The Anxious Generation

Anxiety wasn’t a thing I grew up with.  I heard about it only in the context of someone being worried before giving a talk in church or performing at a piano recital or something like that.  That was dealt with by simply standing up in front of the congregation and doing one’s best.  Much later, while serving as a young men’s advisor in the ward (congregation) where we were living, I encountered anxiety again, this time as it is known in the modern world, a mental condition.  I honestly had no idea how to deal with it, and I think the other leaders and I mostly didn’t.  If the kid didn’t want to do something, that was fine.  It didn’t bother us.  Since that, which is already fifteen years or so in my rear view mirror, anxiety has only become a bigger thing in society.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (ISBN: 978-0-593-65503-0) explores why anxiety and other so-called mental health problems have exploded over the last fifteen years.  The author believes that most of the blame lies with smart phones.  He doesn’t deny that there are good things about smart phones, but he points out that because they allow unfettered access to the Internet and social media in particular, children and teenagers who spend time on the Internet lose out on formative experiences that steel them against anxiety and other mental problems while increasing their likelihood of being negatively affected.  Haidt first argues that children need to be exposed to a certain level of risk while they are young to attune the body’s natural response to risk.  Throughout history, kids have generally done this by playing outside with other kids, usually unsupervised.  A culture of safetyism (eliminating all risks even when the positives of some risk are considered) encourages — in some places, usually more liberal places, forces — parents to keep their kids indoors and only let them out when they or other adults can supervise.  This tends to make kids view the world around them as a large and constant threat.  The perception of a constant threat is just what so-called clinical anxiety is.  Additionally, without being exposed to little risks (the risk of falling off a swing or the risk of being rejected by a peer) that come with interacting with others while outdoors conditions kids to be comfortable only when there is no risk.  The second half of Haidt’s argument is that social media exasperates these feelings in most people.  Social media generally presents only the good side of things, which is something people on it then worry about it.  It is also designed to be addictive (people experience hormone-induced positive sensations when their posts are liked, for example), so it’s a cycle of doom where people endlessly scroll, looking at the supposedly perfect lives of those around them while the post themselves, hoping to feel the dopamine-caused high of the next like or comment.  If those are few and far between, the anticipation of the next like keeps people scrolling, all the while increasing negative feelings toward oneself.  Haidt notes that girls are particularly prone to this type of activity.  Boys are also negatively affected by constant time online.  They are less likely to be anxious about social media, but video games and pornography easily engage the young male mind, pulling them away from reality.  Since it’s relatively easy to exist in a world where you don’t have to engage in real-world situations that may have negative consequences, boys withdraw into these virtual worlds and try to not emerge.  The book ends with some ideas on how to overcome the problems caused by smart phones.  He has ideas for governments and for individuals, led by eliminating smart phone exposure for those under fourteen and limiting it for those over, both in school (complete bans on smart phones at schools are his preferred option) and at home.  He also advocates letting kids get out and play and do other things on their own, like run simple errands, do chores around the house, and other things that are relatively safe, but still have distinct negative consequences for not accomplishing them.

I liked the book.  I may have had a preconceived bias since I find most of what kids do on cell phones to be a waste of time (although, I, like the author, see that there are some good things).  However, I went into my reading not knowing about the reasons behind the market change in kids’ behavior over the last fifteen years or so.  There are lots of things that people can do by opening their eyes and seeing what is going on, and I think the negative trend when it comes to things like resiliency, critical thinking, and mental fortitude in young people is obvious, but a book like provides all kind of solid charts, graphs, and analysis of that.  I always like having the data behind the things I see and believe.  I also thought the prescriptive section of the book was a little stronger than most are.  Usually that is the weakest section in these types of books, but here I thought the author provided some relatively realistic suggestions for both governments and individuals.  I also liked that they were more concrete than those of most authors.  That might be because the data was so straightforward.  If it’s painfully obvious that teens under 16 are hurt by exposure to social media, it’s pretty easy to say parents should do all they can to keep kids off social media.  If all the data says kids do better at school when they have to set their phones aside for the entire school day, it’s not hard to recommend that schools ban cell phone entirely (not just during class).  I thought all the policy and parenting prescriptions were solid.  If you want to understand why the youth of today don’t seem to measure up to what you remember, this is a great read, especially because it provides some realistic suggestions to help not only kids, but also adults improve their quality of life and make them more resilient, forward-thinking people.

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The Coddling of the American Mind

Twenty to twenty-five years ago, my university experience presented me with a chance to learn about a variety of different subjects in both general education classes, electives, and my major classes.  I probably found the electives to be the most interesting.  In any case, some classes presented me with ideas that I disagreed with, usually from a political standpoint.  I don’t remember anyone on either side of an issue ever being bothered or offended that someone brought up a countering viewpoint or argument.  It actually seemed like it was expected.  It was also expected that people be able to back up their statements.  An introductory economics class was one that featured more intense discussion than most.  Some students were of a more socialist persuasion than the professor, and I found the discussions to be kind of interesting, as did others in the class.  Since then, it seems that most college students and many people have decided that, somehow, ideas and words are violence, and opposing viewpoints must not be argued and parlayed with facts and reason, but simply shouted down and suppressed.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (ISBN: 978-0-7352-2489-6) takes a look at how American children and young adults are being set up by the education system and modern parenting for what the authors believe is a more difficult path through life, maybe even often including failure.  They believe that there are three “great untruths” being fed to young people in modern America: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good people and evil people.  They discuss what they term “safetyism,” meaning the idea that kids must be protected from every possible harm, both physical and psychological.  They note that there are many acceptable risks and that for someone to grow up mentally and physically strong, one must take risks.  Helicopter parenting and safetyism don’t allow for much, if any, risk-taking, thereby stunting development.  The authors reject the idea that feelings trump truth.  They believe that truth trumps feelings and that to arrive at the truth, one must be exposed to ideas that one might not necessarily agree with.  They’re not arguing for purposefully offending people, but have little patience of the concept of micro-aggressions, preferring to use cognitive techniques that tend to assume good intentions and a less adversarial view of the world.  That leads to their third point, in which they argue that the world is not good people against bad people.  There may be good and bad ideas, but that should be hashed out in a free exchange of ideas, and one should not assume that someone purveying what one believes to be a bad idea is a bad person.  After making their case, they suggest solutions to the problems.  Their solutions embrace free speech, personal responsibility in how one reacts to ideas one perceives as negative, and an education system and parenting milieu that encourages taking acceptable risks instead of avoiding all risk whatsoever. 

The book is an interesting one that lays out an idea that I found convincing, both in the description of the problem and in some of the suggested prescriptions.  The authors believe in limited social media for children (and adults, really), more chances for kids to be outside and exploring instead of inside behind a screen, and in letting them hash out minor differences without adult intervention.  In high school and college, the authors want students to exchange ideas and be exposed to various ideas.  They decry the fact that colleges in the U.S. are skewed strongly to the left among both the faculty and the student body.  They wonder how those individuals can ever expand their minds if they hear only things they agree with.  If the reader is a conservative, the book can present some cringy moments when the authors lay out their support for various liberal ideas, including some that most view as woke, but it only seems right that they present those views in a book that challenges ideas about how one thinks.

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Hide Your Children

In the 1980s in America, homeschooling was not popular.  For three of my elementary school years, I got to be homeschooled.  I thought it was great.  I got to learn at my pace, which was wonderful for subjects like math, science, and English.  I loved that I was usually done with my school day two to three hours earlier than the rest of the kids in the neighborhood.  At home, I only had to do actual schoolwork and none of the fluff or other, non-academic stuff.  I remember hearing from many people that kids who were homeschooled would not be socialized.  No one ever really defined that word, but between city sports leagues, church activities, and playing friends in the neighborhood, I had plenty of chances to be with other kids, not to mention the fact that the overwhelming majority of inappropriate things I learned I had learned at school.

Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists behind the Attack on America’s Kids by Liz Wheeler (ISBN: 978-1-68451-391-8) provides a look at how the education system has deteriorated further since the 1980s.  The book starts with an overview of just who the Marxists the subtitle is talking about and then gives specific examples of how attacks on the nuclear family, endless accusations of racism, critical theory, queer theory, and attacks on homeschool, a proxy for attacks on personal responsibility and liberty, fit into the Marxist program meant to destroy society.  Each chapter gives some history of where the modern Marxist threat originated and, using specific examples, how it became more mainstream than it ever should have.  The historic sections are followed by a discussion of how it is today and the threat that presents to America, a country built on the idea that it survives only if the people who inhabit it are a moral people.  The book ends with a chapter providing some suggestions on how to change the tide and fight back against the Marxist wave that has overpowered our educational system since it’s much easier to change the minds of the impressionable young than older people more set in their ways.  The author’s suggestions include fighting the culture war, working to ban critical theory from public institutions, homeschooling whenever possible, fighting for school choice, working against ESG and DEI, remembering that local politics have an outlandishly large impact on our lives, returning to religion, and protecting the innocence of our children.  Finally, there were some appendices with the Constitution and papal encyclicals that discussed the dangers of Communism.

Looking back on my time in school, I can see some of the early beginnings of what was discussed in the book.  I remember having lessons on self-esteem in fifth grade.  The discussions about just what constitutes a put-down are exactly the kind of thing that gets rolled into social-emotional learning in the mid-2020s.  Homeschooling was a great experience for me that taught a lot about personal responsibility and putting forth the effort to better one’s own life.  That was the ultimate message of the book, but it also presented a good picture of what some of the problems with the modern American education system and how much of what is taught is at odds with the liberty needed to be self-sufficient.  One interesting undercurrent of the book was Wheeler’s belief that while religion was key to containing Marxism, Catholicism was the preferred route.  The appendices included two very long papal encyclicals, both of which accurately described Communism as a problem, but were also inclined to support organized labor as a rather fuzzy concept of how to deal with poverty.  The descriptive portion of the book was its strongest and make it worth reading.  The prescriptive part was fine, with ideas that were good, but left me wanting more specifics (something that would improve many books about politics).  

 

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The Forgotten Founding Father

I don’t know that I can say that I’ve always been interested in languages, but ever since I served a mission in Russia for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and learned Russian, I’ve had an interest in languages.  I took German in junior and high school, but never made any real progress.  In high school, when they started teaching us about accusative and dative cases, my brain lost it.  I remember doing a homework assignment dealing with those and asking my native German-speaking grandmother and my German-speaking father for help and still just having brain cramps.  Learning Russian was also very difficult, but I was able to overcome my problem with cases, and it’s been fun to attempt to keep some of these language skills from earlier in my life up since then.  Learning foreign languages like German and Russian also helped me understand things like English grammar and the etymology of English words a little better.  As a really young kid, I remember a copy of the Merriam-Webster dictionary on our shelf and sometimes asking my mom why we never read “the big, red book.”

The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall (ISBN: 978-0425-24545-3) tells about how that “big, red book” came to be thanks to another person who was very interested in words and language.  The book chronicles Webster’s life from boyhood to death, taking a very detailed look at the parts of his life that led to his creation of the famous dictionary, part of Webster’s desire to make America its own unique country.  Somewhat unusual for his day, Webster went to college even though he came from a farmer’s family.  He then pursued a career tied to literature.  He wrote extensively, including many essays, letters, and pamphlets in support of American independence and then in support of a federal republic.  While his writings are not as well known today as those of others like Hamilton, at the time, there were many leading Americans who believed Webster’s efforts were essential parts of swaying public opinion.  Webster initially made his name by publishing a speller, a book that helped schoolchildren learn to read and write.  This book provided him with a foundational income throughout his life.  He also worked as a lawyer, editor, and publisher.  What he realized he loved doing, though, was more similar to the speller: compiling, organizing, and ordering information.  This led to his interest in dictionaries.  He found flaws in extant dictionaries and decided to improve on them by publishing his own.  One motivation he had for this was that he believed a uniquely American language would help create and uphold a uniquely American culture, one that was needed to help the nascent nation maintain its distance from its former imperial overlords and move forward.  While his ideas on government changed over the course of his life, his belief in America did not.  The dictionary took much more time and money than he thought it would, but it was eventually published and created a new standard as well as codifying much of what was then a unique American language with new words expressing the new ideas embodied by the new nation.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and found it interesting and informational.  Reading of the American Founding and those who played integral roles in those events is always interesting.  I found some of the discussion of early American literature and the academic scene to be less intriguing, but understand that it helped set the stage for Webster’s work and may be a necessary part of telling his story.  It seemed the author wanted to diagnose Webster with some kind of mental disorder (OCD, autism, etc.), but never really came out and said it, just approached it tangentially.  That constant repetition of that theme was a little distracting.  The dictionary itself is only the last quarter of the book, so there’s a lot of other material to get through, but I thought the case for Webster’s role in America becoming its own entity, separate from Great Britain, was made convincingly.  Those interested in the Revolution and the Founding, not just nerdy linguistic things will find the book of interest.

 

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The Catcher in the Rye

In high school, I avoided reading most of the literature we were assigned.  I found a lot of it dull (somehow, I found MacBeth to be rather interesting) and the discussions we had in class about the books even duller.  Without spending a single cent on CliffsNotes (easily half of the high school used the study guides as replacements for doing the actual reading assignmetns), I managed As in my English classes and passed the AP exam, which helped me avoid having to take English classes in college.  Oddly, when I deiced studying Russian in addition to computer science was a good idea in college, I took a Russian literature (the books were English translations, though) class.  I remember that the non-AP English class had to read the Grapes of Wrath my senior year.  That sounded horrible, and I was glad I didn’t have to do that.

I am not sure if the Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (ISBN: 978-0-316-76917-4) was assigned reading for the regular English class, but it certainly wasn’t for the AP English class, so I never had to read it in high school.  The main character in the book, Holden Caulfield, though, is in high school (well, technically, he’s just been expelled from yet another fancy boarding school), and is struggling with much of what teenagers often contend with, such as a fear of growing up, struggles with making or keeping friends, troubles with figuring out one’s identity, and depression.  The main character is the narrator of the story, which is really just a his train-of-consciousness re-telling of about three days of his life, starting with his having been kicked out of school right before Christmas break, and how he deals with that.  He introduces the reader to some of his teachers, his roommates and dormmates, his sister, a friend from back home, and a few other people he runs into as he tries to avoid going home before he’s supposed to show up at home for Christmas break.  He expresses a lot of negativity for the world and for the people he has contact with, usually because they come across to him as fake.  His rare moments of joy come from his little sister and from other little kids he runs into since they are still innocent and present to the world just who they are, not trying to hide anything or be something they’re not.  He tells his sister that his dream job would be to be a “catcher in the rye,” saving kids running in a rye field toward a cliff from falling off the edge, which is a metaphor for helping people preserve their innocence and lack of “phoniness” (one of his favorite words).

The book was an interesting one, although I would say I had to really push through the first third or so before I felt like had any sense at all of what this kid was about.  His rich, privileged background, combined with his emo outlook and New York street-tough bravado was foreign, complex, and rather off-putting.  Another reason I felt like the book was a slog at times was the insane amount of profane language, easily a dozen profanities per page.  There was also a healthy dose of vulgarity thrown in.  Were this a book a movie script in the 1980s or early 1990s, it would’ve got an R rating.  These days, it probably pulls off a PG-13.  There was also a lot of substance abuse and a handful of sexual references as well as other suggestive scenes.  All of this made me wonder why this book is so commonly assigned in high schools.  The protagonist is a high schooler, but Salinger himself noted that he wrote the novel for an adult audience, and the content is definitely only, as they say, “for mature audiences only.”  I thought the themes explored in the book were interesting, and were things, especially the one about phoniness, even I, now far removed from my teenage years, could relate to in one way or another, and I understand the kind of character the author wanted to portray, but I thought the final product was over the top and detracted from the message of the story.  Remembering my impressionable teenage years, it would’ve been very distracting, and I’m glad I wasn’t exposed to it then.

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I Am Malala

One didn’t hear much about the Taliban before the infamous events of September 11th, 2001, even if one was relatively informed and kept up with the news.  Here and there, they made the news as they continued to make living in Afghanistan less and less desirable, but they weren’t an every-day item.  In my mind, they were most famous for blowing up the Buddhas of Bamyan.  With al-Qaeda’s attacks, though, things changed and changed quickly.  Afghanistan became a military target for the U.S., putting the Taliban in the crosshairs.  With the interconnectedness and fluidity of the region, it was easy for many Taliban members to cross borders and blend into society elsewhere, including Pakistan, where they had already had a small presence since the mid 1990s.  After September 11th and as the Taliban went international, they were in the news every day, and when Taliban gunmen shot a girl named Malala in Pakistan, both the Islamist Taliban and the girl became household names around the world.

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (ISBN: 978-0-297-87092-0) is the story of the schoolgirl from the time she was a little girl to the beginning of her recovery in England.  The book starts with her young childhood and takes the reader through day she was shot in great detail.  Interwoven into her discussion of cricket with friends, friendly competition among classmates, and trips to ancestral villages to visit extended family are brief lessons on Pakistani history and geography, which adequately set the stage for Malala’s life and what would become important to her as she got older.  Far away from the bigger cities where more liberal attitudes existed, life in the villages of Swat went on much like it had for centuries, following traditional Islamic custom.  Malala’s father was a trend-setter in many ways and surrounded himself with others who wanted to see progress in the field of education.  He believed everyone should have an education.  He also didn’t have a lot of use for many of the traditions that prevented women from freely moving about, going to school, or otherwise expressing themselves.  His oldest daughter followed in his footsteps and was nationally prominent by the time she was of junior high age, having won a few national awards, having met with various Pakistani dignitaries on the way.  She enjoyed school, enjoyed learning, and wished everyone had the same opportunity.  She saw how the lack of such opportunities negatively affected others in her community, including her own mother, who was illiterate.  She and two others were shot by Taliban gunmen in 2012, and because she needed long-term intensive care and was under continued threat, she and her family were evacuated to the UK, where they have lived ever since.

I was unsure how I would react to this book.  It was wildly popular a few years ago, but I was reluctant to read it, thinking it would push either Islam or women’s rights in an overbearing fashion.  It did neither and was refreshing in its agenda-free message.  I didn’t know that the Taliban shooting was not indiscriminate.  She was a very specific target thanks to her involvement in Pakistan in trying to get women and girls more involved in education.  (If nothing else, it rubbed off on her mom, who had begun reading lessons near the end of the book.)  While I got the impression that Malala was and is a devout Muslim, she seemed to have a “big-tent“ mentality, simply explaining and never criticizing (other than Taliban policy and actions).  Women in burqas and bazaar dancers were equal in her eyes.  In a world where many in the West are looking for the moderate Muslim voice, this may be one of them.  Her same level-headedness came through in her discussion of women and girls and schooling.  She saw the advantages that it afforded and wanted all to be able to participate.  Neither poverty nor tradition should stand in the way of those who wanted to go to school.  Such a concept seems so basic to Westerners and one that fits well into the idea of equal opportunity, but stories like this show that there is much to yet to be done in spreading these basic norms around the world (and not forgetting them at home at the same time).

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Wonder

Bullying, as the word is used today, wasn’t a thing when I was a kid.  Kids got made fun of or teased, but bullying, as we knew it, was when some kids, usually physically larger and more developed, used their unusual size to threaten smaller or younger kids into doing their will, usually involving lunch money, milk money, or desserts.  They were also to be feared in gym, which seemed to involve a lot of dodgeball, where bullies could unleash their physical prowess by slamming balls into the heads of other kids.  Nowadays, a lot that would’ve been overlooked in my day or engendered a lesson about ignoring or walking away gets put into the category of bullying.  The one area where things are the same is the area of kids who look different or who are mentally handicapped.  That was a problem before and is a problem now.

Wonder by R. J. Palacio (ISBN: 978-0-375-86902-0), explores this latter form of bullying, but also the ability of some people to rise above it, in a short novel about a kid born with a number of physical birth defects who has decided it’s time to go to school with other kids.  He chooses to go to a private school, where he is confronted with all the problems one might expect for a kid facing the trouble of being both the new kid and the kid with some unusual facial features.  There are a few kids who are genuine in their interactions with him from day one, but for others, it takes some time.  Everything in the book is narrated from a first-person point of view, although the first person sometimes changes, as the reader hears from Auggie’s sister and friends on occasion.  They have their own unique takes on the situation and show that there is some internal struggle involved in doing the right thing.  By the end of the book, most of kids have come around to accepting Auggie, and even come to his defense when some kids from another school decide to pick on him at an overnight outing (a very real phenomenon, as most people feel free to pick on their own friends, families, hometowns, schools, etc., but won’t put up with a single negative word by an outsider).  The main character himself has also done some maturing, learning that despite his differences and the hardship they have caused him, there is much he can and even should do on his own.

The book was an enjoyable and easy read that seemed very realistic.  I like to think that my elementary and junior high classmates would not have voted me most likely to shoot up the school, but I was also at the butt end of a lot of jokes and usually picked near the end when it came time to make teams on the playground.  That’s not to say I was friendless, though, and so much of the storyline seemed very realistic to me, based on what I saw and what I experienced during my early school years.  I thought the lessons learned by the hero, his family, his friends, and maybe even his enemies, were positive ones that were general, universal values that people of all persuasions could get behind.  The kids, who were cast as fifth-graders, seemed a little mature for their supposed years, and I thought that distracted slightly from the overall reading experience, as did the sadly standard profane language (this might just be me, but I have a lot less of a problem with vulgar language than with profane language, which is an automatic downer every time).  Overall, the book presented a good message and had some fun along the way, and has been enjoyed by friends and family of all different ages, so there’s a wide appeal.

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Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education

I had a very mixed experience as far as school is concerned.  I experienced both home school and public school.  While much more common now than when I did it, I continued a somewhat unorthodox path through college, attending a private, religious school and doing things like testing out of classes and taking independent study classes.  Eventually I got a master’s degree online.  The odyssey started in third grade, when my mom took me out of public school because she thought there was only one teacher at the school that could properly help me.  I was an advanced student for my age and prone to misbehavior when bored.  After a couple years at home, I asked my parents to send me back since that’s where my friends were.  At the end of that year, I was more than happy to be back at home for sixth grade.  Junior high, which scars many a person for life, tried hard with me, too, especially since we moved between my seventh- and eighth-grade years.  In high school I had a steady diet of AP classes mixed with various gym classes.  I considered early college for my senior year, but had a couple good friends at school, so decided to stick it out.  The benefits were skipping class to play basketball and running on the track team, where lots of girls practiced in nothing but short shorts and sports bras.  Academics were beside the point, and I breezed through even my AP classes.  The point, of course, is that throughout my schooling, the standard one-size-fits-all approach did not serve me well.

In Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education by Glenn Beck, Kyle Olson, and Kevin Balfe (ISBN: 978-1-4767-7388-9), the authors attack the federal government- and union-led approach to education in America.  The first half of the book is dedicated to debunking the typical arguments one hears about why public schools are the only way to go.  They also focus on the idea that the government should control schools, curricula, and even what students eat.  They present argument after argument showing that centrally-controlled education fails the vast majority of students outside the average and even a good many who are average.  They show that the current system encourages mediocrity, whether that be in students, teachers, or the school systems themselves.  Education policy is controlled by bureaucrats far removed from the process, unions who, despite what they say, care more about collecting money for their bosses than what teachers or students need, and administrators, legislators, teachers, and union officials who have an agenda to push.  The second part of the book talks about what us normal people can do to change.  We don’t have to conform to the system, the authors argue, but if we want to control our own or our kids’ education, we have to be involved in bringing about the change we want to see.  We have to participate in school boards, in meetings, on curriculum committees, and in elections, as voters, candidates, and campaign workers or volunteers.  They cite examples of places real change has taken place and note that more can happen should we choose to make it happen.

The book is a follow-on to Beck’s book about gun control and written in exactly the same manner and style.  This book does not live up to its predecessor.  I found the arguments to be weaker and not as convincing, although they were still all true.  The school question is a big one, and they touch on many different aspects.  I think the writing was a little scattered in places and could’ve used some focus.  I enjoyed the suggestions at the end of the book.  It is Beck’s style to encourage participation and responsibility instead of just complaining about a problem.  While he prophesies a lot of doom and gloom on his shows, I think his overall message is one of optimism, but only if we choose to get involved in the processes around us that affect our lives.  If we’re not involved, they’ll pass us by and we’ll really only get the messed up society we deserve.  The voice of the people usually gets it right, but all the people have to make their voices heard.  I like that message.

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