"... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." -Alex Carey
"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations." -Noam Chomsky
The themes that have been prominent in our lives over the past two decades, and even more so those that have surfaced as a result of the Bush Administration; have been more amplified in our every day lives, social discourse and the media due to the importance and truly historical nature of the upcoming presidential elections. Of course, the fact that the economy is teetering on the edge of collapse and the horrendous foreign policies in themselves have been important, with or without the elections. So as i've recently dug deeper and researched many of these issues, many of them reminded me of HLA.
I think programs like HLA probably owe a lot of gratitude to President Clinton's policies and transformations that gave rise to Capitalism on this huge scale. The aftermath of these policies has been corruption on a wide scale, that has affected everything from schools, law enforcement, corporations and government (since corporations and special interests are in affect the ones pulling the strings. HLA is no exception. It's quite obvious that we're all thought of as consumers and objects to these big companies, as that was kind of the point. The idea behind it is to give people the freedom (really still in a very limited way) to live as they please and choose products as we want. And of course parents are sold this horrible idea of these boarding schools like HLA, and give their child's liberties and rights up in the process.
After September 11th, Bush passed The Patriot Act only because it was expected of them so that Bush would have powers to "protect our national security" and be able to react with military response to the terrorist attacks. The Patriot Act is almost 400 pages long and Congress was given about 5 hours to read it; so naturally it was never read before passed. (If you don't know what the Patriot Act is you should probably check that out due to it's complete disregard of the constitution and erodes our freedom and basic rights). Now enter the bill 1959: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. This basically builds upon the Patriot Act, but now any U.S. citizen can be named a terrorist by these standards, just for disagreeing with the government and expressing free speech. Basically it suspends the law and they can perform wiretaps, raid your home, detain you and place you in prison without a trial or any evidence whatsoever. The president can also declare Martial Law. Troops and law enforcement have been practicing this for quite some time, actually. A good book on this that is good for the average reader on the subject is “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot” by Naomi Wolf. There has already been imprisonment of our own citizens with no evidence, who have been taken to places like Guantanamo Bay and subjected to inhumane treatment and interrogation methods.
These are all somewhat reminiscent of the rules and lifestyle at HLA (of course the government level is quite more extreme in nature as it affects the entire country on such a grand scale, and Guantanamo is obviously by far worse). I think the parallels are quite interesting and surely alarming.
And although we're already not in a very good position due to the corruption and deception by the Bush administration, at least we're not all sitting around still arguing whether or not what they've done is wrong. We all know it, it's undeniable to anyone with any type of intelligence and/or decency whatsoever. It's also obvious that what HLA has done is completely wrong and inexcusable and there should be no reason for people to still be arguing about whether or not it was oppressive, abusive, deceptive, and is corrupt should no longer be subject buying into the petty arguments with crazy immoral people who defend such a cause in these forums. I posted something here a whole ago about my experience at HLA and how horrible and absolutely illegal and how wrong I, as well as many others, were treated. If somehow these weird defenders of this Academy on the website are still in denial and would like me to share it, I'll be glad to.
One thing I didn't talk much about was the quality, of lack thereof, of the education at HLA. During an entire semester of algebra 2, we covered about 1 1/2 chapters (that's being rather generous), and went over the basics of factoring a few basic types of binomials and polynomials- using only one method (the one that's usually taught first- trial and error). If you think that is somehow good education or qualifies as an algebra 2 course in high school, then nobody should take you seriously. There was more material covered in the trigonometry course, but it still wasn't nearly up to par and definitely did not cover all of the required material. The biology class failed to even give mention to the most fundamental concept or part of biology- evolution. And of course, the material covered was no where near acceptable. And the most ridiculous part was without a doubt the world history class. There, we read from the Qur'an, were forced to learn arabic and given tests weekly on it, and watched a good amount of videos of muslims praying in other parts of the world. They weren't so much about the history of the religion as much as they were just showing the beliefs, lifestyle and rules. This was the main focus of this class. We brushed over some other things very quickly , but basically didn't spend a whole lot of time on everything else. We even made posters about the festival of Ramadan and all of the rules and pillars and what not. Of course learning about history of major monotheisms is important, in the context of history and how it affected different events and cultures. I think it was pretty inappropriate. Oh, and another thing about this religion problem is that on Sundays we often had a Rabbi come to talk to us, which was mandatory. Even restrictions got to join in on that. I respect your religion, but this is pretty unacceptable. A few times a native american came to talk about his spiritual/religious views, but it was usually the former who visited. Separation of church and state, anyone? But obviously that shouldn't apply to HLA, where freedom of speech, liberty, equality and many others of our most basic rights don't prevail.
