What they haven't been taught is killing us ...

We’ve allowed ourselves to get into such a mess it’s hard to see a way out any time soon. 
 
It’s mostly because our education system is a joke. For too many years kids have been fed a constant stream of misleading and ever-changing propaganda. They haven’t been taught anything that might make them a productive member of our society. 
 
Like the actual history of United States, and not the 1619 Project or critical race theory versions.  Learning more about world history would also help them understand why the American story was (and remains) so unique in the world.    
 
Instead of being taught how morally and ethically flawed we are, and how we’ve historically always perpetuated systemic racism against people of color, they’d probably be surprised to learn that hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives – the highest casualties in any war in our history – fighting to end the enslavement of blacks here more than 150 years ago. A practice, I might add, that was fiercely defended by Democrat politicians of the time.      
 
It was a Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  In the aftermath of the Civil War, it was Democrats that enacted the Jim Crow laws, and then fought against desegregation for another hundred years. It was also Democrats – led by former KKK recruiter Senator Robert C. Byrd, who tried to stop passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 
 
I’m sure they be shocked to learn Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. 
 
Their perspective might change if they were taught what this nation has done to improve the lives of millions here and billions around the world. Or if it had been revealed to them that no other nation in the world has been as consistently generous with aid to the people of other countries, even our adversaries, suffering from natural or manmade catastrophes. And that countless Americans in uniform have paid the ultimate price to rescue millions elsewhere from the tyranny of dictators and genocidal murderers. 
 
To this day, most countries would prefer the United States to be the world’s superpower over any other contenders, like China or Russia. They understand that we are basically a good and generous nation, if at times too idealistic for our own good. They may not always agree with us, or how we do things, but they realize our goal has never been world domination. 
 
Most of the world knows this. But our own kids and younger adults don’t. They’ve been taught something entirely different. Something essentially untrue about America. A lot of things, in fact, that are simply false.  Such as we are a racist nation, founded on racist principles, and are no better – probably worse, ethically and morally – than just about any other country on the planet. 

As a result, they know almost nothing about why people came here in the first place, and why this nation is still so attractive to millions in other countries who would do practically anything to be here, live here, work here, and raise their families here. 

 
They have no understanding of how and why our government was deliberately designed the way it is – with three coequal branches. Why we were set up as a republic and not a pure democracy – and why that distinction matters.  Why every state, big or small, gets two Senators.  Why there’s an Electoral College so the biggest states alone don’t pick every President. 
 
They don’t grasp that our Constitution is one of the most unique in the world for expressly limiting the power of the government. They don't understand the reasoning behind the Bill of Rights and why these amendments remain so essential to maintaining a free society in the face of a potentially authoritarian government.
 
This is heartbreaking because that’s where we are headed now. Out of ignorance. 
 
If they’d been taught the realities of what happens to those under authoritarian regimes as in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, Russia, Iran and much of the rest of the world, maybe they’d understand why so many of their people want to leave.  Ask anyone who left one of those countries to come here and you’d gain an entirely different perspective on America.  
 
If more of our younger people knew the real history of what Marxism, Communism, and socialism delivered practically everywhere these were tried – the suppression of speech and basic human rights, and the imprisonment and execution of dissenters – these wouldn’t seem so attractive. Or that Marxism, Communism, and socialism many times led to widespread deprivation and starvation. If they did maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to embrace these failed ideologies.
 
I have no idea what today’s students are required to read in school, if anything.  Or even if most of them can read. That’s not exaggeration on my part: many colleges and universities are now forced to provide remedial reading classes to their incoming freshmen. That’s scary. 
 
A good starting reading list would include classics from my school years. And yes, these were assigned reading in public high school at one time. They are: Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and 1984. These are all especially relevant right now.
 
Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in 1984 mirrors precisely how our current government and media work together to actively edit, remove, and revise historical events and statements that actually happened to promote a new narrative. 

His Thought Police should be readily identifiable today as the online trolls, political correctness scolds and doxers.  Children in the Junior Spies train to monitor and report any suspicious anti-State behavior or statements by their parents or others. The organized Two Minutes Hate sessions could just as well focus on Donald Trump in today’s political environment. 
 
It’s almost as if Democrats and the media have used 1984 as a guidebook rather than the warning it was intended to be.  I don’t believe I’m the only one who sees the similarities.      
 
I doubt many of the younger members of our population will ever read any of these books. Probably because they either aren’t interested in reading, or simply can’t. Or maybe because the current ruling elite controlling curricula has deemed these books too dangerous.  
 
If they did, it might give them a shock on how closely and quickly our political environment is moving toward our own version of Big Brother, following their "progressive revolution.”  

Stop worshipping public-school teachers ...

If you have a paying job and you refuse to go to work, even though you are perfectly able to and it’s perfectly safe to do so, you’re going to get fired. 
 
Unless you’re a public-school teacher, apparently. 
 
For some reason I’ve never understood, today’s public-school teachers are now considered the most important people in our country – practically saints, if you will.  They deserve ever more money, better working conditions, smaller class sizes, fewer demands on their time, better benefits, and early retirement, because of the stress of their job.
 
And also as a just reward for all their years of self-sacrifice teaching America’s children. 
 
Constantly drummed into us is that if you care about the children, if you want higher test scores, if you want today’s children to be better prepared to compete in tomorrow’s world, better public education is the key.  And as we’re constantly told, teachers hold the key to better public education. Dedicated teachers can make all the difference in a young person’s future success or failure.     
 
Where would we be without these public-school teachers?
 
This year we’re finding out. Most of the above is true; better education is still the key to success. But teachers aren't the key to better education if they don't show up. They've severely tarnished their saintly image this year by refusing to go back into the classrooms.       
 
Many public-school teachers, especially in Democrat-run places, showed us they are are no more than self-serving union hacks. They couldn’t care less about the kids they’re supposed to be educating. Even though the science says it’s safe, they don’t want to go back to work.  They’ve enjoyed what’s about a year off with pay and they see no reason to return any time soon. They haven’t lost one damn thing in the process, while gaining another year counted toward retirement.
 
Which, frankly for these teachers, is their ultimate goal. Not guiding and nurturing the minds of our children to become well-educated, well-rounded, responsible, and productive members of our society.  Nope. It’s to retire as early as possible, with the highest retirement pay and benefits.  
 
For them teaching has become just another public sector job where mediocrity is the norm, and self-interest is the rule. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the kids entrusted to them.  They don’t care if they can read, write, or do even basic math. They oppose any testing to demonstrate whether their students have learned anything. 
 
They oppose even more strongly any proposal to test them to verify they have sufficient knowledge on the subject matter they’re teaching. That’s because so many know they’d fail.   
 
It's almost impossible to fire them. Awful teachers are protected.  Incompetence is rewarded by promoting bad teachers into higher paying admin jobs.      
 
Maybe all public-school teachers deserved respect years ago. Not anymore.
 
Sure, there are still some people teaching in our public schools who are dedicated to truly educating the young in their classes. They didn’t pick teaching because Education was the easiest major in college, which it is.  Or just because it offered what amounts to lifetime job security, which it also does.  Or because they’d be able to retire in their 40s with a fat pension and generous benefits, which is the norm in many public-school districts today.  Or because they’d get every summer off.     
 
I imagine it’s difficult for these dedicated teachers to work side by side with the slackers only going through the motions to accumulate enough paid vacation and sick days to retire earlier. It must be even more disheartening for them to know how successfully those drones are at gaming the system at student and taxpayer expense, and making just as much as they are.    
 
It has to gall the good teachers that so many of their coworkers are in teaching for all the wrong reasons, are fundamentally inept at their job, intellectually dishonest, and demonstrably lazy.  They know that in any other field those people would be fired.  
 
But they also know that a great many of them have absolutely no fear of being terminated, and that makes them arrogant – the bad teachers know they can’t be touched, no matter what they do, short of committing rape or murder on video while in front of credible witnesses. 
 
So what should we do? 
 
First, we need to get over the canonization of all public-school teachers and administrators.
 
Working in public schools does not automatically convey sainthood, even as a teacher.  Once you belong to a union, you lose the halo.  As a member of a union you’re now just another working stiff on the public payroll like the workers on the cafeteria and janitorial staff in your school. Or the people who drive city buses or pick up the trash on your street. 
 
You get paid for showing up for your shift, putting in your hours, and following a routine. Just like them. If you want to do more than the basic requirements, that’s up to you, but you won’t get anything extra as a reward. Do too much and you’ll get called out for rocking the boat. That’s how unions everywhere work.  Teachers’ unions are no exception.        
 
If the good teachers think they should be rewarded more for performance and going the extra mile for their students than the lazy slackers among them, then they need to decertify their union.  Only then can the bad teachers be removed. And if you take out the bad and incompetent teachers now, you also shut off the pipeline for future incompetent administrators typically drawn from the ranks of incompetent teachers.
 
Until they are willing to do that, they’ll never escape the mediocrity that’s inherent in a union system where seniority counts more than skill. 
 
In the meantime, we, the taxpaying public, need to send a strong and clear message to the teacher union officials and members who are currently thumbing their collective noses at orders to return to the classrooms for in-person teaching.  We need to fire the teachers who refuse, even after the science says it’s safe for them, to return to their jobs full time.
 
Of course, if we try to do that, they’ll threaten to walk off the job. So what?
 
That ship has already sailed.   

Why Democrats are running scared ...

They have every reason to be.
 
That’s why they’re in such a rush to cut every corner, break every rule if necessary, to get as much of their looney agenda passed or at least in place before their time’s up.  It’s why Joe’s staff is trying to accomplish everything they can via Executive Orders now.  He’s not even sure what he’s signing much of the time, but his handlers keep egging him on. 
 
They know that at best they have two years before they probably lose control of the House and most likely the Senate, too.  By then they hope to have displaced Joe and have Kamala in the Oval Office.  Their hope is that she can hold on until 2024 when she’ll get the boot. 
 
In the meantime, Democrats have to contend with the almost half the voting population that feels cheated in the last election. They also have to deal with all the moderates and independents who voted for Joe because he promised he would be bipartisan and certainly not radical if elected. 
 
He wasn’t going to ban drilling, or fracking.  He wasn’t going to shut down projects that employed thousands of union folks.  He wasn’t going to push the Green New Deal.  He wasn’t going to push the socialist agenda of the progressives. 
 
C’mon man … Joe would say while campaigning, you know me – I’m not some radical.
 
Now they feel cheated too because Joe isn’t keeping his word. It appears he never intended to. In short, Joe’s the same old spineless weasel who would say anything, blatantly lie, and do whatever his donors required to get elected, as he did for almost 40 years already. 
 
Way down deep, Joe’s shallow. There no there, there with Joe. Never has been.  There’s even less there now, as Joe clearly has trouble talking coherently without a script in front of him.  Take away Joe’s teleprompter and he’s lost. Honestly, even with the teleprompter he screws up. 
 
He has no idea what he’s doing or what he’s signing.  Recently, he was caught on a hot mic confessing he had no idea what he was signing at that moment – another of his Executive Orders/Actions; one of his handlers off camera told him to just sign it. 
 
Which of course he did. He does what he’s told. 
 
Which made him the perfect Trojan Horse to get a shameless political prostitute like Kamala Harris – someone who literally slept her way to the top of California state politics – into the Presidency. Make no mistake, that’s the plan: a couple of months of Joe and then he’s replaced. Democrats have been telegraphing that move ever since Joe got the nomination.
 
Plus, Kamala’s ascent would be Democrats’ dream come true: the first female President and the first female President of color.  And Democrats treasure “the first” token whatever. The first Latino/Latina whatever. The first transgender whatever.  The first openly gay whatever.  The first Native American whatever.  The first double amputee lesbian whatever.  Whatever ... 
 
Forget that Kamala’s a conniving weasel who accused Biden of being a racist during the primaries. Forget that she had to drop out of the primaries because she was polling at less than 1%. Forget that another reason was because she was facing a near-certain primary defeat in her home state of California, where she was Attorney General before winning her Senate seat.   
 
Forget that she’s exaggerated about her heritage and her struggles as a black child dealing with racism in America.  And that when asked as a toddler what she wanted most, she said “fweedom.” Which would be cute if not stolen from Martin Luther King, Jr. 
 
She’s not African American, either. Nor did she come from working-class, blue collar parents.  She has a Jamaican-born father with a Ph.D. who later became Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford, and an Indian mother, renowned for her work in breast cancer research, who earned her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology at age 25 from Berkeley. That’s not hardscrabble by any measure.  Kamala was in no way a disadvantaged child.  
 
Everything about her is contrived and faked.  She once said in an interview pot smoking came naturally to her because of her Jamaican roots. “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” she said. Her own Jamaican-born father was insulted by that – in effect, stereotyping all Jamaicans as pot smoking joy seekers.  He publicly called her out and said her reliance on “identity politics” to get ahead politically was a “travesty.”   
 
Joe knows – or perhaps he doesn’t – that he doesn’t have a lot of time remaining in the Oval Office. In any case, he’s rushing to sign as much as he can before he’s asked, or pushed, to move out.  There’s a feeling by pretty much everyone in DC that he’s part of a clear bait-and-switch strategy.  He may be so befuddled he can’t see it, but it will happen. 
 
Democrat Senate and House leaders know there’s no way the public wants Congress to enact the progressive agenda of AOC and the Squad. The public doesn’t want taxpayer funded abortions, packing the Supreme Court, the Green New Deal, socialism, or putting Federal bureaucrats in charge of deciding what’s acceptable speech.  

Pelosi and Schumer also know Puerto Ricans repeatedly have voted against becoming a state, the Constitution prevents Congress from making DC a state, and prevents Congress from allowing the Feds to take total control over our elections from the states.
 
It's like their unconstitutional attempt to try a former President in the Senate on a sham impeachment passed without any witnesses in a kangaroo court-like affair in the House. Quite simply, you can’t remove a President from an office he no longer has.     
 
The truth is, they know they don’t have the public on their side on any of these issues. So all of this is for show – to appease their more radical elements.
 
We just have to wait out two years. We can only hope they don't get us into any stupid, wasteful wars in that time.