OK, so I dont’ know if any of you watched it, but I can see why parents were so very afraid President Barack Obama’s speech, which just ended. After all, who wants their children to hear things like this:

So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Or, perhaps it was this that made people worried:

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK.  Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

The President talking to adults; via wikipedia

Apparently, the U.S. President has committed a mortal sin by wanting to address U.S. school children via the telly to tell them to stay in school and work hard. Let us all pray. (Or, if you’re talk radio hosts, let you all prey.)

Through the spin of radio and the lack of decent reporting about what was really happening, people got the idea that Barack Obama was going to tell children to go home and tell their parents to pressure their legislators to vote for a public option in health care. These fear-mongers (c’mon, raise your hands so everyone knows who you are) got school districts and parents in such a tizzy that they didn’t know which end was up. Entire districts are choosing not to air the speech, some schools are even shutting down or starting late to avoid accidental exposure to the president. In Arizona, it seems the default position is letting each school or teacher decide locally whether to air the speech and then to let parents opt to have their children pulled out of classes that do show it if they – the parents – find it offensive that a president wants to tell kids to stay in school and work hard.

The text of My Education, My Future can be found here, for those who might actually like to be informed before complaining, and as you can see, it is basically a ra-ra, you can do it treatise to (we hope) inspire kids who might otherwise drop out of school. The speech will be live at the White House Web site at 9 a.m. Tucson time if you want to watch to see if the Prez sneaks in something that’s not in the speech, like the importance of healthy eating and getting exercise and respecting your elders. (more…)

Can you find your way to a hospital? When you get there, can you pay?

You can’t open any newspaper editorial page these days without seeing arguments for and against health care reform. You can’t turn on television coverage of Town Halls around the issue without seeing sometimes gun-toting – as was the case in Phoenix last week – and always sign-toting people protesting the public option as though giving health care to the most vulnerable among us (the very young, the very old, and the very poor) was akin to, well, acting like Hitler.

The comparison, of course, is specious, the crutch of those who cannot argue their case based on merits alone. It is also, as pundits on both the right and the left have explained, trivializing to the millions who suffered under Hilter’s cruel attempt to purify the human race.

But setting that craziness aside, we are still left with the problem of millions of Americans living without access to health care, and, for purposes of God Blogging, a question about people of faith and what they should do about it. According to the folks over at Faith For Health (and a couple of representatives of local Christian communities), believers should get pay attention to what radical discipleship calls one to when reflecting on health care reform. (more…)