Religious Tolerance Does Not Mean Cultural Submission


Lost in the heated debate over the so-called “Ground Zero” Park 51 Mosque is the question as to whether American traditional religious tolerance means that we must submit and give way to the “culture” of Islam. One, religious tolerance, is a pillar of our free society. The other, cultural submission, is what the Europeans and other social democracies have let themselves get caught up in through their hapless efforts to placate their growing and restless Muslim populations. Radical Islamist movements have taken advantage of misguided European “multicultural” tolerance policies, to push their agenda of cultural dominance over their European hosts, while retaining the right to cry “racism and bigotry” whenever a Western politician speaks out against the “Islamisization” of their continent.

As a progressively-minded, constitutionally-conscious American who believes in the separation of church and state, as well as the freedom to worship as one chooses, I’m all for “peaceful” Muslims doing their thing. From Presidents George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and from liberal to conservative champions of religious freedom, we’ve all been trumpeting the cause of tolerance and equal rights for the “peaceful Muslim.” The only problem is that the West is still waiting for that great mass of peaceful Muslims to rise up and let themselves be counted in their group-denunciation of terrorism, misogyny, mass murder, and state-sponsored religious and cultural imperialism.

Instead, the only “face”of Islam that has successfully been shown to the West, is the so-called distorted, perverted “Islamism”—the kind whose followers fly planes into our buildings to massacre thousands of innocent men, women, and children; who blow themselves up in crowded marketplaces and recruiting centers; who cheerful wage war against their own Islamic brethren; who detonate bombs in London and Spanish train stations, and Bali nightclubs; who support the launching of missiles and mortars into Israeli population centers; who saw the heads off of non-believers and stone adulterers; who frequently call for holy wars against Western countries, and for the state-sponsored assassinations of individual leaders and dissidents; who support and host terror training camps; who murder their own family members in honor killings; and the list of murderous deeds goes on and on. This is the only “Islam” that makes itself known.

One of the problems is that Islam is not just a religion. It is a culture. It is a political ideology. And for all intents and purposes, it is a race of people. You cannot separate the three—religion, culture, and politics—from the Muslim, because they are all intertwined and important to what makes them a Muslim. In a “pure” Islamic state, there is no separation of church and state because the church is the state, and vice versa. There is no religious tolerance because every Muslim is either a Muslim or an infidel. “Religious tolerance” on the part of Muslims, if you can call it that, only exists in Western countries where Muslims are still in the minority and not part of the power structure…yet.

Westerners are rightly confused and anxious, especially in the United States, when so-called “peaceful” Muslims talk about building bridges with Christians, healing old wounds, and making friends, then completely ignore American feelings when it comes to the location of the Park 51 Mosque. Wait a minute! I thought you guys cared about our feelings and building bridges.

Then by attaching the insidious name “Cordoba” to the project, even unofficially, only makes it appear that the Islamic founders are banking on American historical ignorance of the significance of that Spanish city to Islamic imperialism. They could have named the Park 51 Mosque anything, but to refer to it as the “Cordoba House,” which harkens back to the Caliphate of Cordoba in the Muslims’ attempt to conquer Spain and then Europe, is nothing but a slap in the face to Westerners, and will do nothing to promote interfaith dialogue. In fact, it only fuels Americans’ fears that Park 51 will actually be a subversive Islamist monument commemorating the September 11, 2001 attack.

You want a show of good faith dialogue—move the mosque then we’ll talk. Then the actions will match the words.

In the meantime, we have to read about Muslim efforts to do away with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and make “Mecca Time” the international time standard, as they build the largest clock tower in the world, atop the soon-to-be second tallest building in the world (the tallest is also in an Islamic country), in Mecca, which they view as the “center” of the world. We have to hear about Muslim children taunting their European peers in Holland, Denmark, and Sweden, that they will soon “take over” their countries (Muslim immigrants are having children at a rate of 4:1 over their European hosts), and how some parts of England might actually have to put up with Sharia Law.

Putting up with these efforts of the Islamic world to dominate the West, and eventually the rest of the globe is not religious “tolerance.” It is Western cultural submission, and that is something that we, as Westerners, and especially as Americans do not have to tolerate.

I’m all for any peaceful Muslim immigrating to America legally, applying for and obtaining his or her citizenship, getting educated, starting a business, and praying at this little mosque or that community cultural center. As long as that Muslim becomes an “American” Muslim, supports our socio-cultural-political foundations, keeps their “church and state” business separate, tolerates all religions, and denounces worldwide jihadist Islamism. And follows and obeys U.S., state, and local, civil and criminal laws and statutes.

That means no Sharia Law, no honor killings, no fatwas, no jihad, no female circumcision, no misogyny, no terror funding or training camps on U.S. soil, no damn “Mecca Time” and NO monuments or commemorative locations anywhere on U.S. soil, to honor or remember any Islamist attack, aggression, or victory against the West, ever. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even dream about it.

We must tolerate the religion of Islam, as long as it remains just that, a quaint, peaceful religion practiced in homes and community mosques. We do not have to tolerate Islamic attempts to push aside American and Western culture, and replace it with Islamic culture. It is every American’s duty to resist this always.

Our house. Our rules. Live with it.

The Enemy Within: Legalizing Pot is the First Step on a Short Road to Total Moral Decay


This November Californians will vote on the future of this country. That’s right, the future of America. And it starts right here in California with the marijuana vote. Proposition 19 represents more than a misguided effort to decriminalize “casual” users and make a little money for cash-strapped California. This is ultimately an ideological struggle between one way of life, represented by all that’s good in America, and another way of life that has already torn our neighbor asunder and stands poised to destroy us from within. And it all comes down to whether voters think legalizing marijuana is a good idea or a bad idea.

We’ve all heard both sides of the debate. The War on Drugs is a failure. Legalizing pot can generate millions in needed revenue and eradicate drug trade violence. It eases the pain of terminal disease sufferers, and besides, weed isn’t half as bad as alcohol and tobacco. Look how many people booze and cigarettes kill, right? Opponents of the measure claim marijuana is actually more cancerous than tobacco, drug dealers will still have a market to minors, and that violence reduction will be minimal.

I’m going to present what should be the only argument for never legalizing marijuana or any other illegal drug for that matter—our children. And here’s the litmus test—would you want your kids smoking legalized weed?

Marijuana kills drive and destroys ambition, plain and simple. It zaps the zest for academic achievement and getting a job right out of a kid. Marijuana will make you do self-destructive things by impairing your judgment. It will inhibit your ability to be respectful and responsible. It will interfere with your desire to be a good son, daughter, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife, because you will no longer care about providing, being thoughtful, taking care of yourself, or making money (except to support your pot craving). You will also believe you can drive safely while under the influence of pot.

Does this make legalizing marijuana sound like a good idea?

If you’re a privileged teen from a good home, become a long-term pot smoker and at best, you’ll be a lazy, overweight, disappointment who’s financially supported by your parents for a while, until the marijuana exacerbates whatever underlying personality disorders you have. Then you’ll have your first mental health break, usually during your freshman year of college, if you even make it to college. You will drop out, move back home, and spend the rest of your days in and out of psychotherapy, becoming a burden to your family and to society. And your parents, being too naïve to put two and two together regarding the marijuana usage, will spend the rest of their days wondering where they went wrong, while waxing poetic about how they saved California’s economy by voting to legalize pot.

Now, picture if you will, an at-risk youth from a low, socio-economic neighborhood in Any City, USA. Throw in a non-existent or incarcerated father, a harder drug-addicted mother with a violence-prone boyfriend, street gangs shooting at each other outside, classmates waiting to assault you as you walk to and from school, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, neuro-psychological issues like autism, ADHD, PTSD, Bi-Polar Disorder and let this kid get his hands on marijuana.

Still think legalizing marijuana’s a good idea?

It’s easy to preach about the benefits of a nightly, pre-coital marijuana joint, when you’re a privileged, self-absorbed, rich Hollywood type sitting pretty in your multi-million dollar home, or a childless, lefty hipster sneering at conservative American values or anything smacking of “Reagan-Bush.” Most of the Hollywood celebrities, rappers, and star athletes promoting marijuana usage are just mental health cases with money. They are just lucky (most of the time) to have sober “handlers” (assistants, agents, etc.) to keep them out of trouble, jail, or the psych hospitals.

But what if you don’t have money or a clean and sober sycophant looking out for you? What if you’re a poor kid from the inner city, self-medicating with pot because you just can’t bear the misery of your existence: no role models, no education, no jobs, no money, no self-worth, no self-respect, no hope, and no future? Now this kid is high on pot, with nothing to live for, and his buddy hands him a gun and says let’s go rob someone.

Legalize marijuana and drug dealers will still thrive, preying on children and teens. There will still be drug-related violence. The Mexican cartels will just tweak their operation a little and the war will continue. All the so-called taxes that you hoped to raise from the “legalized” pot (which won’t be nearly as good as the still “illegal” pot peddled by the dope dealers, who will of course branch out into the “legalized” pot business, pushing out the licensed dispensaries), will have to be spent on mental health, homeless, and joblessness benefits incurred by the drug users, as well as other medical and social services. Are you willing to explain all of this to your children, when they ask what went wrong?

The problem isn’t that the War on Drugs is a failure. You see, law enforcement held up their end of the war. They did their part. WE did not do our part. Parents, who should have raised their children with good morals, values, and behavior, so that their kids did not want to take drugs or involve themselves in criminal activity, did not do their part. Peers, teachers, coaches, and clergy, who should have continued reinforcing what the parents should have instilled, did not do their part. Academics, activists, journalists, sociologists, politicians, and the media, who should have supported law enforcement and the other pillars of the home front in strengthening family values and maintaining the positive fabric of our society instead of promoting divisiveness, victimization, race-identity politics, materialism, sex, violence, and tabloid journalism, did not do their part.

If every one of us had done our jobs properly, law enforcement and the courts would be just one successful spoke in a wheel of societal success stories involving education, empowerment, employment, leadership, and drug and alcohol treatment. But no, we all wanted to sit back and wallow in collective bad behavior, and then point at law enforcement, as if they were the only group that should have been tasked with waging a war on drugs, and blame them for the failure, as if they were supposed to play hand maiden to us all and raise our kids for us while interdicting drug smugglers.

All of us holding up our end of the bargain in the war on drugs would have required politicians and community leaders to tell parents that they were messed up! And that wouldn’t have got them re-elected. It would have required public school administrators and school board members to tell parents that the problem was at home, with them, and how they had failed in raising their children with good behavior and decent values, and not with teachers, and that wouldn’t have got them funding for their schools. It would have required greedy, sex and drug-obsessed CEOs, Hollywood celebrities, sports figures, musicians and rap stars to look in the mirror, and realize that they were part of the problem, and that wouldn’t have been good for business.

And it would have required doctors, scientists, professors, community advocates, you, me, all of us parents and citizens—people who should have known better—to say enough! Drugs are horrible. They ruin lives. They destroy our children. They tear up the fabric of our community, our neighborhoods, and just make all of society’s ills that much worse. It would have required us all to stand up and say that we’re no longer going to tolerate or celebrate law violators, criminality, illegal immigration, bad behavior, hate speech, flag-desecration, anti-Americanism, insidious teachers and college professors who preach anti-Christian “secularism,” socialism, and race-identity politics, and any others that would degrade our values, and that would have been politically incorrect.

I get that so many of our underprivileged youth are smoking pot, and that minorities seem to get hit the hardest with marijuana enforcement action. So the answer is to “decriminalize” their bad behavior instead of helping them to see a better way? Okay, sure. Legalize marijuana. Why not? Heck, all of our young people and our poor “oppressed classes” are doing it. At least maybe we can decriminalize them so they can “get jobs.” And some day, when enough kids are committing petty theft, we’ll say, aw, heck, let’s legalize petty theft, otherwise all of our kids will be criminalized even further. And some day, we might just tolerate the forcible taking of property from another person. Why not? It’s just property. Stuff. Let’s make robbery legal, too.

And where does it end?

I’ve seen first hand a woman from a good family in a wealthy neighborhood who called the police to deal with her 12-year-old son, who was “out of control.” This boy refused to go to school, had long, greasy hair, and only wanted to smoke pot 24-7. His room was in shambles, he cussed his mother out daily while screaming that he hated her, and had no respect for her. His one goal in life? He wanted to be homeless, so he could have the freedom to smoke marijuana. He was 12-years old! When I asked the mother where her son got his marijuana, she sheepishly told me how she grew marijuana plants because she had a “medical marijuana” card. She lamented that her 12-year-old wouldn’t obey her when she told him that he couldn’t smoke weed.

Where’s the modeling, people? Is this the message you’re willing to send to your children? That you, me, we all let the pot heads, the gang members, the American drug-dealers, and the Mexican narco-terrorists determine the future of our way of life? That we all waved the white flag and surrendered to them? That their way—a world with legalized drugs and who knows what else?—was the better way? Let’s just take the money?

If we all vote to legalize marijuana, we’ve lost our children forever. They will never respect you or me as parents or value anything we ever told them. Our children will think we are all hypocrites and liars. Our children will shake their heads in shame and say: “How could you—who always taught me to do the right thing and say NO to drugs—have voted for this!?”

Believe it or not, a great many of our young people, some who aren’t old enough to vote yet, want marijuana and other hard drugs to remain illegal. These kids actually believe in our great country and traditional American values. They go to church, serve as scouting camp counselors, participate in community service projects, feed the poor and care for the homeless, while relishing their role as “part of the solution and not part of the problem.” They cherish their loving parents who establish boundaries, enforce rules, and mete out discipline, along with praise, hugs, and kisses, because it makes them feel safe, and loved, and grounds them by giving them something they can believe in that’s bigger than themselves. These children, many of them teenagers, actually listen to and respect their parents, even over their peers. These might even be your children.

If you give up, and surrender to those who would undermine the fabric of our society, your children will give up. You can forget about your children getting good grades and going to college, your son earning his Eagle Scout, your daughter getting her Gold Award, and their continued affiliation with anything worthwhile, because what would it all mean anymore? They’re not going to care because the adults who want legalized drugs don’t care. Not about their children, their futures, nor about the future of our nation. These adults just want to smoke pot, cross their fingers, close their eyes and hope and pray they can at least make a little money in the process, and that the crime and bad guys will go away.

Do you think your children are going to feel safe with now-legalized pot dispensaries popping up at the end of your block, next door to your house, with riff raff hanging out, drinking, and smoking dope in front of everybody?

Marijuana is the broken window in the “Broken Window” theory of neighborhood decay. Perhaps you’ve heard of this legendary sociological theory of urban blight. Break a window in an otherwise nice urban area, and leave it broken, don’t fix it. A passerby will see the broken window and assume it’s an area that no one cares about and he’ll have no qualms about throwing his litter there. Now you have a broken window and trash in the street. Then a tagger will come along, see the broken window and the litter, think that nobody must care in that neighborhood, and then he’ll tag the walls with graffiti. Now you have a broken window, trash, and graffiti. Along comes a pimp, a drug dealer, and some gang members…and you can guess the rest of the scenario.

Marijuana is that “broken window.” It’s the first bad decision in an inevitable string of increasingly worse decisions, because after legalizing pot, legalizing cocaine won’t seem so outlandish, and then methamphetamine. Pretty soon people committing crime while high on drugs will just “come with the territory.” Then what else will we tolerate? Outsourcing our protection to armed gangs of narco-criminals like in Mexico? Doing away with law and order altogether? Forget the Pledge of Allegiance! What is America, anyway? Let’s all burn the flag! Hey, Sharia Law’s starting to look good.

Remember NIMBYs? NIMBY stands for “Not In My Back Yard,” and was usually the reaction by citizens whenever someone wanted to build, erect, or establish a program, project, or site that could have a detrimental effect on a neighborhood or property values (think parole office, drug-treatment facility, homeless shelter, toxic waste dump, etc.). Those concerned citizens who didn’t want anything to do with the proposed neighborhood site were called NIMBYs.

I’m going to coin a new term here, a NIMFAB—Not In My Flesh and Blood. And I’m going to stand up and be counted as the first official NIMFAB. I have an intelligent, kind-hearted, patriotic, religious, and beautiful daughter, who believes in giving back to her community and helping people. She gets excellent grades, plays the piano and the violin, and is growing as an athlete. And she is an outstanding Girl Scout, who will no doubt earn her Gold Award and make her Eagle Scout father proud. She already knows what college she wants to go to and what she wants to do as a career.

She is 9-years old.

I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up and surrender to legalized marijuana or any other legalized craziness. And I’m not going to sit around and watch a bunch of degenerate yahoos tear this great nation apart. I’m going to rail against this and stand up for what’s right, as long as I have to. I’m going to do it for my daughter, and for all of her awesome friends, and for all of our children. Because I’m not willing to sacrifice a whole generation of our young people so that pot-smokers can be “decriminalized” or so that California can raise money. Not drug money! Not ever. Legalizing marijuana is the first step to the social and moral decay of the United States, and that is a bad idea. And I feel the same way about that bad idea, as every dutiful parent feels about every other bad idea.

Not in my flesh and blood!

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Pasadena Weekly of September 9, 2010.

American Lessons from Mexico’s Drug War

There is one city where, on average, four people are murdered per day. This city has the highest murder rate and has been dubbed “the most dangerous city in the world.” You might be wondering if this place is somewhere in Pakistan? Afghanistan? Iraq? Are these high casualties a result of horrific suicide bombings carried out by Islamist radicals? Try none of the above. This violence is a stone’s throw from the United States, in a place called Ciudad Juarez. This is a city in a country whose daily death toll in its drug war tops the daily death tolls for both Afghanistan and Iraq. And sadly, this is probably the most underreported story in America today.

As America wages its own drug war, albeit in a less violent way, and stands poised to vote on the legalization of marijuana in its most populous state, California, in November 2010, Americans need to do some serious soul-searching about the future of their country. And they need not look any further for answers than the tragedy that has become Mexico in the 21st Century.

Mexico has become a country where the myriad drug cartels have literally integrated themselves into every strata of Mexican society—the government, military, police, business, and the media. If you are an “honest” cop, or a soldier who supports the government, you must grow eyes in the back of your head. You never know if you will be killed in a gun battle with narco-terrorists, or by your fellow men, who secretly work for the cartels. Politicians are routinely ambushed and assassinated, along with their families, just for running for elected office.

No one is off limits. A new police chief in his first day on the job is gunned down. A man from the U.S. side of the border, visiting Mexico, is gunned down along with his first grader son. Teenagers and young adults post a Facebook note advertising a party, and cartel gunmen show up and massacre them. A Mexican Marine slain in a gun battle with gangsters is laid to rest on Mexican TV, as his female relatives mourn over his casket. That evening the women are brutally murdered in their home. Heads roll, literally, into businesses, down the street, or any place where intimidation is needed.

Freedom of the press? Forget it. Journalists are routinely murdered for writing articles critical of the cartels, and are often told exactly what to write if they want to live long. Businesses are extorted, family members kidnapped, pop singers threatened, car bombs detonated. And as many as 72 bodies are found in cartel “dumping grounds”—mass graves where their victims, usually rival drug traffickers or kidnap victims, men and women, are just tossed, like garbage in a heap.

It makes one wonder how long before the government starts teetering on the brink of becoming a national security issue for the United States, an extreme example being a failed state like Somalia. U.S. Joint Forces Command, predicting “worse-case” scenarios for North America, has considered the Mexican government’s collapse within 20 years.

Mexicans, media on both sides of the border, as well as Americans who are left of center and in the pro-drug legalization camp blame drug consumption in the United States for Mexico’s woes. The problem with that argument, is that we have drug-dealers here in the USA, both domestic and from Mexico, and we certainly have as many guns here, if not, more, than in highly gun-prohibitive Mexico. The U.S. has been waging our own “War on Drugs” since the 1980s, while President Calderón of Mexico’s war on drugs was launched in 2006, yet U.S. society is not teetering on the brink of failed-statehood, with U.S. troops and police forces battling drug cartels in the streets of Small Town, USA. Why is this?

One reason is history—although next door neighbors, the United States and Mexico could not be culturally farther apart. Mexico inherited a Spanish colonial system based more on wealth accumulation for the crown and individual soldier-governors, racial and social castes, and the social dominance of the Catholic Church. What followed independence was muted progress, several wars and political instability through years of dictatorships (think Santa Anna and Díaz). This set up a centuries old model of top-down corruption and governmental oppression which still exists in one form or another throughout Mexico today.

The United States on the other hand evolved from an English model of colonialism that established the thirteen colonies not as a far off land to be plundered by military conquistadors, but by religious refugees and learned men, who hoped to create a model of British society back home, based on the rights of man and the rule of law. The United States inherited this system, which enabled the Founding Fathers to create the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the separation of church and state, an armed citizenry, States’ Rights, and a cultural disdain of perceived oppressors, whether large or small, foreign or domestic.

For good or bad, the cultural tone was set for Americans in 1776, and we never looked back. Put simply: We love freedom. We believe in the rule of law, states’ rights, and the right to own guns. We love and respect our military and police forces. We hate corruption, whether in Washington or Bell, CA. And we hate bad guys, from Hitler to Saddam, from Castro to Chavez, from the Italian mob to the Mexican drug cartels. Except for the period leading up to the Civil War and for a brief time in the Vietnam-era, Americans have rarely had to fight each other for the “soul” of our country, what we stood for—we always knew what it was.

That is why the drug cartels, or even Al Qaeda for that matter, are unable to make the violent inroads in the United States that they are able to make elsewhere. The corruption level just isn’t high enough among Americans, who still believe in law and order. Americans, both in the citizenry, in government, and in our military and police forces, just wouldn’t tolerate or accept the levels of violence here that are being perpetrated in Mexico and elsewhere.

Mexico is fighting for her life. She is fighting for the “soul” of her country. Up until now that fight has been whether Mexicans will surrender to the rule of the cartels, in return for peace and a chance to make a living, or stand with a potentially corrupt-beyond-repair government that offers little but more of the same. It doesn’t matter how many guns are smuggled into Mexico from the USA and elsewhere. It doesn’t matter how much consumption in America drives up the prices and demand for illegal drugs. Until the Mexicans stand up and decide what they will believe in—the rights of man and the rule of law, or drug-fueled violence and anarchy—the war will continue south of the border.

So far, America’s “soul” has remained intact. Think about that in November, when Californians will go to the polls to vote whether marijuana should be legal or not.

Seven Reasons to Ignore James Altucher and Send Your Kids to College


Thinking about sending your kids to college? Not so fast, says DailyFinance writer James Altucher. In his recent essay, “Seven Reasons Not to Send Your Kids to College,” Altucher, a proponent of legalized insider trading, argues that the college industry is a “self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme” that must be stopped at all costs. Citing the rising costs of tuition, college grads’ debt burden, and student borrowing, Altucher says that putting $200,000 you would have spent on your child’s college education into a municipal bond yielding 3% would be a better investment for said child 49 years down the road.

Altucher presents some compelling arguments for not going to college…if you were uneducated, greedy, and easily manipulated—you know, the kind of folks who actually do fall for Ponzi schemes. So your non-college educated child now has to wait 49 years for his or her cushy retirement gig? In the meantime, what is your blue-collar, minimum wage earner, if he or she even lands a job in today’s devastated economy, going to do to survive?

Here are some of Altucher’s alternatives-to-college suggestions: Give your uneducated teenager $20,000 to start “one to five businesses.” Altucher believes the so-called “education” your kid could get from this experience (having your business fail, and going from one unsuccessful venture to the next), would “last a lifetime” and generate invaluable knowledge. So much for the school of hard knocks. Most of the parents I know wouldn’t even give their kids the keys to their car let alone $20K.

And how about this winner—“travel the world,” he says, claiming that a global jaunt will “mature” your child and better prepare them for…college! Wait a minute, Altucher, I thought we weren’t supposed to send our kids to college. I guess even he can’t keep the secret in that, yes, eventually one needs a college education to advance in this life. This see-the-world scenario is probably his weakest argument since he points out that college tuition just gets more and more expensive. Well, it isn’t going to be any cheaper after they spend a year trying to find themselves, Eat Pray Love-style.

My favorite was his suggestion that you just basically leave your kid in a room full of books and let him or “home school” their college education. That way you can save yourself the $200,000. I guess you better hope your kids graduated from a high school that didn’t just “socially promote” them their HS diploma, while leaving them with a seventh-grade reading level.

The problem with Altucher’s wacky proposition is that it fails to take into account that American culture in the United States is set up, bad or good, to reward with the trappings of “mainstream success” only those individuals with a pronounced work ethic. While there will always be the exceptions to the rule, for the most part, if you want a high-paying career with benefits, a house in the ‘burbs, a spouse, and 2.3 kids, and you want to live comfortably, the best way to start is armed with as much college education as you can get. A college degree is the most visible, widely accepted “proof” that you have a high work ethic, and can be trusted with the reins of retail, corporate, or government leadership.

Having a college degree (or two) lets employers, CEOs, superior officers, etc., know that you: 1) showed up somewhere, every day, and usually bright and early, 2) knew how to follow rules, policies, procedures, as well as instruction, 3) are experienced getting along with people from different backgrounds, beliefs, etc., 4) worked long hours to achieve a set of clearly-defined goals, and 5) actually achieved said goals. That college degree also usually means you’re even tempered, well-adjusted, mentally sound, and probably morally straight(er) than most.

The ability to apply and get accepted to a college or university, and stay enrolled and maintain academic excellence, and then graduating, is a feat both rare and deservedly honorable. In American culture, getting one’s college degree is arguably the most prestigious achievement a young adult can earn. Don’t believe me? Just ask James “Don’t-Send-Your-Kid-To-College” Altucher, who holds a BS from Cornell University and a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University! Don’t you love when people try to tell you NOT to do something that they benefited from? And for all you college-educated brainiacs, my “seven reasons” to ignore Altucher are buried in the body of my article. How many can you count?


VICTOR CASS is a proud Eagle Scout and college grad, holding both a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, Awarded with Honors, from Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, CA, and a Master of Arts Degree from American Military University, in Manassas Park, VA, all of which prepared him greatly for life success. He highly recommends that parents encourage their children to earn their Eagle Scout, Gold Award (for Girl Scouts), and that they find a way to send their kids to college!