I am not a politician. I am not a political writer. But I have opinions about the policies that affect my life and livelihood. And my opinions, though often expressed poetically, or even humorously, are based on real troubles never-the-less.
I am disturbed by the problems I see in education. Teachers are not paid what they are worth. Anyone with half a brain can see that, for the level of education required of them, the professionalism expected of them, and the ever-increasing responsibilities foisted upon them, they are not compensated for their work in a manner comparable to people who do the same work in the corporate world. And those comparable workers never have to endure the conditions of a teacher’s job, overloaded with students, forced to stand and deliver to a hostile audience whose behavior you are responsible for controlling six or seven times a day, and then being evaluated by how that audience does on tests that often measure the wrong thing with financial punishments waiting for failure and rarely any rewards waiting for success.
I started teaching in 1981 in South Texas for a salary of $11,000 dollars a year. That was below the poverty line in 1981. If I had a family at that time, we would’ve been eligible for food stamps. The highest I ever earned was $55,000 with a master’s degree, 28 years of experience, and a summer of teaching summer school. Some one who delivers similar forms of information to a receptive audience in a boardroom, only has to deliver maybe once per day, and is paid upwards of twice that highest amount is treated far better.
And when teachers strike in West Virginia for being the lowest paid in the country, or a teacher complains on social media by revealing their actual yearly salary from Arizona, or a teacher is forced to move from Oklahoma to Texas for higher pay even though they were the teacher of the year in the State the year before, there is blow-back. There are stupid people out there that think teachers are overpaid. They think all teachers have to do is talk to kids every day, and they have only 185 work days a year, they have the summer off, and their job is one anyone can do. These stupid people have less than half a brain. What makes a guy who sits in an office all day with his feet up making decisions about stocks and bonds and business deals worth thousands of dollars a minute? Teachers, in my amateur political opinionater’s opinion, are underpaid.
To quote the Beatles’ 1969 animated movie, the Yellow Submarine, “It’s a blue world, Max.” Unfortunately, in the world of education, the Blue Meanies are now in charge.
At long last, Robert Mueller Smurf began investigating the election hack by Gargamel and the subsequent obstruction of justice committed by Trumpy with the aid of Azrael, Gargamel’s very hungry cat. He revealed that Gargamel had secretly intercepted the ballot boxes and removed all the votes for Smurfette. Thus Trumpy won by a margin of one vote to nothing. Clumsy Smurf had been the only one stupid enough to vote for Trumpy.
The Republicans have found another scandal to pursue. Two FBI personnel were texting each other messages about how stupid and incompetent Donald Trump is. (As well as why one of them may have voted for him since they hated Hillary too.) The one agent who was involved in the Mueller investigation of Trump was immediately removed from the investigation when evidence of the possibility of lack of impartiality surfaced. This happened long before the Republican Conspiracy Elephants sniffed out the detail to make a big stinky in the media about it. Now, apparently the FBI has become a secret society wrongfully plotting against Trump.
Of course, “Why should anyone believe me of all people?” is definitely the question. I am only a retired school teacher who spent a career finding and verifying information, followed by a simple and clearly-defined presentation of the information to be learned. I have revealed myself in this blog to have the letter “L” on my forehead for “liberal” which translate into Republicanese as “loser”. And that’s where we will stay if we don’t fight back.
Catch a Falling Star 
Blue Waves, Blue Birds, and Red Hope
My political opinions are worth about as much as the intestinal gas they are made of. That being said, at least I don’t light them on fire in the manner my conservative friends with Tea Party hemorrhoids do. Living in the Red State of Texas and being mildly liberal has forced me to listen to incessant streams of flaming insults and invective. It seems “liberal” is a bad word in Texas. We are apparently the primary cause of everything that’s wrong with the world. If you just have more conservative views, like having gleeful titter-fits over tax cuts for rich folks no matter how much they will hurt the working poor in the long run, then you are a good person, and Jesus loves you, and we forgive your three divorces, unpaid alimony and child support, and that Mexican-American you killed with your concealed carry because of the Stand-Your-Ground law.
But, my intestinal gas is bubbling after yesterday’s primary elections in Texas. Huffines lost the Republican primary to Paxton. Why is this significant, you may ask? Because the most corrupt and richest candidate did not win. Texas tradition is totally upended. And while both of them campaigned with lots of mud and bad words (yes, they actually called each other “liberals”), one of them is against both higher property taxes and reduced funding of education (which is the primary cause of higher property taxes). Paxton at least sounds like she is for spending more money on public education (heresy to the traditional Republican view of education). So there are signs of change in the Republican landscape.
And it appears that things are changing color in the reddest of Red States. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat, solidified his chances in November by becoming the Democratic Party victor in the primary. And so far his small-donor contributions have come in waves, giving him a fund-raising lead over the Republican Party’s most hated lizard-man Senator. There is a feeling of a rising blue tide coming to sweep away Republican anchor stakes like Cruz and Pete Sessions. Democrats may actually win despite Republican cheating through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and corrupt dark money.
But the point of this whole long intestinal-gas-fueled display of political insight is not that I want the Red State of Texas to turn completely blue. I think that too many liberals is just as much of a problem and a breeding ground for corruption as too many conservatives. The biggest problem has been that the blue donkeys and the red elephants haven’t done much but hate each other and call each other names for too long.
We need two sides to have a decent debate that can hammer out the kind of decently balanced solutions that solves problems for everybody. Texas Republicans have been in complete control for too long. They ignore problems like equitable school funding, racial problems in law enforcement, and income inequality. They give all their attention to smoothing the way for corporations and money-making interests. As long as the rich guys are happy, the world is good for Republicans. We need to balance the Republicans again with more moderate policies and beliefs. If you look at the political platform of the Republican Eisenhower Presidency and compare that to the Democratic Obama Presidency, you can see that they are very much the same. I think the chaos that the current Presidency has brought to the Republican Party has already produced some hopeful signs of the reversal of some of their most hostile and heartless positions. The high priests of greed and corruption that have taken over the Republicans since Nixon are beginning to experience rebellion among their acolytes. Republican pundits, thinkers, and operatives whom I actually respect are turning away from Trumpism and denouncing it in the mass media. Some of them have even left the party.
But I am not hoping for the death of the Republican Party. I am hoping for a fundamental change in who they are and what they support. I think recent election results are strengthening that hope. We need them to renounce their Gordon Gecko religion of “Greed is good!” We need them to turn away from the corruption, anger, and intractable stupidity of the Tea Party. We need decent moderate Republicans to return to prominence once again.
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