The Youth of Tomorrow
As you may or may not know...I've been substitute teaching quite often. Yesterday I substitute taught out at Ypsilanti Highschool for a social studies class. Turns out it was only a half day so I only had 3 classes, but that is beside the point. Anywho, the teacher wanted me to play a video for the class on the Great Depression so that is what I did. What I saw made me realize just how screwed this country is going to be in the future, and I am not even talking about the video because I found that enthralling. I am talking about the students. They simply didn't care. Granted, I remember being in school and having videos and I will admit to falling asleep in my fair shair of them, but the Great Depression isn't some far forgotten problem of a bygone era; the good times of the raging 20's spiralling to the crushing Depression era 30's is not to different from things happening today. I tried to give things more immediacy by pointing this fact out (especially since a large focus of the video had to do with the auto industry and the extream distance between the obscenely rich and the poor) and by reminding the students that many of their grandparents where born during these years, that their great grandparents scratched and clawed their way through those dark times, but the continued their intense disinterest. When they haulted their conversations for long enough to gaffaw at the Woody Gunthry music I pointed out that he and others like him wrote many of the songs that they have grown up singing. It was horribly demoralizing to see so many youth so disinterested in an event that, most likely, will repeat itself before too long (at least in America). We are so used to thinking that we are the top in the world that we have become complacent and believe that we will always be that way. The problem is that we aren't and haven't been for a while now. Our system was never perfect, not by a long shot, but people worked to better themselves and their society, they had a modicum of pride in their accomplishments, and that IS what people have to do to advance. Our education system is failling miserably to prepair students for the world that greets them. Technological, medical, and scientific advances are staggeringly week in comparison to other countries (especially China and Japan). Hell, even our internet is archaic in comparison. Empty wars that burn billions of dollers and cost thousands of lives (on both sides) are pushed to the forefront of the political landscape and education, the environment, social programs, even libraries suffer due to lack of funds. Our political leaders are so buisy getting into pissing contests and trying to figure out how they can maintain their positions that they refuse to make the major changes that are needed to keep us from heading into a horribly dark tomorrow. Major overhauls will take more than 2, 3, or even 4 years to really have an effect, but no one wants to wait that long. Instead of actually healing the gaping wounds we prefer to slap a bandaid on the festering meat and say that it is fixed. It's maddening.

Oi. On a more positive note, I borrowed a cd from a friend at work the other day (Axis of Justice) and on it are two songs by Tom Morello's solo project The Nightwatchman. The music of The Nightwatchman is amazing. It evokes the feel of some of Johnny Cash's darker songs and the politically rich storytelling of Bob Dylan. And it's freaking good. It is nothing like RATM or Audioslave so do not go expecting anything like that. It is raw, it is acoustic, and it will punch you in the gut. As David Mack states in his amazing comic Kabuki (issue 9 of "The Alchemy," the current Kabuki volume, came out on Wed as well), "If you don't like the story your culture is writing it's not enough to say you don't subscribe to it. You have the obligation of writing your own story, to be a contributing author of your own culture." We all have an obligation to try and affect a change for the better. Let's get cracking.