Burnt Orange Report

Silver Bullet

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

I touched on how important I think education is earlier, but now it's time to talk about it seriously. I know I don't have to tell anyone here how hard it is to get money together to pay for an education. So this post about Jesse Jackson's Pell Grant OpEd doesn't come as a surprise, but it is shocking nonetheless. Cutting pell grants for a million students to save $300 million dollars while simultaneously planning ot vote to extend tax cuts for the wealthy for another $30 billion.

Couple that with the insistance of some that superstitions and theology should be taught as science to America's school children and you start to see a pattern. There is some kind of method to the madness, and the method involves keeping people ignorant.

People are easier to control when they don't know what is happening to them. History has shown that to be true numerous times. Education is the silver bullet that solves all of the problems of the world. Education brings new ways to get people out of poverty, education brings new alternatives to feed starving people and education finds peaceful solutions to confrontations. Wherever there is education, there is hope for a better future.

But there seems to be this intense hatred of education among many people in this country. If I may riff off of What's the Matter With Kansas?, people seem to be voting not only against their own economic interests, but against their's and their children's education interests. They want judges who only enforce the Ten Commandments. They want people to teach creationism as if it were a real science. All the while they doom their children to an even worse life.

We are the party of education and hope fighting against a political party that wants to keep people ignorant so that they can be controlled. I think history will show that we already had half the fight won because people everywhere seek hope. It's just a matter of shining a light in the darkness.

This is a guest post by Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk at the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com