WARNING: This Policy Contains Chemicals known by the State of California to Cause Cancer.
There are those of a certain age and temperament reading these pages standing up and applauding, grown men weeping tears of joy that there are young(ish) persons well versed in complaining about bureaucrats and Democrats equally. In some Republican clubs I just earned myself a free drink and more importantly the right to pull up a stool and begin to recount the Rush Limbaugh monologue from this afternoon's show. For the more cantankerous and curmudgeonly Republicans in the room, this is an affirmation of their life's calling and work.
In truth, the above paragraph is something I could more easily write, and with more conviction and bombast, were I still attending my collegiate chapter of Young Republicans. Pessimism comes quickly and easily to those who get the idea of America. Hope, and sarcasm, only comes after long periods of pessimism and overall foul disposition run their natural course.
I found hope recently in sarcasm. While helping a co-worker use a beautiful but rather powerful gel stain, he told me it was a good thing we weren't in California. Happy to be in the high country of Colorado I readily agreed. He laughed at my weather centric agreement and tried again. Holding aloft the can of wiping stain he announced, " if we were in California we would both have cancer right now." I laughed, and two libertarians proceeded to mock the ominous cancer-warning label on our can of stain. The conversation continued as we both recounted how our trucks -- both had six catalytic converters on them in order to comply with California emissions. Every toy and cooking utensil, household cleaner, and shoe we owned, carried a similar label.
The amazing thing about the California cancer warning sticker is how something passed by a general vote, entirely serious and able to change the future when enacted in 1986 was nothing more than a minor joke to people who were five at the time it was signed into law -- we were the actual children the law would save. Not content to find hope in mocking cancer, I find further hope as Oklahoma is now mocking the carcinogen laced politics of California, not just those labeled on your can of bug-spray.
Since the last printing of the Oklahoma Constitution newspapr, the state has followed the advice I gave in the spring edition and has ditched Common Core. Well done! Not only did the people do what conservatives do naturally and declare, denounce and document a real threat to our inheritance of liberty, they actually reversed it. Not only did the Sooner State identify the sole cancer the labels of California do not, they cut the mass out of the Red Dirt lymph system. Time will show if the tumor was removed completely, chances are no; but for now the state is Common Core free.
What happened in Oklahoma was beautiful. People with the integrity and temerity to be free stood up and behaved as heirs of liberty must. More beautiful than beating Texas come football season, the Sooner citizens even got Gov. Fallin to switch her position and quickly sign into law a full repeal of Common Core. But, just as cancer survivors will tell you, it's not how you fight, but how you live afterwards that counts -- now it is time to start living.
Here is where the virtues of conservative disposition must make room for the unabashed sarcasm of libertarianism. Just as my friend and I relied on our conservative rationale to allow ourselves 30 minutes of stain exposure without the fear of causing ourselves cancer, our sarcasm freed us from being angry with the nanny-state do-gooder's that forced the warning into our small wood project.
The defeat of Common Core is but a fleeting opportunity for the GOP to raise money in Oklahoma, if it is the penultimate expression of conservatism in education. If, however, the void left by Common Core's reaction to political chemotherapy is filled by something else, the future of the nanny state will look more like the easily mocked Proposition 65 Cancer warning.
What most conservatives will not admit in the Common Core debate, is that the undeniable evil, which this law is, was, but the natural evolution of the Republican led federal takeover of education. We got a little carried away with our ability to rule and decided to leave no child behind. Only after the Democrats decided to hijack that bus, and drive the children to a reeducation camp, did we decide to get the children off the bus. Now, after decades of dueling education reforms, maybe we have to find a solution quite different than the terrible ideas we have tried already.
The natural reaction in Oklahoma will be to rejoice at Common Core's defeat and charge the Governor or other high ranking official to craft legislation so wonderful that we will never again have to fear the socialists taking control of our schools. For good measure, we should rename a few schools after Abe Lincoln, maybe say the Pledge of Allegiance again, in whatever way we chose to wrap ourselves in the stars and stripes it will just feel good to know that the GOP won.
If we were to be honest, we would admit that Common Core was as much a GOP problem as it is a DNC caused disaster. The progressives, in both parties, got a firm hold on the education system a good long time ago, and our response has been more talk-radio driven complaining and less engaging in the actual classroom. Even in conservative places like Oklahoma, the education has been less focused on ideas of liberty and more on loving our country just because.
Younger readers of this newspaper, should there be any, are more likely to vote GOP out of Darwinian survival than out of any enthusiasm or belief that conservative principles will revive our nation. Not wanting to be socialists, we hold our noses and vote for the GOP, with roughly the same respect and admiration I give the California Cancer warning. Hope will not be found in politics. Not here, not now, not ever again.
Hope will be found in the mocking of politics and in dipping our brush boldly into the aforementioned stain of life. Forget the GOP members in Oklahoma City and in DC, go right now and get yourself on the local school board. Find partnerships, often with registered Democrats, which will establish educational standards in your local school that make sense. Stop paying for your kids to take advanced courses in trans-gender and colonialism studies and teach them, often outside of the classroom, about American history -- warts and all. Insist that kids master calculus by the 8th grade, your great-grandparents pulled that off in a one room school house where the teacher was paid 25 cents per hour, there was no gymnasium, hot lunch or AP classes.
Education is much like our federal government, it is highly unlikely to be reformed. But just as our inheritance has more to do with liberty and God given rights than the system of czars and commissioners presently recording our phone calls, the education of our young people has more to do with the freedom of the mind than it does the standardized tests we subject those minds to.
We are entering a time and a place that the conservatism we have always known will do little good. The GOP is probably over, and Republicans would be fortunate to go as quickly and gracefully as the Whigs before them. Republican virtue is poised to a big comeback, but it will be the libertarians who preserve those values. It will be more a mockery of certain nanny state hallmarks, not the judicious proving them empirically in error, which will "burst the chains of monkish ignorance and superstition" as Jefferson told Weightman.
Conservatism has pointed out for some time now, that the nanny state devolves people into something less than human. Dependency breeds a sloth that overtakes a freeborn person, chaining him to the burden of ignorance after removing the burdens of freedom. Just as Jefferson used sarcasm in declaring the general light of science to have "shown that some men were not born with saddles on their backs," so we must boldly declare the idiocy of the public schools we know, and quickly offer an alternative.
In Oklahoma, the chance at hand is to build a system of public education that mocks the self-centric and standard devoid systems corroding the peoples of California. Make their "money no object" education appear as ridiculous as their stupid Cancer warnings. You're not in California, so education doesn't have to cause cancer.
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