Scott Free Thinking

All throughout life, you are likely to get to know countless different people. All throughout literature, you can find thousands upon thousands of different instances of romanticism promising you that these people are possibly going to stick by your side. How many different characters can you ever recall reading about that had best friends from their early childhood? And of course, how many, not just pieces of literature, but books, movies, television shows, even advertisements you see in your everyday life - holding the promise of true love, and lifetime love. A lot of the time, it is not just any kind of love, we are speaking of deeply romantic, and at times, straight out codependent by definition, love.
Lifetime love, as much as we would like for it to exist, is more and more these days seeming not to. From the increasing divorce rate, and even to the shifting cultural attitude on the subject of lifetime marriage or even single relationships anymore. There’s a t-shirt I even saw once, the design of a male figure with numerous female figures saying, “Polygamy, it’s not just for the Mormons anymore!” No doubt, in the United States and the world abroad, attitudes toward love, relationships, friendship, sex, and all kinds of other subjects is changing.

So why all the promises? Is it really true that couples in America during the 1950’s were able to stay together longer that modern couples now after the new millenium? It’s baffling to think of some of the possibilities. To understand some of the differences that have taken place in the shifting culture, we also need to understand some of the historical differences that have been happening the past 55 years or so. In the 1950’s, there was an entirely different outlook on sex, clothing, and ‘pop culture’ of the 1950’s most certainly is not the same ‘pop culture’ we have come to know today. World War II had just ended and the infamous baby boomer generation began to flood the country with youngins.

Almost bizarrely in the 1960’s, we saw an evolving shift that emphasized promiscuous sex, drug abuse, the hippie culture, and “free love.” The 1960’s is a time characterized distinctly by imagery of tye-dye designs, peace symbols, Woodstock, and so on and so forth. It’s interesting to me, the kind of evolution that has taken place in the mind’s eye during the past 55 years of American history. Much of the populace of the U.S. tends to remember a stock footage imprint, so to speak, of the last 5 decades. Most people I talk to my age who grew up reading the same textbooks and same materials on the past several decades that I have will tend to say that they can tell me something distinct about the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, and their relative experience of the 1990’s, but as far as the 40’s, 30’s, 20’s, etc. - their understanding that comes combined with associated imagery doesn’t seem to match up. In other words, they can tell me distinct details that have been described in the textbooks and culturally have been stereotypes of these decades, but they cannot go into the 1940’s and prior with much detail, because much of the present culture does not seem to hinge on these time periods quite as much.

In understanding how we think, how we interpret the modern day world, it is critical to understand how we think of the past. The differences in the grade school textbooks that can be witnessed in the 1950’s texts to the modern texts, the books that the kids have been reading, is downright astonishing. Children of today are interpreting the past in an entirely different fashion, and it’s a scary concept. It comes back to that popular question of, Who writes the textbooks? Who writes history? I’ve heard it said that the people who tend to write the outcome of a war that took place in history are the victors of the war, not the losers. To realize that only a select few textbook companies(Thomson Gale, Prentice Hall, etc.) create the textbooks from their own selected writers is a scary thought. Public education, the same education that your children recieve, is subject to companies that are not publically initiated.

Public education is head through a system of political decisions, made by politicians, and supposedly influenced by the voters. A lot of political intellectuals like to throw out jargon sometimes, saying that voters did this, or voters did that. In my view, the entire role of voters in the United States is a joke, is it not? I live in a small city with probably less than 200,000 people, but even if the population amount comes to anywhere near that number, I recently found out the number of people who vote for local city government positions is barely 3,000, and one record year recently saw that number at around 6,000 voters. People everywhere are being encouraged to vote, as there is an increasing tendency to say that young people need to vote, more people need to vote. Votes aside - how much of a proportional amount are going to, even with the encouragement? To market a population to vote is similar to marketing a population to buy or buy into a particular product, service, or activity. If you send out a million requests, you can sometimes only get a less than 1% return, and if you are lucky, you will get somewhere around a 10% return - even that can be pushing it. So all of these organizations who are trying to increase the amount of voters, the questions must be asked. How many people are they reaching? How many of those people actually vote?

Voting on elected officials is one thing, voting on the issues is entirely another. The United States government is one that is largely republican, in that the people tend to prefer choosing representatives to do the decision making and work for them. It is, after all, a very slow, tedious process to get an entire population to act in unison(or just majority), on a decision for some particular national action. Representatives, being of one mind with the population, can make these decisions quickly.

But there are, of course, as we already know, so many problems with choosing representatives, or just politicians in general, to run the government and make these decisions. For one thing, how many politicans have the issue of public education at heart? Everyone seems to have seen right through the nonsense of George W. Bush’s Three-R’s idea, which really was taking the basic method the schools are already using and publicizing upon it. And isn’t it also typical of George W. Bush to use his fancy grammar in describing the idea. Reading, writng, and arithmetic. That does not really look like three R’s to me, but somehow the saying sticks. I don’t get it.

There are constant problems in trying to understand why the public education system has been so overlooked. Education, and knowledge, are two subjects that lie at the heart of any national or international issue. Should the population not be as educated as possible? Should we not devote as much energy to this as we possibly can? Yet in public education, the government does not. Rather, the government lets it function the way it has always functioned, as that works, and does little to focus on improving that system.

But coming back to the original problem. The textbooks are functioning in this particular system under a business model. Business, especially big business, is not always honest. If public education is being supplied free from tax dollars, why are the tax dollars being spent on textbooks written by those who are isolated from the majority of the population? How do we solve the problem that the learning materials are written by only a select few individuals, and not by a developing community as a whole? With new technologies, this can change, with ideas like the Wiki - a fully editable document that can be continuously improved by the verification and additional contributions of others. Even with community involvement, however, can we also always trust the community as a whole? Yet still, still I persist that history is too easily being written by the hands of others. How can I know the education I have gotten on any piece of history is accurate, written by a person who is qualified, or is not distorted by some group that seeks their own agenda, to seek to create their own form of truth, separate from that of the neutral one history so perfectly maintains.

Christopher Columbus, as I learned about him in elementary school, seemed deemed a hero, and later, as I learned more, he was known as a filthy sailor who appeared on foreign shores than his own to murder innocent Native Americans. George Washington, the first president of the United States and supposed powerful military general I later found out didn’t even win the majority of the battles that he fought, and even more so - didn’t even fight that many battles, period. Benjamin Franklin, known for being a jack-of-all-trades in the midst of the forefathers for the country got involved with the American currency creation, the Declaration of Independence, and more, but what is to stop me from believing the other evidence that seems to suggest he and the other free masons managed to socially engineer events that would set up the United States as an envisioned world dominating power? Some of these claims, depending on what you have learned, and what perspective you are speaking from, can begin to seem absurd by some, and then another group believes it to be entirely reasonable.

Why so much confusion?

And what can we do to stop history from being rewritten?