Two missile maintenance crewmen perform an electrical check on an LGM-30F Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in its silo. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

As US President Donald Trump heads to Helsinki for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump’s critics continue to inveigh against what they consider an illicitly close relationship between the two, a perspective stemming from the “Russiagate” scandal drummed up by supporters of Hillary Clinton to explain her defeat in the 2016 presidential election.

Russiagate or not, this summit may represent the two countries’ last, best opportunity to halt  or even reverse a decade of backsliding toward frigid Cold War relations. And Trump has a ready template at his disposal for pursuing warmer relations with a formidable, but hopefully former, foe.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan met with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Reykjavik.  As the non-profit Reagan Vision for a Nuclear-Weapons-Free World describes the summit, “[a] proposal to eliminate all new strategic missiles grew into a discussion, for the first time in history, of the real possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. … Reagan even described to Gorbachev how both men might return to Reykjavik in ten years, aged and retired leaders, to personally witness the dismantling of the world’s last remaining nuclear warhead.”

While the full vision didn’t pan out, a year later the US and the Soviets signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Five years later came the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. “New START” arrived in 2010, shortly before relations between the two governments began to deteriorate in a big way.

At this point, the US is working on “modernizing” its existing nuclear arsenal, while Russia touts an advancing hypersonic missile program. We’re moving back toward the days of American schoolchildren practicing “duck and cover” drills under constant threat of nuclear war.

The best possible outcome of the Trump-Putin summit would be a new treaty that I’ll call “Fresh START.” Under such a treaty, the two governments would commit to getting back on the track laid down by Reagan and Gorbachev, actively working to meet their existing obligations under Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT):

“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament …”

Nuclear weapons are weapons of terror and of Mutual Assured Destruction. They’re not militarily useful outside those two ways of thinking. It’s time for the two countries with the largest stockpiles of such weapons to move together toward decommissioning and destroying those stockpiles. We may never again live in a world without nuclear weapons, but we can aspire to a world with as few of them as possible.

If Trump and Putin can deliver a Fresh START toward that goal, their summit will have been a resounding success.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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For nearly four decades, since the Reagan administration, some among America’s “school choice” movement have advocated for the use of “voucher” systems to give parents more control over their children’s education. Various jurisdictions around the country have implemented the concept, with varying (and much-debated) results.

Most opposition to vouchers comes, as one might imagine, from supporters of government-run, aka “public,” schools for the vast majority of  students. Their concerns include loss of funding for those public schools as students migrate to private alternatives, the destruction of America’s secular character if church-operated schools gain market share, and perhaps even loss of national identity/cohesion as curricula move in different directions.

My own opposition comes from a very different direction: I’m against vouchers not because they might damage, or fail to replicate, the existing system, but because they threaten to make “private” alternatives more LIKE that system.

We’ve already seen this phenomenon play out in our colleges and universities. Government funding, whether it be in the form of the GI Bill, student loan guarantees and Pell Grants, research grants from government institutions, etc., always comes with strings attached.

Even if we like the content of some of those strings (non-discrimination requirements, for example), it is a simple fact that strings in general result in a loss of variety in our higher education options. “Elite” private universities may be able to afford more well-credentialed faculty and nicer buildings, but their curricula and their classroom environments have, over time, lost a lot of what made them different. When you take the King’s Shilling, you must henceforth take the King’s Orders as well.

The history of public education in America is an ugly thing.

You may have been taught that universal public education was implemented for the purpose of increasing literacy, numeracy, critical thinking and so forth among an uneducated populace.

In fact, our system was imported from Prussia and its goal has always been to turn out “good citizens” — drones who get educated enough to turn raw materials into finished goods on an assembly line, or aim an artillery piece on command, but not so well-educated that they might get uppity and question or rebel against the foundations of the system they live under.

It shouldn’t be surprising that such a system would devolve, as ours has, into a gulag archipelago of combination daycare centers / day prisons, many graduating inmates of which emerge barely qualified to press the picture of the cheeseburger on the cash register and count out the amount of change that flashes on the screen.

I’m not interested in saving our broken system. I oppose ideas that threaten to let that system absorb the alternatives to it. Vouchers are just such an idea.

Homeschooling, small cooperative schools funded and operated by groups of like-minded parents, and truly private academies, on the other hand, are our future — if we have a future.

If we’re really interested in reclaiming our birthright of literacy, numeracy, and free thought, it’s time to separate school and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Nothing,” economist Milton Friedman once observed, “is so permanent as a temporary government program.” And nothing makes a government’s programs — or, more importantly, changes in its core values — more permanent than the loss of collective memory that comes with generational changes.

We’re hitting a big one soon. It worries me.

Next year, the first generation of Americans who weren’t yet born on September 11, 2001 will come of age. They’ll graduate high school. They’ll get jobs. They’ll vote.

What they will not do, because they can’t, is remember: Remember a time before the 9/11 attacks, or the changes in American society that took place in the aftermath of those attacks. They won’t be equipped to yearn for better days that they’ve only heard about at second hand from their parents and grandparents.

They won’t remember a time when one could walk into an airport and get on an airplane without risking sexual assault in public by employees of the Transportation Security Administration.

They won’t remember a time before the domestic national security state was consolidated under an overtly nationalist label more appropriate to its creators’ police state aspirations: The Department of Homeland Security.

They won’t remember an era when the news wasn’t dotted with reports of American troops killed in Afghanistan, which the US has occupied since before they took their first steps.

They won’t notice that the US Border Patrol is twice as large now (20,000 employees) as it was when they were born and four times as large as it was in 1995. Or that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, roughly the same size, wasn’t even created until shortly after they were born to replace the smaller and slightly less Darth-Vaderish Immigration and Naturalization Service.

They won’t remember a time when the incidence of police “checkpoints” conducting unconstitutional searches in the name of stopping DUIs and drug trafficking ranged from exceedingly rare to non-existent (and when they were fewer than now for immigration enforcement in the 100-mile wide “constitution-free zone” on the borders and coastlines), or when there weren’t cameras at every intersection and scattered between to watch them whenever they left their homes.

Because they won’t remember those days, all the evils we’ve allowed the state to impose upon us since 2001 will seem, well, normal to them. And from normality follows permanence.

We’ve failed this next generation. Let’s hope they do a better job of saving themselves than we did of saving them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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