California’s values clarification Lifeboat is sinking

Depiction of Sinking U.S.S. Titanic and Lifeboats

"California used to lead the nation in education. Honestly, I think California has lost its way, and I think the long-term consequences of that are very troubling."-- U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan

[T]he state will run out of cash by July 28 unless its budget is balanced in the next eight days.—George Skelton reported on June 22, 2009

I was educated in California and sometime within that process the Values Clarification dilemma called “the Lifeboat exercise” was taught in a class that I took.

As I remember it the class was broken up into small groups and given the following scenario; we were asked to imagine that a ship has sunk and a lifeboat had been put out from it. Each of us was just one of the members on that boat yet the lifeboat is overcrowded and in danger of being swamped unless the load is lightened.

We were given a description of other passengers in the boat, maybe a doctor, an elderly couple, a mother and child, an athlete, an entertainer, a businessman and so on like that. From this list we were asked to decide whom to throw overboard.

And as a finally caveat we were told there were no right or wrong answers.

Little did the purveyors of that little exercise realizes that one day their little exercise would have real world application for California and possible the entire United States of America. What I mean by that is the California ship of state is sinking because of years of overspending and mismanagement by the Democrat controlled California state legislature and such mismanagement put Californians into a literal financial overcrowded lifeboat. (see story)

For decades the California legislature has been controlled by Democrats and they have enacted legislation and spending which has filled the California lifeboat with special interest spending namely; spending on illegal alien education, illegal alien medical services and illegal alien welfare, spending to promote the radical environmental agenda of the green movement, spending to promote unions and spending that promotes partisan Democrat Liberal ideology in the state of California in general.

It is the same kind of out of control spending that Democrats took National with the Democrat controlled U.S. Congress’ $787billion dollar pork barrel spending that was lipsticked up as a Recovery and Stimulus package, which by the way, is not working and which president Obama signed into law in February.

If Liberalism is the Titanic then California is an overcrowded lifeboat put out in a red sea of deficit spending by the Liberal agenda of California Democrats and in this overcrowded lifeboat there are agenda items and spending that the Liberal controlled legislature refuses to throw overboard instead they seek to increase taxes on Californians who are already the highest taxed people in the Nation.

In addition, the political leadership in California has so encumbered it’s schools with so much of the special interest agenda that it has virtually trashed a once leading national education model, a one time envy of the entire nation, and made it rank at or near the bottom nationally in academic performance, student-teacher ratios in middle and high school, access to guidance counselors and the percentage of seniors who go directly to four-year colleges, according to a February report by UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access this all according to AP reporter TERENCE CHEA (see source)

The bottom line is, the California values clarification agenda created a void in the moral ethics of thousands of California students. Many of those children who are now adults like I am now, were convinced that there is no right or wrong in many respects or that there is at least a moral relativity between all ideas and beliefs meaning that all things are equal. Such conditioning would make it difficult to decide between cutting state services off from non-citizens illegally living in the United States since according to “values clarification training” there is no difference between a non-citizen and a citizen.

The California legislature has only until the end of this month before the whole lifeboat of California sinks into the murky depths of insolvency under the weight of it’s own mismanagement and uncontrolled spending which supported the Liberal agenda. It is under these pressures that California Legislators are having such a hard time deciding between which of their programs to cut.

As all this plays out, everybody -- the politicians, the two pollsters -- agree that the voters' overarching message was anti-Sacramento disgust: "Do your job, do it right and do it now."—George Skelton

Legislators and Governor Schwarzenegger have tried to deceive Californians into paying more taxes in a cleverly constructed special election so that they might continue down the red sea of deficit spending but the people of California were not fooled and demanded that their legislators start making decisions as to which special interest projects and programs should be thrown overboard.

There is little hope that the “Values Clarification” generations will make the right choices. In fact it is looking much like they would rather see the whole state fail rather than make the right cuts, cuts to their ideological sacred cows.

In the class exercise which I participated in we students made choices on who to throw overboard based on the values that we brought to the exercise.

The problem now is that after decades of erasing traditional American values by “Values Clarification” curriculum we are left with a California State legislature, many of them, have been educated in the California system and trained under “Values Clarification,” and as a result they have brought an entire state to the brink of fiscal collapse rather than making rational and ethnically legal policies that would have protected Californians.

Rather the special interest have run this state into the fatal iceberg of fiscal ruin while the Values Clarified California State Legislature can’t decided between saving citizens of the United States of America or saving Non-citizens who claim squatter-rights on California to these State Legislators who see squatter-rights equal to Constitutional rights due to their moral relativistic and values clarification training received from the California School System.

And now the ruinous circle is complete! Or will be June 30, 2009 when the entire State becomes insolvent.