Hey, me, too! We all have stories of upward mobility. That is why we have leisure to surf the web during working hours. Can't do that in the fields, construction sites or factories My gradfather grew up in Tennessee moved to work in Missouri and then to Montana to work for the railroads his whole life. My father was born and raised in Montana. The military put him through school as a dentist during WW II. He graduated the year the War ended and had to pay them back with a few years in the Public Health Service working in prisons and military hospitals. Recently the GI Bill has been beefed up again. For a number of years it was not as good as before. Also social security used to pay benefits while you were in college if your father or mother were disabled. They don't do that anymore. There is still some social mobility iin America, just not as much as before. Regarding inheritance taxes, they used to be much more and now they don't even apply unless the estate is $7 million. Still conservatives complain about them. Sorry if this fact seems pessismistic. Is it optimistic to prentend social mobility is not decreasing? I really think it is more optimistic to think that by voicing the increasing inequality in American economic life we can mobilize a majority to at least return to the policies of the recent past.
Did you learn this in college? Go read The Federalist Papers and you will understand how / why they wrote it the way they did. These brave men put their lives and well being on the line to forge a new country and this is the best you can say about them? You do realize that if they would have been caught they would have been tried for high treason against the crown, hanged, beheaded and then drawn and quarted.
Posts like these are why polls show that Americans are, for the first time in our history, pessimistic about their children’s future. It's just sad that for a country that has made so much progress, we have regressed so far in the knowledge of the sacrifices that were made to make us so great. Its no wonder that our secondary education system, as research has shown, is truly one of the worst in the world. http://4brevard.com/choice/international-test-scores.htm
Awesome bro....Hitler could've been assassinated by rebeling jews.... But he was so brave that he went on with his genocide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually mabye our children just arent r****ded and can identify that having slaves and stealing land from indians is unjust.....Crazy, I know
Like the past 2 decade's trend of "myth debunkers" that become history professors say, its the way in HOW history is taught in people's school years (outright lies, fabrication and artificial heroism) that make people jaded and disappointed later when they learn the awful truths of things that REALLY happened. Twisting the story of what REALLY went on during the founding of this country. Pro-US indoctrination in the school curriculum is to blame as much as anything.
I half agree with you here ... until we get to determining the probability of being genetically predisposed to alcoholism, mostly because you're fast-forwarding 150 years and retro-actively placing blame. My point is this: 1. Using alcohol to inebriate and take advantage of local tribes - blame: largely on whitey 2. Persistence and prevalence of alcoholism 200 years later - blame: largely on indians to the main topic - All of us here are guilty of exploitation by using clothing manufactured in sweat shops, over consuming products and energy and producing mountains of waste and McDonalds wrappers in return, and having carbon footprints the size of jumbo jets. Only this time the people that bare the burden of our sins happen to be outside the country's borders - not in our yards. Raise your hand if you bring any of this up every time you talk about the good things you've contributed to the world.
Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes.
I think our constitution is near perfect. So much so, that others wanting to overthrow oppressive regimes were inspired by the founding fathers and America's constitution. Unfortunately for those other movements, someone always had a case of the ronald miller, like fidel castro. Maybe if history class equally focused on the evil side of american politics? I don't know...it might be too much for an 10 year old kid to handle. What happened to the real americans was a tragedy, and it still happens to this day in places with U.S influences. Bolivia, prior to Evo morales, comes to mind.
