At GOP luncheon, the hack is back, Gilbert Garcia, San Antonio Express-News, August 28, 2014 (h/t Marley)
After Wednesday’s meeting, a silver-haired woman with the Christian Coalition of Bexar County (an organization devoted to electing “God-fearing” leaders) approached me and asked if I would attend one of her group’s upcoming gatherings.
Almost immediately, she started peppering me with personal questions: What is my position on abortion? What church do I attend? Do I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior?
I stumbled around for answers, so she insisted that I repeat after her a lengthy pledge to turn my life over to Christ. When I suggested that I didn’t feel comfortable making major spiritual declarations in the Fiesta Room at Luby’s, she looked at me like I was from Mars.
How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps, Debra Leigh Scott, AlterNet, October 16, 2012
To explain my perspective here, I need to go back in time. Let’s go back to post-World War II, 1950s when the GI bill, and the affordability – and sometimes free access – to universities created an upsurge of college students across the country. This surge continued through the ’60s, when universities were the very heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times. It was during this time, too, when colleges had a thriving professoriate, and when students were given access to a variety of subject areas, and the possibility of broad learning. The liberal arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late ’50s into the ’60s — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual, and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn’t like the outcome of the ’60s? The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation.
I suspect that, given the opportunity, those groups would have liked nothing more than to shut down the universities. Destroy them outright. But a country claiming to have democratic values can’t just shut down its universities. That would reveal something about that country which would not support the image they are determined to portray – that of a country of freedom, justice, opportunity for all. So, how do you kill the universities of the country without showing your hand? As a child growing up during the Cold War, I was taught that the communist countries in the first half of the 20th century put their scholars, intellectuals and artists into prison camps, called “re-education camps.” What I’ve come to realize as an adult is that American corporatism despises those same individuals as much as we were told communism did. But instead of doing anything so obvious as throwing them into prison, here those same people are thrown into dire poverty. The outcome is the same. Desperate poverty controls and ultimately breaks people as effectively as prison…..and some research says that it works even more powerfully.
