Parasitic Culture

I've been mulling over what to say in response to the retread of recent comments and articles around what the Drudgetards and several radio hosts call "The parasitic culture."  Neal Boortz (a dickensian name if i ever herard one, it sounds like a wet post-indian food fart that comes out of your mouth) and his ilk have gone around praising the midwesterners for their ability to rise above the flooding crisis, pick themselves up by their bootstraps and bail themselves out, not with the help of the federal goverment but with their own special brand of moxie.  Down here in New Orleans we, like parasites according Mr. Boortz, wait for aid and in the meantime just shoot at helicopters and rape women in the street.  How does one respond to that?  I mean clearly this is a radio personality, not a journalist, so objective reporting of the facts is lost in trying to report reality.  Make no mind about who or what caused the federal flood, that is not part of his argument.  Just that it is our own responsibility to clean up our own mess.

Medicine.Net defines a parasite as an organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.  Consider this; we eat, we consume, we use, we throw away, we trash, we incerate, we pollute...against we plant, we read, we teach, we learn, we love.  Far and away we do more of the latter than the former and we expect everything to just keep going status qou.  

I read an article about how students in some rural counties and parishes were cutting down the school days to four/week in an effort to conserve money and gas.  I applaud the school for making efforts to conserve energy, but at the expense of a kids education?  It is a fact that our kids are falling behind, they are dumber, they are more lazy, and the last thing they need is less school.  School districts and model schools that have experimented with this find that more school is the answer, effectively eliminating the dead time between 2 and 6 when more and more parents are both working to make ends meet and pay for gas.  What if the boy or girl who was going to solve the alternative energy dilemna ended up only going to class four days a week.  They just lost over 2000 hours of science and math training (over the course of thier 18 years) because of our unwillingness to shoulder the burden for our children's transportation.  The notion that to conserve energy we need to sacrifice the growth and education of our children is what is truly parasitic.   

Instead of cleaning up the mess we are in or making sacrifices that truly have to be on a national level to be impactful; instead make the next generation suffer, and on and on and on. It's easy for Mr. Boortz to pass judgement, everyone loves to pass judgement, excepts when it comes to their own deeds.  Please Mr. Boortz explain to the class why their is no class.

WJ