You're viewing all posts tagged with taxes

Join me in dreaming of an America where the rich will have it as good as the poor.

(Note: Don’t click play if it’s going to infuriate you to have to watch the ad that someone — Comedy Central, I guess — tacked on to the start of this video.)

“
I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

- from “A letter to my students” (8/24/10) by Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at Berkeley.

A friend and fellow Berkeley grad used Facebook to link to O’Hare’s letter. That’s how I saw it. The overall message makes me wish I could still vote in California. Things are bleak.

What moved me most, though, is O’Hare’s mourning over students being less and less equipped to “push back intellectually against me or against each other.”

Since it was just a couple of days ago that I used this blog to push back intellectually against another Berkeley professor, I want to give O’Hare props for craving students who can push back intellectually. (I write “props” even less than I say it, but it’s the only word I can think of right now. Not much sleep last night. Besides, “give O’Hare props” beats “I’d like to salute O’Hare” and the other feeble alternatives my brain is offering.)