I came across this quote on my daily calendar today:

Tiny children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.

EDUCATOR GLENN DOMAN

Why do people stop learning? There was a time when people got together, they asked the question, "Have you read [this book] by [this author]? And I imagine that more than often, the answer came back in the affirmative. Try that nowadays. 8 times out of 10, you'll get laughed at.

So when did illiteracy become the norm? When did that act of not learning become a badge of honor? There is such a deep undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in our society that to make a literaray reference in a conversation is to marginalize oneself or go totally misunderstood to point of having might as well not even have said anything at all.

I already know that you all (my readers) read, as a general rule, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this issue.

Dear Georgie,

Since you won't return my phone calls or my e-mails and since you haven't posted on your ultra secret blog that you've been keeping from Laura and those tight asses in your Secret Service detail; I have to post this publicly. Now c'mon Georgie--you and I go back too far for you start acting like a punk, man. And this letter is an attempt to fix what's gone wrong with us because I care.

You know, when you and I started this thing in the summer of 2000; I had such high hopes for us--I really did. I thought we were going to be the Silver Anniversary surfers, my man--taking life by the big waves and smiling at the sun while the other surfers around us ate foam and wiped out one by one. Damn there's been a lot of wipe outs since that summer, hasn't there? But we've had a few good wave runs too, can't forget that and we shouldn't forget that you were the king dong on the board during those times. But we also can't help but pointing out that you were the Faust in charge when we ate it also.

Dude, I was with you in the days after 9/11--you were in my thoughts and prayers. I was with you when the lights starting flashing and the rocks started flying in Afghanistan. And I was even with you when the tanks rolled into the desert of Iraq and embedded media showed us, the populace and people who gave you the job, how a war begins in real time for the first time in human history.

I didn't get as bent out of shape as the rest of the country with the human pyramid torture pictures because I know that what Dr. Meade said in Gone with the Wind is some true shit: "Good Heavens,...this is war, not a garden party."

I was even with you on the surveillance stuff for the most part. Taking away the privacy of communications from the populace isn't anything new during war time. After all, Lincoln authorized simultaneous raids on every telegraph office in the North and seized the record of ever telegram written for an entire year by anyone in the north. He suspended Habius Corpus and authorized the seizing and imprisoning without being formally charged of hundreds of citizens. He took a shit load of money from the US Treasury and just handed it over to the Lords of Industry to procure the instruments of war from their impressive social and business networks and didn't even ask for a receipt.

So bad shit has been done by Presidents in the past who have also been picked by the three sisters who choose, measure and cut the string. Nobody's saying that you're the only one or even that you've gone way too far and deserve to get fired like your predecessor (even though he wasn't removed).

But I've been reading up on Lincoln a lot lately and things started to come into focus when I read this portion of a speech he gave to Congress on July 4th while the Civil War was still in its newlywed stage:

This is essentially a People's war. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of man, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life...Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains--its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that whose who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion, that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take by war--teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

That utterance put so many things into perspective for me--with what we're trying accomplish in Iraq and the Middle East in general.

It's a monumental task to take a conglomeration of human minds so entrenched in their belief and in their worship of their deity (who in their minds calls for continued bloodshed in a ridiculous war which has lasted hundreds of years too long) and say to them that the age of religious zealotry has come to a crashing end and that instead of ascribing patterns and powers to the stars in the sky, mankind is now traveling to them and every race, creed and belief system is welcome to come along.

It's a bitch of a thing to say that to people, Georgie--believe me, I know. I've been trying to figure out a kind way to say that type of shit for over ten years ago and it still comes out harsh and unsympathetic. But since when has human history yielded to the sensibilities of the moment and the human emotion that swirls and fills the vacuum of the possibility of the next moment?

So, look--we're cool, Georgie. You can put my name back on speed dial in your Blackberry and you can start leaving comments on this blog again. Because we're down like that, I'm willing to wipe the slate clean in Two to the Double Aught Seven. Just make sure that everything you do is in the spirit of what Lincoln talked about in that speech because so long as you do that--you are still on the razor's edge, my man.

Keep it real in DC, Georgie Boy and next time you come to Columbus you don't have to hang out with just the millionaires. You can come to the crib and we'll throw down on the XBOX 360 in a little Call of Duty or Gears of War and my wife'll make her Shake-N-Bake pork chops, out of the box mashed taters and Bush's baked beans which is about as good a feast as any man needs.

Love,

Josh

LINKS:

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