As Texas cheerfully replaces history with Republican propaganda in their textbooks; as other school districts fight to replace science with Christianist dogma; as an entire political party is emerging that rejects reason for ideology and anything not American as Unamerican; as a liberal I should be scared, but as a father I am overjoyed.
I no longer think of America in terms of my life, even though I have, barring accident or disease, thirty-five to forty years left to me. I think of American solely in terms of what it will mean to my daughter, who's in second grade.
So I'm very pleased that conservatives have decided to denigrate education and prioritize ignorance because when my daughter is applying to college, then starting her career, the children of at least one quarter of the country today, if not nearly half, will have been long removed from any intellectual competition. Call them the Tea Bag Babies or, less charitably, America's Future Ditchdiggers. If Texan educational standards cause textbooks across America to be turned out more of them, so be it.
What careers in science will be available to a people that reject science? What career involving any research or critical thinking will be available to people who can only see things through one lens and reject anything that isn't already in sharp focus? With businesses becoming increasingly global in their concern, however small, what careers will be available to those who mock anything not in their own backyards, who see foreigners as terrorists, and who think English is the only language for them? The job market's not going to get any less stiff over the next fifteen years, and my daughter will only shine the brighter in comparison to the Tea Bag Babies.
I dream of the day when conservatives, having rejected science and history, turn on what they'll likely call Liberal Math (because Jewish Math would be ugly even for them) with its fuzziness and irrational numbers and negatives. And the zero: how could they accept such a thing, for how can there be nothingness in God's creation? OK, this one's a reach.