Mom, What's A Neo-Con?

On a warm spring day when I was in the fifth grade, my mother took my friend Karen, my little brother, and me to a local park to play on the swings. It's a day I have never forgotten in almost 40 years because that was the day I showed my mother my middle finger and ask her what it meant.

Everyone on the playground at school had been flashing middle fingers for quite some time and Karen and I, who also attended Sunday school together, were clueless. We had discussed this frequently, decided it couldn't be too bad if other kids were doing it right out in the open on the playground, and we agreed this was as good an opportunity as any to ask someone who could fill us in.

This was the 60's in middle America, and I'll never forget my mother's reaction when I held up that middle finger and said, "Mom, what does this mean?" My mother dove for my hand, and it's lucky I still have that finger. "Don't ever, ever do that again!!!" she said. Her eyes were black, and when she let go, I backed up so fast I almost fell.

Now, if curiosity killed the cat, it also about got me killed that day because I couldn't let it go. I couldn't leave the park without finding out what I was missing, so I let the dust settle a moment and then blundered forward again, "Some of the kids say it means something called 'fuck'." Uh, oh. Black eyes again! "[Insert my full name here]!!!

You knew when your mom used your full name, the shit was about to get deep. "Well, if it does (she knew it did), don't you ever, ever use that word!!" Okay, I either wasn't the brightest bulb or I was the most stubborn. "But why? What does it mean?" She never did explain except to say, "Something very, very bad!"

Skip ahead to 2006. I've been a grown-up for what seems like forever. I've used the F*** word more than I care to admit. Now I know what it means and I have the children to prove it. But even adults can run across words and phrases with which they have been previously unfamiliar. Neo-conservative is just one such word.

I didn't know what it meant when I took about two looks and listens at George W. Bush prior to the 2000 election and I fled the Republican party on instinct alone. I didn't know what it meant as I followed the brouhaha over the results of that election. I still didn't know what the word meant as I watched planes slam into buildings or as I questioned what invading the country of Iraq had to do with any of it.

I didn't know what it meant as I watched a rerun of the 2000 election in 2004. I didn't know what it meant as I began to pay closer and closer attention to the homeland politics and foreign policy of the Bush administration, none of which made any sense or seemed in any way based on the values upon which Americans had built a solid and independent nation.

So I started to ask questions. I asked my mom, but for once she didn't know either. So, I started to dig around a little to see if I could determine the meaning of the word neo-conservative. I have liked what I've found about as much as mom liked my middle finger.

Here is the web address for a three-part BBC series I watched that documents the roots of the neo-conservative movement (and interestingly, also the modern fundamentalist Islam movement), and that documents how neo-conservatives have been lurking around the White House for quite a few years. You, no doubt, will recognize some names.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm

A new world order, you say? Here are some prominent participants in helping to bring it all about. You may recognize some more names.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Neo-conservatives/list

Just how far are the neo-cons willing to go to bring about this "new world order"? Well now, that's debatable dependent upon how willing you are to listen open-mindedly to conspiracy theories and decide what you believe is true and what is not. But, you have to admit, these have never been your father's Republicans. So, here's a few sites to get you started:
http://www.911revisited.com/video.html
http://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play?rurl=wc3cl.hs.gamigo.de&oid=e0ab8319e2989360&
http://www.infowars.com/sept11_archive.htm

I don't intend for this blog entry to be a clearinghouse for all websites related to neo-conservatism conspiracies. If you're reading this, you have a computer. So, send me some sites. But one final thing I found, and I sacrificed the six hours it took me to read it, may have helped me answer the burning question I could not escape. Why? What is the point to all this? Is there a point? One document always leads to another and one night I surfed right into this rocky shore:
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion1.htm#PREFACE


Forty years ago, when life was simple and life was sweet, I never could have imagined I would grow up to witness the things I am witnessing in America today. Any search of the daily news leads me to believe that there is definitely a destructive agenda unfolding here and, apparently, at whatever cost to lives and nations is required to achieve it. Anything eminating from the Bush White House always dovetails so nicely into just about any conspiracy theory that is floating out there in cyberspace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ensmPJm5B5A

I have come to believe that America is not the victim of an incompetent "frat" boy who grew up to erringly become president. Rather I have come to believe that America is slowly being strangled to death by a group of elitist social philosophers whose social beliefs attract the greedy, the paranoid, the militant--and who believe they have a way to control all of society, indeed the world, and any end justifies the means.

I started this piece talking about my mother and giving an example of the affect she had on my learning to discern right from wrong. God love her. She's in her 80's now and still reads avidly and keeps up on politics and policy. We discuss the news and history and the conspiracy theories. And, unlike her unwillingness years ago to explain the meaning of the F*** word to a child, as an adult I have shared with her the definition of neo-con. Her response was both interesting and surprising.

She said neo-cons are something very, very bad, and unless Americans stop separating the forest from the trees, we may be fucked.

Public Education is Being Murdered

This is cross-posted as a diary on http://www.mydd.com

I have been laid off for two years as a public school teacher. NCLB has hit public school districts very hard financially. The poorer the district, the harder they've been hit. Hence they've had to toss teachers and programs until they are down to the "core" subjects.

Districts with a higher percentage of minority and/or poverty students were struggling to begin with in trying to overcome the environmental challenges to learning their students showed up to school with daily. That programs like business ed, art, music, and technical education should have to be tossed is not only leaving behind the students in white suburban schools, but again hitting the poorer districts the hardest. NCLB has resulted in a back-door form of socio-economic discrimination.

The NCLB mandate was unfunded and, I believe, that was no accident. In Ohio, a leading contributor to our political candidates also just happens to own a large number of charter schools.

The Bush administration does not believe in the value of public education or perhaps in any education for the public at all. It makes folks so much easier to lead off a cliff if they are ignorant. So, for now, a rich white man will make some money off his charter schools until their negative reputations finally reach the masses, which is finally beginning to happen.

It would behoove the NEA and the AFT to call for a nation-wide teachers' strike in September. I'll bet nothing would get NCLB repealed faster than a lot of parents who don't know what to do with their children seven days a week taking it out on their state and Congressional representatives.

There is not that wide a slice out of the whole societal pie who feel the calling to spend 185 days a year with 30 of their neighbors' children, and to do it for 30 years. I think it would work!