Government schools and the erosion of the American vision

I open with several Pre-Rant Disclaimers:

1. My entire pre-Christian education was in government schools, and most of my educational deficiencies are wholly my fault, not on my teachers'.
2. My parents were terrific people who did the very best by me that they knew to do, and I am grateful to them. I trusted my kids to state schools, too... at first. This has nothing to do with finding fault with my parents.
3. I am not about to argue that there are no fine educators in the state education camp system. In fact, probably my best teacher anywhere ever was Earl Livingood at Glendale Community College.
4. I am not about to argue that Christian parents sin if they send their children to government education schools; that is their decision — though it is my opinion that it should be the distant-last choice, if ever.

So the adults have finally arrived. Democrats have been in charge of legislation and budgetary matters for years, and they have ruined us. Bush, though far better than the current occupant of the WH, was no principled conservative, and the GOP under his leadership was no model of fiscal constraint or constitutional principles.

But the adults are here. Representative Paul Ryan has proposed a budget that would head America in the general direction of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers' vision of a limited government. Calling our current dilemma the "most predictable crisis in the history of our country," Ryan does what the Dem leaders have failed even to attempt: map a path forward that does not depend wholly on confiscatory taxation and deficit spending.

But that isn't really my point.

Dems responded predictably with the usual slanders of the GOP killing people and throwing seniors and The Children^TM into the streets to die slow deaths of starvation and disease. Particularly at the present moment, in the wake of President Obama and the Dems' unwillingness to engage seriously and the looming possibility of a (temporary!) Federal government "shutdown," apocalyptic nightmare visions are being invoked.

Now we're near my point. Just stop and think of that. It is the Dem/liberal premise that the government must confiscate the earnings of productive people and control the lives of all citizens. It has that right, and it has that responsibility. If the government does not do those things for us — control, decide, and provide — death and chaos and destruction are inevitable and invariable results.

In a healthier day, the nation would have rebelled in horror at such a suggestion. This is exactly what our forefathers fought and died to prevent. The role outlined above is a proper role — for God primarily, and for our parents in our childhoods secondarily. However, the innate urge of fallen man is not for freedom, as Bush² imagined, but for power and control and godhood. It started in Genesis 3, and it is still our main problem.

So why don't people rebel today? I have no confidence that the Ryan plan will prevail, or that the principled leaders in Wisconsin will retain their offices, or that tomorrow in America will be any brighter than today. Why not?

Because citizens have been conditioned from childhood to accept statist paternalism.

I see the remnants in my own heart. You will sometimes read that this or that supplement, medicine or technology is "used by the government," or that it is "government-tested and approved." A dwindling part of my consciousness responds positively, as if government-approved means everything. It means that this item/procedure has gone through the most rigorous and omnicompetent testing in gleaming labs run by the very topmost minds in the world. And now it is being offered to my trembling, grateful hands.

Now I know that the precise opposite is likelier the case. But where did I ever get this notion?

I got it where most Americans get it. I started getting it when my mother first left me off (crying, scared) at some government-run institution, trusting me to their care. I started getting it in the kind, benevolent, caring faces of Miss This and Mrs. That and Mr. TheOtherThing, to whom my parents entrusted me for the greater part of every weekday. They told me what and how to think, and how to act. They watched out for me, They cared about my health and nutrition. They were my benevolent caretakers from my early single-digits to my seventeenth year.

So after all: our parents left us there. Our parents loved us. If our parents trusted them to care for us and tell us how and what to think, shouldn't we trust them too?

And so for most Americans, the first face of the State is not a power-mad bureaucrat crushing out all freedom and initiative and individuality. Well, it is, but they don't recognize it, because it is represented by the friendly, caring face of a teacher, assuring them (as state education bureaucrats assured my dear wife and me, in our last meeting with them) that theirs is a "holistic" approach, and that "everything that concerns the child, concerns Us."

That is why there is not an instant national revolution when an Obama or a Reid or a Pelosi rises up and intones dire warnings that, without the government's absolute iron-fisted control of everything, all will be lost, and outlines plans for more and more state control and dictation in yet more and more of our lives, including not only our actions but our thoughts and words.

We have been conditioned, from childhood, to think of the state as our friend and caretaker... basically, not to put too fine a point on it, as our god.

This serves the Dems well. We expect The State to care for us, provide for us, guide us, control us. They're happy to oblige. When conservatives speak of freedom, liberty, and responsibility, those concepts are lost on us. It feels like they are simply abdicating their responsibility. If they don't care for us, people will die. If they don't tell us what to do and how to live, there will be chaos.

And here's the real irony: liberals utterly fail at the more Biblically-rational, Constitutionally/Declaration-defined responsibilities, laid out by men whose worldview was at least framed by a broadly Biblical understanding of man and society. They don't protect the borders, and they don't assure rule-of-law justice in the courts; they don't stand for life, liberty, or the pursuit of (not state-defined-and-provided) happiness.

That's why I'm hopeful and determined, but not entirely optimistic. When I hear leaders and talkers say, as they must, that the American people are smart and all that, I can't agree. If they were that smart, there would have been no Clinton 1, and certainly no Clinton 2, and certainly no Obama; let alone Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Shumer, Snowe, Chaffee, and the like. The fleebaggers in Wisconsin would be on their way out of office. And on and on.

But I don't see signs that Americans at large really get it.

And for that, in part, I blame the state-government conditioning we underwent for the most formative years of our lives. Machen saw it with crystal-clarity, more than 80 years ago:

Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. Such a tyrrany, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past....

Do offer your thoughts, but do me a favor and review the Disclaimers at the top, just one more time.