American Lab Rats
In January 1790, President George Washington wrote to London author Catherine Macaulay, “The establishment of our new government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by creating a reasonable compact, in civil Society.”
Since then, any number of writers have referred to the American experiment—often in terms of politics, as Washington did.
In our country today, the word experiment has acquired other connotations.
For almost 70 years, bureaucrats have made laboratories of our schools. To counter Soviet accomplishments in space, in the 1960s they introduced the New Math, which focused on concepts and principles, and ditched memorization. And since then, experts have introduced other new methods and curricula to millions of school children, experiments that run the gamut from Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to Common Core.
Some of the damage done by these novelties I witnessed firsthand. I encountered the New Math in the seventh grade and lost forever what pleasure I had taken from that subject. For part of his elementary school education, my youngest brother was in an “open concept” classroom, which involved wandering from one work station to the next. That approach to learning left him permanently behind in his schooling. Several of my grandchildren have used Common Core math, which apparently makes multiplication or subtraction as complicated as quadratic equations. Fortunately, all have now moved on to traditional math programs.
More recently, our “social scientists”—they don’t call them scientists for nothing—are experimenting on our children with critical race theory and gender identity. Sex education was introduced in schools decades ago when authorities deemed parents too ignorant to keep their daughters from becoming pregnant. Those days are long gone, as schools and our culture now teach both our daughters and our sons that they can choose their gender, and schools make available the counseling and the drugs to render their confusion a reality. Critical race theory teaches children to judge others first and foremost by their skin color, a leap backwards into overt racism that will undoubtedly end in disaster.
Then came the COVID crisis. With its lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, masks, and closed schools, here was truly “a great experiment.” The overseers of this laboratory seemed less interested in safety than in seeing which of the mice were obedient and which were the rebels. Meanwhile, in yet another catastrophic experiment, the federal government sent out $931 billion in stimulus bucks to Americans. On top of all these lab tests came an experimental vaccine administered to hundreds of millions of Americans, often by way of threat: “Take the jab or lose your job, guinea pig!”
And now the government is at it again, tinkering with climate change. Banish fossil fuels, we’re told by the experts, sacrifice your life styles, your cars, your warm homes, and Planet Earth may survive. Never mind that China is building dozens of coal-powered plants and laughing at us as we bankrupt ourselves.
Apologies are few and far between from those education experts who damaged untold numbers of students or the mini-dictators who issued and enforced the failed COVID mandates. Those in charge of the lab clearly care little about individual Americans. That this is the case is easily discerned in their cavalier attitude not just to the failed COVID policies but also to the illicit drugs that are now killing more than 100,000 Americans every year. They rail against murders by firearms, less than 20,000 a year, but our laboratory gang rarely says a word about shutting down the drug trafficking on our southern border.
So, a question: To which experiment do we belong? George Washington’s Great American Experiment or the one conducted by elites and “experts”?
Some people, often at great cost to themselves, choose the former. Every week I am privileged to edit into print televised interviews with a variety of Americans, lovers of liberty like the former Levi’s executive Jennifer Sey, the NBA’s Enes Kanter Freedom, Florida mother January Littlejohn, and Dr. Torsten Trey. You may have never heard of these men and women—mainstream media rarely report their stories—yet they have chosen to stand on the side of George Washington, to resist becoming complacent rats in a lab. They are heroic reminders that we are not alone in our resistance.
And like them, we can become freedom fighters. We can volunteer for political candidates who share our vision of liberty. We can help organize protests the next time some mandate comes down from on high. We can take our children out of the public schools. We can read and educate ourselves. We have an abundance of ways and means, many of them simple or small, by which we can boost the cause of freedom.
Essential to all these undertakings, of course, is this one precept: We are not slaves. We are not rats in a lab.
We are Americans.
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Image credit: RawPixel, CC0 1.0