Fifth graders taught American guilt, global socialism

How a “liberal” Minnesota fifth grade teacher “explains” the 9/11 attack to his pupils:

In one lesson, he leads the children in a study of world population and distribution of income, and then takes them outdoors to illustrate their research on a large world map drawn on the playground blacktop. With each child representing 240 million people, the kids spread out—15 students in Asia, three in Europe, three in Africa, one in North America, two in South America, none in Australia.

Chocolate cookies are then distributed according to each continent’s gross domestic product.

Six cookies are shared by the 15 people in Asia. Nine are shared by three Europeans, one cookie for South America, just half a cookie for Africa, eight for the lone North American.

Most students have strong reactions and many questions. Why are there so many people in Asia? Why are the Europeans and Americans so rich?

It’s the liberal theory of why hundreds of millions of Moslems hate us and cheer when we are mass murdered: Moslems hate us and cheer our death because of our insufficent attention to world hunger. From which it follows that if we instituted further social programs to help Moslem countries, they would stop hating us. And when we do extend all kinds of help to Moslems, and they still don’t stop hating us, the liberals have only one response: we must do yet “more” for the Moslems.

What is the root of this Western sickness, this cosmic, narcissistic guilt-trip, that makes us see minorities, non-Westerners, and “others” generally as nothing but the passive recipients of our infinite bounty, rather than as beings in their own right, with their own share of the human nature in which ourselves partake?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2005 01:30 PM | Send