The Votes Are In!
2024 Readers' Choice is back, bigger and better than ever!
View Winners → Political Dust on Campus
Arcadia Weekly Dec 17, 2014
by
share with
The Gift of Thanksgiving is to “Keep America Beautiful” and to make “Budget Cut” Obsolete.
by Rachel Melikian
How can we all keep GCC “Clean and Beautiful” when our campus is constantly bombarded with political dust, thus forming dust bunnies? Students rally, demonstrate, strike, and boycott against educational cuts, yet their pleas sound meaningless to the politicians’ ears. “You cannot reason with a hungry belly; it has no ears”. The United States faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s during the global economic financial meltdown, after 2008.
Politicians have surrendered themselves to two words “Budget Cut”, which have decayed in their mouths with a broken record, as we hear it constantly every single fiscal year without any plans of its end and restoration. This gives rise to their action and the meaning to their politics, without knowing how many constitutional values and virtues are being slashed along with it, and how much pain it will cause?
We know that politics work with rules and regulations but sadly, “Budget Cut” has temporarily corrupted politicians’ rational minds, and the political dust has blinded their eyesight to fairness.
All words have failed to register in the minds of the politicians such as: education or incarceration; higher standard of jobs; educational justice; economy and individual prosperity; inflation; lack of opportunities and mobility; unemployment; foreclosures; rise of crimes; violence; increase of hunger and homelessness among students and families; justice; citizenship; democracy; rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness etc., and most importantly the “American Dream.”
Evidently, Zeno of Elea’s advice does not apply to politicians: “Nature has given us one tongue and two ears so that we would listen twice as much as we speak.”
How ironic that California suffered one of the highest unemployment rates of the nation 12.6% during the financial meltdown. Whereas, California’s competitive advantage rests in its higher education besides its agriculture. That has once considered a national and worldwide model.
Politicians have persuaded themselves that they are doing the right thing by just focusing on the deficit and not realizing that their actions of “Budget Cut” can break bones and cause pain to people. “Words have no bones, but can break bones.” As Plato says, it is “Ignorance” that is “the root and stem of all evil.”
The new counter-word is “Dust.” All discussions led against “Budget Cut” can’t help to keep GCC “Clean and Beautiful”. If we start at a different end such as dust for striving to “Keep America Beautiful” than we might be able to reverse the damages of “Budget Cut” and bring about the desired improvements in our educational system.
Before we move on to “Dust” that is ionized, polarized, and its particles charged politically, and inviting the Health Department, EPA, and CDC to our campuses, let’s ask from our politicians at Thanksgiving to open up their hearts to receive the thanks and feel the gratitude to all who are contributing to the abundance of their Thanksgiving meal. “I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other goods of man, public as well as private”, said Socrates. Gratitude is a virtue and the motivator of behaviors. The key for restoring the budget deficit is not cutting rather having a gratitude heart and accepting the labor and contributions of American people as gifts and return that gift back to them.
It is this gift that will be the actual agent of change in our economy and be the bearer of new life to Californians, and help keep GCC, the City of Glendale, and America “Clean and Beautiful”. We are putting ourselves in the hands of the State and giving our labor, time, taxes, and also our thanksgiving-gifts to it. We would like to wait in silence at this Thanksgiving dinner while saying thanks and gratitude, until the State generously returns, with good will, our gifts back to us while stuffing the budget with thanks and gratitude.
Happy Thanksgiving to the State of California and Happy Thanksgiving to America!!!!!
More from Arcadia Weekly
