As writer or thinker, Jack London can’t touch George Orwell, but he’s nearly the Brit’s equal when it comes to describing society’s bottom. To both, being a writer is as much a physical as an intellectual endeavor. Wading into everything, they braved all discomforts and dangers. This attitude has become very rare, and not just among writers. Trapped in intensely mediated lives, we all think we know more as we experience less and less.
London’s most enduring book may turn out to be The People of the Abyss, his 1903 investigation into the abjectly impoverished of London’s East End.
Dressed accordingly, London joined its homeless to see how they survived. With a 58-year-old carter and a 65-year-old carpenter, London wandered the cold streets, “From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them.
One of the biggest burdens on the education system in this country, was the adoption of "Common Core", inflicted on America's schools by Barak Obama in 2009.
And so the "gifts" from this program, just keep on giving; American students are, largely, illiterate; innumerate, and incapable of critical thinking, all of which are desperately needed to function in real life.
New Evidence Shows Common Core Has Been a Total Disaster
How Common Core Is Destroying Training of Teachers
How Common Core And Screen Overdoses Are Ruining American Kids’ Intelligence
But if something like "Common Core" is simply allowed to persist, and past the transition from a Democratic to a Republican president, there are reasons why this is allowed to continue.
Intellectually, and sometimes chemically challenged individuals, particularly as kids, make far better targets for governmental manipulation, than does someone who has a fundamentally "top-down" understanding of how things work.
So if a population of a country is unable to think critically, starting with those crucial, formative school years, and is also chemically disabled, through the easy availability of SSRIS, or other pharmacologically active drugs thrust upon them, the government believes that anything it says, no matter how completely ludicrous, is most probably going to be taken at face value, even though it might be the polar opposite of the truth.
Ever since the inception of the Vietnam War, I have understood, very clearly, and painfully, that the US government has a penchant for lying, in order to justify massive aggression against a country which has neither declared war against us, or done anything nasty against us.
But DAMN, it was a "heady moment" for all the military contractors, because so much of their equipment got destroyed, and had to be replaced.
It was only when President Johnson saw the massive march in DC in 69, he realized that he could not possibly get re-elected on the war agenda, that began his pilgrimage on that hard road to reality, that this war was unwinnable.
1969: Millions march in US Vietnam Moratorium.
Americans have taken part in peace initiatives across the United States to protest against the continuing war in Vietnam.
The Peace Moratorium is believed to have been the largest demonstration in US history with an estimated two million people involved.
The wars, and war crimes, in which this country has been monumentally complicit since then, are crystal-clear testaments to the butt-ugly truth; that most generally, the Federal Government has gotten its population precisely where it wants it: sated with readily-available prescription drugs, putting them in a state of stupor; always craving new distractions; and trapped by the inability to think critically, when it comes to both personal, and political decisions.
Can we make our education system the envy of the world?!?
Absolutely.
But the leadership is then going to have to put up with the fact that some thinking, peaceful Americans are going to, both logically and publicly, criticize how and what this government is doing, and ask for a real, and responsible, and substantive change in its course of action.
And THAT is something that those entrenched in the Bowels of Power in this country, never want to see happen.