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Blogs by Bobbi Ann Duffy
Changes 5/19/2016 1:06:42 PM
It's hard on us when our society out grows us.
I sometimes find life very confusing. No I don’t suffer from a brain disorder. I just can no longer make sense of the society I live in. It has changed so much. Half of the countries I had to learn in Geography classes no longer exist. One thing that bothers me is that when I went to college in my forties, many of the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings had no idea who the people who re-established Israel were, or who the leader of Egypt during the Six Day War was. What made it even sadder is that some of them were History majors. My first tendency was to blame the education system, after all, my sons freshman history text book donated 3 pages to the death of Marilyn Monroe, but only 1 paragraph to the War in Viet Nam.
Now I realize that what needed change was not the educational system, but society’s attitude toward what is important for its citizens to know. Just one example is languages. We as a society begin teaching second languages in high school, other developed countries begin in first grade or earlier because they understand that those are the years when a child’s mind can best absorb and assimilate the new language.
Slowly we have traded our American identity as world class leaders in all fields to leaders in the bottom lines only. And that we gained at the cost of moving our manufacturing overseas where labor is cheaper so the corporation can make more money, but left the average American unable to live the life style their parents and grandparents lived.
Now we live in a society where a large percentage of our elderly live in substandard housing, eat substandard diets, and often have to choose between buying food of medications. When my parents bought a house, payments could not be more than 1/4th of their income; it’s now customary for it to be up to ½ or more. I currently pay 71% of my monthly income to housing costs.
However, I do have the consolation of having a good education that I paid for myself, with grades that I worked hard to get, and a degree that put me in the top 5% of my graduating class. I do know who Sadat was and I wept when he was assassinated.
