Thursday, March 02, 2017

Breaking the political bubble

so Trump meets with the presidents of Black colleges, and signs an order making them a White House priority,

President Donald Trump shakes hands as he meets with leaders of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, Feb. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) more >



and the press story is about: one of his staff sitting on a couch. She left her shoes on! She had her feet under her instead of on the floor! (uh, no, she had climbed on a coach in the back of the room to take a photo but who cares?).

It says a lot about the MSM that this became the talking point: it was a way to change the subject, which was that the government would help black colleges.

Black colleges fill a roll: Often students have problems in college and end up dropping out. The problem is  partly due to culture shock, but often they need help in basic studies because they graduated from lousy public schools.

They need a college that says: No, it's not your fault that you had a lousy school, or that you had a baby at 17. But if you work hard you can be as good as anyone. And we have teachers who did this for your role models.

The call for "safe spaces" is being used by Marxist professors to push guilt/victimology on the students in larger universities. So political correctness. But in the long term, victimology is fatal: Who wants to hire a "victim" who will sue you, when you can hire a hardworking immigrant to do the job?

Back to the work ethic.

But culture shock is real. And not just for black students, but small town kids and Christian kids and Jewish kids and those of us who are science nerds who the sorority type girls hate.

Students have a need to hang out with their own crowd, especially when "integration" means that essentially you are alone and lonely with a large crowd who agrees with each other but have different ideas and values than you do. True, clubs and churches help here a bit, but social isolation and inability to adjust is a big item.

I also saw this with our AmerIndian neighbors, who often were smart but needed extra help and had to go part time (because they had kids after dropping out when young). And the local tribal colleges are fulfilling a double need: to be inside their own culture and the flexibility to help them study despite their family obligations.

There is a big need to fill for those who had children or dropped out and now want an education: flexibility.

The "state college" system used to do this, but I don't know if they still do. Community colleges do this however, and also need to be supported.

my son dropped out of high school to support his wife and daughter. He got his GED from the  Job Corps, which did train him (but from his stories might need to be reformed.)

He later worked with Americorps to earn money to get tuition: working with a private charity that helped fix homes in Appalachia (he supervised spoiled rich college students who volunteered there in the summertime but didn't know how to drive a nail). Yes, he could have earned more if he worked construction, but wanted to give back for his opportunities. He then worked at a food bank in Hispanic neighborhood (He is bilingual), and used the money saved to attend a community college.

So I hope Trump doesn't stop Americorp etc. as he threatens to do.

In our small coal town where I raised my kids, many of the miners became nurses. And this story about training people to do computer work, sounds familiar because my next door neighbor took such a course when I lived in Oklahoma.  Her and her husband were nurses aids, but when the price of oil went up, he went back to work the wells, and they had enough money then for her to retrain.

Then there is the problem of rehab those who fell into addiction.

During the campaign, we read a lot about Trumpie boy criticizing a fat Miss Universe to lose weight. But now we hear about how he sent a Miss USA to rehab and told the press to stop bullying her. 


I became famous as “Mess USA” when my boss — now the president of the United States — tossed me into rehab after I tested positive for cocaine. Rather than strip me of my crown or add to the negative press with a humiliation campaign, Donald Trump surprised me, and shocked the world, when he held a news conference and declared: “Tara is going to be given a second chance.”

Yes, we need rehab and training for second chances.

Will Trumpie boy do it? He is rightly skeptical about government, but knows enough about business to get the private sector involved.

government only require the boxes to be checked. Businesses expect results.

And unlike bureaucrats, private businesses can be fired.

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