Show Me The Money

I want feedback on my sociological ideals. 

                Here’s what feedback looks like:  $.  How’s that for blatant materialism and capitalistic theory? 

                I want to know if I’m a good teacher.  I want to get PAID to do my job well.  For the love of god, someone please hire me or fire me or give me a raise or threaten to give me a pay cut BASED SOLELY ON THE WAY I DO MY JOB.

                I have a friend (okay, this friend is only 17 years old, but I don’t have any other friends, so don’t judge me.  Plus, he’s smarter and more mature than most adults I know.) and he is a staunchly conservative republican.  So … I usually totally disagree with all the bullshit propaganda that comes out of his mouth, even though I love to argue with him.  And even though his is deeply conservative and I am a flaming social liberal, I agree with him 100% that unions are destroying education.  When everybody gets paid the same amount of money based on years of service rather than based on performance, we are communist China.  I don’t understand how AMERICA (insert flags and declarations and pledges here) can tolerate such a fundamentally flawed system, ESPECIALLY when it involves THE CHILDREN (do you see all these emotional and logical appeals happening?!). 

                In my teacher inservice today, I looked around at the people in the room, and (having worked with these people and heard about what they do via other teachers and generations of students), I was thinking that I could probably accurately assign a legitimate dollar amount to the work they do as a teacher.  Some teachers work their asses off to make a difference.  Some teachers watch videos.  Some teachers teach … foods.  Physical Education.  Parenting.  These people are not reading 15 page research papers and evaluating research, writing, and critical thinking skills (which are then monitored by the school district and the state) on a daily basis.  Tell me how that’s the same job, equal pay. 

                I occasionally joke about teaching and say I should be a P.E. teacher instead so that I don’t have to work so hard all the time, working a full work day and then taking home papers to grade for hours and hours every night, BUT I would never teach one of those elective things.  The reason I teach is to (try to) make a difference in the lives and intelligence levels of students, not to sit on my ass and collect a paycheck (obviously).  But I’ll tell you this with absolute authority:  the path education is on is systematically killing the altruistic dreams of real teachers.  People who go into teaching as a mission do so because they are affecting people intellectually and personally, and the rise of the “education” degrees does nothing but compromise legitimate thinking in favor of “theories” presented by online “universities” which are simply collecting money from teachers in exchange for higher pay scales.  WHAT IS THE POINT?!  Stop paying teachers because they took a ridiculous education theory class about font size online and pay them based on what they do in the classroom instead.

                No other profession has such stupid, backwards rules for “advancement.”  Fucking socialists.

Love, actually

                I want to write something about teaching and how it pisses me off that I don’t get paid for my effort.   I want to write something about my marriage and how I want more than anything for him to just give up and leave me alone.  I want to write something about the fact that I’m getting fat because I don’t care about eating right or working out any more.  I want to write about how I used to hate television but now I watch TV all the time because I have no social life.

                Instead, I’m going to write about love.

                I’m pretty sure I’ve never properly been in love.  I have been in lust.  I have cared about people.  But I’ve never met a soul mate – man or woman.  I don’t even have a best friend.  When I was younger I had best friends, but through a long series of stupid betrayals, they all went away.  And then I never tried to make it happen again.  Too much work and no one seems to care about things the way I do (which is kind of ironic, because people think I’m cold and mean when the total opposite is true). 

                Let me tell you a story that only me and one other person know (I can do this because the internet is a vast wasteland of apathy, where people hide behind their computer keyboards).  On my wedding day, I drank about 6 bottles of champagne.  After the second or third, I told a boy I was vaguely in love with that it should have been him wearing the tuxedo that day.  He cried a little, but he didn’t fight for me then or before or after.  They never do.  I let him get away, because it was easier to go with the flow than to acknowledge reality. 

                My husband knew about this guy, and he didn’t really care.  Kinda fucked up, yes?  He said he didn’t need to worry, because me being in love with this other guy was like me being in love with myself, because we were basically the same person.  He was right about that, but is it so bad to love things you have in common with someone else?  Is there some problem with loving who you are?  I get that opposites attract, but I think that’s mostly true in terms of sex and social interactions.  My husband is great in social situations in that he can small talk a person to death.  I, on the other hand, am happier talking about politics and religion and philosophy and ideals and death.  As it turns out, most people don’t like chatting about the big stuff.  They’re content to live in the trivial. 

                Extrovert, introvert.  Superficial, deep.  Blissfully ignorant, Sadly informed. 

                I’ve done a lot of fucked up things in the past, but I think I’ve done my penance.  I think I deserve to be happy.  And if not, at least I deserve to not be angry and/or sad all the time.  I deserve to be free – doesn’t everyone?  Doesn’t everyone want to be madly, deeply in love?  Maybe it just doesn’t happen for everyone.  I would prefer consuming passion – periods of love and hate – to mediocrity and settling.  The generic middle-ground eats me alive.  I talk, no one listens.  I say what I need, and I get told it’s awkward to talk about feelings. 

                This part sucks.  What do you do when you’re done and they’re not?  How do you cut the cord without being the bitchy, cold, unfeeling one?  How do you tell someone that they are hurting themselves just as much by clinging on to something that’s gone?  Why is it so hard to admit failure at marriage, which is so obviously contrary to human nature?  A contract is not love - it’s a duty.  I want to see that contract dance in the flames and picture the flying embers as tiny wings to fly me free.  

Elections & Other Bullshit

            Another election cycle has come and gone – the incumbent president won because the other name on everyone’s ballot was a shape-shifting panderer whose political party was under the impression that money can buy everything.  Before the facts came in, my cynicism would have encouraged me to agree that the person with the biggest fistful of cash gets whatever they want, but it didn’t work out for the elitist rich people this year. 

            In an attempt to pretend to be “fair” super PACs were created to funnel money into critical elections at the local, state, and federal level.  Even on the surface these organizations are shitty and convoluted, because their sole purpose is to influence the population by whatever means necessary.  Propaganda machines.  Most of the media ads they created were not espousing the merits of their chosen candidate, but rather indicting the opposing candidate on some bogus charge or another.  Political poison.

            The only refreshing thing here is that the super PACS didn’t work.  Even $380 million couldn’t get Romney in the White House, which says a lot about his character.  (What says even more is that he lost in his home state and even among the Mormon voters.)  But $380 million was just thrown away by Republican donors.  Karl Rove spent $180 million on ads critical of Obama.  Didn’t work.  The Koch Brothers spend $66 million.  Sheldon Adelson spent $53 million.  The list goes on, ad nauseum. 

            What a disgusting waste of money.  I realize that it’s their money to throw away on whatever they want, but don’t people ever look past what benefits them personally and think to affect the world in a more altruistic way?  The Bill & Melinda Foundation spends its money on improving education, eliminating malaria, family planning, refining agriculture, and improving vaccines.  Where are these types of people in the Republican Party?  They seem to spend all their resources trying to take away women’s choices, denying civil rights to gay people, chasing out immigrants, and ensuring that the wealthy elite stay wealthy and elite. 

            What kind of momentous changes could that (wasted, because they lost) $380 million have made on average American families struggling to get by?  And how much did the Democrats pay to stay in office?  The total for both parties was somewhere around $6 billion, which is more than the GDP of some countries.  What a waste.  Consider the impact of $6 billion on any of the following things:

·         Cancer research

·         Make a Wish Foundation

·         Family shelters

·         The Red Cross

·         Food pantries

·         The Salvation Army

        That kind of money would change the game for a lot of people.  But no, it just got thrown away in the incessant quest for power and control (not to mention lifetime health benefits and a paycheck that never stops coming, even when you don’t have that job any more.)

        Here are some people who need your money more than politicians:  veterans, children in poverty, underinsured families, abused women, victims of natural disasters, schools, orphans, elderly shut-ins, the unemployed, small business owners, students, homeless people …  And I’m not talking about people who defraud the system, I’m talking about people who genuinely need a helping hand.  Come to think of it, that money would probably be better spent in a lump donation to the Humane Society.  At least dogs are loyal and cute.