It's not America, dumbing etcetera.
It's the whole world.

Simply, America arrives first - as usual (McDonald's ? I eated my first BigBurger in 1986, and it was in Milan not in Bologna).

I think there will be always a good leaders' class. We'll have leaders, tomorrow.
Simply, it may be they will be - in Italy and Europe - from Albania, Egypt, Morocco, Moldavia or Turkey, India or Sri Lanka.
They work hard, they have clear-cut targets. While our children (and not only them ... ) fiddle with PS3, I-pod and all those weird things - they run straight for their missions.

The Roman Empire fell down because of decadence; America rose up thanks to the American Dream.
Has it turned into an American nightmare ? I don't think so.

The challenge is "wake up" and restart working.
Forget about stunning cars, dress and technological gadgets.
Not everyone can be the best; just try to be - or try to put your boys and girls - way far from the worst.
It won't take that much.

My 15 y.o son has spent the last school year mocking some teachers, first and foremost because he got "flugzeuge im bauch" (airplanes in belly - note that the original german idiom for "falling in love" is "to have butterflies in belly") and wanted to look soooo tough before his sweet classmate.
Don't remind me about all the money wasted in SMS.
They split - thank God - after a few months, but at last he got five (5) subjects to study hard all summer long. By the way, this means we too had to study hard this summer ...

I think and I hope he has learnt the same old lesson: don't want you to be the first (... er, why not?), but sure don't want you to be the last.

Everyone can do it.

quote:

Originally posted by Frase:
Happy Days: it started out as a cute sitcom, funny at times, good enough entertainment for the family. Then near the final season, The Fonz was wearing his leather jacket while water skiing, and performing the death defying stunt of jumping over a shark in the water.

And what about the time Mork (a young Robin Williams, "Mork & Mindy") landed in Milwaukee and met all the guys at Arnold's ?

It is from the Fonzie water-skiing show that the phrase "jumped the shark" came to be.

I personally think society started its decline when the paddles got taken away from teachers. Education has never been the same since that time!

My dad was a school principal from the early 1950s until the mid 1980s; he devoted his life to kids, and did so in the murder capital of the country, East Palo Alto, CA. He had a paddle, with holes in it, and 5 letters:
T-H-I-N-K. He rarely had to use it in his 30 odd years as a principal (and no, he didn't pass discipline off to the Vice Principal).

The paddles got taken away from the principals and the teachers, alike, because "lawsuits" became the way of the world and parent's threatened administration with... "not with my child you don't" mentality.

I got a phone call in my daughter's senior year of school. Her male teacher told me that she walked out on his class. The reason being, she needed to use the restroom for personal reasons. The teacher would not let her leave. She was too embarrassed to tell him it was for female reasons. He calls me and tells me what happened. Without knowing the real reason and without talking to my daughter to get her side, I told him to do whatever he felt necessary to discipline her.

I understand she had to leave. But, to disrespect the teacher and to leave abruptly and disrupt the entire class, is not how I raised my daughter to act. She should have either slipped him a note on his desk or whispered the urgency to him.

Luckily, there are still some sane, grounded parents out there who would like to see the school systems back to what they used to be. Not many, but some.

A'ndrea

quote:

I personally think society started its decline when the paddles got taken away from teachers. Education has never been the same since that time!

Agree whole heartedly but the wave of lawsuits, real or frivolous preceded it and many other of our ills. Freedom is more than the ability to speek freely (under attack), worship freely (under attack), my own personal favorite, 2nd ammendment because I believe it's the reason until now we've kept the rest (under attack). This is enough of a run-on sentence to get my point across. Freedom is under attack on so many fronts. It seems to me that the trial lawyers will be the undoing of our great nation if the trend is not reversed.

Think about this, Jim McGreevey is now an ethics professor at a college. He's teaching eithics to our children! This is a guy who had adulterous affairs in public restrooms with total strangers and with his own Aide. In the news right now is another politician among many in recent years facing similar scandal. Will he also be offered a position at a university to teach ethics? These so called leaders are on both sides of the isle. How as the country I grew up in changed so much in such a short time? Many call it progress, I have a far different view. Fredo mentioned the fall of the Roman Empire in a previous post because of their decadence. I hope this downward trend is cyclical and it turns around for the sake of my children, future grand children and the sake of my nation.

Cheers, Neil

History also shows us that dominant societies dominate for roughly 200 years, and then they fall. Let's see, we celebrated our bicentennial when? Our country would be about 231 now. Hmmmm. I worry, too Neil; for all our futures.

Andrea, I see both sides of your issue. I am still stuck on figuring out why the teacher would not let her leave the class. Seems like he was just being mean or obstinate. Unfortunately, I would have probably walked out myself. Some people just refuse to listen to reason. She misbehaved but, under the circumstances, I feel that he shares an equal portion of responsibility. That is, unless she is a habitual troublemaker, which, knowing you, she is clearly not.

dr, This was a fairly new hire for the school district. He was trying to prove himself to administration. He was also hired directly out of college. I'm sure he had never been faced with a female-based issue yet.

That was the first and only phone call I had received home from her school in 13 years. I think she got brave in her senior year!

All-in-all, my daughter knows how I feel about respecting people, especially teachers, and she handled it improperly.

She learned a valuable lesson that day when she got home. Mom was not happy, and it's never fun to have your car taken away.... at any age!

A'ndrea

I think we are duped by the media and the courts. I believe that most Americans feels as the majority of posters here have responded for more hands-on raising of children.

It isn't loving parents who gave the medical community the right to cry "abuse" for seeing marks on a child's butt.

Ken, I'm with you. No doubt that feeling is shared also out of America.

A'ndrea, well done.

GC, well said. But don't worry, right now I can't see any new dominating society arising.
I only see people who want to be part of the western way of life.

I think our society needs to seek a panacea which will ultimately derascinate any possibility of any potential future conflict. It will, of course, prevent any hyperperestalsis of the gastric mucosa!!Finally, it will totally eliminate floccipaucinihilipalificationism!!

BillyBuzzy

Couple things make me shake my head a little about the general thesis of this thread.

A) Everyone seems to agree that the poor (read "black") neighborhoods are content to just spawn babies and live off the public dime. I can only assume everyone agrees because no one, not a single person disagreed with Suzy's characterization of the subject of her disdain. Believe me, I live in Detroit, I know what blight looks like - but unfortunately nothing's that tidy or that easily explained away. In so many cases, what you have is a mom and 5 kids all of which are decent, loving citizens, all trying very hard to change things and make it better. But they were given such a deficit at the start the odds of them ever affording a college tuition, much less pay someone to watch their children while they cruise are just about nil. So when you use that ugly word "THEY" so freely, you are blaming 6 or 7 people for the actions of 1, which is obscenely unfair, and shows a complete lack of knowledge of what is actually happening on a personal level with most of those families. Poverty is ugly. It's hard to look at. It's even harder to stand when one begins to feel like it might encroach on one's property value. But at the end of the day if we're not humans loving humans, all this hogwash about bible passages and religion being under attack is nothing but hogwash we're parroting after hearing it on some AM radio talk show.

They're fat because we've decided to keep the fresh salads and leanest cuts of meats for ourselves and make everything injected with High Fructose Corn Syrup the stuff they can afford - and then we complain about how it makes them look.

Being in the gay community myself, I also understand what codephrases like "hate crimes legislation" means. It means laws that permit me to be a free and open citizen. I can understand how disturbing that notion might be to some people. To those, I would say - perhaps your children will show a little more maturity than you about this subject. It might be too late for you, and you and I will be gone long before this matter is finally settled in a cultured, loving, mature and long-lasting way. That's probably best for those who remain, especially if you and I are part of the problem to begin with.

B) People seem to be so ready to disassemble America as "dumbed down" ... and then a few of the posters cite where they heard about it like on the Jerry Springer show. It's possible that America only LOOKS dumb because those are the images some of us insist upon looking at.

C) It makes me sad when people blame the government, and blame the legal system, and blame teachers who choose more evolved disciplinary techniques than beating their students into submission for the state of the country (whatever that is). But if the shoe were ever on the other foot - your house was foreclosed and needed assistance, or it was your child coming home covered in bruises because beating was all the principle understood because everything he or she knew about child development was learned in a (insert denomination here) church instead of actually sitting through the classes and getting the psychology degree ... you would be the first one saying "Not My Child", or "I Demand Whatever Assistance I Have Coming."

America isn't "Dumbing Down." It's just in a period of rest where it tried an experiment. It decided to let dogma be it's guide instead of reason - and the experiment failed. Eventually, our friends across the seas ... you know, those people we spend so much money cruising to go see because it's so beautiful and peaceful over there? ... those people will patiently remind us why they loved having America be their role model, and what we were that made us so. Loving, innovative, brave, and intolerant to bigotry and racism.

It became vogue to "hate the French" a few years back, or belly-ache against this country or that country. But guess what, they still hold the family photo album of what made America the gem of the planet in terms of governance and taking care of its least. Even some of the Middle Eastern countries that we seem to so easily detest these days - actually grieve at the thought of losing the America you and I grew up with. We're not "dumbed down"...we just "fell down". When the ones we rail against the most are the ones who surprisingly help us dust ourselves off and stand back up, it will be a lesson in humility that no class room could ever teach in one semester.

Mark-

I can't say I disagree with much of what you say above, but I do want to point out that you committed the exact same mistake you lectured about in your post. You claimed "Everyone seems to agree that ...." branding "everyone"
based on something one person wrote.

Note that the person you speak of (and a couple of those that were discussing things in this thread are no longer members of cruise chat mainly for some of the things they said.

Political discussions are not allowed on CC because they end up badly. You repsonded to an old post/topic, many of th eposts in the thread may have been removed due to the rules. So please don't jump on an old topic and critize everyone without having been around when the original topic started.

And since this whole thread is borderline at breaking the politcal topic rules, I'm going to close it now.