"At Hope" ?? How About GET REAL!

Washington state senator Rosa Franklin thinks she has the answer to what to do with that state's "disadvantaged" or "at risk" children. She wants to soften the stigma that comes with those descriptions by replacing them with a new one, "at hope".

The Democratic, (there's a surprise), legislator thinks that negative labels are hurting children's' chances for success and that ditching "at risk" for "at hope" is just the ticket for these kids.

"We can really put too many negatives on our kids," said Franklin, who is the state Senate's president pro tem. "We need to come up with positive terms."

Of course this kind of nonsense does NOTHING to help troubled children, but the senator and her like minded liberal minions will feel better about the whole thing. It's the same kind of mentality that has given us a generation or two of people who expect a blue ribbon just for showing up. "Everyone's a winner!" "Don't pay any attention to that mean man who said you weren't good enough to make the team......EVERYBODY MAKES THE TEAM!"

Unadulterated crapola reins supreme in our society and it is already manifest in a public school system that refuses to flunk students who can't add, subtract, or write a simple declarative sentence. How we pay for it is in our face every day. Ever notice the little pictures of hamburgers and french fries on fast food cash registers? Those are for the kids we wave through graduation who somehow never learned how to make change.

When young men used to get drafted into the Army many a moron was saved through the tough discipline of a hardened veteran drill sergeant. No man who experienced basic training could fail to laugh at the idea of being treated as an "at hope" project. To a drill instructor, all recruits are "hopeless maggots", "dip shits" and worse. The inspiration and motivation of the soldier depends almost entirely on the knowledge that if he is successful in learning to fight and win he will never ever have to repeat basic training. If he flunks, the hell starts all over again until he succeeds.

"No fair" is the common lament of children. Somehow they think that life has a referee who makes sure that all of our ups and downs are distributed in an even handed manner. It hurts when they learn that isn't the case, though some never quite grasp the obvious.

A couple of hundred years ago the folks who didn't catch on to this basic truth wound up eaten by bears. Today we have beepers on trucks to alert people who are too stupid to get out the way when the vehicle is in reverse. Pathetic.

Idiotic politicians and political correctness do no favors for kids or society in general. At risk kids are AT RISK and not At Hope. It is only when we acknowledge a problem that we begin to fix it. Children need to know the score and to understand that they alone are responsible for their own success or failure. The longer we attempt to make ourselves feel better by denying the unmistakable truth the more our country is AT RISK.