The Haunting

I have been resting and recuperating, but also planning for the worst.  I mean, when I am ill I often get a little depressed because I know what has to eventually happen to me.  I am not immortal.  So I have been having some fun planning all the people I will haunt when I become a ghost.

Ghosts are usually around for the sake of cosmic justice, seeking to wrong the rights done to them in life (did I say that backwards?  Maybe so).   So, my first task will be to choose the ones I will haunt because of how they helped shorten my life and contribute to the misery I’ve endured.

I really thought the best place to start grinding axes was in the political arena.  (The sound of grinding axes would be spooky, wouldn’t it?  Especially in a State capitol building like the big pink-marble mausoleum in Texas.)  I would very much like to haunt the people who helped kill me with stress by making it so difficult to be a Texas teacher.  This State is rather anti-education, at least since the conservative Republicans took over and made the State their sovereign province for perpetuity.  Rick Perry and the Republican agenda have slashed budgets for education, cut teacher jobs… especially in the arts and music areas, and set up a system of State tests to measure educational progress that are rigged to show that we are failing in Texas to provide a decent basic education.  (If you make the test harder and harder at the same time you make the stakes higher and higher every single year, you are bound to get results that show educators doing worse and worse.  And, of course, the tests are designed by lawyers consulting with test-makers… no teachers allowed in the process.)  So I can haunt Rick Perry to wrong that right.  (Okay, I am saying that backwards because “right” also means “conservative”, and it is apparent that they hate education, especially for people of color and people who are poor.  Can’t have those unfortunates reading up on basic human rights, now can we?)

So, I plan to haunt Rick Perry by spelling out threatening messages in his alphabet soup.  That’ll get him, right?  Scare him out of his cowboy boots, maybe?  Heck… I don’t know for certain that Rick can read, do I?  Not even with the glasses he wears now to look smarter.  And his successor, Greg Abbot, can he read?  He is advertising his latest education initiative to make education in Texas #1 by establishing higher standards in preschool and the lower grades.  That will make education better, right?  Make the little kids reach higher scores on harder tests?  And do it by passing a law that they have to reach those standards or the schools will be punished?  Not spending more money or anything.  Heck, he probably doesn’t even eat alphabet soup.  What scarier things can a teacher ghost do?  I will have to think harder on this subject.  And I am thinking I want to haunt more people too.  I just have to decide who.  So maybe I save some of my spookier insights into what I will do as a ghost until another post.  Let me end by giving you an idea of what I want old Rick to look like when I haunt his sorry old cowboy behind.