I’m troubled.

I listen to my friends. Especially, those ‘alt-right’ friends with whom I violently disagree. One of them, a life-long friend asked me, “why can’t you get behind the new President-Elect and come together as one country?”

Like any coward, I didn’t respond. But I thought about it. Why can’t we just come together as one country? If Hillary Clinton had won, I would be out there criticizing and exhorting my friends to join us behind the new Democratic President. Even Hillary Clinton, herself in the first part of her painful concession speech said, “Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country.’

“Offered to work WITH HIM on behalf of our country.” WOW! If she could do this, then what was stopping me? Am I such a hypocrite? Am I one of those ‘do as I say not as I do’ kind of weak person? Am I just a sore loser?

Then one of the spiritual leaders of our country handed me the answer. The dark clouds of doubt parted in the skies and I could hear the faint song of Angels singing holy hymns in Latin or Greek or Angel, Hell, I don’t know, And the sun shone it’s light on to my troubled face and the voice of God, Herself, spoketh unto me in the form of Jerry Falwell, Jr. Yes, you read that right, Jerry Falwell, Jr, the leader of Liberty University in my own state of Virginia handed down to him in the same fashion that North Korea was handed down to the cute little Kim Ju-un (isn’t his little hair cut just dreamy?) from his pappa, Kim Jong-il, who got his ruling bona fides from Lil’ Kim (I know this is right as I got this information from Breitbart News Network.)

So, what words of wisdom did the son of the late-great Jerry Falwell impart unto me? He declared that Donald J. Trump “will become America’s greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”

Now, we all know what ultimately happened to Lincoln! And I am not advocating that Trump attend ANY performances at Ford’s Theater near the White House, or “Hamilton” at any theater or even go see “Madea: Presidential Aide does Washington” at the AMC Theater at Tyson’s Corner. No, I’m thinking about that little disagreement between the two forces of philosophical opposites in the 1860’s:  the anti-slavery north and the ‘alt-right’ I mean the pro-slavery south.

Falwell-Lite made me think of Lincoln, history, the Civil War, and how everything has a nasty habit of repeating itself. So, if Trump is Lincoln then where am I? Well, let’s look at history: the south was actually jubilant that Lincoln won the White House, They believed that secession from the United States would be peaceful. One alt-right, I mean pro-slavery enthusiast said, “You could slap a Yankee and he’ll sue you, but he won’t fight back.” And that was pretty much the attitude of most southerners. It may be hard to believe but on election night when the news finally arrived in Charleston, South Carolina that Abraham Lincoln had won, there was an immediate outbreak of celebrations, bonfires and even fireworks. They celebrated the election.

Lincoln believed that the government under his leadership would have the power to fix America’s problems, change the country for the better and decide policy for the good of all Americans. So far, it all sounds like I should be backing this new ‘Lincoln’ or does it?

Now listen to the next thing that Hillary Clinton said in her concession speech, “…I’m sorry we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.”

Then it hit me! This isn’t about Trump being my President. This is about the hate-filled, xenophobic and racist people and the policies and philosophy that they represent. This is about me standing up for my beliefs of fairness to all races, religions, for providing a safe-haven for those who are ‘tired, poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

And that’s my View overlooking The Hill of the new civil war battlefield.

When I was young and fresh out of college, I was an outstanding educator.  I made sure that each of my students were learning, engaged and excited about learning, were interested enough to ask more questions and would be inquisitive enough to want to continue learning for the rest of their lives.  And I was successful with each and every student.

My success wasn’t a result of my youth or enthusiasm.  My success was not because I was one bit smarter than any other educator.  My success was totally a result of being left alone in my classroom to teach my students as I knew best.  In 1972, there was no ‘testing,’ ‘no child left behind,’ nor were there annual ‘evaluations.’  You taught to the very best of your ability not because it was your job; but because it was your passion.  And English and Journalism were not my passion; my students were my passion.  They were my kids and I wanted each one of them to learn.

Then it all started to go to Hell.  The road to Hell, as we all know is lined with good intentions.  And that road is a fairly long road.  Well, we all may have gotten a great deal closer in the last couple of weeks.  First President-Elect Donnie J. Trump came to Liberty University to offer the job of Secretary of Education to Jerry Falwell, Jr.   Falwell declined the offer.  A great sigh of relief could be heard throughout the country.

We may have wished Falwell had said yes as Trump turned his gaze to what may very well be the most anti-public school pick in the long history of the job, Elisabeth ‘Betsy’ DeVos, billionaire, Holland Christian High School graduate (whose stated mission is “equipping minds and nurturing hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.”…I don’t see anything about education in there, do you?) and the world’s greatest advocate for vouchers and draining funds from public eduction to go to for-profit charter schools.

This isn’t ‘draining the swamp.’ This is draining the vast rivers of free public eduction and replacing them with for-profit schools.

But let’s be fair.  What is the advantage of allowing DeVos to control our nation’s public schools?

Okay, there’s……………

Well, she could always………..

Oh, she did go to high school, but it was a private “Jesus” school, so, uhhhhh?

Okay, I got one!  If you were a low-income parent who didn’t want your child to go to public school with those other off-white children, then you could get a voucher from the United States government to send your child to a for-profit private academy.  So, the poor white students could have a choice.  Of course, anyone knows that the ‘voucher’ wouldn’t pay for the entire cost of admission to a for-profit private academy, but the parents would just have to save up a couple of thousand extra dollars to take their child out of free public schools and into a for-profit private academy.  And Betsy DeVos, who was born rich, married richer and is a billionaire, can tell you that saving a couple of thousand dollars shouldn’t be hard for ANY American family.  It’s all a matter of choices:  your child’s education vs food for two or three months.

DeVos is a real piece of work!  In her home state of Michigan, she blames the woes of places such as Detroit and the general state of affairs on high wages, high taxes on businesses and those pesky regulations that restrict businesses from polluting the countryside and air we breath.

She has given millions of dollars to influence Michigan politicians to lessen the oversight of for-profit private academies.  There is already no oversight at all for those students who are home-schooled.  DeVos wants a similar freedom from government restrictions on the for-profit business of private schools.

So, if she is confirmed by the Senate, what could happen to your free public education and more importantly, what could happen to the education of millions of American children?   First she could implement President-Elect Donnie Trump’s promise to divert $20 billion from the federal government to block grants.  She could easily take the $15 billion which is allocated for Title I.  (Title I is the federal program which provides equal access to primary and secondary education particularly for children in poverty.)  With the majority of the states in the hands of Republican governors and legislatures, they could feel emboldened by the Trump phenomenon to divert their billions of dollars from traditional free public schools to for-profit private academies.

The results:

1. Public schools are already strapped for cash.  Teacher salaries would be slashed.  Extra help for students through tutors, after school programs, books, supplies and materials would be discontinued.  Opportunities for parents to receive training to help their child in school would have to be halted.
2. The chances for the less fortunate students to succeed would be dramatically cut and their desire to continue their education would be lessened.  The dropout numbers would soar.
3. Teaching would be seen as a dead-end job.  More and more underpaid teachers would be forced to find more profitable ways to provide for their families.  (A shocking number of teachers must take on a second job just in order to provide for the necessities.)
4. Fewer young people would view teaching as a desirable occupation.  The number of new teachers would dramatically drop off.
5. With a weakened pool of new and returning teachers, public and for-profit schools would be forced to hire untrained and unqualified people to teach.
6. The result in a few short decades would be a rapid drop in the ability of the United States to compete in the world market.

Conclusion:

We cannot allow the Senate

to confirm Elisabeth ‘Betsy’ DeVos

as Secretary of Education!

What you need to do:

• Write a real letter on paper and send it to your Senator.  (Each Senator represent about 700,000 constituents.  In Washington, how much effort you take to contact your representative literally counts:  An email is just too easy and counts as less than 500 constituents.  Get 1,500 people to email and you get your Senator’s attention.  A phone call is closer to 1,000 but be sure and leave your contact information.  Why?  Because if you are a constituent you represent 1,000 others.  If you aren’t, you are placed in the circular file next to a used napkin.  Send a postcard and you are closer to 4,000.  But a paper letter is counted as representing around 10,000 other constituents.  So, get others to write as well      Here is a link to find your Senator and their address:  http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
• Either share this blog with other teachers or talk to other teachers and inform them of the grave danger that Donnie Trump has placed the education of our youth.
• Don’t just complain; do something, get involved in your local political party and make your voice heard.  Donate to the Democratic Party.  Here is the link:   https://my.democrats.org/page/contribute/help-democrats-fight-back

And that’s my View from this retired Teacher’s Desk.

When I was young and slim, I loved going to the beach. Just standing and allowing the action of the ocean to sway my frail body back and forth with each crest of a new wave seemed to hypnotize my entire consciousness. I would stand there with eyes closed totally mesmerized. That is until a giant wave would come and knock me off my feet. And that is exactly were we find ourselves politically. We have been enjoying the lazy waves and we were all hypnotized by the inevitable victory of Hillary Clinton and a secure future.

And WHAM! The Donald J. Trump wave slammed into us. But was it really Trump’s wave? He really didn’t even think HE was going to win. He was as hypnotized as we were.

No, the wave came from much farther out to sea. And that wave has been rapidly knocking people off their stable lives throughout the world. It has a name but that name is different in different areas of the world, but it’s still the same force of nature. In America, I call it the ‘alt-right’ wave. In the Middle East, it was the ‘radical-Muslim’ wave. In Russia, I call it the ‘Stalin2.0’ Wave.

In each case the wave has two distinct parts which act hand in glove: political and religious. Let’s take Russia first. The Russian Orthodox Church has been in recent years the leading spiritual guide in Russian society and it acts in unison with the Kremlin. You could almost call it the religious left arm of the body of Russia with Putin as the stronger right arm. But they are of the same body and not really separate or equal.  And in this case the strong arm has become lethal such as killing journalists and political opponents and, with Russia’s help in electing a U.S. President, that arm coupled with an ultra conservative church is ‘Stalin2.0.’

The ‘radical Muslim’ wave is more well known to us. And I use the offensive term ‘radical Muslim’ for a reason to stress the religious significance of the action of the body politic that sees no difference between the political and the religious. It is in the worst sense of the word a Theocracy. The religion dictates the political.

And in each of the two examples above the wave was supersized or ‘empowered’ by political events. The annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation, came less than a year before the 70th anniversary of Victory Day, a celebration of the old Stalin Communist Russia’s defeat of the Nazis. The May 9th celebration brought out throngs of Russians who were once again proud of the newly regenerated stength of their motherland under Vladimir V. Putin. And in the Russian Orthodox churches the priests echoed that pride to the return to the old conservative values of blind loyalty and obedience to the state and church.

In the Middle East they merely cut off your head. In Russia there is a growing institution of moral condemnation that has taken on the force of law. And that institution is based on the same as the Islamic State: fear of authority. So, state enforcement through law is replaced by voluntary submission, making loyalty virtually unlimited.

That same wave hit America on November 9 when we woke up to Trump’s America. Just think back to how much of Trump’s campaign centered around fear: fear of Mexican rapists, fear of immigrants taking your job, fear of Muslims moving in next door, and then there is the religious/Pence aspect of fear: fear of homosexuals, fear of trans genders in your restroom, fear of sharia law, and fear of women becoming as powerful as men. All of these fears must be washed away in the Trump/Pence/religious-alt-right wave.

And it was that Trump/Pence victory that emboldened and legitimized the ‘alt-right’ wave. They are so legitimized that they now have a four year lease on The White House. And all that liberal political correctness that has kept those angry white males down for all those decades has been washed away…in their minds.

So, that is what we are up against. A force of nature that has been circling the globe. Keep in mind that this isn’t just happening in our America. Britain has had it’s own wave called Brexit. And other countries either have been or will be hit. This is a cycle of history which like nature comes and it goes.

But just like after every hurricane, tornado and tidal wave, we regroup, we rethink and we rebuild. The first large wave that toppled us has just sped past. We must wait for the other waves and from the racists, misogynists and homophobes who Trump is picking for his government, we are in for some very rough waves.

And that’s my view of the ocean from the Hill.

Washington D.C. is one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world.

Just being able to walk among the majestic gleaming buildings of our nation’s capital can inspire the most jaded cynic.  Even Union Station looks more like a museum than a mere train station.   I have been through and seen the Capital building hundreds of times, but each time a shutter; a thrill; an awe overwhelms me.  Last week I looked out from the window of the Library of Congress to the newly refurbished Capital Dome and it has never, in my lifetime, ever looked as awe-inspiring as it does now.  It literally shines.

But there is a lingering smell in the air.  It started on November 9th as a faint odor.  Like  slowly rotting meat; a sweat smell of something decaying has gradually grown day by day until it is now almost impossible to ignore.   It makes one want to close their windows tight and shutter their doors and stay inside away from the gleam that is Washington D.C. The smell is so strong that some of my friends from as far away as Texas, Scotland and Austria are gagging from the stench.

Like any bad odor it must first be found before it can be rooted out.  And one must first open up all of their senses to find the source; not a pleasant undertaking but essential.  The first hint of the stench came quickly:  a professor in Indiana was confronted on Nov. 9th and a student yelled in his face, “Now, it’s our time, Faggot!”   On the same day, a woman in Florida was surrounded by a group of deplorable young males and they let her know that they could grab her p**** whenever they pleased.  A young Muslim girl on her way to junior high school in Texas was stopped and her scarf ripped off her head as hate speech was spewed at her.   So, the source of the smell started on November 9th.  All across America bigots, racists, homophobes, misogynists and the dregs of humanity slithered forth with a new empowerment.

This was now their time.  Political correctness was dead and Hillary was going to prison.  The wall would be built.  The immigrants were going back to those foreign countries.  No more women in scarves or those black gowns in the grocery store.  And no more jibber jabber foreign talk at the Walmart.   ISIS would be gone by February.  Closed American factories would magically open back up and hire only white male American workers from now on.  And those pesky black folk!   Oh, how we have waited for decades to get back at those pesky blacks.  Get out the Confederate Flag and tell them to go back to Africa.   America will be great again!

Can you smell it now?  No?  Just my ‘liberal’ slant of some one-off action?  Making a mountain out of a molehill?  Well, everybody can have their own opinion, right.  We can agree to disagree, right.  Well,  there are such things as facts and they keep piling up day after day and hour after hour.  Here’s a couple of facts:

1. Nov. 14. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, says it has logged more than 200 complaints since the election.  Anti-black and anti-immigrant incidents are generating the highest numbers followed by anti-Muslim incidents. Part of the reason it is happening is that hate group leaders are encouraging members to intimidate people. Go to: http://www.splcenter.org/reporthate
2. Nov. 17.  A group of students from Archer City High School, a school that is located about 25 miles south of Wichita Falls, Texas, chant “build a wall” while holding Trump-Pence signs. Archer City High School is composed of about 83 percent white students. The chants were directed at students from Fort Hancock High School, a school located along the Texas/Mexico border east of El Paso. That school is said to be 97 percent Hispanic.  Not one adult stepped in to stop the attack.
3. Nov. 20. Hate crimes in Michigan have spiked in recent days after the presidential election, alarming state officials and community leaders, who are mobilizing to prevent more bias.  Here are a few examples:  In Ann Arbor, police said a Muslim woman was forced to remove her Islamic headscarf after being threatened with being set on fire by a man. In Royal Oak Middle School, some students chanted “build the wall” at Latino students and on Friday, a noose was found in the same school. In Hartland on Nov. 12, the Saturday after the election, an Indian-American woman said she was spit on and called a terrorist by a man telling her to get out of the country.

I could go on and on but I should have made my point by now that something stinks in this country and his name is Donald J. Trump.

Now, I really want President-elect Trump to smell better.  Anyone can shower off the scum, right?  Well, no.  Not if you just keep wallowing in the scum.  This weekend Mr. Trump (he’s not President yet) decided to add some more stink to Washington in his pick of Senator Jefferson Beauregard ‘Jeff’ Sessions as attorney general.  Sessions is as racists as they come and has a long history of blocking any kind of immigration.  Oh, and he is from Alabama.

Then there is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Thomas Flynn who Mr. Trump picked as his national security adviser.  Flynn has said that Sharia, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”  He is an Islamophobe who has said that the US is in a “world war” with Islamist militants and must work with any willing allies in the fight, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.  That term “world war” should bother you; as in III.

And we can’t leave out Governor Michael Richard ‘Mike’ Pence.  Pence is a raging homophobe.  From trying to jail same-sex couples if they even apply for a marriage license in his home state of Indiana to calling for “God’s Plan” to ban same-sex marriages nationally, Pence is to the LGBT community as Hitler was to the Jewish community.   And how did that work out?

Now, you can smell it:  RACIST, ISLAMOPHOBE, HOMOPHOBE.  And this is only the beginning.

So, what can we do about this.  Well, you know those pine scented air fresheners that are shaped like green fir trees and hang in most taxi cabs?   We can buy a whole lot of those or we can get our adult pants on and work to fight this stench.

Let America know,

“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!“

Make a donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Democratic National Committee or whatever organization that you think will help destroy this stink.  And make a donation once a month.  There is a Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017.  Make plans to attend.   Make noise by calling your representative.  Better yet, write them a letter.  Keep informed with REAL NEWS.  Don’t be stupid and deplorable by reading fake news.  Facts are important and use them.   And don’t just be mad as HELL today; keep it up for four more years.

Every person who has ever had to find the source of a bad odor that infests their home knows that it takes time, elbow grease and determination to make your home smell nice and fresh once again.   This cleaning job is for your nation’s home.  This cleaning job is a tough one.  This cleaning job can only be done by all of us together, but we can clean this swamp of this filth.

Join me, won’t you.

                                                           And that’s my first View From the Hill.