Rendering Unto Our Children

MODERN AMERICAN CONSERVATISM (MAC) IS EMBODIED IN THE "Jesus, guns, and Money" people, who hate government regulation of the economy and environment, love to bear arms and bibles, and rejoice in their personal salvation through the shed blood of Christ, while firmly believing that everyone else should do likewise, and that the Christian faith should be supported by government. MAC does not like to pay taxes, hence, the TEA party. Their goal is to privatize and capitalize everything, including education. Jesus encouraged rendering unto Caesar and giving unto the poor, and presumably would therefore have no problem with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, and the taxes necessary to pay for them. He said nothing about the profit motive, nor about working hard, getting ahead, and accumulating personal wealth. The United "red" states are dominated by MAC, and there is, quite predictably, a huge problem in places like West Virginia, Arizona. Kansas, and Oklahoma, where conservative values have lowered taxes to negligible levels, and there is no money to pay teachers, or to even keep schools open. In Oklahoma, many students are attending school four days a week. Teachers are either fleeing these states, struggling to barely get by, striking, or thinking about striking. The conservative community, meanwhile, continues to lobby for ever higher military spending, ever lower taxes on the corporations and themselves, as the nation's infrastructure keeps crumbling and millions of children are cheated out of what should be the best education in the world. Surely the sickness will end. But, when?