Last year, someone created detailed holiday drawings on the classroom whiteboards at the elementary school here in Muncy, Pennsylvania.
“It went through the elementary building like wildfire. It was a game every day for the kids to come in and see who got ‘elfed,'” said Corey Palmatier, the Muncy School District’s building grounds supervisor.
The morning the first drawing was done, the Ward L. Myers Principal Steve Haddon went to the classroom to check out the sketch.
“It was this amazing detailed picture,” Haddon said. “Then they started popping up all over, and nobody knew who it was. It excited everybody; the kids loved it.”
Amy Rosenbaum, a first-grade teacher, said her students guessed she was the secret artist. “They walked in and were completely shocked and they thought I drew it. I explained I definitely do not have this art skill.”
Over time, Logan Pena, one of the school district’s custodians, was found out.
“Last school year, he did it sporadically throughout the building, so you never knew whose room was going to have a drawing on the board. So the kids were trying to guess whose room was going to be next, that was exciting,” said Nevada Davidson, the lead custodian.
Pena could stay under the radar partially because his work schedule is the second shift, beginning at 2 p.m.
Pena, who is self-taught, has Asperger’s Syndrome, which can affect his social skills. But all the attention has brought Pena out of his shell, according to the staff.
“I like being by myself and just getting the job done,” Pena said. “Doing the artwork is a great way to communicate — most of the time, I am just a ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ kind of person.”
One year later, the staff and students still requested drawings from Pena, whether students were asking for a particular animal or office staff wanted festive windows.
“We were just thanking Logan for taking the time to cheer up the building during that time of year — just spreading that holiday cheer,” Principal Haddon said.
Last Thursday, Chicago’s new mayor, Brandon Johnson, the candidate of the far-left Chicago Teachers Union, held a press conference. It was one of those dog-and-pony shows, also in attendance was the city’s police superintendant, Larry Snelling a Johnson appointee, and other municipal officials.
Armed with brochures, Johnson unveiled the “People’s Plan for Community Safety.” Who are the people that devised the plan? Presumably that group doesn’t include cops and crime victims, and it almost certainly doesn’t include the South Side family who had two cars stolen in separate incidents last month. One theft was a carjacking that was captured in a horrifying video.
Crime was the main campaign issue in this spring’s runoff election for mayor. Paul Vallas, a moderate Democrat, promised to beef up law enforcement. It was the center piece of his lackluster campaign. Johnson, appealing to his African American and leftist whites, vowed to attack crime at the root causes–just like the outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot.
Predictably, Johnson and the other city officials at the presser focused on the “root causes” of Chicago crime.
From the event’s press release:
There is a shattered sense of safety in Chicago that has been driven by decades of purposeful disinvestment in our communities. It is time for a new community safety approach – one that addresses the root of the problem by investing in our people and neighborhoods to secure a safer Chicago for generations to come. The People’s Plan for Community Safety calls upon our entire city, and especially those most impacted by violence, to create solutions together.
Lightfoot’s failures as mayor went beyond law enforcement. But Chicago tried the healie-feelie approach to crime under Lightfoot. It didn’t work.
Chicagoans voted to double-down on dopey.
Commenting the next day on the Morning Answer with Dan and Amy, co-host Dan Proft threw a penalty flag at Johnson’s root causes crimefighting strategy. Reminding listeners that Johnson is half of a two-parent household, Proft said Johnson is focusing on the wrong root causes.
Indeed.
A few days earlier in the Wall Street Journal, Proft noted, Jason L. Riley pointed his finger at the true root cause of rising crime rates, the proliferation of fatherless households since 1960. Referring to what is known as “the success sequence,” Riley wrote:
A decade ago, New York City launched a campaign to combat teen pregnancy. It featured ads on buses and subway cars that read: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.”
He continued:
We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”
Chicago, and most American large cities, as well as many suburbs and rural communities, have been on a failure sequence for decades.
I’m not claiming to have the answers to turning around the failure sequence, ignoring the problem, along the lines of placing electric tape over the check engine light on your car when it flashes, of course means more failure. And yes, there are single moms who do a stupendous job raising kids.
One time-tested way out of poverty is quality education. Utilizing education to achieve success worked for that Founding Father without a father, Alexander Hamilton.
But Johnson, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher who was a longtime paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, even while serving as a Cook County commissioner, remains overly loyal to the CTU.
Also last week, the Chicago Board of Education, which includes six Johnson appointees, approved a resolution, in the name of equity of course, that has long been on the CTU’s anti-education wish list, removing the ability of students to attend high schools–better high schools–outside of their neighborhoods. Most of the students who benefit from the doomed program are minorities. Of low-income 11th-grade CPS students, less than 20 percent of them score at grade level in reading and math.
In another attack on students, the state’s private school tuition tax credit program, the Invest in Kids Act, which was signed into law six years ago by a Republican governor, will be allowed to expire next year.
Chicago–and Illinois–are focusing on the wrong root causes.
I have to state for the record at the begging of this article that I have never been a never Trumper. Neither am I a Trump worshipper, although the Trump worshipers’ take on him is the more accurate of the two. I see him for who he really is, a deeply flawed individual who did an admiral job as president. That is until the Wuhan Flu pandemic began, and he botched things rather badly.
At the beginning of the 2016 primary season, I ranked Donald Trump near the bottom of the crowded Republican field. The instant he secured the Republican nomination I became a very outspoken Trump supporter because I knew he would do an infinitely better job than any of the Marxist Democrats.
I am a Libertarian and not all of Donald Trump’s policies are particularly Libertarian. During the 2016 primary season I ranked Rand Paul and Ben Carson well above Trump.
Donald Trump’s greatest flaw is an almost complete lack of self-control when speaking and using social media. Too often he comes across as a non-intellectual. He also has a very loud and abrasive personality. At times he strayed from conservative/libertarian principles. The media very unfairly tagged Trump as a racist and a bigot. During his four years in office, he did a poor job picking advisors and cabinet officials, especially when it came to Chief of Staff.
Last week I tried to imagine who the perfect running mate Donald Trump could possibly chose. I figured that that person would have to offset all of Trump’s negatives. He would have to be an exact opposite. The person who immediately jumped to mind was Dr. Ben Carson. Two days later I saw articles online written by authors who independently reached the same conclusions.
Here are some quotes I dug up that are proof that Dr. Ben Carson would make a fantastic president, unfortunately he lacks the charisma necessary for any individual to win elections in our media driven society.
You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery, and it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.
I want people to understand that we, the American people, are not each other’s enemies. The real enemies are those people who are trying to divide us into every little possible group.
“Basically, what I said is that when tyranny occurs traditionally around the world, they try and disarm the people first. And that is exactly what happened in Germany,” Carson said at the National Press Club. “You know, mid- to late 30s they started a program to disarm the people and by mid- to late 40’s, look what had happened.”
Carson was referencing remarks Thursday on CNN that the Holocaust would have been less deadly had more people in Europe been armed.
“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” he told Wolf Blitzer when asked if there were no gun-control laws in Germany would that have prevented the murder of 6 million Jews. “I’m telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first.”
We’ve been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake up and recognize that it was the politicians who created our problems.
We need to be thinking about: How do we allow people to ascend the ladder of opportunity, rather than how do we give them everything and keep them dependent.
One Nation book Introduction.
The PC police are out in force at all times. … We’ve reached the point where people are afraid to actually talk about what they want to say.
“Since Americans are by nature individualistic and entrepreneurial, by definition, then, the socialist program is anti-American, to say nothing of totalitarian. Socialism is an old dream. Some dreams are nightmares when put into practice.” ―
“Many well-meaning Americans have bought into the PC speech code, thinking that by being extra careful not to offend anyone we will achieve unity. What they fail to realize is that this is a false unity that prevents us from talking about important issues and is a Far Left strategy to paralyze us while they change our nation. People have been led to become so sensitive that fault can be found in almost anything anyone says because somewhere, somehow, someone will be offended by it.” ―
“I believe the only thing that will correct our downward trajectory is the rekindling of the enthusiasm for individual freedom and the reestablishment of the U.S. Constitution as the dominant document of governance. Unless the majority of Americans awaken from their complacency and recognize the threat to their fundamental individual liberties imposed by continued expansion of the federal government, nothing will save us from the fate of all pinnacle nations that have preceded us, those that tolerated political and moral corruption while ignoring fiscal irresponsibility.”
As I have written several times, higher education is an absolute mess, from its leftist culture to its ambivalence toward educating students about essential subjects.
Having suffered through numerous attacks at three universities for my conservative viewpoints, I have some suggestions on how to correct the problems in higher education.
First, eliminate tenure, which provides lifetime jobs and propagates the leftist culture. After only seven years, faculty members who are usually in their twenties when they arrive on campus don’t have to worry much about what they say or do for the next 40 or so years after tenure.
Faculty members play an important role in hiring new faculty. It’s a bit like closed union shops where you only get accepted if you share political viewpoints or know someone already on the inside.
Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria acknowledged recently that higher education policies “use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.” I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day!
Second, eliminate nonprofit status for private colleges and universities. Since these institutions have become political petri dishes, make them pay for their antics.
Third, look seriously at the amount of tax dollars that flow to higher education. Institutions of higher education get more than $1 trillion in tax money from various governmental agencies. State and local governments allocated about nine percent of their total budgets—more than the amount paid for highways and roads. About four percent of the federal budget goes to higher education—much of it in loans to students who end up heavily in debt.
I am heartened that the public is starting to see that the emperors have no clothes.
Americans’ attitudes about higher education have turned sharply negative in the past decade. In a Gallup poll, the percentage of young adults who said a college degree is important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Another poll found that about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. In another Gallup poll, almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.
Partly as a result of these attitudes, the number of college students has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the fall of 2010, more than 18 million undergraduates were enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021.
It’s time for individuals, colleges’ boards of trustees, and government entities to take a good, hard look at what higher education has become and make sure that the trends of intolerance and leftist thinking stop now!
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