Valdosta, Georgia: "A Region of Opportunity"

Fri. Feb. 24, 2012:

Gentle Readers,
After the long absence during an ongoing roadtrip until March 31, this blog comes up for air, at a Residence Inn near Gainesville, Florida.
But let the record show:  Yesterday, we were in Valdosta, Georgia, which its water tower's logo claimed is "A Region of Opportunity" and a "Community without Limits."

Time for a new appeal to optimism -- for Valdosta, for the USA, and for the planet:

1.  Invent a "pacify chip" -- and a "schooling chip" --  to implant in every human being on the planet.  Then maybe "Christian" extremists like Billy Graham's son Franklin Graham, of all people, won't accidentally discredit Jesus on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," as he did recently.  There, sadly, he instinctively jumped into the same "man of faith" pit that chipless inhuman yet all-too-chipless human fundamentalist-Islamist extremists occupy.  Witness the Taliban's latest dupes in Afghanistan, rampaging in fury about the burning of Korans by clueless U.S. military personnel.  Here we have mindless religious zeal on both sides, plus a total lack of meaningful schooling -- among too many so-called "Christian" ministers, U.S. soldiers lacking any real world awareness from their highschool classrooms, and Taliban leaders urging poor jobless uneducated young men to kill every Western Occupier in Afghanistan that they can find.  Franklin Graham is right to say that Western Leaders should demand that innocent Christians be protected from Islamic harrassment & death in places like Egypt -- contrary, by the way, to the Koran's own teachings.  But "Christians" like Franklin Graham seem to ignore the countless times over the ages when "Christians" slaughtered Islamic victims just for being Islamic.  Wound Jesus condone such hatred?
Only thing left is a pacifying chip.

2.  As for the "schooling chip":  Try sitting in on classes in nearly any high school or community college of the USA in 2012.  Nearly every student has admirable courage, and at least a spark of hope for the future, or they would be absent or dropped out from high school, and not have bothered to enroll in community college.  But courage aside, most of these students have so little awareness of academic culture, and so little confidence in their brain's ability or need to study, that as a soldier in the middle east, How Will You Recognize the Koran When You Stumble Upon It?
Google Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City Revisited [c. 1970].  He was no liberal -- President Nixon appointed him as an advisor, and Banfield scorned reformers as mostly "limousine liberals."
But over 40 years ago, Banfield recognized that for any student to advance, he/she required a "future-oriented" time horizon.  For the overwhelming students you visit at a U.S. high school or community college,
these students have never had a chance to hope or plan -- and therefore care & save & work --  for the future.  Dysfunctional family & middle school, have not been able to future-orient them; pre-school & elementary school may have a slightly better chance, but whatever gains happen there seem to get tsunamied in present-oriented resignation thereafter.  Charter schools, Magnet schools, No Child Left Behind, brave schooling experiments of thoughtful visionaries like the late Ted Sizer [google!] -- so far, drops in a huge bucket.
Research & develop that schooling chip, and fast.

3.  Meanwhile, USA's or international political systems seem totally incapable of solving global "faith-based"
violence, or global ignorance & present-orientation [climate change a "ruse" impairing "energy now," anyone?].  Can we really expect a President Romney, or a re-elected President Obama, plus a metasticized financially beholden new Congress, plus a delusionally activist ideological majority in the Supreme Court, to deliver meaningful change after November 2012?  Will the United Nations suddenly hold sway to create peace and harmony, while Steve Martin's "children of the world hold hands"?
Valdosta, Georgia = "A Region of Opportunity?"  "A Community without Limits?"
Valdosta, Georgia, the USA, and the Whole Wide World -- not to mention Henny Youngman -- all plead:
"Implant my chips!  Please!"