if they don't see the full impact of why because to them it is just something boring they have to do.
Even if those words were taken out and it went back to the original wording, I do not think we should impose loyalty oaths on children who do not actually understand what they are saying. It is a subtle form of patriotic brainwashing and I think it should be eliminated from elementary and high schools.
Sex Education
I am all for teaching children to not participate in having sex until they are ready for the full realm of consequences that go with the territory. In order to teach this form of abstinence, it would require the full details about sexual intercourse, the biological functions of males and females, how one could become pregnant, the sexual diseases and the consequences of them, the emotional aspect of sex with love versus lust, and then the prevention of pregnancy and disease with an emphasis on avoiding it until they are ready for the consequences.
With a good program, it would also include more adult topics such as experimenting with an adult life. The children could get a newspaper and pretend to find a job with the teacher letting them know what job they would get and at what pay. Then they could find a place to live in the classified ad and have to create a budget on what they would live on during the month. When they get the budget together, then they could have the experimental robot babies to carry around and have to care for during a month so they could get a picture of what it means to become a parent.
In addition, they should be allowed to talk to people who have had sexual diseases and AIDS to see first hand the consequences of unprotected sex.
The final judgement as to whether a child will have sex or not is more of a result of what the parents teach. Morality is the parent's job, not the school's. The school can only educate to guide the children with all options available while the parent can guide the child in what is expected from them.
Evolution Versus Intellegent Design
Intellegent Design is a cover for teaching the Biblical account of creation under the guise of being a real science. No matter what it is called, it still is not science and in no way belongs in a science class. For those who strongly believe in teaching Intellegent Design, really ask yourself honestly what are your motives. There is a religious group that believes in Intellegent Design. They believe aliens from another planet formed life on our Earth. They take it just as seriously as Christians, Jews and Muslims take the Adam and Eve story. Is this version of Intellegent Design also acceptable or is it really just a cover to introduce a religious bias within a science class? There is no scientific basis on which to use a Biblical story. Evolution is a scientific theory which follows all the rules of scientific proceedure. There IS a difference.
Education
Teachers are doing the best they can, but are often underpaid and unappreciated for all they have to do. In areas where people are wealthy and pay a higher property tax, such schools in those districts can have the best of everything to make a better education possible. Not all areas are so lucky. The bussing issue only masks the deeper problem that only putting a handful of lucky students in a better school will never make up for the ones permanently left behind.
The schools that need the most help are in the poor areas. The No Child Left Behind sounds great in theory, but in practice is severely lacking. It punishes schools that cannot acheive the standards set out before it and if it fails to meet those standards then funding is cut. A school that is already bad off cannot afford to have more funds cut. They will have enough trouble trying to reach those goals due to decades of being behind the standards and not enough help to get them up to meet the goals. It becomes a sinister way to punish poor schools and shut them down while making the school voucher programme become a more viable option to allow more kids to go to private and religious schools for the same money that could have been used to just improve the school in the first place.
School buildings which are old either need to be repaired or rebuilt. There needs to be programmes to encourage people in college to pursue a teaching career. Teachers need to be paid more and better teachers even more. School books should be current and at least made within the last few years. School libraries should be expanded with more book choices and access to computers. The reading and math should be drilled into the children on every single grade level. If a child cannot perform reading or math at their grade level, they should be kept back or allowed to go to summer school to catch up.
Classrooms need to be split up like it used to be with the advanced level kids in one class, the average kids in another class, the below average kids in another class, and the troublemakers in yet another class so all students can perform at their proper level. It has been a bad experiment to mix the students up. The slower kids are not really being encouraged to be smarter by the mere fact of being in the same class, but are often intimidated and less likely to want to try. The smarter kids are often the target of ridicule and tend to act dumb and not live to their full potential. School is supposed to be for learning the skills they will need as adults and a politically correct system is only dragging everyone behind. Let the kids learn social behaviour on the playground, at lunch, during classes such as Physical Education, Music and Art.
I will comment more later on the things I stand for, but for now, I leave it at this.
AAA Resources For Information And Entertainment
Childhood Obeseity
This is a growing problem among the children. In my apartment complex, my children have a total of 23 friends who I see quite often. All but 3 are overweight. 11 are quite obese. One poor boy often has red cheeks when he goes up the stairs and is out of breath just walking across the parking lot. Most of the children have parents who are also overweight. To boot, many of these kids are in homes with low incomes who border on the line between qualifying for welfare and the working poor who do not qualify for help.
As I have stated in one blog entry, one of the factors of being overweight is being poor because the inability to afford quality foods including fresh fruits and vegetables. The diet of the lower income classes are almost always higher in carbohydrates, bad sugars and bad fats because it is cheap food.
Lower income also means fewer visits to health care physicians who can better keep tabs on the children and their weight.
Health Care
When there are so many children belonging to low income families that have little or no health care and do not qualify for federal or state programs for help, they can often get in serious medical complications by having to ignore symptoms until they get so bad that a trip to an emergency room becomes necessary.
A national health care plan, such as the ones in the UK or Canada could work in the United States. Of course there will always be the options for those who wish to have insurance plans where they can have better control over whom they see, but as a safety net for everyone else without insurance, a national health care plan would help the most desperate. It could be set up with a sliding fee scale if necessary to allow those with no income or very little income to see a doctor free up to the regular fees to those with a higher income. Prescription costs for vital medicines for children should be free.
And along with a health care system, it should also involve preventative medicine. There should be more access to fitness centers where even the poor can get in some exercise. There should be provision to help families who cannot afford essential fruits and vegetables to obtain them.
Food Standards
There should be stricter standards on the foods we are allowed to sell in stores because part of the health problems rest on the dyes, chemicals, artificial products, corn syrups and other perverted sugars, perverted forms of fat, and other dangerous artifacts added to make a cheap product. Long term, this is what will kill us all and to feed them to children is allowing them to go to an early grave.
There is no proof one way or another that genetically modified food is dangerous. It allows food that can grow bigger, stronger and resistant to disease and insects. I think more research should be done in this field to satisfy the question of the long term nature of this proceedure. While it may be good in the short run, we do not know if this could backfire in a very serious way in the future.
The abysmal things we do to the animals we raise for food is also an issue of concern. The so-called Mad Cow disease came about basically by feeding vegetarian animals dead cow flesh. So wrong on so many different levels! We do that in the United States and have not had this happen here...yet. We pump them with steriods, antibiotics, and other unnatural chemicals while we keep them in cramped quarters in miserable conditions in order to maximize the profit potential and bring cheap meat into the market. The meat may be cheap, but it comes with a price to our health and especially the health of the children.
Day Care/After School Programmes
Not every family has the luxury of having one parent stay at home to watch the children. If most employers would pay a decent living wage, even a single parent could be able to work just one job and afford day care at the same time. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Some have figured out the black hole in a two parent family. Unless both parents are working jobs paying more than $15 per hour and have one or more children, they cannot afford to have one parent go in the workforce OR both parents could work with one or both of them working two or more jobs to make ends meet. Often it costs more for the other parent to go to work which defeats the point in working outside the home.
A single parent does not even have that luxury to entertain the notion of always being home for the children if they must work.
I think businesses should be encouraged with tax breaks, government contracts, and special perks for paying decent wages and benefits to their employees. Forget about corporate welfare for companies that use it for the CEOs and stockholders to use in their profit margin or to take jobs out of the country. Give this money instead to the businesses that truly love the country and the people who live in it. Give it to those who value their workers and their customers.
There should be more grants and loans for those wanting to start their own businesses, especially for single parents who may want to start a job they can do at home where they can be with the kids when they need them. Give these grants and loans to business minded people who want to create more local jobs which can hire people in the area who wish to be close to their home and families.
If more people could work decent jobs with decent wages, the problems with over inflated daycare cost would be decreased.
Violence And Outreach
Our society glorifies violence. This is wrong. People tend to act out more and it is considered socially acceptable. Movie and sports stars will get lots of press when they break out in a fit of violence sometimes with a pat on the back or with a slap on the wrist. The news covers so many paranoid stories without all the facts and whips people into a fear based frenzy. Is it a wonder that kids pick up on the fact that the world is not a safe place and violence is an okay way to vent your frustration?
Guns are not the problem. Video games and movies are not the problem. The problem is the embedded attitude that violence is cool. As with the anti-smoking campaign which has reduced the image of the smoker from being cool to being a social outcast, the same needs to be done with violence. It is not acceptable to vent out your rage on others. Children see this and imitate this as normal.
When children pick up these habits, they often get in trouble or become bullies. No one seems to take it seriously. Even if the parents beg authorities or government agencies to intervene, nothing will be done unless the child breaks a serious law and then there is no going back. They will not do something to prevent the child from getting to that point. This is wrong.
There needs to be a campaign against violence. Violence and rage are not cool. It is dangerous and socially unacceptable. We should not praise those or look the other way when people do such things. They should be called on their behaviour and made to see how foolish it is. If the children could see that those who participate in such actions get mocked instead of praised, perhaps they will think twice about venting their rage.
School Prayers
I strongly believe in the seperation of church and state. A public school is not a church, but an entity that is run and funded by the local and federal government and through taxpayers' money. It is not the job of such an institution to enforce or strongly favour any particular religion which is what having a school prayer would do.
That being said, I also strongly believe in freedom of religion. Just because one is not in church does not mean they must stop being religious and that includes being at school. While I would be fully against a school endorsed mandatory prayer during class time, I see no objection to students who wish to come together with or without a teacher or pastor when class is not in session on a voluntary basis. Let the Christians, Jews, Muslims, and any other religious group be able to express their religious freedoms, but do not enforce it or make it mandatory for the rest who do not wish to participate.
Pledge of Allegiance
I know some people are getting bent out of shape over the very nature of the pledge. It seems like a bad 50s conformist code forced upon the masses to prove oneself to be an American. The words "one nation under God" were not originally in this pledge, but added to verify that all Americans are in fact different from those godless Communists. So if you wanted to be considered an American and not a Pinko, you were wanting to be under this nation of God, implying a Christian god really.
There are other arguments to saying it other than the "under God" part. Others object to the fact that the nation was started where all states were more independent of the big nation and could seceed at anytime until the Civil War made that impossible. Still others object that this nation does not grant liberty and justice for all. While others still object to saying a loyalty pledge on the principle that they have nothing to prove to anyone. Should one be forced or even pressured to say a loyalty oath as part of a daily school routine?
There used to be a time for a few decades when both the Pledge and a prayer was the way to start off the school morning. The prayer was always of the Christian variety which would exclude anyone not of the faith who were forced to participate in a state run religious ritual. The Pledge was also considered a religious ritual with the added words, "under God."
I do not wish to say it myself. My children have come to their own conclusion that they would rather not say it. Most of their friends think it is a pretty stupid waste of time even if they don't see the full impact of why because to them it is just something boring they have to do.
Even if those words were taken out and it went back to the original wording, I do not think we should impose loyalty oaths on children who do not actually understand what they are saying. It is a subtle form of patriotic brainwashing and I think it should be eliminated from elementary and high schools.
Sex Education
I am all for teaching children to not participate in having sex until they are ready for the full realm of consequences that go with the territory. In order to teach this form of abstinence, it would require the full details about sexual intercourse, the biological functions of males and females, how one could become pregnant, the sexual diseases and the consequences of them, the emotional aspect of sex with love versus lust, and then the prevention of pregnancy and disease with an emphasis on avoiding it until they are ready for the consequences.
With a good program, it would also include more adult topics such as experimenting with an adult life. The children could get a newspaper and pretend to find a job with the teacher letting them know what job they would get and at what pay. Then they could find a place to live in the classified ad and have to create a budget on what they would live on during the month. When they get the budget together, then they could have the experimental robot babies to carry around and have to care for during a month so they could get a picture of what it means to become a parent.
In addition, they should be allowed to talk to people who have had sexual diseases and AIDS to see first hand the consequences of unprotected sex.
The final judgement as to whether a child will have sex or not is more of a result of what the parents teach. Morality is the parent's job, not the school's. The school can only educate to guide the children with all options available while the parent can guide the child in what is expected from them.
Evolution Versus Intellegent Design
Intellegent Design is a cover for teaching the Biblical account of creation under the guise of being a real science. No matter what it is called, it still is not science and in no way belongs in a science class. For those who strongly believe in teaching Intellegent Design, really ask yourself honestly what are your motives. There is a religious group that believes in Intellegent Design. They believe aliens from another planet formed life on our Earth. They take it just as seriously as Christians, Jews and Muslims take the Adam and Eve story. Is this version of Intellegent Design also acceptable or is it really just a cover to introduce a religious bias within a science class? There is no scientific basis on which to use a Biblical story. Evolution is a scientific theory which follows all the rules of scientific proceedure. There IS a difference.
Education
Teachers are doing the best they can, but are often underpaid and unappreciated for all they have to do. In areas where people are wealthy and pay a higher property tax, such schools in those districts can have the best of everything to make a better education possible. Not all areas are so lucky. The bussing issue only masks the deeper problem that only putting a handful of lucky students in a better school will never make up for the ones permanently left behind.
The schools that need the most help are in the poor areas. The No Child Left Behind sounds great in theory, but in practice is severely lacking. It punishes schools that cannot acheive the standards set out before it and if it fails to meet those standards then funding is cut. A school that is already bad off cannot afford to have more funds cut. They will have enough trouble trying to reach those goals due to decades of being behind the standards and not enough help to get them up to meet the goals. It becomes a sinister way to punish poor schools and shut them down while making the school voucher programme become a more viable option to allow more kids to go to private and religious schools for the same money that could have been used to just improve the school in the first place.
School buildings which are old either need to be repaired or rebuilt. There needs to be programmes to encourage people in college to pursue a teaching career. Teachers need to be paid more and better teachers even more. School books should be current and at least made within the last few years. School libraries should be expanded with more book choices and access to computers. The reading and math should be drilled into the children on every single grade level. If a child cannot perform reading or math at their grade level, they should be kept back or allowed to go to summer school to catch up.
Classrooms need to be split up like it used to be with the advanced level kids in one class, the average kids in another class, the below average kids in another class, and the troublemakers in yet another class so all students can perform at their proper level. It has been a bad experiment to mix the students up. The slower kids are not really being encouraged to be smarter by the mere fact of being in the same class, but are often intimidated and less likely to want to try. The smarter kids are often the target of ridicule and tend to act dumb and not live to their full potential. School is supposed to be for learning the skills they will need as adults and a politically correct system is only dragging everyone behind. Let the kids learn social behaviour on the playground, at lunch, during classes such as Physical Education, Music and Art.
I will comment more later on the things I stand for, but for now, I leave it at this.
AAA Resources For Information And Entertainment
posted by Callen Damornen at 11:04:00 pm
1 Comments:
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