Category: social commentary

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Thirty years in the workforce: well deserved ‘tiredment’

Updating the ol’ resume recently, I just realized something.  I spent practically 16 years in one career and 14 in another.  That’s 30 years combined of full-time, real-deal working—and boy, am I tired!  No wonder.  I haven’t been a workaholic really, even was laid off a few times.  And those 30 years do not include part-time jobs in high school and throughout college.  I think my worker’s fatigue comes not only with advanced years of life but also from spending so much time and energy trying to scratch out a living, what has turned out to be two careers.

After college once I returned to the big city, I eagerly anticipated quick employment.  I’d fill out a bunch of applications and just sit by the phone and wait for the offers to roll in.  I was a college graduate.  At the time 30 years ago, not only were we in a recession of sorts, I had no real work experience.  All those part-time jobs—from slicing meat at a sandwich shop to waitressing at an Italian restaurant, writing freelance articles and tutoring college kids—didn’t matter much.  What mattered was real on-the-job work experience, 8 to 5 weekdays, for at least two to five years.  It didn’t matter the education in my pretty little head.  The lack of ink on my resume revealed an inexperienced applicant, a kid just starting out in life.

No Work Blues

Back in the late ’80s, I was one of those college grads living with the parents while searching for employment, any job to get on my feet.  I applied for teaching and newspaper jobs as those were areas for which I was qualified.  I even applied for a job I kept seeing in the Want Ads, something called an Underwriter.  Man, that insurance company must have thought, “This is what colleges are putting out these days?” because I had no idea what the job title meant.  I just saw ‘writer’ and went for it.  I had spunk.  And so dumb.  In those days, we didn’t have the internet to quickly search job titles.  So I humiliated myself, in the insurance world anyway.

I went on several teaching interviews.  No job offer.  “What is wrong with me?” I wondered way back then.  I still ponder why I never started teaching right out of college.  I think I may have come across as insecure, not too bright (well …), uncertain of my abilities and knowledge in my field, and intimidated by a confident older prospective employer who was a school principal.  I know I went into the interviews subconsciously thinking, “Why would you want to hire me?  Anyone else would be better than me.”  I had low self esteem because college had not been easy.  I may have sabotaged myself from getting hired quickly.

Then I was interviewed to be a clerk at The Dallas Times Herald.  My new boss and I had a lot in common as far as love of the arts and news.  I was in awe of her.  She was high-profile, looked like Mary Tyler Moore, and had tons of success in the mass media.  I know because part of my job was to send out her bio prior to her speaking engagements.  I learned a lot at that big-city newspaper—to this day the friendliest place I’ve ever worked.  It was in downtown, and sometimes on pay day a group of us clerks-slash-wannabe reporters would walk over to eat lunch at the West End.  I figured my future was in the newspaper biz as a reporter someday.  I even got a couple of freelance pieces published.  I had spunk.

A clerk job paid only $6 an hour.  At the encouragement of some older colleagues, I asked for a raise.  I did what they said to do: set up a meeting with a supervisor, list my job duties and additional work I’ve taken on, discuss the current salary and explain what I need to live on my own.  I asked for $9 an hour.  The company gave me $8.  So that’s how the game’s played?  Next time, I’ll know to ask for $10 an hour.  A colleague pointed out my great success in getting such a significant raise, that probably someone else lost a job or some budget was reshuffled.  I moved out on my own, living in an apartment.  Life as an older 20-something was looking good.

A year later I was suddenly unemployed along with all 900 workers of that century-old Dallas institution.  We got two months’ severance with insurance plus any pay for sick days and vacation time we didn’t take.  Next I found myself standing in line at the state ‘employment office’ as a laid-off worker.  That was humiliating, but I met a lot of interesting people in that long line.  I pieced together any kind of work, including working at a homeless shelter where I used to volunteer.  Plus I did a lot of substitute teaching, willing to rise predawn whenever the phone rang and a computer listed a job to work that day.  After several months, I finally got a steady job at a major used book store, earning about what I used to make plus health insurance.

What color is my career?

At this time in my life, I could have gone in any direction.  I applied at all the schools as well as colleges and universities and any media outlet, even drove to Austin and other parts of the state doing the same, sometimes getting an interview.  During this time of possibility combined with depression, confusion and insecurity, I was advised to read career books.  I took lots of personality tests to figure out a career direction.  The psychological tests would guide me into an area that would make me happy and fulfilled while also being a productive citizen in society as a whole.  Whatever.  I was bored senseless and certainly had the time to take a bunch of pop psychology tests.

What I found out about myself at the time was I really wanted to be of service to mankind, to help humanity.  That was enlightening.  I used to want to join the Peace Corps.  After the career tests, I considered going into social work.  But that did not appeal to my creative side. Maybe I answered some of the questions wrong.  A few years later when I took all those career personality tests again, I found the one thing I must have as a worker is respect.  That was my top priority, a job or position whereby people would respect me or what I do for a living.  So why would I want to be a teacher?  Or a newspaper reporter?

By the end of 1992, I got a big career break.  I was hired as city editor at a small-town newspaper.  I moved away with my dog and got to work building a career, one week shy of turning 30.  In many ways, I knew what to do as a reporter.  If I needed advice, I asked for it and was willing to listen, and usually would do as suggested.  I’d say that ability or characteristic has been my saving grace.  I would befriend seasoned reporters and learn how to go about covering a story or issue.

However, I’m not sure how I came across as a co-worker in general, because I was all work and no play.  In the workplace I imagine anyone who ever worked with me or near me may have thought I shoot off my mouth, talk too much, try too hard to be funny.  Really, I think long and hard before speaking, precisely phrasing opinions or comments sometimes within a clever turn of phrase, and still I can come up with some very funny quips.  I know I kept myself in stitches all the time.  So another aspect about surviving the work world, to me anyway, has been levity: a much needed release from the seriousness of our workday lives.

I moved on to another small-town paper, taking on another title of entertainment editor along with government reporting, and flourished with a very supportive editor.  A few awards later I moved back to the big city and tried my hand at cub reporter.  It wasn’t for me, not anymore.  I had so much experience and had been virtually free to cover issues and subjects that were important to me (granted, I did grunt work, too), I was unfulfilled.  Maybe I was reaching a mid-life crisis, but at age 40, I wanted to be a teacher.  All along that had been my initial career goal.  When a teaching job was offered, I changed careers like that.  Snap.

So, as the song goes: That’s life.  That’s what they say.  Mine has been that of a career woman with all the connotations that go with it.  The past decade and a half, I’ve worked in the public schools and taught thousands of kids from pre-kindergarten to 8th grade.  And I’ve been laid off as a teacher, too.  I even got additional certification to teach journalism.  I figured my newspaper experience could teach any kid to be a reporter, and I do mean honest reporting.  No fake news.

After three decades in the work world, spanning two careers, I’ve learned: Diplomacy is a must along with self assurance, think before speaking, do a job well, and aspire to be a consummate professional.  Every now and then I see on social media old high school classmates retiring as they reach the 30-year milestone, gladly saying goodbye to their dutiful yet required time spent in the workforce and set careers.  I have never thought of myself as retiring or even retired—though I am indeed tired.  I’ve always seen myself in the future still working, here or there, in this field or that … till the very end.

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“Roseanne” bar none

I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I’ve seen every episode of “Roseanne” so often that I could teach a college course.  I mean a brief Continuing Education fun course.  So here goes.  “Roseanne” was a situation comedy created by the star and namesake, comedienne Roseanne Barr.  The premise revolved around her working-class family life with a husband, three kids, and a close sister.  The show ran from 1988 to 1997 on ABC.

When this show first aired, it was a phenomenal success along with the comedy musings of Roseanne Barr herself who sardonically titled her comedy club act “The Domestic Goddess.”  She made fun of her daily life as a wife and mother with lines like ‘We’re starting a natural food kick at our house, so we switched to brown sugar.’  Her comedy was down-home, family-centered though not always G-rated, with lots of die-hard feminism and blue-collar pride.  Her show followed suit.

Because she was a wife and mother and also obese, probably in the 20+ size range, the network suits did not know what to think.  These were the years of other hit comedian shows like “Seinfeld,” “Drew Carey” and Tim Allen’s “Home Improvement.”  Roseanne did not fit the mold.  Not only was she a woman, a loud-mouthed, wise-crackin’ mother, she was not thin and attractive.  And Roseanne cast as her TV husband Dan Conner an actor equally large, John Goodman.  She can laugh about it now, but in those early years, the tabloids, media and late-night comics were unfairly rough on her because of her weight.  The truth was the higher-ups in show biz could not believe a loud funny woman who was as large as her opinions—spewing left-of-center politics and controversial views—would draw tens of millions of viewers and fans.  They lost a bet.

Americans are big and fat

People saw in Dan and Roseanne Conner couples who look like them, like everyone else, or like most people if we’re being honest.  A precious few Americans can keep the weight off for a lifetime, not without some kind of little helper or great self control and maybe metabolism.  So the fans cheered on Roseanne for years.  She even tells of a time when the network execs bought fancy sport cars for two of the male comedians whose shows were in the top ratings, along with Roseanne’s show which was probably number one at the time and beat “The Cosby Show.”  And what did they get fat Roseanne?  A chocolate rose.  Probably a big chocolate rose.  The sexism and body shaming speaks volumes.  No doubt Roseanne would have enjoyed a new sports car, too, as sincere appreciation from the TV execs whose pockets her talent helped line.

What the suits didn’t understand is “Roseanne” episodes dealt with real-life everyday situations with poignancy and heavy doses of humor.  It was blue-collar comedy.  There was nothing like it coming out of L.A.  Throughout the years, the Conners worked fairly hard: Dan, a dry waller who later chased his dream of revamping classic motorcycles until the shop went belly up; Roseanne faithfully working a variety of menial jobs until starting her own diner which stabilized the family income.  Still in the lean times, the Conners played some games about paying bills (like not signing the check) or misusing coupons (erasing the expiration date).  There was the time during an extreme financial low, their electricity was shut off.  Critics didn’t like watching a sit-com about a low middle-class family laughing their way through a mountain of problems.  I guess they figured it was unbelievable.  Let me tell you, it wasn’t—as many of us who’ve had to rough it can attest.

Watching the episodes in reruns, we see Roseanne’s weight shifts but a little.  She is a TV character, from the health-conscious ’90s, who will remain forever overweight, morbidly obese at times as was her husband.  But have you seen Roseanne today?   She did it!  She lost the weight and at no small price.  A rags-to-riches story does not mean instant weight loss and body perfection.  She has been candid about cosmetic surgeries and a weight-loss procedure that seemed to not take effect until years after her famous show ended.  Still, she lost the weight.  ‘Quite a load off, huh,’ the Roseanne character might say enviously.

Shut up!

Critics also objected to the yelling, what seemed to be constant loud and heated arguing back and forth between parents and kids and husband and wife.  Roseanne held her ground and refused to cut the yelling from her TV family, maintaining this was realistic family life whether people acknowledge it or not.  She was perceptive as most comedians are.  In the family unit, members do not perceive how loud or angry they come across to neighbors, friends and onlookers.  Roseanne believed most families yell on occasion if not often.  Prudish folks wouldn’t understand and felt as parents they were in charge and their power never challenged by their children even during adolescence.  Get real, Roseanne would reply.

What made the show tick was the family unit, the three kids growing up with obese parents.  The wealthy and upper-middle class do not relate to a show like “Roseanne.”  That’s because when it comes to families, the poor and low class care about their children because they have nothing else while the middle class and the wealthy care about their children’s education.  Roseanne’s oldest daughter found this out the hard way, again during the Conner family’s lowest economic crisis.  Becky Conner assumed her parents had a college fund for her, but they didn’t.  Through the years, they needed money for housing, utilities, food, clothes, bills, other priorities and emergencies.  So Becky, without graduating high school, simply ran off to marry her boyfriend who had taken a job out of state.  It was a shocking moment in TV history.

Writer’s block

As a fellow writer, I noticed through studying the series how Roseanne’s character occasionally lamented how she had not done anything special with her life or had become someone special, specifically a writer.  She spoke of her high school dream of moving to New York City and writing for Mother Jones, of being a children’s book author someday.  Possessing a creative imagination, she could spin an original bed-time story for her son every night.  As a birthday gift one year, her family turned the basement into an office just for her to write, a quiet place away from the chores of wife and mother.  The next scene, Roseanne is dusting and vacuuming her new office.  She does not have a writer’s drive, the ability to collect and organize thoughts then sit down and punch it out on a typewriter or computer—both devices she never learned to use.

This is where I cannot relate with Roseanne the character.  My middle-class background led me to take every advantage of writing, from tall tales in elementary school to junior high poetry and newspaper staff, continuing on in high school.  A couple of weeks before starting my senior year, I walked into the hometown newspaper office and talked to the editor about a part-time job.  I could type and was on the newspaper staff, I told him.  I would have swept the floor and laid out the paper old school with glue and light boards.  But he needed a high school correspondent and so hired me on the spot, paying me $10 a story.  That experience helped me in college when of my own volition I wrote freelance features for the town newspaper, which led to becoming a news correspondent for the university news service, and later a writing tutor at the college.

But Roseanne Conner never pursued real writing, any writing, writing just to write, like this blog here.  [The real Roseanne of course has a blog.]  All those years, especially when her children were in school, she never thought to drop by the local newspaper (the town had one) and start writing a column or go to a community college (there was one nearby) and take a writing course.  Other TV characters do just that.  But those other TV shows were written and created by middle- and upper-class folks, people with built-in drive and a lot of self confidence.  That is what Roseanne—very overweight, economically and emotionally depressed at some level yet always quick-witted with razor-sharp hilarious perceptions of men and, well, every kind of person—never had: self confidence.  That counters the real Roseanne.  Her TV character never figured out that through pursuing a passion, doors open that lead to opportunities like a fulfilling job, career and success.  The comedian clearly brought success on herself but did not instill her own drive and ambition into her TV show character.  Wonder why?

Now Roseanne Barr has become a Trump supporter, strange given the American TV audience still believing her to be a big ol’ feminist.  But she’s proven once again, like her working-class sit-com—entertaining through deep characterization and blunt bawdy humor for loads of laughs—she has her finger on the pulse of real America.

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Native American one way or another

A Native American tribe made the news when trying to disenroll a woman, the mother of several children, and remove her family from a tribal home at Christmas.  The ‘tribeswoman’ never knew generations ago, one of her great-greats erroneously enrolled himself as a member of the tribe.  Recently the mistake was uncovered and brought to the tribal council’s attention.  Perhaps nowadays every single tribal person is having their DNA checked to confirm legitimacy as a Native American, down to the specific blood percentage.  After all, certain tribes divide casino earnings, maintain tribal employment, and may receive government benefits like housing, college, and some tax exclusions.

I share the woman’s pain of banishment as a former Native American, though her ordeal brings much more sorrow while mine was inadvertent and self imposed.  With a family hailing from Oklahoma, the story had always been we have some Native American blood.  Mom’s side claimed Choctaw then later Cherokee which Dad’s side had claimed, too.  Turns out, the Cherokee ancestry was either misunderstood or bogus, because I had my ancestral DNA analyzed.  I simply spit in a vial and sent it on to a lab at a cost of $100.  Wild with anticipation, eagerly imagining the possibilities, I sincerely hoped to confirm a Native American lineage of eight percent or more.  I would have accepted one drop.

Uprooted

My DNA analysis was filled with surprises to me, even to my mother who half-jokingly responded I no longer seemed to be her child.  Horse feathers!  Not only am I 100 percent European (85 percent Western European), I have not one drop of Cherokee blood.  I knew about the German, Irish and English roots but was amazed to find some small genetic blood lines from Italy, Greece, ‘Iberian Peninsula,’ Scandinavia, and even European Jew.  Mazel tov!

The analysis supposedly goes back 2,000 years—and in my case, did not coincide with my own ancestral online research.  In other words, I had found official government documents to prove at least one ancestral line was indeed Native American: a Chickasaw woman married to an Early American English settler in Virginia around 1768.  Yet my own spit couldn’t claim a drop of Native American heritage.

I checked with the website handling this research and learned that often our individual DNA does not match the ancestral paper trail, mainly because a person only holds so much DNA.  The vast majority of our true multicultural heritage will not show up in our current bodies of very set DNA proportions.  And it gets even trickier.  Siblings and parents may have totally different ancestral DNA in their spit.  In other words, my father may indeed have five percent Native American ancestry or my mother ten percent, yet that strain may not be passed on to me or my sibling.

American Mutt

Right away I stopped claiming to be a little Cherokee or Native American as I used to do to explain a profile with a knotted nose and increasingly round face.  Oh I could go on and on about my Cherokee roots in the old days.  Doing so now would be a lie.  What became true to me, however, are ancestral roots deep in American history from the nation’s beginnings—and no trails to Texas until the very late 1800s.  But rest assured: I’m Texan through and through, born and raised.  I found that three ancestors fought in the American Revolution.  No one in my family would have ever believed that.  And I found a couple who fought in the Civil War, of course for the Rebel side against northern aggression.

The branch of the Chickasaw Nation was unknown to any of my family.  The lone Native American ancestor was only mentioned as an unnamed Chickasaw maiden.  She had a name.  It just wasn’t easy to say or spell like Mary or Ruth.  So she, and even her parents, went down in Early American documented history nameless.  Yet I exist, and my mother exists, and her father existed, and many others before him because of her.

Another discovery from more recent history was back in the 1930s when two of my paternal and maternal great-greats recorded on the U.S. census their race as ‘Indian,’ meaning American Indian now Native American.  Perhaps this is the situation of the former Native American woman who was kicked out of her tribe.  Why were people claiming to be American Indian in 1930 when previous census records indicate they marked themselves as white?  Maybe there were some government benefits to Americans claiming Native ancestry, no questions asked?  For a long time in American history, white-looking folks never claimed Indian heritage because of the ramifications including job and community loss, verbal and physical assault, and lifelong persecution and humiliation.  Maybe the 1930 census takers encouraged folks to mark their race Indian, if they could claim it, for potential benefits to make up for the U.S. government’s treatment of Native people.  American history clearly taught me our country screwed the ‘Indians’ time and again, breaking every promise and treaty.

I think modern Americans like my parents and grandparents never gave much thought to our ancestral past or heritage.  It was ancient history.  This mindset may have begun after the Civil War, with Southerners picking up the pieces of their ruined lives and moving away … to Texas … to California.  The Old West was when I had figured my family ventured to America, like victims of the Irish potato famine or amidst the flood of European immigrants in the late 19th century.  I was wrong.  My roots run deep in the American soil, and not so much in my beloved Texas, ironic given the title of my blog.

Pssst.  The real reason I did the ancestral DNA was due to one dead branch on my family tree.  A great-grandfather presumably was living under an assumed name.  I did find more than one name from his own census data in 1900, 1910, 1920, and he was one of my relatives who claimed to be Indian in 1930.  In the only photo I’ve seen of him, he was dark or olive complexioned with dark eyes and hair.  Maybe he was Native American, or Italian or Greek.  But on all his census records, he never noted the names of his parents.  He remains a mystery, but I thought I might unlock it through my DNA.  But his secrets remain in the grave.

Americanized          

I think all that Native American blood talk among my Oklahoma family may have been from grandparents and great-grandparents who supported the underdog, their self perception of economic struggles linked to being among the underclass, living in a ruling Anglo-centric society and culture but not reaping the benefits of what minorities today call ‘white privilege.’  There is a hillbilly attitude among my kin, proud outsiders who tend to their own.  We are—and have been for many generations—Americans, fighting in every war, independent, with instincts more cowboy than communal.  As a kid I once asked my grandmother about our heritage.  She didn’t know, figuring herself to be Cherokee and Dutch (she was mistaken) and my grandfather “not much, more Irish than anything.”  But she was the one with Irish roots, only one generation before heading to the New World in the 17th century.

The most rewarding revelation from my ancestral DNA was to learn I am 25 percent Irish.  I never knew it … yet always sensed it, deep in my bones, especially around St. Patrick’s Day and singing songs like Danny Boy, a melody so beautiful and lyrics so sad they touch the soul.  If I have some underdog in me, it is mostly Irish.  Weren’t the Irish the underdogs when pouring into America just a little more than a century ago, called epithets unfit to print?

My parents are essentially one-generation Oklahomans, some of their parents and grandparents not born there at all, except that grandma with whom I conversed about our nationalities.  She was born in Indian Territory 1901.  Maybe having grown up in Oklahoma—where the motto is ‘Native America’ and license plates feature a dream catcher—knowing about and living in the aftermath of the injustice, the filthy lies, the historical mistreatment of the Native people by our own ancestors was too painful.  So a little white lie was created and passed down.  My family never relayed a thing about being Irish, German or British but instead boasted or at least mentioned with a smile of pride a belief in a trace of Indian heritage.  Even so, my folks doubted we had much Native blood.  All could be lost with a finger prick.  More honestly, none of us look Native.  Who would believe we were even a bit Cherokee, least of all the Natives themselves?

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Abba dabba Trump

See that man.  Watch that scene.  He is the drama queen.

It’s only been a couple of months now and every day a new drama with this guy, even 3 a.m. Twit storms.  If the intellectual overload is not from the 24-hour news media just trying to report on the U.S. presidency, separating fact from fiction, and assorted televised political pundits spinning in place, then it’s the president himself saying whatever whenever.

It’s got me longing for the previous eight years of relative serenity with our former president: Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected.  President Obama said that was how he would be as president, taking advice from his favorite predecessor, Abraham Lincoln.  The American people, Lincoln and Obama theorized, want a leader who brings a sense of calm, where there is no daily uproar or scandal amidst dozens of investigations, whereby the People can just live their lives in peace and freedom and let their elected leaders take care of governmental affairs.  This is not what we are experiencing now and may never for the next four long years.

Mama Mia

I can’t get this image out of my mind.  It’s when both Obama and Trump met officially in the Oval Office shortly after the election.  Obama and his key commanders met with Trump privately, revealing all the world’s secrets past and present and perhaps U.S. obligations and commitments.  When the two world leaders sat down together for the international photo op, Obama had a certain smile on his face and a knowing twinkle in his eye … while Trump looked like he was sick to his stomach, like he really didn’t want to be President of the United States of America after all.  I’ve seen the cocky Obama countenance in the movie Amadeus.  The look is from Mozart when his secret rival Salieri asks with all humble graciousness for him to look over a new composition.  Mozart takes a swig of wine from the glass goblet in hand and shoots his tongue in his cheek, his eyes smiling with sarcasm.  The Obama look was ‘Checkmate.’  The look was ‘I know all your secrets, man.’  Trump’s look was ‘I’ve bit off more than I can chew.  I’m President, leader of the Free World, the most powerful man on Earth, and it ain’t going to be any fun, too scary’—because the World, the universe, is a very dangerous and uncontrollable place.

Waterloo

How many bets are ongoing about the days left to the Trump presidency?  Or his ultimate demise?  Impeachment?  Heart attack?  Stroke?  Just simply stepping down and leaving it to the rest of us?  There are talk show hosts projecting an itch for war with Trump’s call to beef up the already mighty U.S. military complex.  Trump has managed to offend several world leaders important to the U.S. including those south and north of our borders.  There are millions, tens of millions, of American people hollering to keep ‘Obamacare.’  There is a split among Republicans, some fearing election turnout if Obamacare is killed and not replaced as they all had promised with typical political sincerity.  On the other side are Republicans whose intent always was to dismantle and bury the very idea of affordable health care, hoping no Americans, the ones who matter anyway, would raise a fuss or even miss the humane benefits of universal healthcare.

There is 100% proof from our very own federal investigators of Russian connections and interference in the 2016 U.S. election simply to discredit Hillary Clinton and leave Americans thinking Trump our lone salvation.  And just when Congress is investigating the Russian connection, Trump himself claims President Obama had his New York palace wiretapped.  Obama did insist on a hot and heavy federal investigative report on Russian tampering in the U.S. election whether through hacking the Democratic national website and emails or infiltrating the internet with fake news that passed as legitimate by millions of American readers—Americans not known to take the time and trouble to verify everything they read online.  Obama had this investigation report presented to Congress by the time he left office.  Perhaps that is where President Trump is thinking his home was investigated by the feds.

There is President Trump’s dubious selection of multi-billionaires to lead major tax-supported federal departments, some of these new radical leaders touting their sole intent to dismantle and dissolve from the memory of the American people any benefits from their government programs.  There is the Trump gold-standard budget that would kill federal funding to schools, education, health care, food programs, the arts and humanities, and any type of Democratic program created long ago to help the poor and disenfranchised.  How did Trump ever get away with being a Democrat for most of his very rich life?  And like other former weenie Democrats whose number one goal was to get elected at any and all costs, he proved a turncoat when sensing the rage of angry Americans over global economics and religious indignation—over circumstances they cannot control.  And half the American people bought New Trump.

All the current political upheaval can be blamed on Comedy Central and their Trump roast.  Every single celebrity on the dais told the Big Man over and over again how they hoped he would run for President and what a great President he would be.  This is when the Golden Dream occurred.  But the stars and celebs were referring to the former Cool Trump who was all business and pizzazz and nonreligious and apolitical.

But not only did Trump need to switch parties for some reason, he also needed to go far right.  During the hotly watched televised Republican debates, Trump verbally assaulted every decent contender right in the morals as they were unwilling to punch back.  They could have and should have.  Evidently Americans don’t mind.  Lesson for the future.  The other Republican presidential hopefuls were first gentlemen and second politicians.  Trump came across as the non politician, the savvy businessman whose immense wealth put dollar signs in everyone’s eyes.  Yet he is the consummate politician and displays it and plays it every single day.

It’s been … exhausting—and remains dangerous for all Americans and anyone else living on the planet at this point in time.

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A suburban Gibson’s girl

Long before Wal-Mart, there was Gibson’s Discount Center.  That was THE low-cost department store in the small-town Dallas suburb where I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s.  Gibson’s had much more to offer than the nearby Mott’s Five & Dime or Ben Franklin.   Gibson’s was small compared to the sprawling and overstuffed big box chains of today and did not carry groceries.  But when I was a kid, it had all the essentials my working-class family of four could afford: polyester shorts, pants, skirts and dresses; swimsuits; night gowns and children’s sleepwear; gloves and coats; baby stuff; bras, slips, undies, girdles and pantyhose; shoes slightly out of style; cologne and cosmetics; cameras and stereos; jewelry; school supplies, posters, and lunch boxes.  It was like an indoor bazaar.

Since my mother took me and my brother there every week, I got to know the place well.  By age 5, I started exploring the place on my own, simply breaking away from my mother usually shopping the clothing aisles.  It was easy for a little kid to sneak under the racks of hanging clothes.  In our family box of photos, there is a picture of me looking up at the Gibson’s camera clerk, who shot me as I was snooping behind his counter.  I remember the man, dressed in a clerk smock, resembling a dentist.  He was holding a new Polaroid color film camera and aimed down at me, saying enthusiastically “Smile!”  Surprised, I looked up at him, and his snapshot caught me biting my lower lip.  I figured I was in big trouble.  He waited until my mother passed by to give her the photo of me caught committing a crime.  Really he was just trying to sell a camera.  The Gibson folks were professional and friendly and knew my family as weekly regulars.

Parting the bamboo curtain

During the early 1970s, Gibson’s was getting hip to the times and way in the back of the store installed a shopping section called the Tiki Hut.  As I recall it, the section had a thatched roof that reminded me of Gilligan’s Island, a show I watched in reruns every day of my childhood.  I was an older child then and loved exploring the weird items found only inside the Tiki Hut.  First you had to walk through a beaded curtain made of bamboo.  That was really fun to a city kid.  I’d walk back and forth through the bamboo strands.  I thought it was so cool and that someday when I was a teenager I’d want strands of beads to replace my bedroom door.

The steel-and-metal shelves contained an array of knickknacks from Far Away places like Taiwan, the exotic destination stamped on the bottom of most of the items.  There were remnants from a sea-faring life like shells, knotted rope, treasure chests, and lots of brass items like statues of Hindu and Buddha gods and goddesses with strange poses and multiple arms.  There were lots of wood carvings made from coconuts, like a smiling monkey with a pipe and sailor’s hat.  There were incense burners of brass and wood.  And of course this is where you’d find incense like patchouli, a fragrance I’d never in my young life encountered but instantly loved it.  I’m sure I bought my first incense burners there, one long wooden and one tiny cone-shaped brass, though I never knew what to do with them for years.  I didn’t want to start a fire in the house.

One item I got from the Tiki Hut was an imitation shrunken skull with long white hair.  It was made of hard plastic … and glowed in the dark!  I had it hanging in my bedroom when a squeamish young cousin of mine dropped by one night looking for me and ran out screaming after seeing that green skull smiling at her.  That was funny.  But I never knew the small skull would scare anyone.  Guess I was a strange kid, a bit of tomboy.

In retrospect, my venturing into Tiki Hut lit a wanderlust which has remained to this day and age.  I always wanted to travel the world and explore other cultures.  And I was interested in the religions of the world, what people believe when it comes to God and the afterlife and why they believe it.  As peculiar as I found those brass Eastern religion gods with multiple arms and awkward poses, some standing on one foot, I was curious.  But mostly I was afraid to buy one, my mind echoing Bible school teachings about all the other religions and their false gods and evil spirits that abide in places like the Tiki Hut.

Rumours

By the mid ’70s at Gibson’s , Tiki Hut was a place I considered kid stuff.  I had outgrown it and turned my evolving adolescent mind to the record albums in the music department.  I spent hours studying rock album covers: David Bowie, Heart, The Eagles, Alice Cooper, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull.  One album Tull put out, Aqualung, featured ‘scripture’ on it: In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.  The blasphemy was so terribly shocking, and yet I kept reading.  Dangerous stuff for a suburban teen-age girl to be caught in hand.  I felt a little naughty seeing some of the sexual album covers that were the norm in those days.   I’d frequently look over my shoulders.  When I had a few dollars, I bought one of my first albums at Gibson’s, Toulouse Street by the Doobie Brothers, only to open it up at home and find an interior photo of the dudes, well, at a whorehouse.

Yeah in Gibson’s music section I could feel the rebel vibes: young guys with long hair, beards, jeans and denim jackets, often with their girlfriends, thumbing through the albums for purchase.  FM radio or album rock was heard from the latest stereo system for sale.  It was clearly where the cool hung out.  As I recall, I ventured over there many a time from age 10, splitting my trips to Gibson’s between Tiki Hut and the music department.  I fell in love with a clear yellow 45 disc by Grand Funk with the rock hit We’re an American Band and wanted it for my 10th birthday.  I got Billy Preston’s The Kids and Me with his hit Nothing from Nothing on another birthday, and mom worked out a deal with me to do a few weeks of household chores for a Glenn Miller memorial tribute double album set.  I was in junior high band then and discovered a love for Big Band music and jazz.

I don’t recall seeing anyone I knew from school or my neighborhood all those years I roamed around Gibson’s.  Yet I know they shopped there, too.  It was the only place in town to explore and discover who you wanted to be someday when you were your own person.  By the end of the ’70s, a big mall was built way over on another side of town, actually into Dallas.  It was so huge and new that places like Gibson’s couldn’t compete to maintain fickle youth.  Besides, the mall had several huge records shops … and Pier One—where I clearly saw my future in home décor, furniture tastes and clothing from the mystical and alluring Eastern world.  But for me, Gibson’s Tiki Hut and music department opened the door to a new world of ideas, free expression and ancient knowledge.

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God save us from American idiots

In the aftermath of 9/11, most of us across the nation continued living our daily lives.  Every morning we’d go to work.  The worldwide web was pretty much shut down as far as news sites, so there wasn’t a lot to read online.  Network TV was carrying 24-hour-a-day coverage, so there weren’t a lot of new entertainment episodes to watch, just cable shows and retro TV.  Airports were closed for a couple of weeks, so no one was going anywhere till the skies were declared safe again.  At night many of us just stayed home, after dinner playing board games, thinking the same thing: Wonder if there’ll be another attack on other American cities?  War was inevitable.  Every American was hurt and vengeful.

Deep within our national sorrow—over this sudden shocking upheaval that dared change our daily lives, affecting jobs, business, industry, banking and the future—there were madmen loose.  Each one acted alone with the same crazy idea to harm those who offended us so gravely.  One was a fellow Texan.  Every week or so in the Mesquite, Balch Springs and Pleasant Grove area, there had been random shootings at convenience stores.  The victims were store clerks operating their own businesses.  Soon the crimes were related, caused by the same assailant.  Police suspected a 9/11 vigilante.

A profile of the murderous assailant was not as clear as his victims.  They were men who appeared at first bigoted glance as Middle Eastern and Muslim: America’s new presumed enemy.  But one of the deceased was from India and was Hindu, his body cremated and his wife, new to Dallas suburban life, left devastated.  Another victim was a Sufi, Middle Eastern but not Muslim, shot because he wore the customary turban.  One man was indeed a Muslim but no terrorist.  All of these men had something in common: brown skin and maybe an accent that hinted of Arabic origins.

Eventually the police caught Mark Stroman, a white supremacist from Balch Springs who during his capital murder trial draped himself in the American flag.  He was sentenced to death row and has since been executed.  Rais Bhuiyan was the Pleasant Grove convenience store owner shot in the face by Stroman.  Bhuiyan was left blind in one eye.  A young, attractive and successful businessman, he had plans to marry in a family arrangement with a woman from his native land in the Middle East.  But his fiancée backed out after his horrible attack, fearing life in America would be precarious, indeed deadly.  Any Muslim would be suspect.

A world without love

With lots of time to think about his attack and attacker, Bhuiyan created a website called World Without Hate.org.  He has come to believe American society’s race and ethnic problems are directly related to our love of technology, perhaps reckless.  With each click for instantaneous revelation or messaging, our humanity has lost its compassion.  Stroman was convicted of a hate crime, but Bhuiyan believes mental illness is the cause of hatred and murder.  He calls on families to be aware of loved ones who talk crazy, shoot off their mouths, swear vengeance toward anyone who’s un-American or non Christian.  These would be people who are always hostile, irritable, depressed, vengeful, anti social, brutish, batterers, alcoholics or hard drug users, unemployed or un-employable.  The only salvation to American society is for people to alert authorities of such a person, no matter how beloved and accepting he may be within his own family.  Because Stroman was treated by his family and friends as a madman, he was left alone with his thoughts and perceptions and spiraling insanity fueled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks against America.

Stroman was one of many 9/11 vigilantes, men who aimed at anyone living in this country who they thought were Muslim and therefore terrorists, all enemies of America.  There were dozens of similar hate crimes nationwide against hundreds of people and their property such as mosques and businesses.  It was a national shame.

If you can believe it, Bhuiyan and Stroman became friends after the trial.  The victim went out of his way to visit his condemned assailant on death row.  He wanted to understand this man—who was so unlike the Americans he befriended and knew on a daily basis from his store and neighborhood.  He had to make the criminally insane somehow redeemable because he needed to heal, not his physical wound but his emotional and spiritual wounds.  Add political wounds, too.

Namaste

India has been a friend to the U.S. for a very long time.  Politically we share a love of democracy and capitalism.  Isn’t it funny how practically every kind of modern American business these days has at least one employee from India?  We find the Indians who immigrate here intelligent, educated, polite, gracious, interesting, and most of all accommodating.  That is the Indian way, to defer to Western man.

But since the election of Trump, America has created a new set of vigilantes with murderous intentions.  These are white men who are just following the punch-hard tactics that got Trump elected president.  Trump came across as speaking for the common man, ensuring red-blooded Americans of jobs, making America great again, beefing up the military to bomb the s*&^ out of Muslim countries where terrorists abide.  Never mind the majority of the populations in the Middle East who are not terrorists, just consecrated Muslims who pray several times a day.  Then there is Trump’s stance on illegal immigration, referring mostly to people from Latin America, which gets twisted into the understanding that All Immigrants Must Go.

Presuming Trump’s election as a sign that white is right and white is might, there is a certain group of white men who consider it open season on anyone living in America who does not physically fit the so-called pure American profile: white Anglo Saxon Christian with deep roots in our nation, several generations removed from the last immigrant family member.  To many Americans, those are the real Americans: the white proud pioneer families whose muscle and ingenuity built this country into the greatest nation on earth.  And there is no convincing them that America had any help in the form of cheap human labor.

Recently a white man in a typical American city went on a shooting rampage while shouting ‘Leave my country.’  He was shooting at men who were from India—not Muslim, not terrorists.  This is one of many hate crimes that have been occurring since the election.  It’s like the fall of 2001 all over again.

India is deeply offended and confused (along with most of the world) with this new hard-line, hard-right political direction in America right now, supported and embraced by tens of millions of Americans with chants like ‘America first.’  In fact, educated Indians who had plans and visas to immigrate to America for set jobs have abruptly canceled their plans.  They indeed are broken hearted.  They had such hopes for a bright future in America, even becoming American citizens, the path many from India have taken for decades.

The world is seeing an ugly side of America, one built on fiction past and present, ignorance and evil racism.  People who live here long enough figure it out.  The one thing a certain type of white Americans hate is brown people, even brown U.S. citizens.  In the minds of that white minority, they have a lot of hate to spread throughout America and around the world—practically everybody on the planet … including the ones who were here first.

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To Russia, with Love

I’m a little confused about our love affair with Russia, alias the USSR, alias the Soviet Union, alias the Red Menace.  As a Baby Boomer, I certainly grew up feeling the big chill of the Cold War.  In those decades of the mid to late twentieth century, Americans had one arch enemy: the red communists from the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic.  The Soviets, in turn, saw America as the big evil on the planet, capable of launching nuclear war—just as they could, too.  It was spy versus spy: the freedom-loving Western world versus the Godless communist Soviet Eastern bloc.  We were taught in school the Cold War was about democracy versus communism.  Really the ‘war’ was about economic theory, capitalism versus socialism, than political philosophy.  There was blatant hypocrisy in communism, which in theory sounds Utopian: Everyone is equal, even paid equally.  That’s not how it worked, though.  The rulers were always fat cats while the majority lived in deprivation, just happy to be alive, sort of.  Time and again, history teaches that the human masses will topple governments that just don’t work in the best interest of all the people.

In 1980 President Carter campaigned to continue diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union to reduce the threat of a future nuclear war.  But the Republicans—backed big time by the so-called Silent Majority, the religious right—maintained the USSR would never be a friend to the United States.  Their candidate Ronald Reagan felt the same way, innately distrustful of the Soviet Union.  That year would be my first presidential election, so I discussed the issue with many adults.  And I could not believe my ears: Most folks I knew, all Texans, were voting for Reagan.  I loved Jimmy Carter—despite the gas lines, inflation, lay-offs, energy conservation, and Iranian hostage crisis.  He was a Democrat, and that was good enough for me.  I was idealistic and believed Carter should try to make friends with the Soviets.  I did not see them as people to fear, though I clearly recall their iron-fisted government as foreboding.  Life in the Soviet Union featured food lines; cramped dingy apartments; criminal black markets; forbidden music, art and religious expression; censored news; lots of lies; and mandated job quotas.  They had one thing going for them: Everyone had housing, something America still wrestles with.

While debating my support for Carter with a conservative Christian friend, I explained the one thing I liked about the president was his willingness to talk with the Soviet Union.  Appalled by the very idea, that was exactly why my friend refused to support Carter, because the Soviets were just evil and could not be trusted.  I realized then America needed to maintain the Cold War and dis-ease with the other world power.  Once Reagan was president, he frequently criticized the Soviet leaders and often suggested the Soviet people compare the quality of life in America to their own.  Later Reagan dubbed a state-of-the-art nuclear protection system for our hemisphere as ‘Star Wars,’ and that really upset the Soviet man on the street.  They seemed to view this possible protection shield in outer space as some sure sign we were going to nuke them first.  The ‘shield’ was to keep the nukes in outer space so no harm would come to our side of the planet.

What no one knew during the 1980s was the West had already won the Cold War.  Democracy had won.  Capitalism had won.  How?  Besides the Soviets’ love of jeans (yes, American blue jeans!) and black market rock albums, American television in communist nations probably had the biggest impact.  Glamorous soap operas like Dallas opened the eyes of the masses living in the bleak Soviet bloc.  But the biggest thing that really broke the Soviet Union was CNN.  Once everyone on the planet could see with their own eyes what’s going on around the world and that there was nothing to fear especially from the West, the Eastern bloc dictated by the Soviet Union began to break away, country by country—because the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed it.  Finally the Berlin Wall was busted to smithereens.  It was a beautiful moment in human history.  Freedom had won over tyranny, trust over fear, love over hate.

She sold seashells by the seashore

The Soviets and others who experienced an entire economy based on socialist-Big Brother theory and propaganda were going to have to think differently about every aspect of their lives and livelihoods.  Economically, they were going to have to turn around very quickly if they wanted to emulate what Americans take for granted: supermarkets with plenty of food, houses, reliable fuel and energy, cars, clothes, stuff, honest business dealings and money handling, plus competing for jobs and salaries and even self-employment through privately-owned businesses—all this because of total and complete individual freedom: of thought, word, deed, art and media.  The New Russians tried.  But one generation can’t create what has taken America and Western Europe hundreds of years to develop.  They were starting from scratch.  And an overjoyed America, still chanting “We’re Number One,” did not do much to help the Russians transform their lives in preparation for the twenty-first century.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia became the new-old name of the largest part of the former communist empire.  Maps were redrawn and redrawn.  It was messy for a decade or so.  As the Russians continued to suffer trying to catch up with American capitalism—which in itself is cold blooded and ruthless—the days of the former Soviet Union became glorified memories.  Enter a new leader: Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent with a hard-line penchant toward restored communism.  He has proven to be a leader who insists upon total control and is willing to go to any extreme including imprisoning and killing enemies and of course censoring the media, incredulous in this internet age.  President Obama slapped economic sanctions on Putin’s Russia for a military encroachment into Ukraine, a nearby European country that was begrudgingly part of the former Soviet Union long ago.

But President Trump has some kind of bromance with Putin, speaking admiringly of his counterpart in the First World.  And why does Trump want to make amends with Russia?  Oil, glorious oil!  So both of our conflicting economic and governance theories have come full circle.  But alas comrade, communism supports the government as controller of all mineral rights—not private citizens, land owners or businesses.  Americans, the hardest-working people on earth, crave gasoline.  How we gonna get to work without it?

President Trump is a businessman first.  Putin is a communist first.  America and Russia are like a divorced couple who are dating again.  It’s crazy to outsiders, but the two lovers can’t fight the attraction.  They are the magnet, and we are the steel.  In communist Soviet Russia, there was a saying: You see one thing, hear another, and think a third.  With Trump’s tough talk, twisting the truth, and blasting the American media—with its constitutional role to ensure a lasting democracy—perhaps now the old Soviet adage applies to the New Americans.

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The student outsmarts the teacher

(Squelch)  Is this mike on?  Pop, pop, pop.  (chuckles)  So, did you hear the one about the teachers who are evaluated by their students?!  (laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh)  Well, let’s just say the kids are getting away with a lot more stuff than they used to.  (laugh, laugh)  No, I’m serious, this is a thing.  Schools are making students as young as third grade rate their teachers.  (laugh, cough, chuckles)  Teens evaluate their teachers, too, now.  This newfangled mandate comes from the ‘world of academia’ where college students have been evaluating their professors.  (sniff, chuckles)  Can you believe we’re allowing school-age kids to rate teachers, like this means anything?  And the student ratings count, like 15 percent of a teacher’s overall evaluation score.  (gasp, uncomfortable gaze)  Yeah, swear to God.  And this is going on in practically every school district around and throughout the nation.  (sobering stares)

I mean, can you imagine parents being evaluated by their kids?  The likes of us rating our parents?  (laugh, laugh, laugh)  The people who raised us back in the day?  (laugh, laugh)  Boy would my butt be sore!  (laugh, laugh, laugh)  Oh, but the student evaluations are anonymous!  Talk about payback!  (laugh, laugh, laugh)  You know in our day, a lot of kids would’ve scorched certain teachers especially if they flunked a class or were paddled.  (“Yeah, really!” laugh, laugh)  I can think of a couple of teachers that every kid hated.  I won’t mention names, but these were ladies—and yes, for some reason now that I think about it, they were all women who every school kid happened to hate—who paddled some butts or sent kids—usually all boys for some reason—to the principal—who was always a man.  Then the principal would heave-ho the paddle and lay on a few whacks, probably just practicing his baseball swing.  (laugh, laugh)  Remember, the boy would return to class, cocky disposition effectively obliterated (laugh), looking at the ground, sniffling and wiping tears, then dive into his desk and lay his head down in folded arms and cry like a baby.  (laugh, laugh, chuckle, clear throat)

So now we’re letting Eddie Haskell and Larry Mondelo evaluate their teachers?  (laugh, laugh, laugh)  How fair is a kid, especially in elementary school, gonna be?  (chuckle)  No other profession allows kids to rate them, seriously anyway.  Can you imagine kids rating police officers?  Store clerks?  Therapists?  Doctors?  Dentists?  Oh and the kids do not rate the school principals, who as everyone knows have long ago put away the paddle or any remote sort of painful reprimand to effect discipline in our public schools.

Rough Room

Here are some sample questions from the student teacher evaluation.  Really, these are statements that kids rate, like: My teacher is always in a bad mood.  Or ‘My teacher is always very pleasant.’  Or ‘My teacher always takes time to work with me when I don’t understand a problem.’  Or ‘My teacher never supports my community.’  That last one, what the hell?  Why is that an issue today?  Wouldn’t a kid be led to believe that his teacher is supposed to live nearby, grocery shop, attend church and every baseball game with the kid’s family?  (laugh, chuckle)  What is this, 1959?  Like we expect teachers to reside in the communities or cities where they teach?  Do we expect all other professional working people to live in the communities where they just happen to have a job?  (chuckle, chuckle)

The student answer choices are literally: Never, Hardly Ever, Sometimes, Most of the Time, Always.  (laugh, laugh, snort)  Yeah, you adults know what I’m talking about here.  Sounds like quite a few of you have been in ‘couples counseling.’  (laugh, laugh, laugh)  You know, where we are told to avoid telling our partners things like “You never clean the house” or “You always lose your keys.”  (laugh, laugh, laugh)  Psychologists remind us no one is ‘always’ or ‘never’ a certain way.  To even use the terms ‘always’ and ‘never’ when referring to someone is a sign of an immature mind.  It just may seem like someone screws up every day, especially if we don’t like the person anymore.  (laugh)

The student teacher rating is just unbelievable considering kids see everything as black or white.  They are not old enough to understand nuance, mood, life as shades of gray.  We know a person is not the same way every minute of the day.  Am I right?  (“Yeah!”)  So kids are going to check the Never and Always choices when assessing their teachers.  That would explain why most of our teachers do not receive a 100 from their student evaluations or even rate an A.  In fact, a large number are actually failing, in the minds of their students.  (chuckle, laugh)  No wonder so many teachers quit.

Education Major

Look, there isn’t an adult I know who wants to be a teacher.  Come on, show of hands: Who wants to be a teacher, in our public schools?  (laugh, chuckle)  OK, I see a few hands, very few.  I see that group of women back there raising the arm of the guy with you.  Very funny.  (laugh, giggle)  You know why adults don’t want to be teachers?  Because adults don’t want to hang out with lots of kids all day every day … even with summers off.  You like your own kids, right?  (laugh)  OK, you love your children, I know.  But you know kids can get on our nerves.  They can disappoint us sometimes.  And sometimes we don’t react well when a kid says some smart (bleep) thing to us or rolls the eyes or snickers—like they know more than we do.

What I’m trying to say is those who go into teaching are literally doing the Work of God.  (applause, whistles)  They are living, breathing, walking saints of God.  (applause)  They spend all day trying to teach and often end up having to handle kids from a variety of family structures or no structure at all.  And now society is making school kids, including quite a number from rough childhoods with parents in prison or on drugs or overworked and too tired to raise them, rate their teachers—who usually come from a completely different background.  Doesn’t seem funny anymore, does it?

Well, let me leave you with this final thought in praise of teachers or just to feel sorry for them.  (chuckle, chuckle, “Good.  Go.”)  Wait a minute.  Am I being heckled out there?  The state of our schools and the teachers who still work in them is not comedy material to you?  I find it quite laughable sometimes.  Nevertheless, I have a couple more minutes before my set is through.  Someone engage the heckler in a more scintillating topic like Trumpian politics till I’m through here.  (chuckle, “You suck.”)  All right already.

The heckler does prove another point.  The other reason why some folks—maybe like you, just enjoying a comedy club tonight with a drink or two—don’t care much about teachers or the profession.   It’s because we all had bad teachers when we were in school: the grumpy, the overbearing, the smug, the air head, the touchy-feely, the elderly, the chain smoker, the beauty queen, the jock, the disinterested, the loafer, the wannabe cool friend, the creep, the Hitler.  What can we say?  We were raised in a different era maybe.

I grew up with a teacher, and the one thing that struck me during my childhood was how professional she was on the job, not necessarily at home where she expected her kids to behave.  Mom could swing a belt!  (laugh, laugh)  So I looked at my teachers in a different light.  I had a little insight into them as people, unlike my peers who just didn’t like school, being in school, having to be in school, and having to follow rules.  (laugh)  I liked school a lot, not every subject like math and science, but I liked being in school, the formality and the structure.  And I’ll make a confession: As a kid, I always thought the summer breaks were way too long.  Like, why don’t we have year-round school already?  (scant applause)

Like you I suppose, most of my teachers did not leave a great impression on me.  But several did, even a lasting effect, perhaps life altering.  Even in elementary school, I was mature enough to understand every teacher is different.  My job was to try to get along with a variety of personalities, do what they said, and learn their subjects.  I think today by letting students rate their teachers (which really is a way to prevent raises for the less-than-popular types—pssst, most teachers) we are sending a message.  What is the message exactly?  That kids count?  That what children think of their teachers is important?  That what a kid thinks is accurate and reliable, fair and honest?  Have you spent a day in our public schools lately?   (laugh)  Kidworld is cruel, not unlike The Simpsons or Southpark.  (laugh, chuckle)

So my guess is this latest experiment in trying to improve our public schools is solely to whip the teachers into a frenzy.  It’s just continuing the illusion or delusion that our schools—a reflection of our society—are fine, just fine.  (laugh, applause)  You’ve been a great audience, thank you!  Have a good evening everyone!  Enjoy time away from the boss!  (And for teachers, that would be the kids.)

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American fear: of guns and immigrants

The only thing Americans have to fear is … more guns than people in the United States.  And most people with a gun in the home are not trained to shoot it.  There are twice as many gun accidents than gun deaths—combined, however, they are in the tens of thousands every single year, and this excludes suicides.  Gun proliferation in our country, our communities and neighborhoods, is more of an immediate threat to our security and sanity than immigrants from the Middle East or Central and South America.

Our own home-grown American crazies who have taken to high-powered assault weapons, the kind used by combat soldiers, are our most pressing concern—screaming for a solution.  The political argument used to center on mental illness or gun control, as if we have to impose on the freedom of the chemically imbalanced or the proud American sportsman.  By now we’d best deal with our own personal national epidemic of gun violence.

And our fearless leaders did just that, by eradicating a late-ordered Obama mandate that would have kept people with mental illness from buying guns.  So the insane along with the rest of us can enjoy our American right to bear arms?  What’s there to be afraid of if’n we’re all packin’?

But it doesn’t work that way.  Time and again, we are caught off guard by a maniac or maniacs shooting up high schools, elementary schools, churches, mosques, playgrounds, cinemas, restaurants, funeral processions, Wal-Marts, shopping malls, apartments, residential streets, Christmas parties, birthday parties, courthouses, police stations, protests, police officers, nightclubs.  Most of these mass shootings had nothing to do with Muslim terrorists and everything to do with easy access to assault rifles and unchecked mental illness.

1980

Remember the issues behind gun control—way back when Americans really thought reason and sanity would win over fear and power and money?  First John Lennon was shot multiple times, then a few months into 1981 President Reagan and James Brady, then Pope John Paul II.  Only one of these men died, another left with permanent brain damage, and two survived—Reagan and the Pope recollecting with a chuckle their brush with death.  Their assailants were carrying only a handgun, and the movement against guns was underway.  No one was safe since anyone could buy a gun even illegally.  Many guns linked to crimes were stolen, usually during home burglaries and then passed down by sale or pawn.  No questions asked.

Oh and then in the 1990s the uproar for the seemingly rational government background check for anyone wanting to purchase a gun.  Those years of heated debate have faded into black and white memories.  A decade later, shooting deaths not only continued (by the tens of thousands every year) but mass killing sprees were accomplished by high-powered rifles to ensure multiple deaths in a frenzied lust for bloody murder.  The movie Bowling for Columbine about the Colorado high school massacre and the student assailants didn’t change Washington or the nation.  Instead, Americans were more vocally adamant for carrying guns at all times anywhere, any place … just in case.  They seemed to be chasing the very real opportunity to play hero, Clint Eastwood with a .44 Magnum—just like in the movies!  Make my day, punk.  It didn’t matter that every police and law enforcement association was against ‘any and every body carrying a gun.’  They had a point, being the ones who legally wear a gun and are without a doubt trained and licensed to shoot one.  They know all about criminals, drunkenness and doped-up delusion, human passion, depression, and how quick guns kill.  Yet society just didn’t feel safe letting cops fight their battles, real or imagined.

Holy terror, Batman  

We got caught off guard by 9/11 and subsequent attacks like the Boston marathon and San Bernardino.  During the presidential campaign, I had tweeted: If Trump wins, it will be because of San Bernardino; if Hillary loses, it will be because she always includes a Muslim-dressed woman among a multi-ethnic crowd of supporters for speeches.  That was a turn off to Americans after two long, hard, vicious wars trying to combat Muslim terrorists.  Call it prejudice, but it’s how Americans feel pain.

The terrorists who attacked our homeland wanted to bring what people in the Middle East deal with every day and have for decades.  Terrorists are usually not highly educated and come from dire poverty unimaginable to anyone growing up in the U.S.  An unschooled mind within a poor family and community is a dangerous thing.  There is no hope … except for religion.  Many Christian families can relate.  The Great Depression drew throngs of folks to church, hoping things would turn around … and we would find God’s favor once more.  Terrible times often bring people to their knees in prayer to God.

In these admittedly dangerous times in which we live … there still is no comparison between the numbers of Americans killed by terrorists in our country and abroad to the number of Americans killed and maimed by guns and assault rifles at the hands of our own.  Many Americans will not part with guns because they have the Constitution on their side.  In the beginning Americans were given the right to bear arms to form a militia—probably because in those more dangerous times there was the likelihood a ruler might attempt to overthrow our newly born democracy.  It’s happened throughout history and still does in nations all around us.

But since 1776, guns have become awfully powerful … and fast!  Our forefathers never could have conceived of such a thing in the days of muskets and reloading powder.  A modern gun’s sudden death and damage today is faster than a speeding bullet—irreparable, perhaps doing more damage to our collective psyche than to the doomed human life.

We are the ones with the sickness, the mental defect, the dangerous and deadly personality quirk when it comes to our ideas about personal safety and guns.  Our nation’s history was built by our own people who had to quickly size up an enemy: from Redcoats to ‘red skins’ then black and brown and yellow.  By  now it’s in our genes, our perpetual need for an enemy.  So we shoot first and ask questions later.

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The give and take in government

Government giveth, and it taketh away.  They get it from the Bible.  So why is anyone shocked about dismantling the Affordable Care Act (passed during the Obama administration and referred to as Obamacare)?  Our Government has a history of creating social and education programs—even lofty science ones like NASA—and then eroding or removing them through budget cuts, often when a new administration comes to power.

Back in the 1960s, old-timers tell of the Republican fight against Medicare and Medicaid.  But since then, generations have forgotten all the fuss.  Today not a single elderly person or the poor and disabled and disenfranchised and, well, everyone living in the middle and lower classes would want to see a single dollar cut from these programs.  [Medicaid might take up less than 5% of the federal budget while Medicare is close to 30%.  The military is around 15% while education funding is not even 5%.]

A quarter of a century before Obamacare, our federal government looked into passing universal health care, whereby no one would be rejected or dumped by an insurance company due to circumstances such as pregnancy (or just being a woman of child-bearing age), chronic health ailments and pre-existing conditions, or a previous cancer battle.  The Clinton administration tried and tried and tried to get something passed along the lines of universal health care—like every modern country provides its citizens except the good ol’ USA.  The President’s wife, First Lady Hillary Clinton, was appointed to lead the charge and instead found through round-table discussions with physicians, insurance companies, hospitals and pharmaceuticals, no one could or would come to a consensus.  Issues of conflict centered on lowering health care and prescription costs, cutting a physician’s salary basically in half, and increasing insurance rates to expand coverage.  There could be no compromise.

Higher ideals

During the Bernie Sanders’ campaign, I learned of an era before my time, 50 years ago or so, when Uncle Sam would pay tuition of any American attending a public university or college.  How kind of our government leaders in those bygone days, how unified they were for the common good:  ensuring fellow Americans a college education.  It had to do with the American Dream of the house, the car, the summer vacation—in short, pulling folks financially decimated by the Great Depression into the middle class.

When I chose to go to college in 1981, the times had changed.   America was on edge with a rough, punk attitude.  No one cared about anybody.  Recession and inflation were common daily language, which for a high school kid left little hope for optimistic dreams or a brighter tomorrow.  Those of us growing up in that gloomy era understood government could not help us.  Don’t even ask.  Nevertheless, I did.

I received a federal student loan to cover my first year of college, plus I took on a couple of part-time jobs.  During my college years under the Reagan administration, budget cuts greatly affected government assistance for college.  By my second year, I was eligible for only half the loan amount with triple the interest.  Later I received a federal Pell Grant (thank God) and was eligible for college work-study.   Throughout the remainder of college, the Pell Grant was cut in half year after year, though it always covered tuition.  Incredulously, during my final year of college, I no longer qualified for work-study.  What kind of crazy government policy was that?  Reagan seemed to support kids working their way through college.

Other college students had government assistance taken away, too, affecting their plans and aspirations.  One student was on the GI Bill, having been a Vietnam-era veteran but not one that saw combat.  That was the new hitch in trying to balance the federal budget, I suppose.  Another college friend had to leave when Social Security could no longer afford it.  The government program used to provide a college education for youth whose parent or parents were deceased.

Those programs benefited millions of Americans until funds were cut.  Education programs like those could only help our nation and future generations.  The Social Security fund for college came from President Johnson whose programs and purpose was to ensure that any American who wanted to go to college ought to be able to do so.  I grew up with that mindset, a natural assumption (maybe because I am an American) that I could go to college even if my parents could not afford it.  I was grateful for the federal government supporting young people to achieve a worthy goal and a bright future for all.

Here we are today.  Our federal government and millions of Americans do not support tax dollars funding a college education.  Not only do we have a generation of college grads who cannot pay off their loans in their lifetimes, we have the same generation and younger disbelieving in college as the only way they can get ahead in life even if they are living in poverty.  They are affected by negative government, family, TV shows, movies and pop culture with sarcastic online references that play down a college degree as making any difference.  This cynical worldview has penetrated school kids who do not see the benefit of education or even a high school diploma.

Here’s the truth: Work options for people with a degree are much better than the vast number of jobs that do not require higher education whether from college, trade school or military training.  Here’s another fact: Businesses desperately need workers at every level who can read, write, calculate and think to make quick assessments and decisions ON THEIR OWN.  And businesses continuously lack the kind of employee who is overall intelligent, self sufficient and well rounded.  For decades businesses have complained workers with only a high school diploma or less are not smart enough to keep up with technology.

Government budgets reflect what’s important to people already in power.  It’s up to us Little People to let Washington know: We know how our tax dollars are spent, how the budget is divided, and what the government’s priorities are—because we know what used to be important back when America was great indeed.