[X]Write in: Do your lobbyists have your best interests in mind?
My fellow Americans, I have a question for you. Do your lobbyists have your best interests in mind?
PBS has long been the channel for educating and informing American children.
I have been told that the goal of a good education is not to make your child Ready to face the world but to make it so the world is not ready to face your children.
To do this, we must give our children the hard lessons along with the easy ones.
Conflict is a fact of life. There will be disagreements.
As demonstrated by your work here, some of those disagreements can be solved with words and planning. Accepted rules that are followed and updated as needed for all to benefit. But that does not mean all disputes are solved by words.
Some disagreements can be solved with craft and science as demonstrated in our great centres of learning, in schools and libraries and in the work of the CBS. New thought and discovery building on what was possible for our forefathers, removing the root causes of disagreements. New Mining and farming methods create more resources. Better manufacturing makes goods stronger and cheaper with less effort. However, not all agreements can be solved with more people to share.
Some disagreements can still only be solved with force.
Some of your lobbyists will tell you otherwise. That violence solves nothing other than complete abstinence that hiding the very existence of violence from children is the only solution.
Say you achieve that. Say you succeed. How long will it take a child to reinvent the concept of solving their problems with violence?
From time immemorial, violence solved problems. Hungry? Kill something and eat it. Disagreement? Kill the other party.
It is as effective as it is brutal. Sufficient violence will solve nearly every immediate problem the winner has. But what of the next issue and the next? What happens when you have robbed, stolen and killed, and there is no one and nothing to take from?
Violence is not the best solution for every circumstance. It is a truth as old as civilisation when cooperation to achieve mutually better goals began to elevate man's behaviour above an animal red in tooth and claw. Violence solves the immediate problems but not the future. Violence allows me to take what I want at my neighbour's expense but leaves no neighbour to help me.
Cooperation is hard. It requires me to think about what my fellow man might need. I want to do things that may not benefit me now or only potentially in the future if my fellow chooses to assist me in return. I need to consider and work with a model of thought that is not mine from someone who does not have the same past as me and may not have learned all the lessons I have.
But violence is easy, simple and solves my problem right now. Why shouldn't I use it to solve my problem today? I am strong. I could take what I want. I could crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women. Why don't I?
Because the long-term cost of violence is too high. Because two together can do what one cannot do alone. That cooperation makes civilisation. I know this, you know this. Do our children know this?
I am a father. I have small children, and I can say with certainty that they do not know this. They need to learn it. For those that don't believe me, go watch small children squabble. Watch children in school pick on each other for petty reasons.
Most of us will be taught as we grow that the cost of violence is too high and that spilling blood does not solve all your problems.
However, we also know that some never learn that lesson. Some never learn to cooperate that violence or fear of violence will get them what they want. Then, it is the role of the police, the correctional system and the military to educate these people that it is not so.
But there is a cost in those late lessons both in money for the military and police in judges and jails, in lives lost and lives ruined. All because a lesson was not learned.
PBS aims to reach out and teach lessons that our children need to learn to supplement and fill in the cracks in our educational system. How are they to do that when some lessons are banned?
Another old saying is that a pinch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The existence of these sayings and the fact that we live in an environment where they can be passed on is a mark of civilisation's success, that cooperation is better than violence, and that civilisation works.
If your moral guardian lobbyists have their way, the lessons on why violence is bad and why we moved away from Violence to cooperation will not be passed on. And our children will have to learn again, in lessons of blood and violence, why we do things this way. The ones about violence and why it doesn't work as a long-term solution, the lessons history and mythology taught us, and the ones we have tried to share on PBS.
The choice is yours when we are old, will we have scientists and doctors building on the wisdom of their elders or warlords and warriors learning in lessons of blood and ruin what you and I already know and chose to hide from them.
Do your lobbyists have your long-term interests in mind? Or only their short-term gains? Do they wish to help you or leave you holding the bag? Do they have the children's best wishes in mind or only avoiding uncomfortable questions they don't want to answer? Your lobbyist's names will not be the ones whose names are cursed if you make the wrong choices or fall into their temptations.
So, rather than use my fists to demand your co operation by violence, I use my voice to ask you to think because I have been taught a better way . What is the future we want? Do our children have to learn what you and I know again because we did not want to teach them a lesson that makes us uncomfortable? Leaving them unready for a world where the lesson is still needed and vulnerable to those who already know it. Or do we want to do the hard, uncomfortable thing and make it so that the lessons that history and mythology teach us are learned? So that our children have learned from history and are not doomed to repeat it. So that we as parents do not have to go through the hardship of Watching our children learn from the school of life what we could have learned from PBS.
Thankyou
Having a go at a speech in hindsight []Write in: Ladies and Gentlemen of Congress, is better
TLDR
If you don't teach a lesson then don't be surprised if people have not learned the answer.
Fund PBS so lessons are not hidden
Watch your lobbyists Closely
