Let me just jump right in - it’s obvious that we no longer live in an America that’s conducive to success. I don’t mean that the overall economic climate is quashing success, I mean that the cultural climate is killing it. And when I say success, I mean the kind that hardworking people strive for, that usually entails moving up a ladder towards something they have set as a goal. You might define that as The American Dream, which is generally defined as the aspirational belief in the U.S. that all individuals are entitled to the opportunity for economic prosperity and upward social mobility through hard work. Achieving those things is called Success.
To me, it’s obvious that we no longer live in an America that’s conducive to that success. It’s not the economic climate that’s quashed it, that’s just a temporary situation. What is killing the ability of Americans to succeed is an orchestrated plan designed to kill the very concept of excellence in America.
Let me illustrate by giving you a simple example: pooling tips. This is a policy where all the waitresses at a given restaurant dump all of their tips at the end of the night in a big pile, then divide it up evenly between all of them. Any hardworking waitress will tell you that they hate working anywhere that has a policy of pooling tips because the restaurant takes her money and gives a chunk of it to the slacker waitress who comes in to work late and gets high out back by the dumpster on her break. Or, if I want to be more warm and fuzzy, I might simply say that the hardworking waitress who is saving to buy a house, is forced to share her tips with a waitress who has no such ambitions, and thus works at a pace more conducive to her more laid-back, plan-free demeanor.
And yes, I’m aware that waitresses’ “tip out” back of house workers and busboys, but that gets into a whole separate discussion. Anyway, our hardworking waitress gets discouraged because this pooling tips policy has essentially thrown a set of spike strips down in front of her work ethic. She ends up quitting. The new servers that the restaurant hires are attracted by this pooling tips policy, and customers drop off because the servers no longer have any real incentive to perform, and the restaurant ultimately closes down. To many of you, that cycle of downward performance brings lots of examples to mind, like school choice – an issue that leftist culture hates because it essentially turns a school into a version of our hardworking waitress described above – schools become competitive and accountable to those they serve.
So, why would the Ruling Culture want to kill the idea of excellence? That’s simple – because the ideology of the Democratic Party assumes that for every person who’s succeeding, someone else is being deprived. In their mind, the idea of someone working hard and getting ahead means that someone else is being victimized - feeling bad about themselves, or slighted in some perceived way. Of course, whatever aspect of excellence has not been reined in by policy, mandate, or legislation, is finished off by that favorite enforcement tool of the dominant culture - political correctness.
The extermination of achievement, excellence, and accomplishment in America is being achieved on a scale far bigger than my simple waitress example might imply. You will never see words like achievement or excellence anywhere in the leftist handbook, just as you will seldom see the word individual, because the concept of the individual needs to be abolished, for if there are no individuals then how can excellence be measured in someone? But I’m getting way ahead of myself and frankly coming off as a little paranoid making a case that there’s a plot to eliminate the very idea of American Individualism. That’s absurd – to accomplish an idea that crazy, you’d have to cover every single American’s face with a mask or something.
Love the truth in this Drew
Ironically, the 'choice' school in your "school choice" example is actually the lazy waitress in your illustration, while the public school is the hard worker getting screwed. Public schools are required to serve every student that walks in the door, regardless of academic aptitude, learning disabilities, physical handicaps or behavioral and emotional issues. Private and charter schools can be selective with their applicants. So, not only does the public school have to work harder for the same money per pupil, but the high-achieving students siphoned off by the for-profits bump up the test scores, which rewards the school with more funding, and punishes the "under performing" ones, i.e. the ones that need it most. So, they play by different rules, have different demands put on them and get paid the same per student. School choice rewards less effort, then, perversely, casts the unfair advantage as 'merit.' I wonder if you just stumbled on a bad example for your argument, or your general argument lacks merit itself.