For Robin

I’ve been lost.  Cyberspace and whatnot.  My brain is too busy with superficial nonsense to properly write.  No one really cares if I’m absent or not, but Robin does. 

My problem with writing is that there are roughly a million thoughts running through my head at any given time, and committing them to written words is difficult.  There are many, many things on my brain right now, so I’ll just puke some of them out:

1.      Has the news media been taken over by The Onion, or am I crazy?  (It’s quite possible that I’m crazy, so don’t worry about judging…)  America has turned into one of the dystopian novels everyone is forced to read in high school!  America 2018 is social satire, but for REAL!  What in the bloody fuck is this president (lower case p) of the United States of America?  Did people actually go to a voting booth and check the box by this dumbass’s name?  He is quite literally the worst person at the wrong time and in the wrong place to make America great again.  What a childish moron.  I understand that descending into personal attacks is the argument of one who’s losing, but … AMERICA IS LOSING RIGHT NOW.  We are regressing, Retrogressing, actually.  I truly believe that DJ Trump is a Stalin-esque psychopath. 

a.       P.S. Donald, if you were in Russia, you’d be in a Siberian prison camp (and don’t think your butt-buddy Vlad wouldn’t put you there in a heartbeat).

b.       And if you were in North Korea, they’d put your entire family in a camp (not that you seem to care about any of them).

c.       Oh, and Melania?  I feel you, girl.  Get the fuck out of dodge while you can.

2     Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  Florida.  Unbelievable.

a.       ANOTHER school shooting.  As a high school teacher (for 20 years), and a parent (for 26), I can say with personal experience that school shootings are a fucking travesty.  I remember watching Columbine on TV.  I remember watching the raw footage from the school cameras, and the kids filing out with their hands up.  I remember watching that poor kid trying to climb through a broken library window (after he’d already been shot) and basically throwing himself onto the police and firemen below him, while he was essentially bleeding out.  He knew what was up.  He had probably just heard those other two fucking murderers shoot each other over in the library book stacks.  He wanted the fuck out of there.  Immediately. 

b.       Carnage.

                                                               i.      Oh, but two decades later, how many school shootings have happened?  As of today, since January 1^st, 2018, there have been 18 school shootings.  2,281 people have been killed by guns since the beginning of 2018.  And America does (essentially) NOTHING about it.  We talk about stupid shit and then do nothing.   17 more human beings murdered, while they were trying to go to school.  Gunned down in cold blood by a boy who needed help that just isn’t available to people like him.  Not in America.  Give him a gun, right, but don’t him any access to mental health.  In America, you have to fucking murder people before someone pays attention.  How fucking sad.  How embarrassing. 

1.       Until … Emma Gonzales opens her beautiful mouth.  Bless you, baby girl.  Maybe you’ll be a catalyst. 

c.       Carnage, Part 2.

                                                               i.      As a society, we should be surprised that there aren’t MORE school shootings in America.  We force these kids to attend school for 8 hours a day, surrounded by other hormonal human beings, and make them ask permission to use the restroom, and suspend them for not attending school (an obvious irony).  What. The. Fuck.  (And then add on athletics, and clubs, and band, and activities … some teenagers are strung out.)

1.       (And then some of them are totally alone.)

                                                             ii.      Every day I see a school shooting “situation”, even though no one has a gun.  Everyone in the building wants out, all the time.  My school is built like a prison.  I have no window.  I have no idea what’s going on outside of the four walls of my classroom.  But, if (god forbid) a school shooting happens in my building, I will absolutely, 100% of the time, open the door for a student who is trapped in the hallway.  If I get shot, well, I get shot.  I don’t go to work because it’s a job – I’m trying to mentor the next generation of human beings.

d.       So  … let’s stop shooting other people right now, okay? 

                                                               i.      And let’s take a minute for the brave, young, sad, broken souls who are newly engaged in the political process for the first time right now, even though they aren’t even old enough to vote. 

3.       Last, but not least:  Mother Russia.  Yes, that makes me sound like a communist , but Russia has a coherency that America will never have.  They are being taken as fools by an oligarch, and everyday Russians suffer every single day.  They are not better off than Americans; they are simply better trained to suffer. 

a.       We are America.  There is no need to suffer.  As a country, as human beings, let’s get our shit together.  Let’s help people who suffer from mental illness.  Let’s get the guns out of everyone’s dirty hands.  Let’s have some common sense about the reality of teenagers being able to walk into schools and kill whomever they want in a short period of time.  Let’s not make school teachers shoulder the burden of being teachers, police officers, counselors, social workers, substitute parents, and subsidiary circus acts who are trying to teach a life subject area.  As a teacher, I’m tired.  I love my students, but I have come to mistrust the very foundation of my government job. 

b.       Our children, our teenagers, need us. 

Let’s remember that these little motherfuckers are going to take care of us when we are older, so let’s show them some respect.  Let’s just SHOW them how to be better, rather than demanding untaught skills from our students, our children, their friends, and the entire next generation.  Don’t tune out.