Sounds pretty typical.  Someone at another blog said that the problem with this prowar stuff is that the powers that be don’t have what she calls a “positioning statement”.  I think we do have one and it’s the ultimate meaning that Joseph Heller imparts to the phrase Catch 22:  Catch 22 means they can do anything that we can’t stop them from doing.

My charitable donations to the ACLU have never been higher than during the last three years under Bush. Of course the schools crave conformity, they have to pump out as many little robots as they can today to work in the factories and cubicles of tomorrow. If they cant push religion or even patriotism in class then they can do their best to enlist the parents help. If their father’s were anything like mine all it will take is one warning of “if I get one more letter from your school for any reason, you wont be able to sit for a month” and I would have been standing the next day.

Most kids will do just about anything to either 1) please their parents or 2) avoid getting beaten and the schools count on that.

If any teacher dared call me to try and shop in my kid for standing up what he/she believes in they’d certainly be getting a good old fashioned tongue lashing from me.  I’d definitely take after my own mother in that regard, who loved nothing more than to give some of my idiot teachers a piece of her mind (and threaten them with talking to the media I might add - she was quite savvy)

My initial feeling is to agree.  However, maybe we need to push the pledge in school - to take it back from the facist corporate media (such as Clear Channel) that pumps it 12 times a day.
Oiling the robots for the cubicle…I have to agree with that. But why are people having children anymore anyway?  They’re fate is determined.  Even if you raise your own correctly, the overwhelming majority will have been raised by the machine or not at all.  ADOPT!!!

There is no logic behind this. It’s ruling through fear, rather than leading by example.

Which is my primary reason for voting the current administration out-oUT-OUT!!! come November. Bush and co. aren’t attempting to lead the people by example. They’re attempting to rule by fear: making us all afraid of the phantoms in the dark, the other nations of the world, and of each other.

That really pisses me off. There’s enough legitimate reasons for me to be afraid: yabbo drivers on the interstate (Hwy 17 is a bloodthirsty stretch of road), my business not succeeding, my epilepsy rising up and slamming me down.

( Does anyone else realise that they’re using the same psychological tactics that Saddam Hussein was using? They’re just not using threats of physical violence, which mightn’t work as well on Americans. They’re using fear of loss of privilege, a more abstract concept that works just as well yet doesn’t intimidate the general populace as much. )

I’m glad to read that many U.S. citizens are not going to conform with more control and conformity in the school system. In just a year, in a moment of opening and closing my eyes I woke up to a different United States that I had known for many years. As a Spanish language teacher applying for full-time jobs in the area of bilingual education I was quite shocked by such a sudden loss of civil liberties. The first shock was to find out the teachers could be fined for not wanting to lead the pledge of allegiance at the beginning of the school day. To also find out that most teaching of history would focus on patriotism and emphasize a pro-war mentality amongst children. I was also quite shocked that “progressive administrators” are suddenly complying with the allegiance to the point of calling parents of those students who refuse to pledge the allegiance. My experience in talking to people before proposition 2 was passed, is that people did not have a clear understanding about this referendum. It was twisted in the way that it was framed as “Teaching English for children”... those who come up with the idea certainly new which public sentiment they were manipulating. Read carefully this new law that sets the public school education further back in the progress of civil liberties and freedom of speech in the school system. A teacher can now be fined for using the student’s native tongue to teach. If the administrator offers a waiver to a family that requests a two-way bilingual program as a mode of education for their children, this family has the right to sue the school if they did not receive the “adequate education”... In one year, the voters of Massachusetts seem to be misinformed of the long-term cost of the current decisions in terms of protecting the civil rights of immigrants.  In addition, to be educating children to take a one-sided view of history and teach love for country through compulsory actions.
Those of us who have lived under dictatorships and
review history objectively, are aware of how passivity allows for others above to make decisions for the “common good”. Lets help our children to think and show no fear of expressing our freedoms according to the first amendment of the United States constitution. My hope is that parents, teachers and students will organize to fight back for the progress achieved since the civil rights act of 1968 and the hard work of Chinese Americans who implemented the Lao law protecting the rights of English as a second language speakesrs. Most of us come from a history of immigration and could learn from the rich cultures and languages that have populated our earth. The political events experienced now date back to the 18OO’s fear and disgust towards non-English speakers and Reagans attempt to enforce the “English only movement”... Bush is taking us in that direction…. to be fearful of our neighbors, to use a preventive war mode instead of diplomacy and negotiation, to create patriotic robots of our children and to ask questions but never receive answers as to why the United States needed to invade Afghanistan and Iraq… To protect our lawns and decorate our houses with flags as though this may bring us safety against this “anonymous enemy”, that is to instill FEAR, FEAR of those of us who may have a different color, a different language or a different culture than the language spoken by current administration.