This is part two, but you don't need to feel compelled to read part one first. I am going with the idea of part one being an introduction, so I'll try to keep part two as much of a stand-alone blog as possible.

If you didn't read the first part, all you need to know is I started public school before Kennedy was president. I witnessed the way life in America was before President Johnson started creating "The Great Society" and I personally experienced the way life evolved afterwards.

To some, my remarks concerning these changes may often seem too critical, or, if you prefer, too negative, but the reality is these remarks are pretty mild, unless you've been conditioned to think it's wrong to fight back. One of the most important lessons I have ever learned is you can't fix social problems by being polite to the people trying to ruin your life. The mere fact you are even trying to be polite gives them the false impression they must be "On the right side of history." They will never consider the possibility they are wrong until people get angry enough to tell them. This is because stupid people don't know they are stupid. You have to actually tell them they are before they start wising up.

Case in point: The only reason a young woman ever felt she was important enough to tell Congress she needed free birth control from the government was because nobody told her she was being a fool. I can't be the only person whose first reaction to the story was, "Seriously? Birth control? All the way to Congress? This is the one issue above all others sooo important Congress must be forced to listen to your whining and pretend they care?"

Come on! Why should Congress or anybody else need to know she couldn't afford to have as much safe sex as she'd like? In fact, why should any of us have to pretend we care about the insignificant problems of a trollop? Had anybody just done like the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes and said, "Look, mommy, that girl has no brains!" she would have hid herself in shame.

The problem with conservatives is they are afraid to be that blunt. Despite the fact conservatives are called intolerant every time a liberal can't think of any intelligent arguments to make, the truth is conservatives aren't intolerant at all. If anything, conservatives are entirely too tolerant. As long as we tolerate leftists spreading lies about us and calling us names we will keep losing. It's time to hit back. That's another major part of what I've learned in life. Sometimes you have to hit the obnoxious person in the mouth if you want him to stop screaming at you.

Naturally, we don't always have to hit them in their mouths, but we do have to make them afraid to be insufferable jerks. Remember Taser Guy? In case you don't, the hilarious, "Don't taze me, bro!" video can still be found on the internet. That guy was being loud and obnoxious, thinking his right to scream trumped other people's right to talk, and as soon as he got tased, just that one day, he figured out he was in the wrong. That's what we need to do if we want to make lunatic leftists go back to hiding in the dope-smoke filled basements of their mom's houses. They need to start feeling uncomfortable about their behavior, and, above all else, they desperately need to be told they are morons. I hope you now understand why the narrative may have a critical tone. I'm telling it the way it was, the way it is, and I ain't out to make friends with the hate-mongers on the left.

Whether or not you read part one, something everybody should know is what I am about to tell you occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area. The life I describe there after the Great Society came along may not be a total surprise, but the way life was beforehand just might blow you away.

Let's look at what life was like in California from the time I was born to about 1966 or so. The most amazing thing you might discover is the people living in California back then considered themselves to be Westerners. Yes sir, this was true farm and cowboy country! Gene Autry had a real ranch in California, and a local area called Niles Canyon was famous for making old cowboy movies. Nowadays, Niles Canyon is publicized for the few Charlie Chaplin movies made there, but "Back in the day" it was mostly known for the Westerns.

Why, shucks, pardner, California was so countrified, even Disneyland was way the heck out in farmland. You'd drive through so much agriculture getting there you'd actually wonder if you had misread the map. Among other crops, orange groves were plentiful. In fact, one of the best parts of making the trip to Disneyland was all the juice stands shaped like giant oranges found along the highway. It could get pretty hot in the summertime, and very few cars had air-conditioning, so it was a real blessing to occasionally stop at a stand to cool off for a while. A glass of orange juice only cost ten cents, by the way. Ah, but it's all just a dying memory now. The stands, the orange juice, and an enormous amount of the orange orchards are gone.

Unfortunately, it wasn't just orange orchards we lost. When I was a kid the Bay Area and other California regions were fairly teeming with walnut and apricot orchards. Hardly anybody even remembers the apricots anymore, but the walnuts live on, by name only, through the towns titled after them (Walnut, Walnut Creek, Walnut Park). The only reason those places ever got such names is because they used to have plenty of walnuts around, but good luck on finding any now.

If you want to blame the destruction of all these trees on Capitalism, fine, have a nut (as it were). You can blame Capitalism all you want for the trees being ripped out to make homes for all the newcomers who wanted to live in California, but have you ever bothered to figure out who most of those newcomers were? The overwhelming majority of the people taking over the state were at the very least border-line Socialists, and the brutal truth is they only started worrying about the trees and other aspects of the environment after they got themselves firmly ensconced in their own private slices of heaven.

Have doubts? You shouldn't. Everybody who moved to California after LBJ became president had to be willing to accept a good deal of destruction as a way to make room for the newcomers. If liberals had truly cared about California's environment they would have stayed away, and then it would have remained a mostly tree-covered paradise forever. Too bad liberals don't think logically. They don't see how destroying twenty or thirty trees to create room for each one of their houses makes later claims of "I'll give my life to save a tree!" sound preposterous.

Oh, and here's the clincher. It's not too late for leftists to put their money where their mouths are. If they are truly concerned about California's environment, all they have to do is knock down their houses, replant the trees, and start living in tents. Sure, it may be difficult, but it's not as drastic as dying for a tree, and that's all you need to know about the truth of leftist slogans. The words aren't worth the oxygen being sucked up to spout them.

Back to early life. We didn't go to Kindergarten because our school hadn't built one yet, so we started with first grade. Our teacher, Mrs. Breedlove, not only taught us the alphabet and how to read, she had to teach about half the class how to speak English. Our neighborhood had quite a few German immigrants in it (the fathers had been captured as young kids during WWII and had been interned in the Bay Area. They liked it here enough to later return), and there was a large number of Chicanos, plus a smaller amount of Filipinos. Mrs. Breedlove simply stood at the front of the room using a pointer on each letter over the chalkboard as she taught us what each letter was and what sound it made. As soon as we all had them memorized she started teaching us simple words, and by the time first grade was over everybody was reading and speaking English. There wasn't any kid of any nationality who failed to learn, and we never had any language problems at all in school.

We also had discipline back then. One kid, Nick C. (I do remember his last name, but there's no need to embarrass anybody), decided to come in one day dressed like a young hoodlum - hair greased back, black pants, white T-shirt, and black coat. If you remember Fonzie from Happy Days,you'll know the look. Mrs. Breedlove took one look at him and told him to go home, get cleaned up, and not to come back until he looked like a nice, little boy again. Nick had to walk home, which was no big deal because we all walked the few blocks between our houses and school everyday by ourselves, but his mom drove Nick back to school and had him stand before Mrs. Breedlove for inspection. The grease was washed from his hair, and it was combed to the side now instead of over the top. His clothes were also now about the same as the rest of us, complete with a button-up shirt. Nick passed inspection, and his mom left.

Nevertheless, Nick wasn't totally reformed yet. Some time after that he pulled his pocket-knife on a kid at lunchtime and took his milk money (a whole nickel). Just so you know, kids were always allowed to carry knives when I was in school. No switchblades were allowed, but just about anything else was okay. The kid who got robbed hadn't learned yet not be a snitch, so he quickly reported the crime to Mrs. Breedlove. After lunch was over, and we were back in class, our principal, Mr. Turner, came into the room and asked if Nick could please be allowed to come out to the hallway.

Mrs. Breedlove said yes, and then, before she followed Nick out, she told us, twice, to ignore anything we might possibly hear outside, no matter how interesting it may be. She also apparently forgot to close the door when she left. One kid immediately jumped up and took a look into the hallway. He told us Mr. Turner was sitting in a chair and Nick's mom was standing beside him. As soon as this kid yelled, "She's pulling down Nick's pants!" the rest of us jumped up and ran for the door. There wasn't room for us all to stand in the doorway, so we pushed our way into the hallway. Mrs. Breedlove pretended not to notice.

Nick's mom picked him up and laid him across Mr. Turner's knees. Then Mr. Turner held Nick down while his mother just royally beat his butt with a paddle. It was hilarious! Everybody was screaming so loudly with delight all the other classrooms opened their doors, and pretty much the whole school saw the ending of Nick's punishment.

It was also the end of Nick's criminal career, at least while at school. Right up until I left the area during my high school years Nick behaved properly, but that doesn't mean as much as it should. The world was being massively altered, so it's entirely possible he allowed his dark side to come out when he was away from school. This is especially likely since the pressures from the counter-culture I'm about to tell you about were coming at us from all directions.

In elementary school most our teachers had been teaching since the 1930's and 40's. We had no young teachers at all, and the ones educating us were pretty much teaching the same things they had learned from teachers who were born in the 1800's. This all changed about the same time as the Great Society came along, which is not to say the Great Society was responsible for the changes in the teaching methods, but it does seem likely the same political climate creating the Great Society was at the very least a contributor to the idea the schools needed to modify their practices.

The dress standards were dropped about fourth or fifth grade, which meant it would now be okay for Nick to dress like a hood if he wanted, and discipline in most other areas also was dropped. The kids wasted no time at all in taking advantage of the new lax attitude. It wasn't even a year before fourth, fifth and sixth graders would actually stand on the street across from the school and light up cigarettes, in full view of the front office. They were only this bold because they knew they wouldn't get into trouble over it. Even so, that was pretty much as bad as it got in elementary school. It wasn't until we moved onto junior high the environment became far, far worse.

The most noticeable change was in the age of our teachers. Many of them were less than ten years older than us, and, except for the shop teachers, very few of them were past their thirties. Their ideas on how to run a classroom were also a lot younger. They now dressed in the same clothes we did, and they tried to talk to us as if we were merely young friends instead of students. A few of the female teachers were especially distracting when they decided to casually chat with us. They tended to wear mini-skirts, and they had no problem at all in deciding to sit on the desk in front of the chalkboard while they talked, swinging their legs, and giving us a view of things we'd never seen before.

Being a man I suppose it's only fair to say this wasn't considered a bad change in our society at the time, but there were some other changes in our new school life many of us were highly uncomfortable with. This is because those older teachers in elementary school, combined with our parents, had done a fairly decent job of instilling an early sense in us of what the differences between right and wrong behavior were.

Thanks to the guidance we first received from people who actually cared about us, we knew drug and alcohol abuse were not only wrong but dangerous. In elementary school we had learned most of the nick-names for the drugs of the day, and we knew how bad they all were, but it wasn't until junior high before we saw any of these drugs actively being used. Here, the drug use was so bad the first feeling most of us had was fear. Starting with the first day of school we were scared to death.

You couldn't go into the bathroom without having to pass a guy or two selling marijuana or pills, and the air inside was noxiously filled with pot smoke. As if the drugs themselves weren't bad enough, some of the guys pushing dope at the door were as close to hardened criminals as a thirteen or fourteen year old could get. If you upset any of these guys you'd be clobbered. The only way to avoid the dangers found in the restrooms was to learn how to stretch your bladder to the maximum limit it could reach without exploding - something most of us could not do without avoiding liquids altogether until after school was over. Unfortunately, that choice wasn't even possible. The best we could do was reduce our trips to the bathroom.

Marijuana was either sold loose in baggies or already rolled up into "joints" to be bought one or two at a time, and the pills also were sold either by the bag or one at a time. The pills had a variety of innocuous names - Bennies, Reds, Yellow Jackets, Uppers, Downers, etc. - but when we first arrived we weren't fooled by the friendly names. We didn't want anything to do with this stuff.

At our very core we were nothing more than terrified little kids being thrust into an appalling world no child could control. In fact, despite how young we were, we still knew children had no business even dealing with this junk. We desperately wanted somebody to take control and make it all stop, but the ignorant adults running the school did practically nothing to make things safer. They were hell-bent on letting us run our own lives, our own way, and they made it a point not to notice the terrible things kids were doing all over the place. The most the teachers ever did was show us films against drug use, but in the process they never even mentioned it was actually going on around us. Ignorance may be bliss, but deliberate ignorance is nothing more than an evil lack of responsibility.

They even made us read Lord Of The Flies during this time, and it struck me as extremely ironic. The message of the book was what happens when there are no adults around and kids try to form their own government. The only difference between the schools and the book was we could visibly see adults around. They weren't good for anything, but we knew they were there, or at least we knew we'd see some as soon as we entered a classroom. It's odd, but finding adults outside the classroom was about as rare as seeing Bigfoot.

Inside the classrooms our teachers spent as much time telling us how to think politically as they did teaching us from the books. Notwithstanding all the glorious justifications our educators were spouting as they tried to reshape our minds, the reality is these new-age idiots weren't giving us special freedoms as a way to help us develop into the more enlightened leaders of the future; they were actually, and happily, letting us ruin our lives in an effort to test out their ideologies.

In fact, it's only because they were so enslaved to those ideologies the situation never got better. Anybody with any common sense would have started fixing this nonsense as soon as it got out of hand, but zealots are never willing to admit they were mistaken. They stubbornly push on with their beliefs, no matter how severe the obstacles may be, and they simply do not care about the resulting damage they create in the process. As is always the way, those of us who were caught up in these ideological experiments were forced to fend for ourselves.

Since the so-called school administers were no longer in control, peer pressure became a much stronger influence upon us than adult supervision. As a result, one by one all my close acquaintances gave into that pressure and started smoking dope. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only kid who refused to participate, but I have to say there couldn't have been very many others. I never found any new kids to hang around with because there just weren't enough other non-users around for me to find. In the bubble surrounding my little world, everybody I knew at least gave in to marijuana use, and several of them liked it enough to move onto other drugs. That turned into my biggest awakening to what the new realities were. Before seventh grade was over I lost one friend to a drug-related death (he was massively stoned and died of overexposure when he passed out trying to walk home one night), and more friends died in the following years. The worst part is nobody had even started using heroin or other opiates yet. These deaths were pretty much overdoses from taking, and mixing, several pills at a time.

There was a girl in seventh grade sitting beside me in one class, and she'd frequently be so messed up by the time she came to class she couldn't even stay upright in her chair. Every so often she would tilt towards me, and I would stick out my hand to push her back. If she tilted the other way the guy on that side did the same thing. The teacher never seemed to notice. These type things happened quite a bit, and the teachers almost always turned a blind eye to it. However, in a different class there was a girl one day who flipped out so badly she started screaming and clawing at the wall, and that was the only time I ever saw a teacher do anything. An ambulance was called and the girl eventually got taken away. Later they said somebody had put LSD in her food at lunch, which may even have been true, but it's just as likely she took it voluntarily.

My family moved to another California city just before I started high school, and then during my sophomore year we moved to another state. By the time the moving was done I'd attended four different high schools. What I can say from these experiences is the schools were worse in California, but not by much. Most of the smoking in the bathroom in the other schools was of cigarettes, but drug use was still going on. When the kids wanted to smoke dope they mostly just used a car or van in the parking lot. One school had some tree covered land around it, so kids would also go smoke dope in the woods.

Nobody was using the word "rave" yet, but the same type parties were going on late at night under different names. There was one incident where two girls went walking around in the woods while attending one of these parties, and one of them got killed. They were seriously messed up on drugs and got fascinated by a light they saw coming towards them. The girl who survived only did so because she wasn't on the tracks when the pretty light on the train reached them.

In class we were constantly being taught to be more socially aware, and one of the things repeatedly drummed into us was the differences between suburban America and the "Ghetto". We were told the number one cause of death for white teenagers was car crashes, and the number one cause of death for black teenage males was murder, usually committed by a family member or a known acquaintance. What struck me about that stat was, as far as I could see, drugs were killing more teenagers of all races than car accidents were. Even at my third high school when four students got killed in a high speed car crash, drugs and alcohol were involved. I'm not certain, but I believe the disconnect between what we were being told, and what we were seeing, probably occurred because the stats being given to us at the time were compiled years before the drug craze took over.

What I am certain about is schools today aren't any better. In California and several other places they are even worse because public schools have turned into virtual recruiting stations for gang-bangers. How do I know? I still have family in California, as well as in other urban areas, and, unlike the typical modern day parent, my relatives keep an eye on their kids. If you aren't paying close attention to what is going on in the public schools around you then chances are good your kid also is being influenced by things of which you might not approve. Oh, and don't bother asking your kids about it, either; they will not tell you the truth. Instead, ask them to let you open their computers so you can read all the message traffic going on between other kids. I guarantee the reason your kid will start having a fit is because he or she doesn't want you to find out all the things kids are doing behind their parent's backs.

After my unpleasant experiences with public schools, and because I actually spent a little better than a year and a half in a private school, I made sure to put my kids through private Catholic schools.

Unfortunately, even those schools weren't totally beyond the reach of corruption. In two different Catholic schools we had instances of Catholic charity proving to be a bit misguided. In both places a request was made of the church, by city officials, to accept several problem kids as a way to help those kids escape their unpleasant environment. The idea was to show them a better way, which the church was glad to do, but in both cases the troubled girls were beyond saving. They actually used their new environment to set up clandestine operations of oral sex for money on school property.

Okay, that probably shouldn't have been a surprise. Whether the school is private or public I suppose teenage boys will always be attracted to such behavior, but the sad truth is the only real difference between these occurrences and what I saw girls doing in the hallways in the public schools I attended is now the girls were getting paid.

The most disturbing thing is we only know about those two instances because the girls got caught. It seems almost certain there are other schools out there having the same situation going on, but nobody is even suspicious enough to go looking out for it. For some stupid reason, parents and school administrators believe children will behave better if they are left unsupervised. As a result, our kids now live in a secret world where they can behave any way they want, and they are so used to getting away with things they believe they are untouchable. You ask, they lie, and the problem goes away. The process has become so routine the kids don't even bother to make up believable lies. They already know modern day adults are more interested in proving they trust the kids than they are in learning the truth.

Frankly, I don't get it. Why are grown-ups today so willing to trust teenagers? The only answer I have ever gotten, and it isn't a good one, is, "Hey, I did all that stuff when I was a kid, and I turned out okay." Yeah, that one doesn't work. I've heard it several times since the 1980's and nobody who ever said it actually turned out okay. They just didn't know any better. When all you do is compare how messed up you are against serious waste-cases, and not against people who were raised the old-fashioned way, you get a false impression you are okay. It's the old "one-eyed man in the world of the blind" thing. He can see he's better off than the people around him, but he doesn't know how much better the world would be if everybody had eyes and could see what they were doing.

The worst part is the kids I grew up with should have known better than to allow their kids to go through the same garbage we did, but not only don't they feel the way I do about our school experiences, they think I'm the one who turned into a Nazi. After talking to them I know why. They adapted to the situation so completely they ended up embracing it. To me that's the real danger behind smoking dope. It's makes you more compliant.

Just as I said at the beginning of this blog, "Stupid people don't know they are stupid", and smoking dope makes you stupid. Had it not been for the fact smoking pot made them feel better, the guys I grew up with never would have gone along with all the other stupid changes being forced upon us. In fact, I have come to the conclusion the people who want to transform America are fully aware of this aspect of dope-smoking. They are in favor of legalizing marijuana simply because it will help make their goal easier to attain. Nothing seems important anymore once you're good and stoned.

Oh well, this blog has gotten long enough I need to stop again, but there are other comparisons of life in America before and after "The Great Society" I would still like to make. Television, taxes, and what freedoms we lost against the few we supposedly gained are important enough to have their own blog, but I don't know yet if it will be called part three to this one. I may just create a new blog.

In the meantime, Life to America!





Posted May 18 2015 by Robert O'Connor
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