Learning from past mistakes

It is amazing how resilient bad ideas can be.  My fourth grade science teacher told me that I should learn from the mistakes of others because I would not live long enough to make them all myself.  It now seems that we are incapable of learning from our own mistakes

Yesterday I was amazed that the Christina school district, of Newark, Delaware, wanted to sentence a six year old to 45 days in reform school. He was so excited about becoming a new cub scout, that he brought his new mess kit to school, a knife, fork , and spoon.  The “knife part” violated the district’s zero tolerance rule.  If that was not dumb enough, it was even dumber the first time.

The same Christina school district expelled a third grader for a year because her grandmother sent a knife along with a birthday cake to class.  AFTER using the knife to serve the cake, the teacher reported it.  What can I say?

Oh, you want dumber?  At the height of the Iraq war, when the reputation of the United States was at its absolute lowest, the Bush administration paid reporters, here and abroad, to run advertisements as if they were news stories in an attempt to “improve our image.”  That campaign, in itself, was enough to send us to even newer lows.  The best, the most expedient way to improve our image is to start doing things right.

Now we read, today,that there is an advertising campaign to tell the American people how wonderful our economy has become. In New Campaigns, Spots Take On a Rosier Hue , By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD.

“Newspeak” was the first thing that popped up in my head.  “Newspeak” was the creation of George Orwell in 1984, where definitions of words were rewritten to shape the minds of the people.  Again, the most practical way to improve the people’s attitude towards the economy is to improve the economy.

The economy isn’t “banks,” it’s people.  The economy will ONLY get better when the people in it do better.  The banks are only tools and right now they only improve the lot of the top 1%.  The economy will only do better when much of the concentrated wealth is redistributed. Stop raping credit/debit card customers.  Stop foreclosures.  Start passing on the globalization cost savings to the consumers.  Start providing everyone with good, affordable healthcare.  And, until then, stop telling us how nice everything is.

We tried nation building in Iraq.  We still have 120,000 troops in Iraq and we can’t get it right.  Now we are embarking on that same course in Afghanistan.  Can we learn from our own mistakes?  Apparently not.