At this point, I had given up on being disturbed. Too much seriously weird shit has been happening in the past six years that I have damn near been convinced that we were living in an unreal time, a surrealistic novel about the complete transformation of a society. Here's the latest chapter: a public high school in Maryland will soon offer a new magnet program. The title of the program?
In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.
Truly, the culture of terrorism is becoming deeply ingrained in the American psyche when public high schools work to create the future administrative staff of Blackwater.
The military-industrial complex is reaching a peak of power we have rarely seen. Rather than exerting covert influence on what happens in American public education, it is getting aggressive in an effort to secure a stable supply of low level functionaries to fill its operating units. It recognizes the labor deficit the country will face under the double punch of baby boomers exiting the work force over the next twenty years: more services required and fewer in the labor pool to provide those services. It has created its own vocational skills center:
The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the "new reality," though they hasten to add that the school isn't focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it's no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.
Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language."
Funded and guided by...several defense agencies....school administrators channeling Cheneyesque secrecy....Arabic or some other Third World language. Its sad to say that Mr. Volrath, exec director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, is a complete tool for not recognizing that the we are declining in the face of those Arabic speaking nations and he has just become part of the machine leveraging it further. He's a tool for not acknowledging the enormous wealth concentrating in the gulf region, wealth accumulated from all of us and put to use in tax free kingdoms. That Dick Cheney probably has one of those man made islands in tax free Dubai already picked out after the fuedalization of America takes full and complete hold. That third world language speaking nation is kicking our ass.
Making more automatons to run the machinery of the fraud that national defense is will not serve public education well. Schools should exist as a counterbalance to popular culture, a concept I have recently read referred to as "cultural thermostats." Truly, we must hope that this magnet program is a miserable failure. If the Pentagon likes what it sees here, this program will replicate. The Mother Jones article refers to the area around Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, where the school will locate, as becoming a popular area for defense related businesses to locate. Soon, the enclaves of military industrial complex, areas where defense related businesses cluster, will each have their own Homeland Security Academy, creating a secretive publicly funded system of education where teenagers have security clearances. A secret class of youth. Oh my god.
Truly the tin foil is smoking now. My tin foil reflects back, at anecdotal events, small things that feel like shared experiences in the post 9/11 culture shift we are experiencing. Like being surveilled by Navy Intelligence when I last stopped to watch a nuclear sub go by in the Hood Canal. Coast Guard cutters with armed machine guns fore and aft escorting the ferry boat I've ridden for years with never a sense of fear. Or watching the second plane crash into the WTC on tv as it happened, surrounded by shocked coworkers who were profoundly shaken some leaving to go home. We were 3,000 miles away on the other side of the nation and it still had a deep effect on each of us. Not seeing planes cross the sky for so long made it even more real. This magnet program feels the same way to me. Another in a bizarre chain of events. We can only hope that this idea will fail and some measure of balance is restored.