Often when I ask Opinions writers to formulate ideas for articles, I have them come up with things they're angry about. It's a great way to blow off steam and perhaps create something constructive out of the rage that any rational and reasoned person living in America today must experience. Here I go:
1. Coal companies are sneaking advertisements into educational materials that 90 percent of American public school children read, as reported by The New York Times yesterday and denounced in an editorial the day after. Apparently, this isn't the first time Scholastic has used its access to the nation's classrooms to indoctrinate unsuspecting children. Last year, it conducted a book competition to promote Sunny D, a sugary beverage that most youngsters should probably not be drinking. If you ask me, it's quite similar to how Big Tobacco marketed cigarettes to adolescents in the 80s and 90s. In any case, public schools are supposed to be commercial-free zones and should not allow mega-corporations to make another generation of Americans obese and/or uncaring about the environment.
(above) Scholastic's thinly-veiled advertisement for the coal industry.
2. Republicans continue their ever-quicker march to the fringes of the far right. Ron Paul says today that he doesn't think FEMA should exist, his son Rand Paul equates believing in a right to health-care with believing in a right to enslave, and Florida Governor Rick Scott wants to privatize his entire state's prison system. The sheer ignorance of the conservatives and the people who elected them is just breath-taking. I guess H. L. Mencken had it right though, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
(above) The great king of columnists, H. L. Mencken.
3. I have more class tests, APs, finals, projects, and papers than is conceivable to man. Oh well, might as well stop kvetching and put my nose to the grindstone. Talk to you all later.
