In a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan writes, Teach Your Children to Love America. Here’s Charlotte Beyer Hubbell’s response to her.
Dear Peggy,
Yes, let us indoctrinate and propagandize the young American mind. You seem to forget, Peggy, that love - and respect - must be earned, not required.
Let’s look at a VERY partial record of America in 2024.
States keep cutting public education to K-12 grades as well as to state universities and colleges. What are they afraid children will learn in school? How to become a Marxist? I guess educating every child for a successful future is too expensive.
And while we’re on the subject of education, let me just add that most kids and/or their parents have to go into debt to get a college education at a time when a college education is essential for entry into the middle class. What middle class, you ask? You’re right. Where DID they go?
The country seems to be content to let increasing numbers of people die in mass shootings rather than enact laws controlling the ownership of guns. So much for conservative ideas of the “right to life.”
Tech companies have found a way to put a supercomputer in our pockets, yet the US government cannot ensure safe drinking water for our entire population. I guess it costs too much to keep everyone cancer-free.
Infrastructure is crumbling. Consequently, lives are threatened, and getting goods to market is becoming more difficult.
Compensation to the average worker is stagnating in the face of rising productivity. And income inequality continues to soar while many Americans, including our most precious asset - our children - go hungry.
We face a looming crisis of sea level rise along our eastern and southern seaboards, and yet Congress dithers (or is “fiddles” a better word?). Maybe conservatives think that destruction is good for the economy. It will put everyone to work rebuilding it and make money for the contractor, business owner, and capitalist.
And on and on and on….
No, Peggy. You wonder why Americans don’t seem to love our country anymore? (I think they do, but perhaps I am wrong. Young men and women certainly keep signing up for the military to pay their respects. Maybe they join for the food.) But to the extent people don’t love their country, the government hasn't earned it.
Our Congress is pathetic, having accomplished very little except for impeachment hearings and attempts at immigration reform that go nowhere. Republicans are waiting for the Great white man with orange hair to get a win on the border if he’s elected.
Our taxes are too low for high-income earners, and their “saved” earnings are not trickling down. And don’t kid yourself - enormous tax cuts have allowed rich individuals and corporations to buy political office for their stooges.
It’s too bad you’re so blind to the fact that America’s “brand” of capitalism, ever since the Industrial Revolution, isn’t working anymore. If it ever did. KEEP IT SMALL AND PASS LAWS THAT LIMIT TOP EXEC SALARIES! Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, gets paid $33 million a year. Has he earned it?
Charlotte Beyer Hubbell
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Thank you for these passionate words, Charlotte. You have always worked to give a voice and power to those you had neither.
Yes, I'm one of those free subscribers. Not by choice. I haven't heard or read much from Charlotte. Maybe others have. Personally, I'd like to see, hear, and read more. And, if she doesn't currently, I'd like to know she's writing letters to more political pundits and government leaders.