"So," you ask, "Why doesn't Congress make college tuition free? Surely a more educated populace would lead to an even better America."
Whoa! Not so fast, folks. You're starting to sound anti-American...even socialistic. Perhaps you don't really understand how dangerous that would be.
Thomas Jefferson worte, "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people," and he meant it.
He also wrote in the Declaration of Independence "...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
That, however, did not stop the wealthy leaders of the American colonies from changing Jefferson's idealistic, unalienable right to "the pursuit of happiness" into the much more business-friendly right to "the acquisition and protection of property" when they wrote their state constitutions after the Revolutionary War was over. They did not do this out of Jeffersonian idealism or democratic fervor, but out of good, old-fashioned, quintessentially American self-interest.
That same self-interest perpetuates America's favorite self-deception. We love to tell ourselves and the rest of the world that in America "all men are created equal" yet we continue to elect officials whose ideology calls for the perpetuation of inequalities within our multi-cultural populace.
Fear of education lies at the very heart of this ideology, for education is the true leveler in any society. It is "a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."
However, "an educated citizenry" that is free can't be controlled and manipulated nearly as easily as a one perpetually in debt to their "betters" and brainwashed to vote against their own best interests out of fear that "the dreaded other" (distinguished by race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, education, or any other wedge-issue) will get what little they have.
A glance back at history will show that a minority which controls the purse strings of a country has always used this tactic to forced the majority at the bottom of the economic ladder to dance to its tune.
It worked on the plantations of the Old South. It worked in South Africa under apartheid. And it is alive and well in today's America where corporations have been given the status of people by the Roberts court and can make a mockery of the "one person one vote" principle by simply purchasing politicians with millions of "free speech dollars."
Education is much more than "a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." It is the only property whose acquisition enables a free people to pursue happiness, and it must be protected.
"So, " I ask, "Are you interested in equality and freedom or only in the myth of equality and freedom? Do you believe that all people, have an inalienable right to pursue happiness or that property and wealth have an unalienable right to negate the ideals and principles on which our nation was founded?"
With control of the Senate and the governorships of many states on the ballot in November, what you do on election day w will answer those questions."
