It's 2:55 on friday, September 4th. I'm sitting in AIS class after listening to a long discussion about Obama's controversial speech that is going to be directed solely at schoolchildren. According to the media, America is throwing a shit-fit about it. Personally, I don't believe it. Being fairly liberal and entirely "go with the flow," I simply can't see why people would get so riled up about a president taking time to tell their kids to stay in school.
I think that the voice is coming entirely from the far right. People like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh who think Obama is a secret muslim with plans to kill our infrastructure and eat our babies. It's called the "tyranny of the few." Basically it's when a few people decide to throw a fit and have the power to back it up (in this case, threatening to sue the schools that decide to show the Obama speech).
But that's just my opinion.
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I agree with the idea of tyranny of the few. If you go on Beck's web site you can see all sorts of messages he has on there such as 'we are the majority' and 'we can surround them,' the sort of rhetoric that gives people an illusory feeling of being a majority that's being ignored by the public. And how could a majority opinion be ignored by the government? It must be a huge flipping conspiracy or something.
ReplyDeleteTo make two connections, in my sister's old Tae Kwon Do dojo, a girl got kicked in the face. Normal occurrence, right? Apparently not. The girl's dad threatened the dojo despite his daughter not having more than a sore face for a few minutes, and now they legally cannot have sparring. Sparring is the actual one-on-one fighting aspect of martial arts.
Meanwhile, at my old karate dojo, kids were actually encouraged to punch each other in the face, although that's one of the reasons I quit (my sensei lacked a tad of discipline face punches are typically considered a lack of control. I recall a fight in which a student was encouraged to keep fighting someone much his senior while being continuously punched in the face and crying, actually).
What baffled me is that kids are there to learn basics so they can apply it to the real world if they are put in a dangerous situation, and that application is practiced through kumite (fighting/sparring). The fact that everyone in that dojo could no longer do sparring because one girl's dad complained defeats the purpose of martial arts education, and is unfair.
Similar thing happened at WJHS. We all signed waivers so we could watch Lord of the Rings and then later Schindler's List. But now WJHS no longer plays Schindler's List because, despite a child having signed the waiver, the parent still complained about it being too graphic.
In the case of WJHS's parental complaints and of Obama's speech, not only are minority of influential parents intervening, but the students themselves are being ignored because they don't have the power to sue. When people threaten to sue, education goes down the drain for the sake of money concerns.