Obama missed the big celebration

It is our heritage! We were lucky enough to be born in the most successful, most free, moral, honorable and innovative society the world has ever know. Had our president attended, he could have glimpsed the spirit of America. The spirit that bows to none.

Our success as a nation derives explicitly from our political systems, economic liberty, traditions of scientific and cultural innovation and a general understanding that societies advance when their people are able to fulfill their potential in freedom.

The McCook celebration was put together by Air Force Colonel Linda S. Aldrich, MHS class of 1969 and her team of volunteers. Pretty as a picture, Linda appears delicate and every inch the genteel lady, but I also happen to know that there is a column of steel beneath the exquisite exterior. Several years ago, Linda was one of the very first females to earn the title of Minuteman II Missile Commander.

In English that translates to her leading a team of officers and enlisted personnel living in a deep underground bunker 24/7 with her finger on the trigger of a slew of nuclear tipped continental ballistic missiles. Those missiles were locked, loaded, and targeted somewhere east across the Atlantic Ocean.

Their mission in life is to be maintained ever-ready to launch within seconds of our president's order to strike. McCook has to be proud of our native daughter. I know that her late father, Ray, was button-popping proud of her career accomplishments as is your humble columnist. Go Linda, Colonel, ma'm!

Had President Obama attended our homegrown celebration, someone could have pointed out to him that we the people can also make correction when our leaders have lost their way. I'm pretty sure, though, that he will discover in November that "We the People" think the path that he is attempting to lead the country took the wrong fork in the road. The needed correction is on the way.

Of late, I have been privileged to fly with a student pilot who came back to McCook for the all school reunion. My older-than-my normal student has been successful in life and can now afford to satisfy his lifelong dream of learning to fly. Raised in McCook his current home is the Austin, Texas, area.

He owns a string of pawn shops which he acknowledges to be a rather lucrative business in today's economic climate. I suggested that perhaps the majority of his clientele were persons, hooked on illicit drugs, pawning their personal property to feed a drug habit. Mike acknowledged that those persons were a small minority of his clientele, but the vast majority were common ordinary persons who simply didn't know how to manage their money. He suggested that our public schools should be teaching personal finance.

Yep, that is a good idea, but my question is where would the schools get teachers qualified to teach personal finance? Most teachers come directly out of an education curriculum taught by professors who also have no experience or concept of personal finance.

One of the best professors that I ever had taught a night school college-level business class out in California. He was a gent who recently had been the chief financial officer of the Avis car rental corporation. The wealth of real-world experience that he brought to the classroom indicated to me that American might be missing out on a good thing.

I feel that we need teachers tempered by practical experience. Those are the older persons that have been successful in business themselves and in their "retirement years" choose to return to the classroom in a part time role. We need teachers who have run a profitable business, persons that have met a payroll and who have been educated in the school of hard knocks out in the real world.

We need teachers who can come to the classroom and impart their own hardearned lessons in life to eager-to-learn young minds. After all, two of the very best teachers that I ever had in high school were recent veterans of World War II.

All of my college teachers were active duty military officers who had already walked the walk. To be chosen to teach at the Academy, they had to have already been successful in their military careers and it turned out that they were, for the most part, excellent college teachers!

A bonus to having more mature individuals in the classroom could also be resistance to some of the psychobabble, socially correct, pap that passes as modern education.

Anything that would further education rather than simply increase pay and benefits would of course be resisted by the teacher's unions. I am not sure that those unions have the best interests of the students at heart anyhow.

That is the way I saw it.