A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

There was a commercial a few years ago encouraging financial support for historically black colleges with donations to the United Negro College Fund.  Its bottom line was “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”  As this holiday season progresses I seem to be brought back to that truth.  A mind is truly a terrible thing to waste, the only question is whose responsibility is it to make sure it’s not wasted?

It seems unlikely we will ever move past the issue of race, at least not in my lifetime, but the message of the UNCF was exactly correct.  A mind, any mind, is a terrible thing to waste.  Yet, every day we see the destruction of minds as a normal cost of life and business.  Everyone in a position of authority seems to think almost everything is more important, or that minds can only be saved through the completion of some lofty educational construct, or incarceration.  Both agendas seem to care little about the complexity of individual minds, or how they have been shaped to form a human being capable of advanced thought and independence.

Our species has been around for some 6-7,000 years and we have reached out to the heavens, sending probes that have left our solar system, yet we still cast aside almost 99% of the available minds as just so much flotsam and jetsam.  To take it a step further, thanks to instant communication we are now polarizing into massive tribes of US and THEM.  But, then again humans have always been tribal in our nature. 

There are clearly two schools of thought on this.  On the left, there is a belief it is the government's job, and those minds are part of the national capital the government must control.  I see this as the natural process of socialism, where “it takes a village.”  Looking at the educational systems of socialist states like pre-WW2 Germany, the USSR, China, Cuba, and others the rulers of the state make a concerted effort to take over the training of a child so their minds are conditioned to the needs of the state.

On the right, the responsibility of developing a child’s mind rests with the parents and the child.  They are aided in this by the state through the educational systems available, as well as any organized religion they may prescribe to, but the responsibility rests with the individual, not the state or the church.

It seems to me that at the end of the day, this difference is what separates "US" from "THEM."