He once said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” American universities and the liberal media have failed abysmally to educate our children. Instead of learning how to think, students are fed a steady diet of anti-American “facts.”
They are told that our country is so racist and exploitative that our entire system must change immediately. Instead of being encouraged to learn history and compare America to other countries, students are told they should demonstrate or riot.
The professors and liberal media ignore the obvious fact we have millions of legal and illegal immigrants. They came to America because life is better here than it is where they were born. Some of them risked their lives to escape from “more egalitarian” countries such as the USSR, China, and Cuba. Those “ideal” countries built walls and killed people to prevent them from escaping.
I love history and once wanted to teach it. When I was a child, I was proud of America’s history, proud to be an American. When I became old enough, I enlisted in the marines, an extremely patriotic organization.
In 1963 I went to Berkeley to get a Ph.D. in psychology. Berkeley was the epicenter of the ’60s movement. The anti-American rhetoric we have heard recently is not as extreme as it was then in Berkeley. Many students and professors hated America. They insisted our country was so evil that we needed a violent revolution to create a just society.
I never accepted Berkeley’s hatred of America, but I was upset by racism, poverty, etc. For the first time in my life, I had serious doubts that America was a great country.
After completing my degree, I taught at UCLA and Carnegie-Mellon. The students, professors, and local media were less extreme than in Berkeley, but they did repeat the same propaganda: America and western societies have failed. The future belongs to socialism, communism, or eastern cultures. I didn’t believe most of it, but my doubts about our greatness grew larger.
I started consulting all over the world. Most of my work was in America, Canada, and wealthy European countries such as Belgium, Holland, and Sweden. Some of them did not have our racism and economic inequalities.
My doubts about America grew stronger.
Then I went to India to help an extremely rich family’s business. On my first night there, jet lag woke me at about 3 AM. I decided to take a walk. I left the Intercontinental Hotel, walked a few yards, and turned a corner. I was hit with a sight I will never forget. Thousands of people were sleeping on the sidewalk.
I walked down the street and every few feet passed another sleeper. Their heads were toward the wall, their feet toward the street.
Children hit me hardest. There were hundreds of them. Some were babies, and they were sleeping on concrete. It was heartbreaking. How could the Indian government let babies sleep on sidewalks?
A few days later I heard a pain-filled voice crying, “Sheesh!” It was a beggar, pleading for money. A horribly crippled man was sitting on the sidewalk. His bones had been broken and reset crookedly to make him so pitiful that people would be more generous.
Once I was with my rich client in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. When we arrived at his office, I grabbed my briefcase. He told me to leave it for the driver. My status was too high to carry my own briefcase. The chauffeur’s status was also too high. He took my briefcase and gave it to a barefoot man who carried it inside.
Another time we were in that Mercedes and passed women working as beasts of burden. They were loading gravel from a large pile into a small boat. They formed a circle: Each one took a bucket of gravel, put it on her head, ran onto the boat to dump it, and then ran back to get more gravel. If Americans treated donkeys that way, they would be arrested. In India it was okay to treat women worse than Americans treat donkeys.
A few years later I met an Indian professor at an American university. He said his father was a professor, and he grew up in a much nicer home than most Indians. He came to America to get his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. As part of his new student orientation, he was taken on a tour of Chicago’s notorious slums.
He said, “I never realized that I had always lived in what you Americans call ‘a slum.’”
And India is much richer than most other countries!! In poorer countries, thousands or millions of people starve to death. I’ve seen and been appalled by the statistics, but numbers don’t hit me emotionally. Seeing real people living in horrible conditions has had much more impact.
We don’t realize how good our lives are, how lucky we are to live in 21st century America. Just consider our longevity: We live longer than 99% of all the people who have ever lived. Our official “poverty level” is much higher than the incomes of most people in most countries. We live longer, safer, healthier, and more comfortable lives than almost everybody.
We are not just better off materially. We also have much greater personal freedom and a better political system. Like many of you, I’m troubled by our political corruption and nastiness. I wish our politicians were more honest and tolerant. I hate hearing them lie about each other.
But we do have fairly honest elections, and our politicians don’t kill their opponents or grab power by military coups. Many countries have never had an honest election, and some of them have “Presidents for Life” or “Supreme Leaders” who were never elected.
We don’t appreciate our good fortune because we compare our lives and our country, not to the realities of history and other countries, but to a perfect world that will never exist.
Again and again, I forget how lucky I am. I’m jealous of the tiny group of people who have better lives. I wish I was younger and richer and better looking. But the facts don’t support my jealousy. I am a healthy, 85-year-old diabetic. If I had been born just a few years earlier or in almost any other country, I would be dead.
I should remember how lucky I am to live in modern America. Of course, I’m troubled by our racism, poverty, homelessness, greed, and other serious problems. But I should compare my country to reality, not to some fantasy world.
When I get upset by America’s weaknesses and problems, I shouldn’t rant and rave and demand that our system must change immediately. Instead, I should remember the night I saw babies sleeping on concrete.
Dr. Al Schoonmaker
Ask-Dr-Al.com
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