Most of my friends stopped watching the news. They can’t deal with it. But not me.
Why? Because I was a teacher and saw how messed up our schools were back in 1995. I figured that since they were openly breaking the law, it was just a matter of time before everyone in power would do the same.
Our schools used to be the “Wholesome Class.” They influenced us to choose a cooperative, decent way of life. Once corruption found an air-tight way into our schools, and there’s been nothing to balance it, and no way to report it, the “Epstein Class” has owned the entire playing field.
I know this firsthand, since I started teaching when people were true public servants, and returned to teaching to find so many educators had morphed into either self-serving control freaks or their puppets, all serving only themselves to stay employed.
It’s not that I like what I hear on the news. It’s just that I expected it to happen if no one did anything about what was going on in our schools. It was as if someone stole them from us, and there was not a thing anyone could do about it. (At least that’s what my union attorney forcefully told me, trying to discourage me from the mission to expose this truth that I was and still am on decades later. )
So one could say I was vaccinated.
I actually think it’s the shock of what’s going on that’s making almost everyone but me so upset that they avoid watching the news. When you expect challenges, and your brain grows accustomed to them, it stays in problem-solving mode—a silver lining for a miserable career, perhaps?
When people find the time to read my tell-all memoir, they start thinking more like me. Most say they now see a path out of this chaos from learning about our schools.
But I get why most aren’t in the mood to read a book on such a heavy topic. It reminds me of when I kept having infections in my wisdom teeth, but dreaded their removal, so I put the solution off. After I finally had them removed, I wished I had done it sooner. Those ongoing infections were far worse than the removal procedure.
I feel compelled to share that I wrote a book. A Graver Danger: White Chalk Crime, which is overly intellectual, deeply depressing, and not at all entertaining, in order to get the truth out about our schools so we can fix them, as well as the democracy they were meant to support. It’s definitely not a fun book. It’s like a wisdom tooth removal to read. However, my book gives rather than takes the wisdom you need so you can get back to watching the news.
After all, don’t you want to know how to get your country back?
And you can skim it. You can listen to the audiobook at double speed. Don’t you want to know about the book our next president needs to read to save our democracy, so you can talk about it and get it out there?
Off to watch the news.
“Action is the antidote to despair,” Joan Baez
“Crippling despair is Trump’s plan,” Karen Horwitz
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