What has changed? It seems these days we live in a different world from when I grew up in the 60s and 70s. I don’t want to say it was a ‘simpler time’ because it wasn’t. We had our issues that every generation has had including the current generation. But today there is a difference.
We are told that there are more ‘mass’ shootings these days because of the availability of guns. But when I grew up almost every American male carried a pocketknife and gun racks, complete with guns in the racks were a common sight almost everywhere we went, including schools. Yet, there were not a lot of stabbings or shootings.
Education is another problem area. Growing up the United States education system, top to bottom, was the best in the world. We produced graduates that had skills necessary to become functioning, productive adults in society. Today we spend more money on education and rank 25th in the world among developed nations. American businesses have to import engineers and scientists because our education system is not producing enough qualified candidates. Some blame standardized testing and grading teachers and schools on how their kids perform in standardized testing. But we took standardized tests when I was growing up. What changed?
One of the undeniable truths of life is that most problems have complicated solutions because the causes of the problem are varied and multiple. So is the answer to this question but I do have a theory that I’ve held for quite some time that would at least begin to explain how we find ourselves in this situation.
We changed our expectations. Our education system quit focusing on teaching kids basic skills and began focusing on feelings, aka self-esteem. Most of us built up self-esteem by overcoming obstacles. We developed skills, mental or physical, that helped to achieve a goal. Our parents, our teachers, and society in general expected us to develop and improve our skills and abilities in order to succeed. In general, if our feelings got hurt by someone else or we failed a test or didn’t win a contest, we were told to work harder by the adults in our lives.
At some point however, the focus changed. We put more emphasis how we felt about a difficult situation. Smart people told us we needed to build up self-esteem by eliminating traditional expectations or definitions of success. Just trying was good enough. There was no longer an emphasis on working harder to improve what caused someone to fail so they could do better next time. We had to love each other or our kids for ‘who they are’ and not put expectations on them that they might not be able to achieve. Because that could make them sad.
That then progressed into adulthood manifesting itself in the victim mentality. It’s not your fault that you can’t make a million dollars, it’s because someone else is either hogging all the resources or they are bigoted towards you, limiting or eliminating the opportunity for you to succeed based on some demographic characteristic over which you have no control.
These smart people don’t want you to feel bad about yourself, they want you to be angry at someone else. They want you to blame someone else for any problem in your life, real or perceived. Even if you succeed in life, they want you to believe that the less successful are being oppressed by you or someone else.
Why do these smart people do that? Power. Because they can convince enough people that they hold the key to solving all the problems in our society. Then they get the money, the control, and all the trappings that go with having tremendous power. Even though they are the ones that created the problems, we somehow believe they have the solution.
They convince us because they are smart people with degrees and experience. We think they know more than us at the same time we discount the value of our life experiences and our common sense. We know what worked before, we know what existed before, and we know what is best for us better than any politician, academic, or pundit.
It’s time that we stopped for a moment, looked at what we know to be true based upon our experiences and tell the experts that we don’t buy the BS they are selling us. We have the power to change the way the system works, both by getting involved and through our day-to-day actions, especially in the way we raise our children. It’s time we take that power back.