Sex ed trumps math literacy?

Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.

How much change does a grocery customer get if he hands over a $20 bill to pay for $7.93 in groceries?

How many of you instantly said $12.07?

Good. But what if your customer said, "Oh, and here are three pennies?"

How many of you said you'd hand him $12.10?

Excellent! This simple mental arithmetic would qualify you to work as a cashier any time from the minting of the first coins – sometime around 600 B.C. – until the advent of electronic calculators.

Calculator technology and declining academic standards are rendering change-making ability obsolete – and atrophying the brains of young Americans.

Three times in the past few weeks we have tried to "help" cashiers by handing them a few pennies to help them make change, only to cause them frustration, embarrassment and, in one case, near emotional breakdown.

In that latter instance, the clerk in question seeing a $20 bill punched that number into the cash register. As in the "problem" above, we handed her 3 cents to help out.

Ah! Those pennies! The register couldn't accept new data to subtract $7.93 from $20.03. What was the clerk to do? Grab a pocket calculator, of course, then try to figure out which number to enter first. Ask the customer not to confuse her by telling her the answer. Start shouting that it was difficult enough without the customer throwing numbers at her.

Way back in my youth – probably 50 years ago – I read a science fiction story (if any of you knows the author, please e-mail me) in which America's military leaders were summoned to a meeting where a government functionary was asked the product of two times two.

Without hesitating, the bureaucrat answered, "Four."

Immediately, the joint chiefs of staff whipped out pocket calculators and worked the problem.

"But is it always four?" one asked.

Assured it was, the military embarked on a top secret program to teach select staff to do simple mental arithmetic. It would save time and give the United States an advantage in dealing with the Soviet Union, our military rival at the time.

We aren't quite at such a pass, but it's coming. For this we can thank parents who have been satisfied with an education system that teaches kids political correctness and sexual intercourse but fails to insist that students memorize their math facts. I have no doubt that the young clerk who couldn't figure out what to do with three pennies was adept at putting a rubber on a banana.

Speaking of latex products: California's Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are among U.S. senators ready for a rubber room. They're among the 41 signatories to the letter demanding that Clear Channel Communications reprimand Rush Limbaugh for "slandering" anti-war soldiers. The fact that he didn't do it was no deterrent. Isn't denial of objective reality evidence of mental illness?

More psychosis: Can we expect a wild-hare proposal from Hillary Clinton every week? This month already has seen the $5,000 "baby bond" and the federally finance 401 K for American adults. (The latter gives a bizarre, socialist twist to supply-side "Reaganomics.")

Mrs. Clinton has since dismissed the baby bond as "an idea," not a real policy proposal, even though she had had her staff propose a new tax to finance it.

Kudos to the Washington state Supreme Court for ruling the Legislature cannot bar political candidates from lying about their opponents.

Writing for the majority, Justice James. M. Johnson said, "The notion that the government, rather than the people, may be the final arbiter of truth in political debate is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment."

In dissent – and reminding us that this is the state that sent Patty Murray to the U.S. Senate – Justice Barbara A. Madsen said the decision was "an invitation to lie with impunity."

Put her in the same pen with folks like Murray who believe a government of men can perfect mankind.

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