Next book

Discussing The Forsaken was very interesting -- thanks for your insights ladies! Jen Wall served a mission in Estonia in 1993, two years after the "Velvet Revolution" set them free from Russia. She remembers how when she first got there, the stores had just a few things in them, and were sometimes empty -- the people had plenty of (worthless) money, but nothing to buy with it. As her mission went on there was more and more food in the stores, with more selections. The prices were high, since it was all imported, but the young people were ecstatic -- though they had never seen bananas before and didn't know how to eat them. The “Five Year Plans” were supposed to end hunger and give everyone a job and health care, but food (and all other consumer goods) shortages, and the lines they produced, lasted the entire seventy year history of the Soviet Union.
That is just one tiny anecdote I thought I'd pass on that shines a light on the central problem of socialism -- basically, if you rely on the government to take care of you, it may, or may not, take care of you. Or it may keep you alive, but your living conditions are so poor (like in the Gulags) that you wish you were dead. Why would a bureaucrat care if you have good food and decent clothes. "We're trying to beat the Americans in the space race! We can't afford bananas for you!"
I'm writing an article on "socialization" for the LDS Eastern Home Educators conference (I promise this isn't a crazy tangent, but a link between our last book and our next book), and I just opened the book Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms by the noted educational historian Diane Ravitch, and read, in the chapter "On the Social Frontier" the following:
"It was odd that the Russian Revolution inspired (American) educators to want to build a new social order through the schools, because the schools in Russia had not created the Russian Revolution; nor did any of the progressive educators wonder how their own social ideals had been forged, since all of them were the products of subject-centered traditional education. Nonetheless, they shared the faith that progressive education would lead the way in building a new, collectivist social order. In the 1930s, few in the education profession questioned whether they should engage in the political education of their charges. Any educator who said his goal was to teach young people to master academic subjects risked being seen as a reactionary." (p.220) This fabulous book details the century-long fight between parents/local schools and the educational elite over whether the schools should be emphasizing academics to develop well-educated youth, or, as the elite wanted, teaching only job skills and "socialization" along with heavy indoctrination in the gospel of socialism.
We're NOT going to be reading this book (not now anyway), but here's the tie-in: the educrats who run the schools get to choose the values that our society will live by in twenty years, and right now, having mostly got their way in preaching socialism and denigrating western civilization, they are attacking capitalism through another route -- environmentalism. Both Lisa and Natalie said that they are actively involved in "un-indoctrinating" their kids from what they learn at school, and much of that has to do with "Saving the Planet" and "Going Green." Brother Nanto told me that little Paul is afraid of the dark and had been sleeping with a night light on, but lately had been insisting that they turn it off, since it was going to cause "global warming." SO SAD!
So (at last I get to it) the book that we are going to read next, in order to get lots of ammunition to fight the "watermelons" (green on the outside, red on the inside), is called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, by Christopher Horner. He is an old co-worker of my husband's from the days when he worked at the Competetive Enterprise Institute, and is a really sharp, hilarious guy -- I've met him. Here's a couple of interviews with him.

There are 18 copies of the book in the Fairfax system, two in the PWC system (but one is lost and the other checked out.) I have two copies that I have lent out already, but when I get them back, I can pass them on.