Our Own Effort Is The Common Thread In Democracy
Written by redqueeninla in COLA, Education, Local neighborhoods
I think some of those who moan loudest about the dissolution of the social fabric are themselves most complicit in its flimsiness.
At a recent neighborhood potluck frequented by a lot of white-haired, old-time southern Californians there was an awful lot of grousing about the state of families and children today, the lack of discipline among the children or from the parents toward them. The absence of discipline permissible in classrooms and the coddling of students, whether in acquiescing to parents or refraining from applying adequate expectations and rrrrigor.
What on earth does all this mean??? This is the generation that ushered in proposition 13 which starved the public commons and any services associated with it: police, parks, streets, schools. We are to be an ever-urbanized society with increasingly less to spend generally on our over-stuffed cities. Money for private expenditures is un-censured and private sequestration of all of it is fetishized.
These hundreds turnout for a potluck common klatsch whereas those who turnout to elect they who convened the event are fewer than this in number. Free food is fair game but free elections are expendable. Swapping food in kind is worthwhile but sharing one’s labor, or purse, in service of a common good is an entirely different matter.
Whatever has happened since the social upheaval of the 60′s and 70′s culminating in the proposition 13 lockdown of public monies? While some point to chaos in the classrooms as auguring poorly for the future, I wonder whether political isolationism is not more iconic of the disenfranchised we see Our Own Effort Is The Common Thread In Democracy – redqueeninla:
