By the time young people in Europe leave high school, they are fluent in 3+ languages, have read Plato, and play at least one musical instrument fairly well.
Southeast Asians, as we all know, are more inclined towards math and science, which is why we see their surnames all over our hospital placards.
Americans are lucky if they can find Poland of a map of the world.
So, why this cataclysmic failure? I suspect that it’s a combination of factors, mostly rooted in U.S. politics. Americans have very little patience for solutions to problems that take years or even decades to play themselves out. If a certain politician advocates for something that doesn’t show immediate benefits, he’s a failure, and that now becomes ammunition for his opponent in the next election.
This is all coupled by the fact, that, at a certain level, we simply don’t care. If you disbelieve that, ask yourself why we pay our teachers so poorly, and why we allow charter schools to siphon the cream off the top of the student population.
Trump appeals to two groups of constituents: a) a small group of billionaires who lavish him with campaign contributions in exchange for huge financial favors, and b) a large number of poorly educated white people who call themselves Christians–the so-called MAGA base.
Trump has little if any appeal to everybody else: honest, fairly well-educated people of a variety of ethnicities and religious affiliations.
For Trump, staying in power means making sure that there is a minimum of leakage away from the MAGA base. That requires barraging these people with messaging to the effect that the president is the only thing standing in the way of communism/socialism, open borders, the invasion of Muslims, godlessness, teaching our little children about LGBTQs, critical race theory, choking environmental regulation, and whatever else may be on the radical left’s agenda.
Maintain this chasm means not letting up on the propaganda for a single minute. No nuance, no critical thinking, no considering what we’ve learned from history–just constant bombardment.
The mural here reminds us of what Tom Joad famously tells his mother at the end of in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in response to her asking Tom where he’s going:
Wherever people are fighting for their rights, where kids are hungry and crying, and where folks are struggling to be free. Everywhere in the dark, wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat or a cop beating up a guy.
What the late Frank Zappa said here about atheism is what I began predicting when I was in my teens, but I’m not so optimistic today.
In fact, there seems to be a trend towards the rejection of science, fear, brutality, and tribalism–each one a pillar of religion and the fanaticism that so often surrounds it.
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