A couple of memes showed up in my Facebook feed.
::sigh::
First of all, SUBJUNCTIVE VOICE, PEOPLE!! “If kids were allowed”—that’s correct. But then it has to be “they might not end up in prison,” not “may.”
However, that’s not the problem. The problem is the idiotic belief that Bibles are not allowed in schools, with its attendant idiotic belief that children are not allowed to pray in schools any more.
This is a lie.
Of course Bibles are allowed in schools. In my media centers at East Coweta High school and Newnan Crossing Elementary I had Bibles on the shelf for students to check out. At ECHS, in fact, my religion section (the 200s in Dewey Decimal (PBUH)) was phenomenal. I had every major religious text, plus commentaries and histories for almost all of them. Even at the Crossing I had the Book of Mormon and the Koran on the shelf. (Until I got a security system installed at ECHS, the most stolen book was The Tao of Pooh—every year.)
Not only was it not illegal for me to have religious texts in the media center, it is not illegal for students to have their own Bibles at school, and it is perfectly OK for them to have them out and be reading them if if it’s OK for them to be reading anything at the time.
So why do we hear stories of “persecution” of kids reading Bibles at school? Two reasons: stupidity and viciousness.
Sometimes a kid will be reading a Bible and some stupid adult in the room who somehow believes the lie about Bibles not being allowed will create a scene by trying to take the Bible away from him. This adult is A Idiot and deserves all the thwapping he/she will soon receive at the hands of the Intertubes.
And sometimes a kid will viciously pull out a Bible to read when he’s supposed to be doing other work and then create a scene when he is reprimanded by a teacher trying to run a classroom. This kid is A Idiot and should have to watch C-SPAN as punishment. It’s no different than when I read Crime & Punishment in 10th grade English rather than pay attention to the freaking workbook sheet on FREAKING PARTS OF SPEECH, KENNETH! I was thumbing my nose at that inadequate teacher, and so is the vicious little Bible-reader. The difference is that if I had been called on it, and sometimes I was, then I put the book away—and so should the VLBR.
Where does the belief in this lie come from? Read about it here. Christian chronic persecution complex: it’s a real thing.
And then there’s this:
Such clever. Much snide. So capitalism. Bless her heart.
Years ago, in the fabulous periodical The Weekly World News, there was a columnist named Ed Anger, surely a nom de plume if there ever was one. He was an irascible Archie Bunker kind of guy, always ranting about some minor inconvenience to his white, male privilege. It was, as far as I could tell, a Poe.[1]
One week, Anger announced that he had a solution to whichever recession crisis was going on at the time, and it was surefire foolproof, and this was his plan and it belonged to him: Cancel all credit card debt!
How simple is that? You see, if you canceled every American’s credit card debt, then we’d all suddenly have a whole lot more money at our disposal, which we would then spend (by charging, of course), which would then end the recession on account of how consumer spending would boom.[2]
Okay, two things.
One, that’s pretty much the idea behind Keynesian economics, not that Ed Anger or his ilk would ever suggest that the government lift us out of a recession by deficit spending.
Two, Ed seems blissfully unaware of the circular nature of money. Yes, that sum on my credit card bill is my debt and it would be great if I didn’t have to pay it and I would in fact be able to spend more if it were gone.
But… that same amount of money—plus the interest I pay for the privilege of borrowing it—belongs to other people. That interest goes to the credit card company, who uses it to pay their workers and their bills, plus some amount of profit for their stockholders which I’m pretty sure is ungodly, but let that pass. If we suddenly yanked the billions of dollars of household credit card debt[3] out of the economy, you don’t have to be a student of economics to imagine the disaster that would follow.
(For one thing, all the credit card companies would immediately go bankrupt, so there would be no way for us to charge anything anyway. A thinker, Ed Anger was not.)
Ed makes the mistake of thinking that our money supply is a zero-sum game. In his case, he imagines you can just wipe the books clean and start over, like hitting reset on your cassette tape player’s counter.[4]
Maggie makes the same mistake in thinking of the money supply as a zero-sum game, pretending that she thinks that we will run out of “other people’s money,” when in fact all our money flows in a circle. However, she’s a little more insidious in the game she’s playing. She is playing a zero-sum game: she doesn’t want the money flowing in a circle, she wants it flowing in one direction—towards the rich. They deserve it, you know. They’re job creators, unlike those unworthy parasites who only, oh, I don’t know, work the jobs. Socialism: bah! humbug!
It is this very kind of snide punching down to the less fortunate that makes me see red and dream dreams about The Revolution. And it’s this lack of understanding of basic economic terms that drives me to hover over that Unfollow button more and more every day.
—————
[1] Of course, that’s the point of a Poe: you can’t tell.
[2] It seems he did it twice, in fact, here and here. (You have to give the author credit for actually writing a new column for the second one.)
[3] $712 billion as of Q3 2015
[4] I’m old. Shut up. Okay fine, your trip mileage calculator in your fancy self-driving car, you hippity-hop punk. Get off my lawn.
