Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • June 16, 2010 citizens are losing the house to property taxes? I don’t think so. Can we afford these people in the middle of an economic slump? No. Senior citizens have contributed taxes, and sometimes soldiers, to the war against Hitler and the cold war against Stalin as fought in Korea. Does that make them irrelevant now that both of these monstrous figures are now dead? I don’t think it does. They were there when they needed them, just as Washington, Lincoln, and Grant were there when we needed them. Let’s help them and not hurt them with the notion that enough schooling can get every kid into Princeton. It isn’t about taxpayer money. It’s about IQ and how much your parents foster your love of learning. The public schools just can’t cut it. If they say they can, they’re trying to save useless jobs. The prom is not the SATs. Feel free to laugh at them, and swing the axe, big time. If your kids need fantasy, send them to Disney World. If they want Ivy League colleges, have their IQs privately tested. Unless you are a legatee or a phenomenal athlete who is also reasonably bright, the Ivy League is out of reach unless your IQ is 140-plus. Are you starving in Northwest Bergen County? Nobody should starve in the middle of prosperity, but that is the vestigial remnant of Judeo-Christian culture, not the secular culture advanced by the ACLU with O’Hair’s help. O’Hair was murdered by a fellow atheist along with her son and granddaughter when a fellow atheist decided to steal the money she was stealing herself – a squalid but appropriate end to a greedy, ignorant, vulgar woman who served as an eager cat’s paw for the moral destruction of America. I once flew to Los Angeles to appear on several radio shows. One radio host, Michael Jackson – not the singer, but a West Coast radio personality – told me he would never interview O’Hair. He was an observant Jew, and a gentlemen to his fingertips. He all but flipped when he discovered that I knew enough Hebrew to interpret what the Old Testament actually said. “Lo tirzeh” doesn’t mean “Thou shalt not kill.” It literally means “Do no murder.” This is important to people who regard devout Jews, God-fearing Christians, or Muslims as hypocrites. Facts are stubborn things, as Benjamin Franklin was wont to observe. Do not accept everything you read as factual. Trust me: Most of it is propaganda promulgated by greedy children living off their parents because publishers won’t pay qualified journalists a living wage. You will be deceived by what you read elsewhere. Can anybody afford to support a family on what the competition pays? Do the math and you’ll see who is telling you the truth. You chose whom to trust. It’s your tax money, not mine. The amount of money people pay for the school system that favors only the most gifted students is preposterous, and what people who are paying if they don’t have kids in the schools is outrageous. The vast majority taxpayers, for instance, shrug off foreign languages and are satisfied if their kids plow through two or three years of Spanish. Forget French, the major culture language of the West other than English. Forget German, the major culture language of Eastern Europe, including Russia, where the ability to speak German separates people with a future from people who don’t. (I’ve met very few educated Russians or Poles who didn’t understand at least some German, and these were the intelligent people capable of rebuilding both counties.) Forget Japanese and its four crazy alphabets, including our own– the language of the free world’s second biggest economy. Forget Chinese, with its mind-boggling-picture-writing – the language of all ancient Asian cultures, including Japan, and of what will pretty obviously replace Japan as the world’s second economy within the next decade or two. Keep flogging on Spanish because it’s easy and there are plenty of tenured teachers who need those safe jobs teaching it. Who cares about the kids? It’s the teachers’ jobs that matter even though the kids who aspire to top colleges would really rather aspire to anything but Spanish – a perfectly good language but not an Ivy League bargaining chip. Who is the Spanish contemporary of Goethe, Schiller, Lamartine, Hugo, or Tolstoi? Somebody tell me. But this above all – keep flogging the languages that are convenient for the teachers, not those that are useful for the kids in college or in employment. We all know what’s important: It’s called job protection. Where public sector jobs are concerned, nobody is safe. While that is sad, that is also as it should be. I personally know one of the young policemen whose job is at risk in Ridgewood, and if I had the choice to make I would keep him on if at all possible, or re-hire him once that option became viable. I suspect that if I knew the other policemen personally, I’d feel the same. Abuse of authority for private gain or out of sheer arrogance and lying under oath should lead to the immediate dismissal of any public employee who carries a badge and a gun. Otherwise, we should respect their courage and restraint in taking on a task that is stressful and sometimes dangerous. The reality is that we just have too many people on public payrolls – with school systems rather than police and paid fire departments being the key examples. I reflected on a family I knew who “did everything” for their kids and basically credit-carded themselves out of Northwest Bergen County paying for those frills the schools did not provide. The kids did so-so in school: no Ivy, no MDs, lawyers, or engineers. One never finished at all. Basically they wasted their money. They had a right to waste their own money. They had no right to waste my money or other people’s money or to chase the thriftier older people out of town before they spent themselves out of the house on ballet lessons and show-off vacations. Feed people who cannot make it on their own, but quit feeding their fantasies. Over the weekend, I celebrated another birthday and took part in some responsible reflection. Each of us carries a sort of internal barometer that tells us we’re about 28 years old. I feel that way, which is why I got rid of my beard when it turned white, and why I’ll get rid of my moustache when I stop plugging my present book and my casual resemblance to the principal character is no longer a fiscal incentive. I suspect that barometer holds us on course until the numbers flip and we realize we’re 82. A respected and likable friend who is 82 spoke recently at a public meeting and urged everybody to forget their petty fears and grievances and do what is best for everyone. I realized that he was also 28, based on the barometer. I’ve been a reporter since a year after I left the U.S. Army with a very small medal and a very small limp. By the time I was, let us say, 35, I had long since given up the notion that anybody except for Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama cared enough about anybody but themselves to reconfigure their lifestyles beyond the next paycheck or whatever entitlement program they’re plugged into. “I’m old, so even though I’ve got five million in the bank, I deserve Social Security.” “I didn’t get here legally, but I deserve a governmentfunded scholarship even though I hate to read.” “I was in the service, but pulled strings so I never saw combat, so I deserve four years of college at the taxpayers’ expense.” You take it from there, and it will take you straight to the bottom. As my good friend Quintilius Dickerson – half African, half Cherokee, and 100 percent made in the USA – once told his son: “Gimme died.” If you are disabled or seriously too old to work, you will be able to find a program with your house of worship so you don’t starve or freeze. Outside the religious context, which is vital and important, the remainder of the population doesn’t care any more. The late Madelyn Murray O’Hair, backed by the same American Civil Liberties Union which shrugged off the deportation of the Japanese-Americans to concentration camps because of their race, terminated the idea that the United States is a Christian country. The United States is no longer a Christian country. The United States is now a secular country where most people are fortunately still Christians. American citizens now owe nothing – I mean this seriously – to failed people because they are American citizens. The Declaration of Independence suggests four times that the United States is theistic, but there is no legal documentation that the United States is Christian. I’m a Christian and I try to help people in need because I am a Christian. My wife and kids do the same. However, as an American citizen, I owe people squat, and I don’t want to pay taxes for them because the tax money is mostly wasted by bureaucrats. How much energy does it take to print out form letters and run the form letters through a mailing machine? Does it take $60,000 a year when senior To tell the truth, and take the hits Great season for Mahwah Mets The Mahwah Mets beat the Mahwah Yankees 7-6 in the finals to become the Junior Division Mahwah Recreation Softball Champions. Standing: Asst. Coach Tom Bohde, and Head Coaches Chuck August and John Devine. Kneeling: Jamie Weiss, Christy Altomare, Dominique Maio, Kayla Devine, Georgia Allaker-Cassidy and Emily August. Sitting: Vanessa Bognar, Isabella Moriarty, Isabelle Mendez, Erin Allegrino, Jessica Cianci and Therese Bohde.