MICHAEL GOODWIN: RADICALISM NOW GOING MAINSTREAM
http://nypost.com/2015/04/18/radicalism-is-going-mainstream/
Something’s in the air, and it’s not just the normal spring rituals of protests, love and allergies. It’s the unsettling sound of radicalism tearing America apart.
Ideas that only recently were relegated to the fringes are now going mainstream. And policies that were settled, established norms are under vicious assault.
Here’s the real shocker: The radicals are not limited to Occupy Wall Street and other anarchists demonstrating against cops, capitalism and all authority. Instead, respected public figures and government officials who would normally defend the establishment are leading the charge against it.
Take the growing New York movement to opt out of standardized student tests. While unions are protesting the use of tests for teacher evaluations, many middle-class parents are joining them.
Indeed, the most prominent opt-out leader is Rob Astorino, the county executive of Westchester County and last year’s GOP gubernatorial nominee.
Astorino, who presides over a suburban bastion of orderly and manicured prosperity, wants to repeal the Common Core standards adopted by New York and more than 40 other states. He boasted that he and his wife, a special-ed teacher, withheld their children from the exams for the second year because the tests “are poorly and secretly devised, developmentally inappropriate, disruptive to wider learning, and federally rather than locally engineered, among other concerns.”
A Bronx middle-school principal went further down the rabbit hole, charging in a published letter that the tests come from “the same system that facilitated our current economic gap, redlining, crack cocaine, Jim Crow and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
The principal, Jamaal Bowman of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, insisted, “We should not trust the state” because it uses “testing as a smoke screen to destroy public education.”
Wow, imagine what his students are learning.
If that were all, it would be bad enough. But mainstream radicals also are assailing childhood vaccines as another government plot. California is the epicenter, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went off the deep end making the case.
Speaking against a bill that aims to curtail parents’ rights to get exemptions from vaccines that protect children against whooping cough, chicken pox, mumps, measles and rubella, Kennedy insisted to a Sacramento audience that vaccines cause autism.
“They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy said. “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
He later apologized for using the word holocaust, but not for making the outlandish claim about vaccines.
He spoke during an alarming outbreak of measles, with most cases originating in Disneyland. Although measles can be fatal to children, only a reported 92.3 percent of California children are now vaccinated, compared to 99.7 percent in Mississippi, which does not allow exemptions.
Reports suggest that the “anti-vaxxer crowd” is concentrated among well-educated, financially secure families — the kind of people likely to shop at Whole Foods.
The San Jose Mercury News found that 87 percent of kindergartners at the wealthy Berkeley Rose School had vaccine exemptions because the parents believed in “more alternative health care,” according to a school spokesman.
The school, where half-day kindergarten costs nearly $12,000 a year, says it offers “judgment-free” education. Children handwrite their own textbooks, learn to knit in first grade and, despite its proximity to Silicon Valley, the school features an anti-tech culture that emphasizes experience over facts. No kidding.
In fairness, new ideas are almost by definition unorthodox and even many that become widely accepted were initially ridiculed. But this anti-establishment mind-set coming from within the establishment is more about turning back the clock of progress than pushing new ideas.
Some of it reflects widespread distrust of government, but the choice of targets also smacks of paranoia.
Calling standardized tests of literacy and math skills a tool for destroying education isn’t rational. The argument means no test, including the SAT and those for medical and law school, would be acceptable.
What then? How does society declare its values, set and enforce standards and organize professional requirements?
Similarly, boycotting vaccines risks a return to a time when children routinely died in infancy or were left with crippling and disfiguring injuries. America’s public health system grew out of calamities caused by contagious diseases and it’s nuts for a spoiled brat like Kennedy to use his celebrity status to put other people’s children in danger.
We live in strange times, and they are getting stranger by the day. I have argued that America appears headed for a crack-up, and mainstream radicalism is both cause and effect of the potential chaos.
If the center doesn’t hold, nothing else can.
Sickos welcome at city’s shelters
If you build it, they will come. Cons, druggies and rapists, that is.
The Post story on the city’s Bellevue Men’s Shelter counted 13 convicted sex offenders living there — and that was before accused rapist Rodney Stover showed up. At least four, including him, did their crimes and long prison stretches in other states, then got free room and board here, courtesy of taxpayers.
Stover spent more than 20 years behind bars for two other rapes. He was released two months ago from a Pennsylvania prison and subsequently took a bus here from Boston, prosecutors say.
The shelter, at East 30th Street and First Avenue now has a whopping 850 beds. Mayor de Blasio is making it easier for all comers to move into it and other city facilities.
Over 60,000 people now sleep in shelters each night and the annual tab is about $1.1 billion. That might be progressive, but it’s not progress.
How Clinton Foundation finances the “Clinton Lifestyle”
Reader Barry Friedberg sees a big Hillary Clinton story waiting to be told.
“If she gives a speech for a fee of $300,000 and receives it directly, federal and state taxes take about $150,000,” he writes. “But if the same fee goes to the Clinton Foundation, she pays zero taxes, leaving the full amount available for private jets, hotels, meals, entertainment, etc.”
All she has to do “to reasonably justify travel and entertainment is show some relationship to programs and promoting the foundation.”
He goes on: “Country ABC that abuses women and civil rights wants to give $10 million to Haiti. It can give the full amount to Haiti, or give $10 million to the Clinton Foundation to give to Haiti.”
“In the first instance, the Haitians get $10 million. In the second, the Haitians get $10 million less the skim. The skim is used to finance the Clinton lifestyle, otherwise known as the operating expenses of the foundation.”
All good points, and I would add one more. Clinton says she wants to get “unaccountable money” out of politics.
OK — to lead by example, she can start with her foundation.
Obama’s next stop: West Dakota!
Headline says: “Obama will finally visit South Dakota, his 50th state.”
Only seven more to go and he’ll have seen all 57, which is how many states he claimed there are in 2008.
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