You might not realize you are starving to death

When I was in the army, many of the cadre who trained us were World War II and Korean War veterans.  Part of the training was to instill in us the U.S. Military Code of Conduct, which had been instituted a fews years earlier under the Eisenhower administration.  It has a section devoted to how to behave if you are taken a prisoner of war.  It instructs:  Article III - If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

The sergeant who covered that article for us had been taken prisoner by the Germans.  He and some fellow soldiers escaped from the prison camp and made their way across the Alps to neutral territory.  Their escape took some elaborate preparation.  The GI prisoners were underfed and under-clothed and in a weak and vulnerable condition so that escape was not much of a consideration.  The Germans were confident that the GIs were not in any shape to execute a successful escape.  That confidence was used against them.

The GI prisoners were assigned to do the menial tasks for the prison, such as peeling potatoes.  They were supposed to take the peelings and other waste to feed a herd of pigs that was maintained to feed the German personnel.  But all of the potato peelings did not make it to the hogs.  The GIs developed a system for diverting the peelings to two  other places.  One was to a fermentation vat where some GIs were engaged in making a crude vodka.  However, that enterprise was a diversion in case the Germans discovered some missing potato peelings and had a lockdown search of the prison camp.  The other place was a nightly enterprise of turning food waste and any other ingredients which the POWs could smuggle away into a stew rich in fiber, vitamins, and minerals.  Potato peelings were the main ingredient because they were the most abundant source of nutrients.

The taste of the stuff was not a consideration.  The health of the POWs was the objective.  Their diets appeared to the German guards to keep them weak and unlikely to revolt or take on strenuous tasks, so the GIs played the role of listless and demoralized prisoners, while almost every night making a concoction that kept their bodies nourished for action.  If the Germans pulled a surprise inspection, all evidence of the stew could be disposed of quickly, leaving the vodka-making apparatus as the only evidence of a surreptitious enterprise.  The Germans would confiscate the vodka for themselves, but regarded its making as an enterprise that would further weaken the POWs and divert their energies from revolt or escape.  The Germans were kept unaware that the GIs were fortifying themselves with a nutrient-laden broth and a physical conditioning routine almost every night.

I do not remember any details of the escape. I do recall that the escapees traversed some mountains in the winter, but the point of the presentation was to stay in shape as much as possible so that one could create and take advantage of opportunities to escape.  I cannot forget the part about the nutritious value of potato peelings.  When I cook potatoes, I try to leave the peelings on.  But that probably has more to do with laziness than nutrition.  Nevertheless, potato peelings are a constant reminder to me of survival in perilous times.

We have reached a point in human history where many of our brains are not receiving the essential nutrients to function.  They are getting too weak to generate logical thought.  Like people whose diet is largely junk food so that they can't digest  proteins, many peoples' brains cannot digest facts.

The fact is that the means to deliver information on a mass scale is so constricted that it does not handle essential facts well.  The human brain is getting unaccustomed to direct exposure to hard facts.

For a number of years now, the news media has pared down its editorial staffs and its coverage of events.  The Internet has had a huge effect on the distribution of information and goods.  Aberdeen, for example,  has lost department stores--Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Herberger's--and other retail outlets--Osco, Ben Franklin's, Walgreens--and Shopko announced it will close in May.  The mall is half empty.  The news media has experienced a concomitant decline because of the loss of advertising revenues from retailers.  The local newspaper recently announced a serious reduction in staff.

In addition, the media has changed the way it delivers information.  Cable news finds it cheaper to fill its broadcast time with panelists who sit around and give their opinions about politicians and events rather than send experienced and competent reporters out to determine what the facts are.  And as people turn to the Internet to get news, they tend to select sites which conform to their prejudices.  Even when facts get presented with some clarity and verification, they get so mauled over by commenters on the Internet that the facts get lost in the contentious noise.  The facts get displaced by exchanges of ignorance and animus.  The internet exchanges feed stupidity.

People who realize the deficiencies of the information they are receiving become like those GI prisoners of war scrounging for nutrients to survive.  A constant message going out from the White House is that the legacy media is the enemy of the people and produces fake news.  Those who have some understanding of how real journalism works, however, rely on the legacy media to get at the true facts.  Real journalism has the job of finding and verifying actual facts, not merely passing on jabber that may or may not have any relevance to real life.  If you watch cable news or browse the Internet, there is a good chance that you won't encounter a single fact.  And when you do come across one, a swarm around you will be screaming that it's fake. 

The human brain can't function properly on a diet of opinion.  It needs the facts of the reality in which it operates to successfully deal with that reality.  And it needs the facts to analyze the coherence of the opinions it encounters.  It also needs some skill in assessing which opinions are valid and which are ignorant reaction.  Providing brains with facts and the ability to reason with the facts is the underlying objective of all education.

Many of the attacks on public education are coming from the right wing that seeks to keep students ignorant and gullible.  Right wingdings have sought positions on school boards and state legislatures so that they can tamper with education and make it a brain-washing process to create ignorant and unthinking constituents.  The Washington Post has the slogan Democracy Dies in Darkness.  The objective of many in the Republican Party is to darken public school classrooms so that democracy may die.

There is no better example of the GOP undermining education than the 2019 South Dakota Legislature.  Fortunately, it has kept the wingdingbats in check.  Somewhat. Nevertheless, the dingbats have introduced legislation that tries to overrule practices and policies put in place by the professional educators.  South Dakota Republicans have an obsession with transgender kids.  This is despite the fact that only "about 0.7 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds living in the United States identify as transgender."  Most schools make provisions for these kids to use restrooms and locker rooms according to the physical plants they have to work.  Their main concern is to provide clean and safe places for kids to go to the restroom and practice hygiene, not whether some kid might catch a glimpse of another kid's genitalia.  

The Governor is promoting a bill to require the passing of a citizenship test to graduate from high school, despite the fact that the state content standards for social studies are constructed around the development of civics and citizenship.   The Legislature is diddling around with a bill that requires each school to display the motto "In God We Trust" prominently somewhere on on the premises.  It looks very likely to be put into law.  

Perhaps the most anti-education proposal was voted down, but it proposed that the mandatory attendance age for students be lowered from 18 to 16.  The legislator who sponsored the bill is a retired high school English teacher.  Proponents of the bill said current law puts too much of a burden on schools to manage kids who don’t want to attend class. The sponsor, says the state is doing an injustice to its schools, parents, taxpayers and students.  These legislators would rather see uneducated 16-year-olds roaming around aimlessly with  no futures rather than be kept in school to improve their opportunities.  This failed bill raises serious questions about what kind of effect this former teacher had on students.  It is an example of the attacks on education within the GOP.  The goal of these attacks is to create an ignorant and inert constituency that does not question the demeaned status with which it is regarded by the right wing.

If there is one thing the South Dakota GOP hates it is that the educators might be quietly and competently doing their jobs.  The efforts to tamper with and pervert education are  a constant obsession in the GOP mentality with the goal to turn schools into indoctrination centers.  The success of those efforts is illustrated in the kind of people who are elected to office in South Dakota.   The Speaker of the House, in response to a bill for Spanish language drivers'  license tests actually said, "The idea that we’re going to dilute our population with a second culture and encourage that second culture it doesn’t advance our state at all."  He is the same man who banned a lobbyist from the House floor because she noted that a signifiant portion of the state legislators were "wackies."

While one can point to the anti-democratic absurdity of the man, one must address the people who elected him to office.  The ignorance and crude malice of the electorate is the issue, and the subversion of education and the media has contributed to the prevalence of that ignorance and the environment of malevolence that pervades much of the state..  The wackies in the state legislature are creating a stupid constituency designed to keep them and their kind in charge.  

Our young people of intelligence and talent seem to have subscribed to a civilian code of conduct requiring them to escape the state at first opportunity.  South Dakota officials have long been perturbed that it loses its brightest students at high school graduation because they tend to choose colleges out of state.  But they then lose those good students from the state's colleges when they look to advance their careers in other states.  The reasons for this are many, but a driving factor is the attitude expressed by the Speaker of the House about protecting the purity of the state culture.  To the educated, that purity means stupid and mean, and they want to move away from it.

We citizens are prisoners of a culture war.  Those who preside over us issue a mental diet designed to keep us weak, flaccid, and indolent.  Like those POWs who scrounged potato peelings while watching for their opportunity to escape, we have to be on the look out in our education system and our media for the hard facts that can lead us out of the morass of lies and deceit in which we are forced to operate.  We need to face the facts of global warming, lying presidents, a moronic state legislature, and especially our collaborating friends and neighbors who help those who wish to keep us ignorant and inert.  

Remember the potato peelings.  They may keep the democracy alive so that it might work again.