MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

Much of what you know and understand is based on your framed narrative of reality, every myth you believe and every narrative that you cling to makes up who you are. As a man thinks, so he is. What he does with those thoughts is what gives him a consequence.

There is also the faith factor where much of what we do and think is also based on a very carefully programmed core belief system that dictates silently and proficiently some of our actions. Things like the golden rule and other such creeds apply in this realm.

So, we have a basic narrative that we keep as part of what makes us who we are intellectually and socially. Our morals are actually part of a core belief mechanism that is guided by religious and philosophical thoughts and what is left can be attributed to knowledge that has been provided by the education system.

I would speculate that most of the common core beliefs that most people have are based on knowledge gained while growing up and learning in the public and private schools system.

A lot of people do not know that the school system’s real job is not just to educate children and young adults it is a place where teachers and councilors are given the task of molding and shaping what is called “human capital.”

A quick definition of “human capital” is the “stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality attributes, including creativity, cognitive abilities, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value.”

In other words, your children are to become programmed and indoctrinated by the system in order for them to have the basic knowledge in order for them to have value in the economic machine.

This has always been the game. The child must be brought into the system, educated by the system in order for them to function in the system as to increase the system’s ability to guarantee the force of human labor.

In despotic systems, corrupt community leaders are well aware of how the education systems must be changed in order to shape both teachers and students into fixing a perceived “broken” education system.

When systems of communication and education are efficiently and heavily controlled, children will learn and accept as truth exactly what the few in control want them to.

Who is supposed to teach our children?

Society has long debated this question, perhaps agreeing only on this simple truth: “Who teaches matters.”

Every state in America establishes its own criteria for public school teacher certification, effectively outlining the knowledge, skills, and attributes required for the teacher to stand in front of a class. These requirements are in place because it is largely through the efforts of classroom teachers that the goals of education are met or thwarted. A teacher’s ability to convey knowledge, to teach skills, to challenge, and to inspire students should determine who should teach our children.

Teacher dispositions are of primary importance in shaping the school experience of students by either broadening or foreclosing their opportunities to grow and be successful achievers.

When children are dropped off at school, the law says teachers must assume the role of ‘replacement parent’.

Under the Children Act 1989, teachers have a duty of care towards their pupils, traditionally referred to as ‘in loco parentis’. Legally, while not bound by parental responsibility, teachers must behave as any reasonable parent would do in promoting the welfare and safety of children in their care. The idea dates back to the 19th century when courts were first coming to terms with teachers’ responsibilities. It was during this period that case law established that a teacher should act “as a prudent father”.

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 also requires schools to show a duty of care towards pupils’ safety and well-being, although not their ‘welfare’, in so far as this is practicable.

Teachers are very often unsure where the line should be drawn between the role of the teacher and that of a social worker. Indeed, teachers have increasingly become not merely educators, but also mentors in their pupils.

Teachers are often entrusted with confidential details of a child’s personal background, perhaps related to child protection issues and links with social services, or perhaps even through information volunteered by the family or the children themselves.

I have stated on my program a few times that I believe that children should be taught basics and that political biases, sexual and religious preferences are not appropriate in the classroom.

If the teacher wishes to teach history where politics are used, if a teacher wants to teach sexual education, or if the teacher wishes to take a sociological view on various religions in the curriculum I have no problem.

I just don’t think that a teacher in loco parentis should be cavalier with revealing personal things to students.

Religion, sex, Politics are not to be impressed upon students for preference.

This is why I am angry that teachers are encouraging Strike Against Climate Change where students are going to walk out of their classrooms on Friday to protest the against the President’s lack of action on Climate Change.

This is the latest of a series of school-student-led protests, strikes, and demonstrations that began back in 2018 when a 15-year old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, decided to skip school and protest outside the Swedish parliament due to its inaction on Global Warming.

Greta has said to both parents and teachers “You say you love your children above all else yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

She also spreads pessimism about the future as she says to her fellow protestors “I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act.”

That statement says it all – the chief motivator of this strike is fear – fear that the world is going to end and the blame is being bestowed on older generations as they are not moving fast enough to somehow avert the climate apocalypse.

Teachers are encouraging this type of fear by allowing the students to walk out.

Not only are they encouraging truancy but they are avoiding inconvenient history that if taught, would calm the kids down and give them hope that the future may not be all that bad.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also championed the grooming of doom by making outrageous statements that other extremists in her corner have pushed about climate and the fate of the world.

She is panicking and has been clamoring that the oceans are rising and the end of the world is near because of Climate Change.

Many people who use common sense knows that her doom and gloom statements are equally melodramatic and overwrought.

But the children don’t and most of them put on their protest posters Cortez’ warning about how the planet has 12 years left unless we act on Climate Change.

Someone needs to tell the children that Cortez is not an expert on climate. Children need to be told that she is not an expert on energy and that she has a political stance that is contrary to the foundation of what the United States stands for.

I am sure that many of these young children have not been taught about the failed mechanisms of socialism.

Last week, Cortez went on the record again saying that Miami is going to disappear if we do not fight Climate Change.

Speaking at an NAACP forum to drum up support of her radical multitrillion-dollar Green New Deal the freshman congresswoman said:

“What is not realistic is not responding to the crisis – not responding with a solution on the scale of the crisis. …Because what’s not realistic is Miami not existing in a few years. That’s not realistic. So, we need to be realistic about the problem.”

Now as adults, we can laugh at that statement – we can see it as overwrought hyperbole. Children see it as a reason to walk out of school and believe that this is going to happen. I believe it is an evil thing to tell young people they are going to die or that places are going to disappear without any kind of proof. It is even worse to encourage children to blame their parents and their elders for destroying the planet and not caring about their future.

Keep in mind that Ocasio-Cortez said not too long ago that the world would become unlivable in 12 years unless we made massive changes – including some that are scientifically impossible – to all our energy choices and the way we live our lives. When her prediction of the end of the world drew ridicule, she backpedaled and said she was only being sarcastic.

Not quite – I have heard Bernie Sanders say the same lie and no one has the fortitude to challenge the statement.

I have been chastised in social media by Global Warming cultists that I am a denier and that I adhere to pseudoscience when I speak of geoengineering.

Well, check me if I am wrong but aren’t over the top statements by Ocasio Cortez make the climate change crusade look as hyperbolic and devoid of science as those who don’t believe in it.

This alone should shake its credibility – this should be pointed out to the kids that are walking out the classroom. A classroom where they should be taught that they are being manipulated with fear tactics that are not at all true.

Even people without advanced degrees in climatology or geology know her absurd statements are demonstrably untrue. However, the kids who are walking out, unfortunately, don’t.

Teachers have a responsibility to correct these untruths, rather than encouraging activism out of fear.

The older generations remember dire predictions that were often repeated in the media but never taught in the public school system. Now it appears to be the curriculum.

If you remember we were warned of a variety of impending disasters – famine, drought, an ice age, and even disappearing nations – if the world failed to act on environmental issues.

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read “Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials.” The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” That claim came from an “international team of specialists” cited by The New York Times in 1978.

Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that “another ice age” was imminent.

They pointed out that the signs were everywhere– from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a the armadillo from the Midwest.

The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.”

In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century.” The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist’s claim that the world could be “as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”

Some of the more dire predictions came from Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who famously urged population control to mitigate the impacts of humans on the environment. Ehrlich, in 1969, warned that “everybody” would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,” The New York Times reported.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Ehrlich, warning of a “disastrous” famine,” urged placing “sterilizing agents into staple foods and drinking water.”

Does that sound familiar? Democrats like Kamala Harris told viewers during a special Climate Change debate that in the future she would actually ban certain behaviors and maybe even change the food triangle in order to combat Climate Change.

They were encouraging the eating of insects – one scientist even suggested eating human flesh to combat Climate Change.

Do the children know that they will be forced to eat maggots and crickets in the future in order to reverse Climate Change?

Timing is everything – much of what we were taught about the ice age climate danger happened around the same time President Nixon established The Environmental Protection Agency.

Since then, the U.S. has adopted a series of environmental reforms aimed at preserving a sustainable ecosystem.

Years after those initial ice age predictions, media outlets and politicians continue to teem with claims of apocalyptic scenarios resulting from Climate Change.

In 2008, ABC released an ominous video about what the world would look like in 2015.

As the video warned about rising sea levels, a graphic showed significant portions of New York City engulfed by water.

Al Gore himself famously predicted in the early 2000s that Arctic ice could be gone within seven years. At the end of seven years, Arctic ice had undergone a period of expansion.

Officials at Glacier National Park have begun quietly removing and altering signs and government literature which told visitors that the Park’s glaciers were all expected to disappear by either 2020 or 2030.

In recent years, the National Park Service prominently featured brochures, signs, and films which boldly proclaimed that all glaciers at the park were melting away rapidly. But now officials seem to be scrambling to hide or replace their previous hysterical claims while avoiding any notice to the public that the claims were inaccurate.

Teams from Lysander Spooner University visiting the park each September have noted that Glacier National Park’s most famous glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier and the Jackson Glacier appear to have been growing, not shrinking since about 2010.

Teachers, I ask you – do the children know this?

Would children be better off staying in the class room hearing stories that would avert their fears?

I think the children should also know that some of the actions proposed to combat climate change will have consequences that may not be as beneficial to those whom the pundits claim they are helping.

I know that the young people walking out of school believe they have good intentions and some actually love getting involved in social causes.

What they are less experienced with, like all humans, is multiple-stage planning—the kind of forethought it takes to anticipate not just what to do, but the unintended consequences of doing it.

Reality doesn’t bend to good intentions. If we fail to consider the secondary and unseen effects of even our well-meaning actions, our grand plans can make things much worse.

One of the principal laws of economics and logic is that nothing is ever just one thing, because resources always have alternative uses.

When the UN claimed H5N1 avian flu epidemic would kill millions in 2005, researchers’ diverted precious resources away from far more serious health problems. Fewer than 300 died from H5N1, which is about a tenth of the lives malaria claims every day. The panic over a perceived pandemic can kill far more than the disease itself because the resources marshaled to fight it come from somewhere else.

When we embrace the meatless burger as a victory over factory farming, we don’t consider how much added land must be cleared to raise soybeans.

We don’t want to believe that we will be forced into food repugnancy where we eat things that we wouldn’t dream of eating today.

We are being told that we will have to give up old cars for electric ones but fail to see the coal-burning power plant at the other end of our electricity grid.

We agree to avoid plastic straws without calculating whether “strawless” lids actually use more plastic.

We protest pipelines without considering how many tanker trucks must be added to move that fuel to heat homes. We decry fossil fuels as dirty or villainous, without appreciating their role in protecting forest which would otherwise be farmed or burned for fuel.

In our zeal to do what feels like a helpful thing, we don’t anticipate the consequences. The larger the proposed change, the greater the potential fallout.

Are the children being taught this?

Do they know the basics about cause and effect?

Here is something else that is being ignored with regard to climate and adaptation models if things do get hotter or colder.

Each of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, that guide our understanding of Climate Change, account for large leaps in worldwide wealth between 2000 and 2100. Even the poorest in the world, sometimes called “the Bottom Billion” will be four to eighteen times as wealthy as they are today.

Wealthier people are more able to cope with climate change and are overall less likely to die from all-natural causes than the very poor.

This means that if you are well educated with a modest amount of money you can adapt to any and all climate spikes or disruptions, just like we have been doing for centuries.

So there should not be any panic or at least we should act to guarantee the leap in financial ability to buy climate safe homes and obtain protective clothing and take preventative steps to protect what we value.

Whatever the ill effects of so-called climate change, the funds needed to keep people safe will be far more important in the future than they are now.

Someone should let the children know that there is a ray of hope and no need to be afraid and generate blame.

Even in the IPCC’s worst-case scenarios, those that they claim will be facing the harms of climate change in 100 years will be many, many times more prepared to deal with those harms than we are currently equipped to sacrifice in hopes of preventing them.

Right now we are told that things look bad – we are told that doomsday is lurking but none of the climate fear merchants want you to believe that innovations are already being tested and used to help people adapt to harsh weather.

My great-grandchild’s inability to sunbathe in Miami cannot be prioritized over a living child’s access to adequate food, even if growing it requires tractors that use fossil fuel and pesticides made from oil derivatives.

How is it that the children are being influenced into prioritizing future convenience over their own contemporary survival?

Traumatizing them with the end of the world scenarios should be seen as criminal.

Written by Ron Patton