Rock-Bottom

Well, the positive way of looking at this is that we first need to reach that lowest of levels before we can bounce back up. I'm hoping we're there now, but when I look at the big picture, the state of the human condition, or at least the part of it I'm able to observe through the very tiny lens that is my person, everything is still on a downward trajectory...

I had a customer on the line yesterday, as I do dozens every working day, and I asked him which model set top box he has connected; we have two models, one starting with the letters "RBX" and one starting with "ZXV". The answer this young man gave me startled me for a second when he said that his model was the "SXF" one... Imagine that; only three letters and he got two of them wrong. This is just one of many occasions that I'm confronted with a, seemingly to me at least, steady decline in verbal and linguistic accuracy and agility. The quality delivered by our educational institutes has been on a steady decline, especially after much of it has been privatized, leaving schools in competition with each other and always looking for new ways to increase their bottom-line.

The schools' "customers" are the parents that send their children there. I place quotes around "customers" because I truly believe it's yet another sign of the decline of our age that we don't call sick people patients in need of a cure, but "customers" who shop for healing, and that parents have to shop around for a decent school for their children; some things aren't fit for the market to decide. Schools competing for these parents' approval is what we have nevertheless, so they do everything that's expected of any for profit institution and make use of advertisements and they flash their test results; if the school has a high percentage of children who actually graduate, and graduate with stellar grades, that says something about the quality of their education. Right?

Nope, wrong unfortunately. What happens in reality is the eternal story of the marketplace; schools do everything possible to make their product look attractive to their customers. And if a school wants to be able to present a high percentage of their students graduating, preferably with above average grades, the path of least resistance toward that goal is to simply dumb down the tests. And it's important to note that public schools are also publishing their numbers on graduation for the exact same reason; they have to hit certain targets to be eligible for subsidies. Combine this with the normal "efficiency" imperative of anything profit driven, resulting in ever more students per teacher, bigger classes, and the disappearance of the school canteen that served healthy food for almost free, to be replaced with a coke- and snickers bar vending machine in the hallway, and the cutting of gymnastics, music and other creative classes that are not deemed necessary for any worthwhile professional career, and you begin to get a picture of which way we've been heading these past decades.

Remember U.S. president George W. Bush? He was the last Republican clown president before the current Joker in Chief; do you remember how much fun was made about that president's gaffs? At the time I really didn't believe it was possible that an even more incapable person could be elected to the highest political office in the world. And Bush at least had the advantage of having some talented speech writers working for his administration, as evidenced by lyrical phrases like: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," used in the baseless accusations against Iraq in 2002, and catchy slogans like "Axis of Evil." His successor was just as evil and continued all the illegal wars he inherited by the neocon war-hawks I mentioned in yesterday's post, but Obama was Bush's opposite in every visible way: he was charismatic, had a way with words and always looked stately and professional.

With Trump we've hit rock-bottom. That's what I hope. His latest war-crime, also discussed in yesterday's post, was hopefully the exact moment humanity hit that absolute low point. When that customer from the first paragraph gave me the three letters, scoring one out of three, a picture of an orange man briefly flashed before my eyes. He's a symptom of the dumbing down of the general population I've witnessed during my lifetime. You might think I'm a grumpy old man, one that believes everything used to be better, and maybe you're partially right; a lot of things were a lot better in my opinion. We didn't have as much wars, education was not yet in decline and television actually aided in that education instead of dumbing down people with absolute brain killers like "Dancing with Stars", "The Voice", "Big Brother", and, of course, "The Apprentice". Look up some articles and studies about education in America and a lot of other western countries, and you'll see almost none of them are positive or even see a way out of the downward spiral. I remember from a few years back a news-item that went viral: 1 in 4 Americans Apparently Unaware the Earth Orbits the Sun. And Europeans did even worse; only 66% of Europeans knew or guessed that it's the Earth that revolves around the Sun... Rock-bottom indeed.

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