Public Execution: It’s Here

We’re scared to do it to our own criminals. ISIS had no qualms about doing it to an innocent Journalist whose great crimes were his nationality and his camera. What does it mean when a religiously fanatic organization publicly executes an innocent man simply to make a point? In the feudal age it would mean as much as a declaration of war. The lord was obliged by the very nature of the feudal arrangement to protect his subjects from foreign harm. The nature of democracy is not very different, the people use their pooled resources to defend themselves. The nature of a republic is perhaps more similar, since there is a leadership granted the responsibility to coördinate those resources, allowing for a quicker response to threat. What is the meaning of the public execution of James Foley? ISIS has declared war on America. When a nation has declared war on you, you can’t look the other way while the enemy tosses grenades at you.

A little to the left (no pun intended)

The situation tests our nation’s integrity, its republic, democratic principles. Because of the pact made between citizen and government, a nation founded on republican and democratic principles has an equal responsibility toward each and every citizen to respond to the threat of an organization willing to capture and publicly execute these citizens.

The nature of this response may very, but it should be a response of force swift and definitive. Taking a vacation and playing golf are not adequate responses. Sitting back and watching your country fall to pieces is equally inadequate. As easy as it is to criticize the president’s hands-off foreign policy, the people of a democratic republic have their own duties to fulfill. America belongs to Americans. It is childish to quickly pass the blame to the “grown-ups”. America can only be screwed up if “We the People” screwed it up. And we’ve screwed it up on all levels.

1. Birth: The United States of America once gave birth to the rough and rugged frontiersmen, to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy, and to generations of risk-taking innovators and mold-breaking inventors. Today the United States hardly gives birth. Seriously! The replacement rate is 2.1 births per woman. Anything short of that indicates a dying breed. Since 2008, America is not only giving birth to heroes and geniuses, she is failing to sustain her population. In 1911, women gave birth to an average of three children. As of 2014, American women are averaging 1.86 children. We need each woman in the US to have an additional 15% of a child to keep our country from becoming a ruin. There are a few obvious culprits here: Abortion, contraception, and Homosexual Unions. I’ll go out on a limb here and assume we can all see how abortion and contraception might reduce the birth rate. I’d like to assume we can all deduce the impact of Homosexual Unions, but I won’t. I’d rather say it out right. Homosexual Unions don’t create kids. This is especially true of gay couples. Before you rant about failed leadership, consider you’re own contribution to this great nation.
2. Education: We, the people, haven’t only failed to bring new life to an aging nation. We fail to educate the few who survive the womb. The education system worked, once. It’s a joke now. Skeptics can just go sit outside the steps of an average American High School and listen to the language of those young impressionable minds. Sure they’re reading Shakespeare in Literature Class, but they can hardly piece a sentence together without inserting something vulgar. I guarantee, or I hope their teachers haven’t taught them this habit. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation studied more than 3,000 classrooms and found that more than 60% were competently managed. That itself is not flattering. If you only have on child, there is a 40% chance that child will land in madhouse. What’s worse, the study found that only 20% of these classrooms were taught to ambitiously engage the material and apply their own reasoning to topics of discussion–20% of a shrinking population taught to think on their own! We’ve come to want quantity over quality. Rather than challenge students, we lower the bar, making it easier for everyone to pass over it…and possibly make their way into politics. I tell my students this all the time. People shouldn’t just trust the government to provide education. Get your own education. Educate yourself! Go to class, listen to talks, take tests…that’s not education. Education is a mutual relationship instigated by the student who seeks out a teacher.
3. Parenting: Along the same lines as education, parenting habits have changed. A cartoonist once illustrated this change cleverly, showing two frames. In the first, frame parents holding an exam marked with a large F stood behind the teacher. Parents and teacher are shown shouting at the student. The caption reads “1950”. The second frame shows the parents standing behind their child. The father has his arms crossed. The mother is shoving a failed exam in the teacher’s face as the student sits complacently in a chair. The caption reads “2010”.  When parents only have one child, they’ve only got one investment in the future. There is a tendency to be soft. But there is also a tendency to have ridiculously high expectations. The blend of these two inclinations lead a parent to imagine that their child has already achieved perfection and can never be at fault. We used to tell our children to suck it up and be a man. Today we call the principle and threaten to withdraw funding unless the boy who punched little Johnny in the face is expelled. What’s ironic is that Johnny isn’t innocent, soft, or confused about his gender identity. Johnny is a mischievous boy who has learned how to play the system. Maybe he did get punched in the face, but maybe he deserved it (yes, among boys that is a possibility; I dare say that among girls it is also a possibility). My experience with students would lead me to believe that Johnny knew how his parents would react and even wanted to have the other boy expelled. And I’d wager that was a talent Johnny learned at home from his parents. Kids probably learn the least at school. They learn more from the internet and TV than they do at school. But they learn even more from their parents. Language, vices, habits, mannerisms, attitude: they’re all picked up at home and at an early age.
4. Opportunity:  It would be satire to call America the land of Opportunity. It would be more honest to call it the land of Extortion. We used to offer opportunity, because we used to be a kind nation. We used to care about the poor and oppressed. We used to pool our collective resources to help a neighbor. But we kicked that habit good and hard. The only opportunity most Americans really care about is their own opportunities. I still don’t think we’re a selfish nation. The number of kindhearted people I’ve met on the street astounds me. I’ve come up short of cash when eating out and I’ve had complete strangers cover the whole cost of my meal. The national heart is still as good as gold, but the instinct of survival can turn the tamest pet into a beast. What we have lost as a nation is the notion of collective sacrifice for a good cause. Colleges need to make a profit in addition to paying a staff which is supposed to care about their students. Why should they allow students to amass enormous student loans in order to achieve a degree which may never get them a job? Why do business require a degree for entry-level positions when they don’t expect new employees to creatively apply their education to the job? It’s because industry doesn’t believe in opportunity. Industry believes in money.
5. Economy: America has definitely screwed up here. We once had the advantage of being pioneers whose economy system was bargaining. You can’t beat the bargain system. I’ll give you my cow if you give me a pig. You didn’t need a job to create cash, you needed a skill to grow things you could trade. Sooner or later we had enough gold and silver to go around that people just traded precious metals. Then we decided to leave the metal at home and write IOU’s. The government decided to sanction IOU’s, issuing official paperback money which was meant to signify a quantity of goods owed. In the 30’s FDR decided to get rid of the gold standard forever dooming America to confusion about the monetary value of anything. No wonder prices fluctuate so easily when the worth of a dollar bill isn’t nailed down. Now we have a government which practically determines the worth of a dollar and at the same time exists in a state of perpetually worsening debt. Just as children learn from parents, so do civilians often learn from their civil leaders. Our nation has been plagued by poor financial leadership, the nation has been led straight into debt. The only way out is for change to happen from the bottom up. The people with the money won’t give money to those without money. Those without money need to discover ways to make their own.
6. Healthcare: As bad as we are at conceiving life, Americans have tried their hardest to sustain and prolong it. But we go about it all wrong. There’s the famous joke about Americans. We’re the only place a person orders a Big Mac, Large Fries, and a Diet Coke. Of course the irony is that the Diet Coke is a joke when it’s on the tray beside a greasy burger and genetically engineered potato slices saturated with lard. Americans grow up between the extremes of obesity and anorexia. We fail to settle down somewhere healthy in the middle. On TV, Medical professionals push weight-loss pills, liposuction, carb-free diets, gluten-free diets, protein-free diets, dairy-free diets, and it all gets so convoluted that people careless attempt them all in no order and with no discrimination. Americans throw themselves into the arms of fitness regimens until they are run ragged, then they sit down to eat a tub of ice cream before going to bed. We complain about Healthcare reform because it’s too slow, too quick, or too much. Healthcare reform starts at home. Work out! Remind yourself that humans were designed to live off of oxygen, not cigarette smoke. Take a shower. Brush your teeth. Use Deodorant. Trim your nails. Everything your mother should have taught you. Hygiene has its reasons.
7. Art: Art is just as important to a culture as economy. In many ways art directs culture, and in other ways art will indicate the direction a culture has already taken. I sincerely hope that contemporary art is not an indication of the direction our culture has already taken, but I fear it is. Lets take an obvious example: music. The Billboard top hit of 1960 was Theme From A Summer Place. A classically romantic song about a couple finding comfort in each other’s presence. The 1970 top hit was Simon and Garfunkel’s famous Bridge Over Troubled Waters. There is a fairly common rumor that this song is about shooting heroine. Not true. The misinterpreted line “Sail on, Silver girl” doesn’t refer to the needle of a syringe, but instead to the artist’s girlfriend/to-be-wife who’d found a few grey hairs. The song tells the story of a man comforting a woman, being her strength and rock. The 80’s were weird, we all know that. The Top hit of 1980 was a song by Blondie, Call me. It’s about a prostitute. Yeah.
   

   Mmm! Ain’t that pretty!

   At this point perhaps art was trying to direct the culture. Wilson Phillips took the 1990 top spot with Hold On. The song is directed to a person who has allowed herself to become enchained in a painful situation that she is reluctant to leave. In many ways, that was the 90’s. If the 90’s was a girl, the 80’s was her abusive boyfriend. The Y2K chart topper was Faith Hill’s Breath. It’s like one of those cheap romantic paperbacks, only as a song. It is sensual and vivid. And to round it out, in 2010, we have Ke$ha: Tik Tok. Intro the YOLO generation. A girl is going clubbing and she’s drunk. Has art failed? Only because Americans fail to make good art look good. Among most healthy, sane, rational Americans there is a sense of resignation to mediocrity. I’m not even thinking about Evangelical Grassroots student film projects, I’m talking about well-established and well-meaning production companies like the Hallmark channel.

I’ll limit myself to these seven areas where America has shot itself in the foot. Even though there is room for legitimate outrage when the President of a democratic republic remains on vacation when his constituents (the American people) are being kidnapped and publicly executed, the first reaction should be one of self-evaluation. There has already been a public execution of the American character, and it was the people of American who tied the noose. We sleep in the beds we’ve made. It’s time to get out of bed.