29 results for author: Denele Campbell

Academic AND Vocational Education

Sidetracking traditional education and leaning into vocational training at an early age will only exacerbate cultural division in the U.S. Much of what currently upsets under-educated Americans is that they do not understand much of what they have to deal with on a daily basis. It’s not news that people fear the unknown. The anti-vaxxers are a perfect example—people who know nothing about viruses or how they function in the human body or how vaccines work to provide a level of immunity. So there’s all this pressure from the educated (scientists, doctors) and the government (tasked with protected public health) for people to get vaccinat...

Israel and Palestine – My Two Cents

The utter absurdity of the current situation in Israel/Palestine could have been predicted for the last 75 years. Did anyone really believe that you could move into a man’s house and “give” him the hall closet to live in and he would accept it? Yes, I understand that the Jews had suffered horribly under Hitler’s attempt to eradicate them. And long before that, the history of their horrific treatment deserves understanding and condemnation. But why did anyone think that what existed in Palestine could be rearranged like chess pieces and no one would care? Jews, Arabs, and yes Christians all lived side by side before 1948. What was wrong ...

Gas, Grass, and Ass: Adventures in Rural America, 1973

Seeking a self-sustaining life outside the city and a new start for her marriage, this twenty-five-year old a woman boldly embarked on proprietorship of a full-service gas station along a highway in rural Arkansas. Her hope to live and work at her own place of business soon encountered not only the end of her marriage but also the entrenched conservatism of the rural South. Joyful in recounting her experiences with an endlessly astonishing parade of human nature, Campbell portrays a unique slice of American life at a pivotal time with the fall of Richard Nixon’s presidency and the end of the Vietnam War. Buoyed by a wellspring of support and ...

Aquarian Revolution: Back to the Land

Aquarian Revolution: Back to the Land reveals the guts, glory, and grief of 1960s social upheaval and documents the real accomplishments wrought when dreams are forged into reality. In turn funny, heart-rending, and inspiring, these thirty-two interviews reflect not only the flavor of those times but also the continuing ethic so deeply embedded in the generation’s consciousness. More than four decades have passed since hippies heralded the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a New Age promising peace, love, and personal fulfillment. In the intervening decades, disillusionment and spin have molded our understanding of the Aquarian dream and in ...

Bailout or Investment? Student Loan Debt

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-free-college It’s not a student’s fault that the government shifted student loans over to private lenders who started increasing the interest rates on the loans. It’s also beyond a student’s power to determine what college costs. In 1980, the price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,231 annually—including tuition, fees, room and board, and adjusted for inflation—according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2019-20, the total price increased to $28,775. That’s a 180% increase. Needless to say, the income to be earned with the degree ...

His Inner Search

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an exodus from the cities brought hundreds of new settlers to the Arkansas Ozarks. Their personal stories are testaments to an awakening shared by many of the Baby Boom generation, personal and communal. This interview is one of 32 personal stories gathered in 1999-2000, and published in Aquarian Revolution: Back to the Land. I didn’t like the way I was treated as a kid. I was beaten regularly. I don’t think I’ve cried since I was seven years old, because if I cried, they would beat me with a leather strap until I stopped crying. I had a bleeding ulcer from age twelve until it healed up after I left ...

PUTIN’S COUP

Abortion has been, and continues to be, a vital weapon in the Republican toolbox, a means to gain control over a multitude of less savory objectives. With this hot button, they have been able to whip up energy within their ranks. Over the last fifty years, a growing mob of zealots have taken to the streets and the halls of government with placards showing the pitiful fetus so wronged by evil women and their fiendish abortion doctors. The truth is that the flap over abortion was never as much about the ‘unborn baby’ as it was about political capital. Powerbrokers saw right away that this issue aroused emotion like nothing else. Yet what the ...

FEARING OTHERS

  What if we all had the same color of skin?   Who would you hate then?   What if we all had the same religion?   What if we all had the same warmth in winter, cool in summer?   Who would we fight then?   What if we eliminated the industries of war, destroyed all guns and other weapons?   Would we kill each other with rocks and clubs?   What if our jobs all paid the same and my stainless-steel appliances were no newer than yours? What if our furniture was exactly the same, our lawns just as nicely tended, our cars the same year and model?   Would you still ...

NEWSPEAK

(Denele blogs from Arkansas. You can read more at www.denelecampbell.com) Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime, as contradictions of ...

OUR JOB AS CITIZENS

(Denele Campbell blogs from Arkansas. You can read her blog at www.denelecmpbell.org.) As a nation operating under the concept of self-rule, we the people have to talk coherently about the issues. Mass shootings doesn’t solve our problems, but rather exemplifies our current failures as citizens. How did we get to this point? Does the 2nd Amendment really grant the right to assault rifles and 100-round ammo clips? No, it does not. Nor do gun hoarders constitute a “well-regulated militia.” A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. ...