Submission by Guest Author 
 
Financial literacy is vital to success in life and should be a part of any young person's education. By learning how finances work, young people will understand how, and why, to plan carefully as they make key financial decisions later in life. 

​Failure to acquire financial literacy can lead to catastrophic crises, such as bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, homelessness, inability to cover emergency expenses, inability to obtain desired medical or dental services, and other dire yet avoidable scenarios.

Conversely, acquiring skills in personal finance management can enable one to enjoy financial stability and earn exponentially more — through long-term investing — than one can from one’s salary.
 
Financial literacy empowers an individual to live happily, healthily and securely throughout his or her life. Consider financial security impacts every facet of life including:
● Career choices
● Stress levels
● Home Buying and renting
● Marriage
● Raising children
● Dining, travel and entertainment
● Retirement
● Health care 

​Financial literacy also includes understanding how financial markets work. It will need to cover stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, and commodities, as well as the world’s great exchanges, like the London Metal Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Intercontinental Exchange.
 
Such an education will also include the various instruments that can be used for investments, such as options, futures, and other securities. And it should include basic ways that students can analyze their investment choices such as comparing real estate investments to gold.
 
Understanding these things will help students better grasp the meaning of national, regional, and world events. And it will provide the groundwork for a lifetime of delayed gratification — saving and investing.

Sounds finances also bolster the stability of a country. For example, research shows that the most stable societies are those where the majority of citizens diligently save and can therefore provide for themselves in emergencies and in retirement. The latter is particularly important, as with health care advances, people are living longer and need a larger “nest egg” than in decades past, in order to retire comfortably.
 
Savings rates vary between nations: China has one of the world’s highest rates, its citizens save an average of 25% of each paycheck. By contrast, Americans are an average of over $90,000 in debt. But during the uncertainty of the pandemic, the average savings rate of Americans reached over 32%. By contrast, their savings rate averaged between 6%-8% over the preceding decade.
 
That said a nation’s debt also plays a factor in the stability of a nation, and helping students understand America’s debt can help them become informed voters.
 
Understanding financial markets, including how commodities and stock exchanges work, as well as securities, is essential.

​In a survey conducted by Credit Karma and Qualtrics, 63% of participants said they wanted financial literacy taught in schools.
 
Yet, while there's great consensus about the need for financial literacy in education, opinions on how, exactly to implement that objective vary. For instance, in that survey, roughly one-third each of respondents believed financial literacy education should begin in elementary, middle or high school, with small outliers, comprising about 5%, believing it should begin in college.

​In 2007, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published, "A guide for advancing K-12 financial education" to help resolve some of these questions and to help educational institutions implement such programs. In this report, the authors parse the daunting project into a sequence of digestible actions:

1. Lay the groundwork - By making the case for it in the community, creating the strategy for implementing it, defining the structure under which it will operate and fostering partnerships and securing resources for enacting it
2. Build the program - By setting standards and requirements according to which all educators and administrators will operate, preparing teachers, choosing classroom resources and establishing and implementing systems for evaluating progress
3. Improve and expand the impact - By refining and scaling programs as needed and highlighting accomplishments and achievements

​

​Implementing financial literacy into the education systems of various school districts, each with its own unique set of challenges and resources, will require careful attention, and perhaps adaptation to concerns about equal accessibility to knowledge.

​Financial literacy education must be implemented equally and uniformly across all districts and economic spectrums if it is to truly be effective in uplifting and securing the future of subsequent generations.
 
 Next Gen Personal Finance published a report in 2018 called, "Who Has Access to Financial Education in America", which found that, in the poorest areas, the percentage of students required to complete a personal finance course in order to graduate high school was the smallest.
 
For instance, access to technology plays a major role in how effective such a program can be in any given community. Many banks and brokerages now have mobile apps their customers can download onto their smartphones and mobile devices. In many cases, these apps include tutorials not only on utilizing the functions of the software but on better managing one's personal finance, from keeping a checkbook to creating a budget and saving and investing.
 
Digital tools, like ClassCast Podcast create on-demand content giving students an even deeper dive into some of the more specific topics and challenges they may face in their financial education and lives.
 
Using financial apps and digital tools, however, requires a means with which to use them. Despite the ubiquity of smartphones, some students still don't have them. Many don't have computers at home either, or ones they can access or that have access to the internet. All of these technological obstacles must be overcome in order for students to have equal access to learning financial literacy using these tools.
 
Ways schools and districts can support greater access to the technology needed to run financial apps include:

• Computer and mobile device lending and sharing programs
• Computer labs on school grounds with reasonable hours of operation
  
• In-classroom access and use of technology-based tools

​There are currently many games on the market, such as CashFlow, that provide a fun, engaging way to learn about financial management and to be rewarded for making the right choices.
 
Games provide an immersive, playful experience. Players get immediate feedback and learn through iterative actions and benevolent competition.
 
Importantly, academic research shows that games are effective educational tools.
 
Conveniently, there are financial games available for all age levels. Some games are designed to be played in the classroom. Some are downloadable apps. And others are designed to be played online in a browser.
 
Here are some examples of popular games:

• Peter Pig’s Money Counter - for ages 5-8, this game helps children learn about currency and how to count and save money
• Financial Football - for ages 11 and up, was created by Visa and the NFL to help students learn financial skills in the context of an exciting 3D football game
• The Payoff - developed by Visa, this game has players adopt the role of video bloggers who encounter life-changing events while preparing for a competition

If basic financial skills aren't taught in schools, where else will students learn them? Unless parents take on teaching their kids financial literacy or individuals seek it out themselves later in life, schools are the only places where these vital skills may be instilled.
 
Incorporating programs teaching these skills into classrooms requires the focused and combined effort of teachers, administrators, students, parents and the community at large. As the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction laid out, it requires a clear mission and vision and must be relevant, learner-centered yet community-focused and connected to the standards of the educational system. It must also be properly integrated with other curricular areas, supported with sufficient resources and continuously evaluated and adjusted for effectiveness. If done right, however, schools can help their graduates go on to lead happier, healthier and more secure and prosperous lives.
 
 
Other Resources  
"Closing the Financial Literacy Gap"; Laura Zingg, Teach for America
"Resources and Downloads for Financial Literacy"; Edutopia

By Ryan Tibbens

​Check this out: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/performance-artist-eats-120-000-banana-duct-taped-wall-calls-n1097696?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma.  It's funny, right? An artist, previously best known for creating a $1million solid gold toilet (recently stolen from a British palace), created a new piece called “Comedian,” which is composed of a real yellow Cavendish dessert banana duct taped to a wall. Someone paid $120,000 for it. When stories of this “art” sale hit major media outlets, those media outlets also reported the public’s “outrage.”  Then, two days later, the same media outlets reported that a man claiming to be a “performance artist” ate the banana, without permission, in a performance piece he calls “Starving Artist.”  Again, we were told that people were outraged.  People can act outraged by the money wasted, the people who could have been helped, the degradation of art, or even the general stupidity; but reality is even more outrageous. 

First, we are asked to believe this is newsworthy – some jackwagon tapes a banana to a wall; then some rich idiot pays the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree worth of tuition, room, and board for it; then some other jackwagon eats the banana.  Then the art gallery curator “replaces” the banana – new banana, new tape. Their spokesperson said, “[The performance artist] did not destroy the art work. The banana is the idea.”  If this is newsworthy, then we have two options: we're all idiots, OR the artists are geniuses because they are forcing us to reflect on what art is, what money is worth, what people are worth, and how to deal with idiots.

Consider the absurdity of the following screenshots from NBC and Fox News: 

Second, in terms of wealth, the top .01% of Americans (~200,000 households) own as much wealth as the bottom 90% (~110,000,000 households).  The top 10% own as much wealth as the entire middle class.  I’m not a communist, but when there are nearly 500,000 unconvicted people sitting in jails, most because they can’t afford bail, and some wealthy paint-sniffer buys a banana and eight inches of tape instead of freedom for thousands of people… Well, ready the guillotine.  12.4% of US households live below the poverty line (and a whopping 48% of people in Puerto Rico). There are tens of thousands of families who earn less than $15,000 per year, and all those families know that bananas cost about 60 cents per pound – PER POUND.  They also know that an entire roll of duct tape costs about five bucks.  Some people don’t know what things cost because they don’t have to pay attention. The current Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is massively wealthy – her family controls more than $5,400,000,000 (BILLION) dollars, nearly all of it inherited.  Despite the fact that she’s never held a regular job, DeVos could buy “Comedian,” the taped banana, 45,000 times and still live like a middle class person. When the people running the country live like THIS (seriously, click the link – you will be amazed and nauseated), while the median American home is approximately 2,300 sq.ft., we have a problem, and it’s bigger than some banana art.  

It seems every time I hear a debate over refugees and asylum, somebody says, "It's not that I'm opposed to helping, but we can't even afford to take care of our own."  But that's not true.  We can take care of our own. We can take care of every person in the country if we want, and substantially more than that too. We choose not to.  
​
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this artwork isn’t the real story – wealth inequality is. You don't have to be a communist to agree that something is wrong, and you don't have to be a communist to see that massive wealth inequality is bad morally and economically.  If you’re outraged by the banana art shenanigans but don’t connect the absurdity to excessive wealth, then your outrage is misplaced. The banana art is just a symptom of the problem. And who knows?  Maybe the artist was trying to make this point all along.  For now, eat your bananas, and eat the rich. 

by Ryan Tibbens

More school.  That is Senator Kamala Harris’s suggestion to help working class families struggling with childcare bills.  Harris, who built her career by putting more people into more government institutions for more time, is now vying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, and as her campaign loses steam, she panders harder and harder to her base’s concerns.  Unfortunately, Harris does not share many of those concerns, and when she does, she is so far removed from experiencing the problem on a personal level that her solutions seem tone deaf.

A few weeks ago, Harris suggested that, as a measure to ease childcare costs for working class families who pay for after-school care, we should keep public schools open for three additional hours each day, approximately 8am through 6pm. The senator, previously a successful lawyer, married for the first time at the age of 50 and now has two step-children.  Regarding the difficulties of raising children on a budget, Harris shared personal experiences from her own childhood: “My mother raised my sister and me while working demanding, long hours, so I know firsthand that, for many working parents, juggling between school schedules and work schedules is a common cause of stress and financial hardship.” Interestingly, after somewhat-almost-kind of-supporting universal basic income, Harris now promotes a supposed working-class measure that actually benefits businesses.  It is astonishing that, reflecting upon her own family’s situation through a child’s eyes, her solution is to make childcare cheaper, not to make parents get home sooner.

If America’s leaders are concerned about burdens on families, why not try to reduce the work day rather than lengthen the school day? School's primary purpose is not childcare, but politicians, parents, and social reformers conveniently forget that, again and again. Children need more free time, not more school; parents need more time with their children, not more time at work. Harris's bill is yet another example of how America's priorities are misaligned and of how good intentions in school legislation too often yield bad outcomes.  While some companies and school systems are having success experimenting with a four day work week, others (and others and others and others) are finding benefits in a shorter work day.  Given low unemployment rates and historically low birth rates, plus the oncoming wave of automation, modern economies will soon need to come to terms with the fact that few employers and fewer employees benefit from a long work week. But here we are – a serious presidential candidate for a major party “helping workers” by misusing schools as daycares so that employers can continue archaic eight-hour expectations. 

The very real, very current problem is that she says she's helping young, working class families, but what she's really doing is subsidizing employers who don't pay their employees enough to afford decent childcare or those who require impractical, inconvenient work schedules. It's like how Walmart and McDonald's pay many of their workers far below the wages necessary for quality, independent living, but they get away with it because taxpayers pick up the deficit through a variety of housing, food, and healthcare assistance programs. Those programs are generally good, but we should oppose offering too much assistance to someone who has a real job because we're really transferring money from taxpayers to the corporate stockholders, using that underpaid worker to mask the transaction.  If we want to help those workers, we should find ways to increase their wages rather than subsidize their employers.
​
Educationally and developmentally, most young people need more free time, more independent play and inquiry, not more time in the classroom -- particularly the elementary school-aged children that this program would  target (high school kids don't go to babysitters after school). Plus, we already can't adequately staff our schools, so why on earth would it be a good idea to extend the hours and hire more people, further diluting the quality of the candidate/worker pool everywhere? Families need more time together, not more time working or being housed in government facilities. If you want to help working families, give them more time together, not a cheaper way to spend time apart.

By Ryan Tibbens

Disclaimer -- This article took over a month to right, not for lack of ideas or research, but for lack of a conclusion.  This ClassCast segment -- in which Jessica Berg and Ryan Tibbens discuss the US Soccer pay gap, women's sports, and more -- helps to explain the delay and some of the nuances (hopefully) addressed in this article: https://youtu.be/rf0xd68U0RI.  Consider this ClassCast clip a companion to the essay below. 

​Let's get this out of the way: I support the US Women's National Soccer team and their fight for better compensation. If I had to guess, you probably do too. There are already TENS OF THOUSANDS of articles on that subject (really, just Google "US Women's Soccer Pay"), many of which, particularly in light of the women's 4th World Cup Championship, are overwhelmingly in favor of the women's pay demands. However, this is not one of those essays.  Everyone on the planet has beaten me to it, including Uncle Snoop.

Besides, the concern about pay (Why is there a pay difference between male and female athletes who play the same sports?) isn't even the most interesting question. Most writers and pundits ask about pay, then dive into the nuances of wage scales, advertising revenues, attendance figures, winning percentages, civil rights, common decency, and the rest.  They're right.  Researched, reasoned argument is the only way to understand the basic question and make a fair decision.  Unfortunately, their results are often misleading or incomplete because those people did not address the full dilemma. The most interesting question in this US Soccer situation is about structure:  Why do we maintain separate men's and women's teams in the first place?

Your answer to this question becomes the foundation for your argument about equitable pay. 

Disclaimers:
1) This essay focuses upon asking questions more than answering them.  The ultimate goal is to arrive at an ethical, just answer that can be applied across similar disciplines. I'm certain other people will offer better answers than I can. 
2) I am an upper-middle class, white, male teacher who played multiple sports and coached co-ed and girls' sports.  
3) I have a daughter and a son, both of whom I hope compete in athletics some day.  They deserve access to the same opportunities and experiences. 
​

This is my problem: Questions beget questions. I can't begin to ask, and certainly can't answer, the question about sexual division of sports if I don't first understand the purpose of sport.  

Remember that sport is, by definition, competition intended for recreation and/or entertainment.  In an evolutionary sense, participation in athletics provides people opportunities to prove their physical and genetic fitness, but they are luxuries -- few people waste time on games when their next meal or shelter are uncertain.  Plus, sports are fun. Most are fun to play recreationally AND fun to play more seriously, when practice and process become essential. In fact, most people play sports, or at least started playing, because they love the games; they are fun. This is no trivial matter.  US Courts have repeatedly ruled on issues of equal access for people of various demographics and abilities in the arena of sport. 

In Justice, philosophy professor Michael Sandel breaks down a sports controversy (the PGA and Casey Martin's request for a cart due to disability) by starting with the purpose of sport. Even though the Court sided with Martin, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented with words that ring on in every sports equity argument because he actually considered the purpose of sport.

​Sandel writes, "Justice Antonin Scalia disagreed. In a spirited dissent, he rejected the notion that the Court could determine the essential nature of golf. His point was not simply that judges lack the authority or competence to decide the question. He challenged the Aristotelian premise underlying the Court’s opinion—that it is possible to reason about the telos, or essential nature of a game: 

Sandel continues, "Since the rules of golf 'are (as in all games) entirely arbitrary,' Scalia wrote, there is no basis for critically assessing the rules laid down by the PGA. If the fans don’t like them, 'they can withdraw their patronage.' But no one can say that this or that rule is irrelevant to the skills that golf is meant to test."

If we understand that sport is, fundamentally, about recreation and entertainment, our thinking becomes more clear.  Recreation implies that the participants are having fun, perhaps even playing in their spare time. Entertainment implies that the spectators are having fun.  When it comes to large venues and televised games, entertainment can't be argued.  And while some athletes play purely for money, most acknowledge that love for the game lives on.  Through this lens, it seems that we have the problem backward -- the men are overpaid rather than the women underpaid.  If this is simply for recreation, for "sport," then we can reasonably assume that most of the athletes would still participate, even if paid less.  Considering the US Women's National Soccer team's roster, participation, success, AND pay complaints, we already have proof that skilled people will play the game for less.  So maybe the men should make less?

For some, that solves the problem: we end the pay gap by reducing the men's pay.  Most people don't love that, though. They want equality up, not down. They might point out that US Soccer, Nike, FIFA, and a few dozen other companies profit off these athletes' labor and images.  They say that the athletes deserve a cut. This isn't just about fun.  And that seems reasonable too.  Big man Dr. Shaquille O'Neal (great basketball player, big personality, and savvy businessman who now holds a doctorate in education) understood the conflict between money and purity of the game early in his career when he joked: "I’m tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok."  After several successful seasons in the NBA, Shaq went back and finished his bachelors degree (and later his doctorate); at graduation, he told the crowd, "Now I can go and get a real job."  

Unfortunately, we've reverted to the pay argument without resolving the root question.  And that is dangerous because, based on viewership and financials, the women might be arguing from a position of weakness. Based purely on global viewership and profitability, women's soccer (even among great teams) is undeniably losing to men's.   Even when raw numbers are meant to show women's soccer to be more lucrative, they don't take into account how many extra games women played to generate the advertising and attendance revenue.  Regardless of data interpretation, none of these questions, about pay and sponsorship and the rest, can reasonably be solved if we don't first answer why the sexes are separated in sport. ​
​

I was blindsided by this question a couple of months ago.  At that time, I wrote a short article about Castor Semenya and  her fight with the Court of Arbitration for Sport.  I ended that article by saying, "More [...] coming soon." But I never followed up because shortly after writing the article, two issues changed by thinking and my questions. I haven't forgotten the follow-up; I just haven't figured it out yet.  

Here's why.  First, Castor Semenya is intersex.  To my knowledge, none of the major news or sports outlets covering the CAS/IAAF included details about Semenya's biology in their initial reporting. Based on those incomplete reports, masses of people (and I) were outraged that a woman with natural gifts would be handicapped or excluded, but that wasn't exactly the situation. While she demonstrates external characteristics of a female human, Semenya is 46XY, meaning that chromosomally, she is male. Her testosterone levels are in the typical male range and well above the normal female range.  Also, many 46XY women have testes, often internal in place of ovaries, which boosts testosterone levels. The CAS's ruling about testosterone levels and participation do not apply to chromosomally normal women because no 'normal' woman has ever achieved a testosterone level high enough to break their threshold without significant performance-enhancing drugs. So Semenya has a choice: take a birth control pill (or comparable medicine) to lower her testosterone and compete as a woman, enter men's races, or race at events not regulated by CAS/IAAF.  Suddenly the issue of "handicapping" a natural talent doesn't seem to fit the situation.  And if the organization's ruling seems unfair, then perhaps it is because male and female athletes shouldn't be separated anyway. 

That's the second reason I never revisited or concluded my Semenya piece: I ran into the question about sexual division of sports.  It's not that the concept had never crossed my mind before.  I've coached coed varsity golf teams as well as girl's JV softball and recreation events.  But when responding to a friend's post about the Semenya decision, a well-meaning SJW challenged my position by questioning the sexual divisions.  It soon became obvious that this man had never played nor coached competitive athletics and knew little about sport.  I was ready to write off his concerns.  But with only a little reflection, I realized that he had a point -- if we believe in the equality of the sexes, then why separate them at all?  

Something I now try to teach in my rhetoric and argument classes is about premises and why to reject them.  Too often we get tangled up in arguments that don't feel right, that don't allow us to fully answer or to explain the nuances of our answers.  That is often because we've accepted someone else's premise.  The argument about equal pay is built upon many, many assumptions, including that men and women should be paid equal wages for equal work and that sports should be segregated by sex. But I'm not sure either of those are fair here, and probably for the same reason. 

Men and women are different.  On average, men are taller, stronger, and faster; they have more lean skeletal muscle, denser bones, and more aggressive behaviors.  If we accept those differences, then the sexual division of athletics makes sense.  And perhaps we should.  At the youth, high school, and even collegiate levels, participants often learn a variety of personal and life skills while building fitness, confidence, and friendships.  If men and women competed together, it is likely that few young women would make varsity teams.  Consider that "Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys.  (Yes, that’s the right number of zeros.) The same is true of Olympic, World, and U.S.  Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters lifetime best of 49.26.  Just in the single year 2017, men and boys around the world outperformed her more than 15,000 times."  But what about in professional sports? As professionals, participants should be elite, the best of the best.  If the men are that much better, faster, stronger, why do we maintain women's leagues and tournaments? 

US Women's Soccer star Megan Rapinoe said, ​“I think we’re done with: Are we worth it? Should we have equal pay? Is the market the same? Yada yada," adding, “We — all players, every player at this World Cup — put on the most incredible show that you could ever ask for. We can’t do anything more, to impress more, to be better ambassadors, to take on more, to play better, to do anything. It’s time to move that conversation forward to the next step.” But if we reject the premise that women should play separate from men, we have to ask -- is that true?  Was it the most incredible show? Could someone play better?  Again, I don't mean to be an ass -- I support the women's cause and believe they deserve a raise.  But is equal pay really fair?

Another premise worthy of examination is that of collective bargaining.  The men bargained hard for individual bonuses; they took greater risks in exchange for more aggressive pay scales.  If a man makes the general roster but isn't dressed and on the field for a game, he receives no money. Women get paid for each game simply for being on the roster.  Some of the pay differences are the result of different priorities and bargaining strategies.  Which brings us back to a concerning premise -- whether men and women play together or not, why should they negotiate separately?  They do the same job for the same company with the generally the same requirements.  They are all elite athletes in their categories and they all equally represent the organization and United States. If we reject the premise of separate contract negotiations, then the pay disparity dissolves. 


So it seems we've arrived at a conclusion, which is not really a conclusion at all.  It is a series of questions that US Soccer, FIFA, the athletes, and the fans must all consider.  What is the purpose of the sport? Why do men and women play separately?  Why do men and women negotiate their contracts separately?  I'm inclined to respond "for entertainment," "because it allows women to compete and enjoy too," and "because no one is thinking clearly."

So here's the solution.  From now on, have all men's and women's players negotiate together.  Players should be signing essentially the same contracts; they should be entitled to the same percentages of profits from jersey and merchandise sales, ticket sales, and TV advertising sales. If we base all this purely on physical might, then the men deserve most of the money.  If we base it on previous labor agreements, then the men deserve most of the money.  But if we acknowledge that the players on both teams support greater equality, then simply group them together as common employees for negotiation purposes.  I'm still undecided on the sexual separation of professional sports.  I'm still undecided on the entertainment-to-dollar value of professional sports.  But I'm fully decided on this -- if the men and women work together in their contract negotiations, the pay gap will disappear, the equity and justice will increase, the conflict will dissolve, and the incentive for young men and women to compete will increase.  

UPDATE: In this OPEN LETTER, US Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro explains the collective bargaining differences between the men's and women's teams as well as the varied (and sometimes better) compensation the women receive.  The conclusions above, regarding the premises of segregated sports and, more importantly, segregated bargaining, remain intact. But this statement is worth reading. 

                 ~~Don't forget to check out this segment from the ClassCast podcast, Episode 003~~

By Jim Dunning
[WARNING: The perspective I present here is not carved in the granite of my brain — this is what we in the high school debate world (as opposed to the presidential debate world) call a Constructive, meant to prompt responses intended to transform my opinion. That means “Write back! This is a dialogue.”]

Not too long ago, one of my students told me her life’s aspiration is to fix what my generation did to the world. I asked what she believed needed fixing: “You know, the environment, poverty, poor health care, hunger, crime-especially-gun-violence, discrimination, and inequality. All the stuff you created.” I asked how that all was my generation’s doing, and she said because we have made it worse. Admirably, unlike us Baby Boomers, she wants to leave the world better than she found it.
​
There’s irony in that I probably have to explain my meaning of “generation gap” to the demographic that substantiates the current reality — a fitting punishment for incipient senescence. Google Ngram neatly marks the term’s entry into the world and paints its decline to today’s virtual obscurity.

​Although the term was born just a handful of years after my birth, the concept has been around since the idea of “teenager” has been around. That is, ever since adolescents transcended from being primarily a resource to a marketing demographic. I chuckle—wearily now—when I hear my contemporaries complain/lament/rail/bitch about the moral decline of today’s youth because they don’t seem to ever consider how much they sound like their parents.

Of course, this creates the Generation Gap, with opposing sides pointing fingers, invective, and sometimes guns at each other.

For me, it was parents complaining about my generation’s music, politics, entitlement, sense of entitlement, clothes, sexuality and sex, drugs and sex, etc. Our complaints back at them were about the environment, discrimination, inequality, poverty, violence, politics, and hunger — all pretty much summarized with “Never trust anyone over 30!” and a determination to leave the world better than we found it.

In fact, this Generational Gap finger-pointing has been going on for centuries.

​Based on my own experience (and past belief system(s)), I can understand why my student blames me for her pessimistic perception of the world—after all, I did that once. My generation’s short-term memory is unsurprising since it’s so pervasive, but still frustrating; I almost think, given the thousands of years of its history, that criticism of the next generation must serve some evolutionary biological purpose; what it is, I haven’t figured out.

Thus, I am not shocked at my student’s assessment and goals.

But I am bewildered — primarily because of the enormous amount of historical and contemporary information available to Millennials in the form of entertainment, news, and scholarly works. A Millennial's “Thoughts from a hipster coffee shop…” recently served up this indictment of her peers--

This brings me to my question for the Far Side of the Generation Gap. Not only do we have—literally—at our fingertips the greatest trove of information ever available to any human, but, as we look out the Starbuck’s window, what is it that we see that makes so many of us fervently believe the world is worse off than it was yesterday or last week or last year or 30 or 50 years ago?

​Do we live in the “most privileged time” ever?

Not to say that the world is perfect (it definitely is not), but, personally, I can easily recall that my family never got strawberries in December in snowy Western New York when I was a kid — metonymic for access to food and every type of consumer good imaginable is unimaginably greater today than it was 50 years ago in this country. Grocery stores looked nothing like what most Americans experience now. In fact, not only does just about everything that was around when I was in high school cost less in dollars, but significantly less in the number of labor hours required to purchase it. And that leaves out all the stuff that wasn’t even thought of then but is quotidian now.

Yes, there are social and economic and personal injustices—still!— but today’s “Marches” were bloody riots when I was a kid. During my sophomore year in high school, on average, a bomb went off somewhere in the United States every day! There were armed soldiers on college campuses. My mom had to have my dad’s permission to have her bank issue her a credit card. When I was seven, my dad couldn’t get to his store for a week because race riots had burned out swaths of the city.

That stash of information in everyone’s pocket seems to back up my anecdotal evidence. Data shows that income and wealth for everyone has done nothing but increase in the past half-century--

​​—not only in this country, but the world…

Why?

The current narrative for Millenials is that they are unable to start families and buy houses and big-ticket consumer goods — all because they believe they are the first generation to not do as well as their parents. They all walk around with $1,000 mega-computer-communicators in their pockets, but think the world is devolving into chaos and disaster. Is it really?

What does the world look like on your side of the Gap? Comment below!
​

Also check out TED Talks by Hans Rosling and Matt Ridley.

"Achieve an Informed and Common Sense Opinion on the United States' Dealings in the Middle East: An Anthology"  -- Compiled by Ryan Tibbens for educational purposes ONLY

On this Flag Day, we should all consider what our flag stands for, not just here in the United States, but around the world too.  We should better understand how actions taken under that flag and paid for by American citizens affect peace, prosperity, and geopolitics around the world.  This 'article' is more of an anthology, a compilation of reliable sources and literary connections, designed to inform discussions of American involvement in the Middle East. 

​Before you ever suggest raising taxes for public services or cutting social safety nets to save money, you should better understand how our federal government effectively gives away our prosperity, often to countries that support our enemies.  You should also try to understand why these decisions make sense to those who wield power in our government and major industries.  

Let's start with a trailer for a GREAT documentary. (Go watch the whole movie -- it is currently available on Amazon Prime.)

Why We Fight, a fantastic documentary (2006) by Eugene Jarecki, addresses the threat of the military-industrial-congressional complex using strong research, purposeful rhetoric, and an impressive set of interviews with ranking government and private sector leaders. Jarecki's discussion (argument?) builds on a foundation created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address. 

Next, let's take a look at geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East, with extra attention paid to the two biggest players -- Saudi Arabia and Iran. 

Vox has several well-researched introductory videos on YouTube that create solid foundations for further study or (the beginnings of) informed discourse.  They have also compiled a few maps (some animated) to further clarify the historical and cultural complexities of Middle Eastern politics, for example: 

​Perhaps the most urgent item in this brief compilation is the video of Senator Rand Paul speaking before the Senate on June 13, 2019 (yesterday) about the government's plans to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. With a determination and repetition that are both rhetorically effective and somewhat annoying by the end, Paul points out the complete lack of common sense in our approach to Middle Eastern foreign policy and arms sales.  Our president and legislators seem to believe that the best path to peace in the Middle East is sending in more armaments, weapons that often end up in our enemies' hands to be used against our own young soldiers. Using the context from the previous two videos, think carefully about Senator Rand Paul's words. 

​Remember, we are talking about millions, billions, sometimes trillions of dollars -- and that is a lot more money than most of us can even imagine. As President Eisenhower pointed out, we could build scores of schools, hospitals, and highways with that money; we could uplift the American people. President George Washington gave similar warnings in his farewell address -- that a standing army will lead to wars and that foreign entanglements will ruin our republic.   We continue to ignore good advice from two strong presidents, two of our nation's great military leaders, instead wasting tax-payers' dollars on misguided military interventions and arms sales. 

How can we make sense of all this nonsense? George Orwell explained these processes clearly in his book within a book, "THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein," contained in Part 2, Chapter 9 of 1984.  In this section of the book, Winston, the protagonist and active opposition to the Party and Big Brother, finally gets to read from "the book." In this block of text, Orwell demonstrates his social and political clairvoyance by describing the world in which we live today. 

In this writer's opinion, this is the most important source in this anthology; unfortunately, it also requires the most reading.  However, if you've made it this far, it is my sincere hope that you will finish the job and read a few extra pages -- your outlook on American politics and "defense" spending will never be the same.   The link above contains the full text (as well as the entire novel); you can also read here on Read.Think.Write.Speak. by clicking on the "Read More" link just below the Amazon ads. 

​The next time a politician claims that "we can't afford" domestic programs or that "we need to raise taxes to fund public services" or that "cutting defense spending endangers all Americans as well as democracy around the world" or any such nonsense, remember what George Orwell, Rand Paul, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and objective history have to say about those lies. 

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