Offensive

2004-12-07 at 8:51 p.m.

So sorry there have been no updates. It is finals week, and, just as a bonus, I have a cold and sore throat. Yep. So, compensation, sort of. Here is my "A" Paper for English. That means I'm posting my work for my final up here. Yep. I'm stretching it.

Knowledge is My Flag of Attack
I have a story to share. I work at a bookstore, and every holiday season, like most retailers, the Christmas music starts before Thanksgiving, the holiday set up is done before the beginning of November, and calendars have been in place since May. The holidays are the time of giving, and in that spirit, every year we have a holiday book drive. This year, we added the �Would you like to purchase a four dollar book to a child in need for our holiday book drive?� question to the list of things we already ask customers. One answer has stuck with me since last week, when I received it. I asked a customer that question. His response? �No, no, I don�t give to the poor.� This stunned me a little, but I progressed with a professional attitude. He must have felt the need to explain himself, however, because he carried on. �My cousin had this collection of porcelain dolls that she collected, you know? She kept them at her mom�s house, and her mom gave them away to some poor kids down the street. She had them 30 years, and her mom just gave them away. The next time she saw them, these kids were playing with them in the dirt. 30 year old dolls. They were worth money, you know? And these kids just played with them in the dirt. I don�t give to the poor because they can�t respect what they have.�
He told me the poor cannot respect what they have. I would say that he cannot respect the poor. He did not respect the dolls. And he was suffering from some major ignorance. What really ails America is ignorance. �The country has grown comfortable with the game of �let�s pretend we care� (Barber 154).
The media plays a huge role in ignorance. The news programs spend so much time trying to create an emotional avalanche and improve ratings that they forget to add the news in the program. They begin by creating suspense. Then they add fear. Someone was raped or murdered or drowned in their car going over a low watch crossing (which is stupidity, in a different league than ignorance.) Then they cut to commercials. They lighten the mood with weather, perhaps pictures of cute puppies at the pound. Then they hit you with the one news story in the whole program. We have a new Homeland Security Chef, or something else that might actually affect the viewers. Then there is some chit-chat between the news people, and after another bout of commercials they show you something interesting, like a guy who has caught a really big fish locally or a picture of flooding in some country they don�t even name. News programs feed ignorance. They claim to be all you need in news. They are sorely lacking in actual news. Television and news specifically, gloss over both sides too quickly to give any accurate information. �The influence of public media on our perceptions is enormous��(Dove 503). People who only get their information about the world around them from the television media, or nowhere at all, have chosen to be ignorant. They have chosen not to know what is happening.
The only time of the year I receive donation requests is holiday time. I always find myself wondering if this is the only time of the year charities can get donations. The idea of giving the homeless a meal on Christmas and thanksgiving day is great, but where do they eat the other 363 days of the year? As rich as our country is, you would think we could give our poor an equal chance to our rich. �The richest school districts (school financing is local, not federal) spend twice as much per student as poorer ones do. The poorer ones seem almost beyond help��(Barber 154). People cannot get by on unskilled labor wages. �The Bureau of Labor Statistics found full-time �private household workers and servants� earning a median income of $223 a week in 1998, which is $23 a week below the poverty level for a family of three� (Ehrenreich 61).
Clearly, our public school system is a starting point for our society�s ignorance. Too many parents, ignorant of their child�s needs and education, see school as a great free babysitter. They dump them there. A few hours later, they pick them up. They admire the map of the US Little Johnny colored in class. Never mind that Johnny is in seventh grade and still coloring maps of the US. If there is a bad weather day, the parents are very upset because they must pay for a babysitter. Very few parents check what their child is doing. Very few children read at the grade level they are at in school. Benjamin R. Barber tells us that �more than 90 million adult Americans lacked simple literacy�(153). This is a horrible way to educate the children of one of the top 3 most industrialized, rich countries in the world. E.D. Hirsch has noted �There is wide agreement in the international community that the United States has created� the worst public schools in the developed world�(144). We should expect more from ourselves, instead of less. In reality, �No Child Left Behind� translates in non-political talk, �we will not stop until our system is so standardized, that we move map coloring to an eleventh grade level instead of seventh.�
Ignorance of how bad our school system truly is and of the poor is a terrible problem. People say ignorance is bliss. I believe they�re fools. However, I have heard another statement on ignorance. �Ignorance is my best defense.� It might be a defense; however, it is time to be on the offensive to resolve these problems, to shake up the views and blindness of people like my doll customer. Stop the ignorance. Shatter the doll�s face. A child�s joy in playing with a toy, perhaps a child who had never had a doll before, is worth much more than looking at something bound in a glass case.

last & next

0 comments so far

newest archives profile notes image design host