Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
My cousin from Fridley is smart: National Merit Scholar, scholarship to St. Thomas, worked for the State Department abroad, taught college in Madison, lives near Baltimore – a very smart and thoroughly educated woman.
She’s shocked and appalled at gun violence. Something Must Be Done! But not if it would offend anyone. Can’t focus our efforts on the 13% of the population who commit 50% of the murders, that’d be racissss. Besides, who says so, the KKK? No, the FBI. It’s not hate speech, it’s the truth but she no longer recognizes it because she’s embraced so many lies from The Left, the truth sounds ridiculous to her.
I wish there were a way to have a reasonable discussion but when the first words out of her mouth are “assault rifle,” I know it’s hopeless –
Joe Doakes
Converting someone from the Madison/Macalester/Berkeley version of America’s left is not much unlike deprogramming a cult member.
Hey! I’m from Fridley, and I have a degree in the liberal arts!
An LA degree really does help you know how to think about the world, but only if you stick to an English “great books” style program. History is worthless. Psychology is worthless. Take economics, and the hardest math classes they will give you credit for.
From what I remember, many students in LA programs want to be taughtt what to think about certain topics, and colleges are only too happy to oblige them.
Some types of idiocy can only be reached after a long time in academia.
I’ll always stand up for the liberal arts. Unfortunately, I think Prussian Blue is correct about many people who go to liberal arts schools. If I ran a liberal arts college, I’d require a class in logic for all incoming freshmen. It would be great preparation for all the fallacies that students were likely to encounter going forward.
I replied to her “assault rifle” post on Facebook and shocked her. I think she’s lived in a liberal miasma so long, my post was her Pauline Kael moment to learn that a person she knew could hold such wrong-headed ideas. And she knows me too well to dismiss me as ignorant, uneducated or wicked so the discord is causing her head to spin. If only I could get some sense into it while I’ve got her attention . . .
Fridley, much like Camelot, is a silly place. But friendly.
“National Merit Scholar, scholarship to St. Thomas, worked for the State Department abroad, taught college in Madison, lives near Baltimore – a very smart and thoroughly educated woman.”
With due respect Joe, I must gently disagree with your first conclusion, while agreeing with the second. My point being, an excellent education does not in any way indicate high intelligence. Maybe it did at one time, I dunno, but in the 21st Century it certainly doesn’t.
But I think you already knew that.
It’s so humiliating when you show up for your first day as a college freshman wearing a Fridley High School Tigers sweat shirt (state wrestling champs ’75!) and the instructor asks if you are a “special needs” student, informs you that the syllabus contents are not going to be spelled out phonetically, etc.
Hate hurts.