Fwd: [ cacklinggrackle] Garrison Keillor: America eats its young

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Lassiter Jonez <ljonez23

Aug 30, 2006 8:44 AM

[cacklinggrackle] Garrison Keillor: America eats its young

cacklinggrackle

 

 

 

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/30/keillor/

 

America eats its young

 

We're sticking the next generation with debt and an

unjust war. Solution: We must cut healthcare for

people with " Bush/Cheney " bumper stickers.

 

By Garrison Keillor

 

Aug. 30, 2006 | It's the best part of summer, the long

lovely passage into fall. A procession of lazy golden

days that my sandy-haired, gap-toothed little girl has

been painting, small abstract masterpieces in tempera

and crayon and glitter, reminiscent of Franz Kline or

Willem de Kooning (his early glitter period). She put

a sign out front, " Art for Sale, " and charged 25 cents

per painting. Cheap at the price.

 

A teacher gave her this freedom to sit

unselfconsciously and put paint on paper. A gentle

6-foot-8 guy named Matt who taught art at her

preschool. Her swimming teachers gave her freedom from

fear of water. So much that has made this summer a

pleasure for her I trace to specific teachers, and so

it's painful to hear about public education sinking

all around us. A high school math class of 42!

Everybody knows you can't teach math to 42 kids at

once, kids doped up on sugar and Coke, sleepy kids,

Hmong kids, African-American kids who think

scholarship is white bread. The classroom smells bad

because the custodial staff has been cut back. The

teacher is shelling out $900 a month for health

insurance, one-third of his take-home. Meanwhile, he

must whip his pupils into shape to pass the federal No

Child Left Untested program. This is insanity, the

legacy of Republicans and their tax cutting and their

hostility to secular institutions.

 

Last spring I taught a college writing course and had

the privilege of hanging out with people in their

early 20s, an inspirational experience in return for

which I tried to harass them about spelling and

grammar and structure. My interest in being 21 again

is less than my interest in having a frontal lobotomy,

but the wit and passion and good-heartedness of these

kids, which they try to conceal under their exquisite

cool, are the hope of this country. You have to

advocate for young people, or else what are we here

for?

 

I keep running into retirees in their mid-50s, free to

collect seashells and write bad poetry and shoot video

of the Grand Canyon, and goody for them, but they're

not the future. My college kids are graduating with a

20-pound ball of debt chained to their ankles. That's

not right and you know it.

 

This country is squashing its young. We're sending

them to die in a war we don't believe in anymore.

We're cheating them so we can offer tax relief to the

rich. And we're stealing from them so that old gaffers

like me, who want to live forever, can go in for an

MRI if we have a headache.

 

A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't

pay teachers a decent wage has made a dreadful choice.

But healthcare costs are ballooning, eating away at

the economy. The boomers are getting to an age where

their knees need replacing and their hearts need a

quadruple bypass -- which they feel entitled to -- but

our children aren't entitled to a damn thing. Any

goombah with a Ph.D. in education can strip away

French and German, music, art, dumb down the social

sciences, offer Britney Spears instead of Shakespeare,

and there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in

the library, which is being cut back too.

 

This week we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

and the Current Occupant's line " You're doing a

heckuva job, " which already is in common usage, a

joke, a euphemism for utter ineptitude. It's sure to

wind up in Bartlett's Quotations, a summation of his

occupancy. Annual interest on the national debt now

exceeds all government welfare programs combined.

We'll be in Iraq for years to come. Hard choices need

to be made, and given the situation we're in, I think

we must bite the bullet and say no more healthcare for

card-carrying Republicans. It just doesn't make sense

to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in

the future. Let them try faith-based medicine, let

them pray for their arteries to be reamed and their

hips to be restored, and leave science to the rest of

us.

 

Cutting out healthcare for one-third of the population

-- the folks with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who

still believe the man is doing a heckuva job -- will

save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a

bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them

die and reduce the surplus population. In return, we

can offer them a reduction in the estate tax. All in

favor, blow your nose.