George Carlin was a very funny man and, despite his antiestablishment rants, a great American. I say Carlin was a great American because he challenged authority, preached personal freedom and hated paying taxes; what could be more American than that?
What I learned from George Carlin was that it’s OK to question established thinking, that the government almost never fixes anything and that, through the clever manipulation of words, we can laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously.
I’m no George Carlin but I am an American, concerned with the direction we seemed to be headed and the corruption and dysfunction in the government that seems to be making things worse.
I’m also a humorist who firmly believes that what this nation needs, now more than ever, is to lighten up and stop taking everything so seriously. Yes, we have problems and yes, some of them are serious; but this divisive “us and them” attitude has gotten us nowhere fast.
Words like traitor, socialist, cronies, and (scariest of all) Newt, have been thrown around and nothing is getting fixed. I think that more of the same will only produce well…more of the same.
While watching the halftime show of the Super Bowl the answer came to me. The word we should be using and the word that we should be concerned with and the word that may be the root of all of America’s problems is “class.”
Then I saw that misguided young performer flip off the entire nation during her 15 seconds of fame, it occurred to me that we’ve created a society that places value on low-class vulgar actions intended to bring individual attention regardless of who it may offend.
Let me be perfectly clear about what I’m saying; we’ve reached a point in our society where we promote outrageous behavior, at any cost. We’re becoming a nation of thugs who are hyper sensitive to being “disrespected” but have no respect for others.
My mother and millions of other wives, daughters, mothers and children could possibly have been watching the Super Bowl half time performance and, by extending her middle finger, this “wanna-be” performer declared that she didn’t care about disrespecting the grandmothers and ten year old girls watching as long as she drew attention to herself.
I don’t blame her. Heck, I don’t know or care who she is, but I do know that she is just a product of what we’ve allowed to become acceptable behavior in America. We all need to behave with a little class if we expected to be treated in a classy manner.
Class is not measured by the quantity or cost of the things you have, but rather, by the treating others with dignity and respect; you know, like our political leaders treat each other, no wait…bad example.
Like art, class means different things to different people and to paraphrase an old saying, I don’t know what class is, but I know it when I see it. I haven’t seen a lot lately.
The other “class” we need to start paying more attention to is our public education system. Our kids are dropping out of class at increasing rates and those who stay are, too often, getting a second-class education and find themselves unable to compete in the job market.
Without a decent education or a job they soon find themselves slipping out of the shrinking middle-class and end up in the lower-class then, in frustration, start behaving with no class and we’re right back where we started!
There are those who think that this is all perpetuated by the ruling class, the now infamous 1%, who keep the rest of us under their thumb. A lot of these people have taken to the streets to protest the low-class behavior of the upper class toward the middle class creating an under class who, too often, retaliate by acting with even less class and here we go again!
The thing is, I went to class when I was a kid and in Kindergarten I was taught how to work and play well with others. Later, in civics class I learned that in America, if we work hard and conduct ourselves with a little class we can determine our own destiny because there is no class system to hold us down. I’d really like to believe that.
Nobody ever accused me of being a classy guy, but I believe it’s time to put some class back into America….in every sense of the word.
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