ClydeStyle

Tag: the dream

  • Forever chasing nothing

    Forever chasing nothing

    As a nation, we pride ourselves as being an advanced culture with highly intelligent people and as having the best of everything — pound for pound — the world has to offer. Sadly, I struggle to find anything we do as signficant to mankind.

    Now this is not a bash America blog! I used to say I love America but like many I could not tell you why. It was my only frame of reference so I loved what I knew. I assumed that people in government were looking out for the little man — looking out as defined as making laws and provisions for the little man to grow and develop into something more, not throw him a bone and keep him dumb.

    There was a study done in the 90s with 21k people across 7 nations to test there literacy. The study covered more than 30 tasks over a 45 minute span. The test takers were between the ages of 16 to 25 and the specific items on the test dealt with reading comprehension, following directions, reading maps, completing job applications etc. — things you would need to function and thrive in every day life. The results were astonishing (see table below). There were level grades from 1 to 5 where a 4 or 5 was pretty high functioning and of course a 1 was struggling. Sweden’s population of that age group were the brightest with more than 40 percent functioning at the highest levels. Only 18 percent of Americans at that age range preformed as well as the Swedes.

    What does that mean you ask? Well other than the obvious, it seems that the study has also proven that higher functioning was related to higher wages. When France talks about job creation and the US talks about it, those are two totally different conversations. France is only talking about a living wage where you can take care of a family with a modest living. In the US, we say a job is a job — better than not having one.

    Today we are in a literacy crisis. No one should be surprised about this but I don’t think we understand the effects.

     

    • More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or complete basic math above a third-grade level. —  Proliteracy
    • Children whose parents have low literacy levels have a 72 percent chance of being at the lowest reading levels themselves. These children are more likely to get poor grades, display behavioral problems, have high absentee rates, repeat school years, or drop out. — National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
    • 75 percent of state prison inmates did not complete high school or can be classified as low literate. — Rand Report: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education
    • Low literacy is said to be connected to over $230 billion a year in health care costs because almost half of Americans cannot read well enough to comprehend health information, incurring higher costs. — American Journal of Public Health

    Our problem: Politics. We constantly elect people who can not relate to the problems of the average American and they could care less about those problems. It doesn’t even matter what political party you belong to — both parties have failed the little man.

    It seems that we have disfellowshipped the word demand because we don’t demand anything — nothing of ourselves and nothing from those who rule the world. So we sit and take it — you live your life paycheck to paycheck and die in a sea of debt. In our country they tell you that you have the right to pursue happiness, they just forgot to tell you it was nearly impossible to catch.

  • There are still some who can’t see the dream

    This week we honor a man who dared to buck the system and show the powers that be what they really looked like. A man who said he had a dream and shouted it from the mountain tops. A preacher worthy of a celebration in his honor because of what he stood for, what he taught and what he ultimately died for.

    Some believe that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been America’s first African-American president had he not been gunned down by an assassin’s bullet. I believe that if that would have happened he would clearly have ended up being America’s fifth assassinated president. I say this because too many people still don’t see the dream.

    We can’t help where we came from and how we were raised, but King’s dream would work much better in another country than it would in ours. Sad, but true. The only thing we as American’s can agree on seems to be “gain” or “gain at someone else’s expense.”

    We profit on everything. If it can be sold and someone can make money, then so be it because, after all, that’s what we all really wanted. Right?

    Dr. King hoped that all children would have an equal opportunity to be educated and earn a living like everyone else. He wanted to see people of different races together in peace and harmony without strife. He wanted to see hate eliminated.

    What actually happened is more people have the opportunity to get into most colleges, but there is still an elite group that exists as gatekeepers. They still hire who they want. There are two places where you will always see mixed races in America together and that is the welfare line and the soup kitchen. And as for hate, it can’t be eliminated as long as love is in need of love.

    I wish there was a better message here. But in the wake of hatred spread throughout our political system, members of Congress getting shot and companies profiting on the sickness of others, clearly there are still folks who don’t get Dr. King’s dream.