The Day Before Election Day

[Excerpt] ....So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution – that it isn’t just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It’s about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn’t be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it.

Teach your kids they don’t have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters – heirs, everyone – of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it’s a great big lie – despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they’ve been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image. - Bill Moyers, America 101

Yes, yes, consider the source, liberal stinking bias, et cetera. But whatever your political persuasion, I believe that Moyers' speeech in its entirity is worth reading and thinking and talking about. What kind of a country are we shaping for our children--and their children?

Are we fiddling while Rome burns?

I'd end this with a reminder to go vote on Tuesday...but I think y'all are already more than aware that we're at the tail end of a particularly nasty and mean-spirited mid-term election. So. Go, Vikings?