Richard Dreyfuss - One Thought Scares Me...: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Dont Teach Our Children What We Dont Wish Them

Copyright 2022 by Richard Dreyfuss

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-7612-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-7613-5

Printed in the United States of America

To my wife Svetlana, for showing me what love truly is.
The key is sharing.

Contents

I have some questions:

Why did we remove the subject of Civics from our public schools?

Why have we made it impossible to give our children even a glimpse of the reality of running our government before its their turn to run the government?

When and why did we stop telling our children that we were responsible for a revolution in governance that was the first ever to free the minds of the entire human race and firmly commit to our belief in the potential of the poor?

Why have we kept all this completely unknowable by our progeny for the past fifty years?

Why have we refused to even discuss this stupid and self-destructive act?

Introduction

D avid Sarnoff was an immigrant who became one of the most admired Americans of the twentieth century. He created and owned NBC Radio, and in the 1940s he created the NBC television network.

He also owned the company that produced RCA Victor television sets. He created NBC TV so that people would have something to watch when they bought RCA Victor television sets.

Imagine the world after World War II; in the late 1940s and early 1950s we were at the top of the world, we were the winners over Hitler and his ideas, and we, as GIs and as a nation, were admired and respected as few people or nations in history have been. We had saved the civilized world from an uncivilized nightmare that might have become the future of humankind were it not for the United States of America and its allies, the Russians, the British, and others. We were at peace, at great sacrifice, and though the world was still a turbulent place, America was different, and held in real affection by millions of people around the world.

Now imagine buying Sarnoffs RCA Victor TV set. It was a new technology, and no one was capable of seeing how powerful it would be. Within a few years, we were happily hooked on the delivery of images of fantasy and reality, entertainment and current events.

No one realized how hooked we were until we began to study the phenomenon closely and discovered that the American peoples toilets, in the millions, were flushing at regular intervals, timed to the commercials of I Love Lucy and the breaks from the reality/drama of the ArmyMcCarthy hearings, broadcast live into our homes. Timing to commercial breaks was a perfect irony, because Sarnoff, the Immigrant Boy Who Made Good, was originally opposed to commercials on television. He thought that commercial television was inevitably going to create a shallow experience on NBC television, and CBS and ABC on that same RCA Victor television. We might have had more than one TV, each set dedicated to a different network. Might have been...

Now imagine turning off the TV and going to bed; imagine not knowing that when you turned off the RCA Victor TV that Sarnoff had sold you, it didnt go off. (That didnt happen; just imagine that it did.) It stayed on and listened and recorded everything it could, and sold the information it received to advertising.

Imagine finding out about that in a newspaper or on the radio or even from a television news bulletin.

Perhaps Sarnoff would deny it at first, but then hed have to fess up. So, add to his list of hypothetical ethical lapses (or criminal behavior): Lying under Oath.

(Please remember this didnt happen, its a story, a tale, IT DIDNT HAPPEN...)

But imagine how we would feel about Sarnoff then. CBS and ABC didnt do this, only David Sarnoffs NBC (this is my story, remember?). Our society as a whole had heroes who were your neighbors and our GI fathers who just a minute ago had saved the world from Hitler; we watched Leave It to Beaver and Walt Disney shows, the world was still trying to comprehend the word Holocaust, Ike was in the White House, boys were in Cub Scouts, and America was the most admired country on the planet. What would we want to do to Sarnoff for being revealed as a snaky con man, worse than Bernie Madoff, for damaging our fine reputation in the eyes of the world?

Wed be thinking thoughts that are fear and anger and stuff not fit for polite society.

WED WANT TO STRING HIM UP BY HIS THUMBS, wouldnt we?

WED WANT TO SEND HIM UP THE RIVER, wouldnt we?

You betcha.

So, now, Mark Zuckerberg...

Zuckerberg isnt nervously rubbing his thumbs while he appears on the news under oath in front of Congress, is he? I bet he isnt even worried about any kind of punishment at all. And we dont expect any, do we? Even when the owner of Facebook announces that he is going to allow a change of rules and says he will encourage Facebooks users to assassinate Putin, a stretch of what we would call appropriate behavior...

What changed?

I mean, aside from a new technology, what changed?

We did.

Thats what this book is about.

Chapter 1

A Spiral of Decay

I m not a tease, so here it is in one sentence: If we share the sovereigns power but no one tells us what that means and how that works, then we dont got it.

We dont teach our Constitution anymore.

We dont teach our Bill of Rights.

We dont teach our governance theory, thought to be at the time of its creation the most radical theory because no other country agreed with our idea that Sovereign Power could be left in the hands of all of the people. We call the study of government and the tools necessary for the maintenance of a civil society civics.

We dont teach civics either.

All these things have been removed from American public schools for over fifty years.

Have you felt the consequences of what I just told you? Does it explain a large part of the spiral of decay we all feel in the country today?

Does it make you angry? Does it horrify anyone, other than me? Because its horrifying, people. This is our one real world, and it has become unquestionably absurd and suicidal. We were the first to attempt a sensible approach to create fairness in governance. We could have done much better, but at least we didnt just repeat the structures of governance that had preceded ours, all having built-in advantage for the Few, keeping the rest of us, the Majority, as cattle.