Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.Sometimes it is good to make lemons out of lemonade By J. G. Fabiano I was talking to a colleague the other day about how education policies are driving many great veteran teachers out because they can no longer cope with the beaurocracy that is strangling a profession they have always loved and thought important. She then told me this evolution was probably good because it allowed new blood into our profession. She ended her response by stating it is sometimes good to make lemons out of lemonade. She then quickly tried to correct her statement but I told her the original comment was very true. Walking back to my room I started to think about other instances when situations sounded remarkably good only to turn out to be remarkably bad. Since I am a teacher the first program I thought of was the 'No Child Left Behind' education program our nation instituted five years ago. How could a name like 'No Child Left Behind' be a bad thing? Five years after the program started our education system is being buried in testing, data collecting, impossible standards that will drive most of our schools into failure, and the possibility our public education system that is still the envy of the world may just cease to exist. As I stated before many of our best teachers are being driven from their profession because of this program. They explain they went into teaching in order to make a difference in the lives of their students. With the excesses of this program their life's work has been reduced to being clerical workers more involved in data than the education of their students. Another program that comes to mind sounding almost too good to be true is the new fuel we are putting in our gas tanks every day. Instead of having a synthetic chemical placed in our gas in order to make it burn cleaner our nation has decided to use ethanol. In fact, 10% of our gasoline is now this alcohol. The beauty of this is we are the Saudi Arabia of agricultural products that can be used to produce ethanol. In the future, I am sure the percentage of ethanol in our fuel will increase. It is difficult to understand how such a program could be considered a lemon. The problem is analogous to the opportunity. Since we are the largest supplier of food in the world the concept of growing corn and wheat for fuel instead of food takes away from the food supply. Obviously it will be more profitable to make fuel out of food instead of leaving it as food. The whole world will feel the effect of this. Third-world nations, that are part of our planet, will become hungrier. With this hunger they will become more rebellious because they can't feed their families. With the rebellions there will be more troubled areas of our world we will be forced to control. The sweet taste of ethanol will become sour with time. One can't think of a concept in which an idea went from lemonade to lemons without discussion our war in Iraq. Remember too many years ago we were told the primary reason we were going to war was to protect ourselves from a nuclear attack by a nation led by a monster who could attack us within hours with weapons of mass destruction he already had. After we attacked and destroyed this monster's regime we found the weapons of mass destruction did not exist. We were then told the reason for going to war was to overrun a government that had killed its own people and had direct relationships with the terrorist organization that attacked us on 9/11. Soon the connection between Saddam Hussein's government and 9/11 fell apart. The concept there was any connection between Saddam and Al-Qa'ida was proven false. The primary reason we went to war then morphed into the concept of bringing democracy to the region. This then changed into a reality that if we left the region there would be mass carnage of the people of Iraq because of a civil war our government has yet to admit is happening. I read an article stating if we left Iraq the entire Middle East would fall into civil war directly affecting the security of our nation. All I could think about was the 'Domino Theory' that kept the Viet Nam war alive for well over a decade killing over 40,000 of our children. The sour of the lemons that was supposed to be lemonade is quickly becoming very bitter. The End.
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