This essay was written by Tim Smith,aka shutupandgoaway on battleforums.

Many people, especially liberals, bemoan the state of the US, whithout showing an alternate solution. They especially bemoan finished issues such as race, making the situation even worse with policies such as affirmative action. I propose to, in this essay, state what i believe is wrong with the US and I will offer a solution.

The problem i believe to be most threatening is the problem of America's youth. America's youth faces many problems, and this is important because in 2006, America will have more adolescents than any time in history. The first threat to America's youth is the threat of lack of education. The educational system of the US is collapsing far more quickly than it can be repaired. For example, a student can finish high school without knowing how to read. I'm sure that if you can read this, you will find this pathetic and unnacetable in a country that claims to be the greatest in the world. Another threat to America's youth is the lack of political information and caring. There is not a lot of political awareness in America, especially in the 18-25 demographic. It is true that the music industry is trying to combat this, but the mainstream music industry is far behind less known punk rock outfits such as Anti-Flag and NoFX. These punk rock bands are extremely politically active, but they have far less of an audience than other forms of music. The people who listen to these groups are also already most likely politically aware, because most of these groups carry an overtly political message. Thus, the media and private groups are doing little to combat political unawareness. A third large threat to America's youth is the media in general. It's bad enought that the corporate media manufactures 98% mindnumbingly stupid programming, but this is not only applied to entertainment. If you watch the news, you will notice that there are nice little things called human interest stories. These are simply reporting on pointless things such as celebrities, movies, or random useless trivia stories instead of reporting on politics, technological breakthroughs, encomics, protests, or crimes. This and the practice of airing the same thing constantly are a huge plague upon the media. Even on NPR, i've heard the same thing for about a week now, and this is the best station for news there is.

First, the political awareness of America's youth, and Americans in general, is very low. Many people blindly follow the a single party simply because their parents, friends, co-workers, or bosses follow it. A system run by blind partisan voting is not a democracy, or even a republic, but a nation of drones, controlled by a small portion of aware people who manipulate the massive group of blind partisans. Thankfully, the blind partisans are in the minority, as many are not fully blind partisans, and do believe and understand the party's ideology. However, if there is not a revolution in voter awareness, a regression in political awareness will continue, eventually degenerating to a Droneocracy, the name i assign to the rule by the small, manipulative group, controlling a large, unaware group of drones. The way to avoid this and to create an upward trend in voter awareness is to add more media programming about all the candidates for an office and to continue making voting registration more readily available. Get out and vote organizations have done an admirable job of making registration easily available, as have activism groups. They are not, however finished. There is still more work to be done in poor areas that may not have internet access, such as making voting registration available at public places such as community centers and grocery stores, and possibly even malls. Many people in low income areas do not have time to get to the city hall, but may be able to get to these places many already go to. Thus, voter turnout would increase, making the will of the people know, but we still must repair voter awareness. The media can no longer influence the election of the president as much as it does. Now, one may ask how the media does this. The media influences and controls many votes based on coverage of candidates. Any politically active or current events oriented person will tell you that no news source is without bias. This is extremely dangerous around voting time, as many voters depend on the corporate media for their information on candidates. This bias often effects the way a candidate is portrayed, and even whether or not they are portrayed at all. The media should not be able to do this; the purpose of news reporting is not to change the election, it is to provide as news as accurately as possible. The reporting will always be biased, but the media must provide equal coverage for all, and the coverage should be discounted for candidates at election time, in case someone who is (heaven forbid!) not an incredibly rich corporate executive or corporate politician runs to actually represent the people. This runs into the issue of campaign finance reform. This is essential for America to stay under a good government. Candidates require such an incredible amount of money to run, that by the time they actually run, they are almost required to be so rich that they are alienated from the working class, and even the middle class. A policy discounting air time for candidates must be instituted, or a government station for each candidate must be temporarily created. The money for this would be found in reducing spending on building a moon colony, or on sending probes to Mars. This is how candidates will cease to be chosen by the media. To increase voter awareness of what candidates are doing, representatives should communicate more with their constituents. I realize that they are in Washington a significant amount of time, but they should ask for more input and give information on what they are doing in Washington back to their constituents through mail, or on websites kept up by staffers. If people know what their representatives are doing without going through a laborious process of sifting through many internet, newspaper, or magazine articles, activities in which mostly politically aware people already engage in, than this system would greatly increase the ability of a young, possibly largely underinformed voter to make a decision about voting for the congressman.

The American public education system is in serious need of reform as well. As I said, it is possible for a student to graduate from high school without knowing how to read. Many influential politicians, mostly democrats, believe the way to combat this is by starting education at age 3 or 4. I strongly disagree with this philosophy; the problem is not the lack of time in school; after all, many great men such as Abraham Lincoln were not educated for a long time. The quality of public education in most areas is the issue, not the quantity. It is not productive for a young child to be taken off to school as soon as he is able to function at all. This will certainly cause rifts in families, and we already have enough of those in the US. There is also the problem that most teachers are not trained and able to deal with children younger than five, and most teachers, even ones that are trained to do so, have troubles with teaching even kindergarteners how to read and do simple arithmetic. The schooling suggested for these young children is real education, not just a structured environment to prepare for formal schooling. I strongly doubt that this system would accomplish it's goal of teaching children early on, but simply hurt America's families and flush our tax dollars down yet another bottomless toilet. As early starting of education is clearly not the way to reform the American school system, I will propose a way to do so. First, to repair national literary proficiency, especially at an early age, I propose the institution of phonics into our public school system. It stands to reason that a system that is at least somewhat rational would be vastly superior to the arbitrary memory based system currently taught in America's schools. Secondly, I would like to see extreme changes in college courses in education. These would not only include the teaching of phonics, but give teachers the ability and empowerment to actually discipline misbehaving students, instead of incessantly talking about it. They would also teach potential teachers to defend the usefullness of their subject, as with inreasingly cynical students, the teachers will be taken far more seriously if they can actually explain why students should believe their class worth taking, and thus the student's performance would increase, as would respect for the teacher.Teacher's must also be required to have good command over their own subject, so that all classes taken by all students will be worthwhile and informative to the students in the classes. Theachers must also not be forced to join the union by harassment from the unions. This is not the purpose of unions;unions should not fight against it's members, it should protect and serve them. I also propose that teachers be paid more, as they are payed very little currently, especially in proportion to the importance of their vocation.

The problems produced by the corporate media are the hardest to combat. They are protected by the first ammendment, and this is more legally important than the problems the media causes. These problems include extreme shallowness over things such as clothes, attractiveness, corporate censorship, and excessive care over inconsequential material objects. The shallowness i speak of is caused through the attitudes of advertising companies and of tv show characters, and especially in the content of fashion magazines. The entire idea of fashion is, in my mind, an extremely shallow and commercial thing. It is just a group of designers deciding what people should wear that year, and then marketing it as a "fashion breakthrough". This is also true of many ads; ads market products by simply showing attractive people who supposedly use this. This is not only indicative of the shallowness of this industry, but of the American consumer. These products may be completely worthless, but simply because they may have a more attractive spokesperson, they have great revenue because ignorant people buy products based on the subliminal message that people who use this product will become like the spokesperson himself, or herself. The combat of shallowness in the media and society in general is a hard issue, because the first ammendmant, rightly so, protects the press. The entertainment industry based in the media will most likely not change it's content, but the news industry most definetly would with the correct stimuli. If the government, partnered with citizen groups, would issue incentives to news companies to run real stories and give actual equal time to candidates, or even if enough people eimply withdrew monetary support from these stations until policy was changed, there could be a drastic change in the bias and lack of content in the media. There will still be bias, as the media is run by human beings, and human beings all have views which will, purposefully or not, run together into almost all communication, especially in the news industry.

Another problem that faces the US is the problem of security. President Bush has attempted to address this through forming the Department of Homeland security and taking away our fourth ammendmant rights.The department of homeland security is and was a good idea, but the abolition of our rights is not. The patriot act may quite easily produce even more enemies of the US out of our own citizens, angering them to the point of rebellion and terrorism. This is clearly not a course we wish to take. The way to defend our country from terrorists is to stop aid to countries supporting terror, not countries tied to al quaeda through nothing but rumor and suspicion. Afghanistan was a step in the right direction, because it scared osama into extrem secrecy. Now, we must squeeze other countries known to be helping al quaeda or other terrorist groups such as saudi arabia, iran, and pakistan.Another policy that would help security would be a sort of gun control law. A gun control law that did not punish law abiding citizens for the crimes of violent criminals, but at least makes it harder for these criminals to obtain these weapons. A complete gun ban would be a bad idea, as it would not stop criminals from getting guns, as they are commonly obtained illegally anyway. I propose a partial gun control law. This would do several things:First, it would ban sale of assault weapons(uzi's,AK's, sawed off shotguns, under 8 gauge shotguns)to anyone who does not have proof of membership in the US military or the SWAT team. These weapons can serve only one purpose:to kill human beings. This is the function of the army and SWAT team. It is true that it is sometimes necessary to kill in self defense, but a .2 gauge shotgun or an AK-47 is not necessary for this. The only purpose of weapons that powerful is to carry out military or guerilla style attacks. Another measure that I would propose is one limiting gun owners to owning no more than three guns. It is true that this hurts collectors, but is it more important to appease hunters who have a gun for each type of animal and collectors, or to protect the people from violent criminals and terrorists by making it harder to obtain large amounts of weapons? This is not unconstitutional, as it does not ban guns completely; anyway, since when have high powered special ops weapons been required for a standing militia? Felons convicted of violent crimes such as rape,murder(of any degree),or armed robbery should not be allowed to purchase guns of any type. Laws effecting in policy like this would greatly improve national security, especially against gang violence.

A problem that has become more and more potent in the past few years is the fact that our intelligence gathering agencies are clearly deficient in their actual gathering of intelligence.They did not even PREDICT 9/11, and they,along with British intelligence, got us into Iraq under completely falsified pretenses.I do not know much about the inner workings of the CIA,as I am a private citizen,and this secrecy is a good thing for an intelligence agency. I would imagine that it is possible that these intelligence failures could be avoided through a system giving less autonomy to the agents. If the information was more centralized and the agency worked closely together to stop terror,instead of simply having their fingers everywhere, we may have been able to avert 9/11.If the agents were working together more closely,the Iraq crisis may not have happened as well,due to more accurate findings.It may also be true that intelligence is lacking funding. If this is true,I would say that this would definetly be a good candidate for additional budget money. I disagree with the president's policy of adding to military spending;I believe that we should send that 10% increase to the CIA and FBI, not to the military. The president's reasoning on this is that we need the money to make the military more agile to "fight terror" by buying new weapon systems. This is true, but it would be far more economically feasible to spend on the CIA, which is already built, trained, and armed to fight terror than to change the regular military into a terror fighting operation.