We live in a world of contradictions. Perhaps it's Nature's way of keeping us from living too long or remaining unnecessarily sane whilst yet we breathe.
For example, we are besieged daily, almost hourly, with the news that we are fat, out of shape, under-ambulating blobs waddling down our sidewalks like a grotesque herd of trendily-attired hippos, yet we are simultaneously seduced by a continuous monsoon of hypnotic advertising for fast/casual/snack food delights all of which contain calories in numbers usually associated with the Federal deficit.
Try Our New Colossal Burritos! Diet! Exercise! Our Appetizers Can Be Seen From Space! Get On That Treadmill! Have Some Pie! Buy a Workout Video! Buy the Six-Dollar Hamburger That's Bigger than Your Kid! You're Fat! You're Hungry! You're Hopelessly Conflicted!
Our government wants us to save our money so we'll have something to live on, however miserably, when Social Security, Medicare and all the other elderly-assistance programs go broke within minutes of our becoming eligible for them. This is sound advice, although on careful examination it can be seen to conflict with the other government advice that we should spend and spend some more on anything that will produce a job for our fellow citizens, and increasingly, us. The American economy is assuming the characteristics of an Escher engraving: "If I spend enough money it will create a job for me so I can have money, but that's not counting the money I'm saving by not spending money because after all, I don't have any."
Ah, but these things are mere bagatelles when compared to the brain-bludgeoning incongruity engendered by the Bush Administration's grand attempt to, as Dubya himself might and probably did put it, learnify America's school population, the No Child Left Behind Act.
The laudable goal of this legislation was to provide every American kid with sufficient skills in English and mathematics to propel them into the new century as the world leaders God wants them to be. In practice, this has resulted in such comprehensive devotion to language and arithmetic every school day that one academic subject has been almost totally ignored; that subject is called "everything else."
No science, no history, no geography, no social studies, no P.E., no art, no music - no time. We are herding a generation of children down the cow path of adolescence with no idea of who they are, where they live, who anybody else is, how we got here, how anything works, or what "culture" is. We have jettisoned all these traditionally-thought-necessary elements of a real education primarily for the sake of teaching everyone how to comprehend and use English, and how do the fledglings repay us for the sacrifices we have generously forced them to make?
They twitter. For those of you just emerging from your cave after a long nap, twittering is how those newly language-adept youth are actually learning to communicate; in function it is the Every Child Chooses to Stay Behind Act.
Twittering is our once rich and beautiful language, which had already been mangled into literary road kill by the exigencies of texting, further reduced to a Haiku of extreme abbreviation in order to remain within its 140-character maximum per message. To be fair, adults also twitter, the difference being that they are at least conversant with the language they're shredding.
But to the young yet battle-hardened veterans of thousands of hours of texting, the very concept of a complete sentence is but a quaint relic from a primitive era; even complete words are rare commodities to be reserved for special occasions. Grammar, syntax, illuminating modifiers, subject followed by verb? Surely you jest; who needs them? Who cares? Certainly not the kids who, like it or not, are the heirs of English.
For this we have turned an army of dedicated educational professionals from teachers into standardized test-coaching drones? For this we have redefined "well-rounded education" to mean "arguably proficient in two subjects"?
From the midden heap of the language once ennobled by the Bard, the language we have apparently spent billions and squandered our cultural future attempting to graft onto our offspring, a new form of techno-pidgin is emerging. We have "twitterers" (I hesitate ever so slightly to refer to them as "twits") exchanging "tweets." Tweets that aren't true are called "twiction" while compressing actual published writing into 20 or fewer tweets is "twiterature." Tweeted cooking instructions have become "twecipes." Don't you wish I was making this up?
I say we're in twubble.
Robert Mitchell
Robert Mitchell Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.mchl@verizon.net.
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