A Few Things I wish I would have Learned in School...

In today's socioeconomic climate, there are many things that I am learning as an adult that should have been taught to me from my first day of kindergarten. The alarming thing is that a lot of these things are still being taught to even my kids. The education system in the U.S. is tremendously flawed, especially in the subjects of science and history. With that, I'll begin.

1. While the most popular figureheads of the U.S. past did some important things to make progress in our country, they were not great folks.

George Washington became a slave owner before he became a teenager and owned slaves for almost 60 years. His dentures were not made of wood as we are told as children, they were made from the teeth of his slaves. Thomas Jefferson began raping a 14-year-old slave when he was 44 and she and the six children he fathered were the only slaves he ever freed. Abraham Lincoln actually spoke out about racial equality and while he abolished slavery with the passing of the 13th amendment, he also allowed a loophole to pass ensuring that slavery would still be prevalent in our prison systems.

2. Our nation's leaders have, historically, done some pretty shady stuff.

In light of current events in the U.S., I have begun looking into what it looked like when other great nations fell. In doing this, I find that there has been some pretty serious meddling in foreign affairs by the past leaders of the United States. From the fall of the USSR to the installation of the military dictatorship to the Russian meddling in the 2016 election, our nation has not only been complicit but in many cases, directly involved in some of these events. The end of the Cold War ushered in what was supposed to be a new era of free speech, hard work, and free market in the USSR. The CIA was actively involved in the disruption of progress and the events that led to Chile's democratic socialist government being replaced by a tyrannical military dictatorship. The U.S. aided the Mujahideen in the 80s in their fight against Russia. The Mujahideen created the Taliban, and along the way, ISIS was born of all the turmoil in the Afghanistan region. These are just a few examples that weren't in the headers in my history book.

3. White people have been conditioned to synonymize people of color with "criminal."

Dating back to the founding fathers, there has been an ongoing agenda to keep African Americans separate from the white population in this country. Rep. Henry Barry says this in 1832:

“We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which the light may enter the slave’s mind. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work will be complete. They would then be on the level of the beast of the fields and we then should be safe.”

Fast forward to the late 60s and you can see the implementation of "the Southern Strategy" used by Republicans to sway the voted of Southern Democrats by way of invocation of fear and division. If you haven't seen the documentary "13th" (linked above), it demonstrates exactly how this type of thinking persists today and how we can change it.

4. Climate change is our fault, and it's probably too late to fix it.

So growing up in a generally conservative community, I was told by many family friends and relatives that "global warming is a lie being told by the Democrats to get rid of our capitalist economy and turn the U.S. communist." Being young and impressionable, I didn't really question it. But then I went to college and was assigned an ethics paper on, you guessed it, climate change. What I learned was alarming, terrifying, and ultimately saddening. By the time I started college, I was already a father of five and the paper that I had to research and write was painful. Basically, if everyone on Earth started living green right now, the mega manufacturing corporations have already done so much damage that we probably aren't going to bounce back. (Not to mention that these corporations would have to cease to operate in the capacities that they are now and that's obviously not going to happen.) Temperatures in Russia in 2020 shattered records over 120 years old. Some of the current models did not show these types of temperature increase (or Siberian forest fires) for another 80 years.

5. There's "hard work" and then there's economic slavery.

I've spent the better part of my adult life working. I've worked in grain elevators, tire shops, warehouses, sales, etc. I even served in the military for a bit. I've worked long days, weekends, holidays, on-call shifts, and anything in between. I did this because I thought that is what you had to do to make money. I used to believe our economy to reward those who work hard, go to school, try to "make something of themselves." After almost 20 years in the workforce, I now know that this is not how it works. Minimum wage was a standard set for anyone to be able to buy a house, vehicle, and raise a family. We all know that can't be done.

In closing, maybe I could have done something, even the smallest thing to make a difference if I had known any of this sooner. Here I am in my 30s trying to figure out what was real and wondering why so much is left out in educating our kids. For example, instead of showing kids the dangers of marijuana in health class, maybe teach them the fundamentals of virology and disease transmission. Seems like that could have been useful in the event of, I don't know, a global pandemic?