Yep, the state of the onion is stinky. The great onion that is our world is hyuge. And it tastes like an onion. Especially if you eat it from the inside out. Mmm… I love onions. I want to eat them all myself, every onion in this garden. But if I am going to do that, I am going to need the support of all sides. Yes, there is blame to go around on many sides. But I need their support to get rid of all the dietary restrictions illegally placed upon our garden by the last onion-master-in-chief. That illegitimate onion-master was not even raised in this garden. He seems to think that everyone has a right to clean, pesticide-free soil to plant their roots in. But all garden vegetables are not created equal. Tomatoes are poisonous. They all have radical religious beliefs that makes them hate our onion-ness. They are therefore terrorists, believe me. They are trying to sneak across the southern border of the garden and take over the onion-growing space that good, conservative, right-thinking onions have and need more of. They are trying to spread their poison in our garden. They want to replace our onion laws with their own stinky Tomatillo Law. And corn. The Corn Party tries to defeat every item on the onion agenda. When we pass a law that all corn voters need to be stripped of their kernels before they can be allowed to vote, they selfishly vote against that law. Government in this onion garden cannot work if they continue to do that. And we need a wall to keep illegal jalapenos from crossing the garden’s southern border. They are not the best vegetables, I guarantee you. They are onion-eaters and foul mixed vegetables. And promises were made to spring onions that were brought into this garden as seeds and now are crying that they deserve not to be uprooted and thrown into distant gardens where they don’t even speak the proper vegetable languages to get by. I know this garden loves those onions. I love those onions too. I want to eat them too. They are very nutritious. But their protections are now gone. I leave it up to the Corn and Onions of Congress to build that wall, and if they do, I will let the spring onions stay.
And now you can heap praises on me for the state of our economy. Yes, I take credit for all the fertilizer I have created by speaking tons of bull manure every single day. The quality of my manure is fabulous… simply fabulous, believe me. It is the finest manure any garden has ever received. And I, Donald J. Onioneater, am the finest onion-master you have ever seen. No onion-master before me has done as well, except maybe for Abraham Limabean. He was pretty great. Although I don’t really know why. Maybe I should have said Andrew Jackfruit instead. So the state of the onion is stinky. And let’s all work together now to MAKE THE GARDEN GREAT AGAIN!
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.
Another Brick in the Wall
I sincerely hope I never appeared in any way to be like the teacher in the video of Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall. That teacher represents everything wrong about education and everything that looms over us as a coming darkness if the conservative privatization movement continues to move forward with their evil sausage-factory plans.
In the video you see the teacher making fun of a student for writing poetry instead of participating in the rote recitation about math that the class is engaged in. The school is portrayed as a factory that puts masks on the students, makes them march in a line, and eventually pitch forward, face first into the sausage grinder.
The song was written by Pink Floyd’s bassist, Roger Waters. It was written in the long ago 70’s as a protest against rigid education systems in general, and British boarding schools in particular. But old problems can come back to haunt us.
Here’s the evil being protested. Schools should never be used to suppress creative thinking and enforce conformity. While it is true corporate America is hot for education that treats educating students like baking bricks, with attention to precise shapes and uniform size and color, that is not how kids learn. They have to be treasured for what they are, unique individuals, no two alike, and all possessed of varied strengths, skills, and talents. The idea of education is to help them add to what they are born with, use what they are born with, and fit into the jigsaw puzzle of working with and getting along with others. We cannot teach them by pressing them into molds with standardized high-stakes tests, or taking their individual faces away by always trudging through the same low level thinking skills year after year just because a textbook written in conservative Texas says so. Learning in the classroom needs to be through guided discussions, activities, and interactions. Not through filling in all the blanks on a worksheet.
My own children, for the most part, have been cheated by the public education system in Texas. They are bright kids, but have humongous school troubles stalking them like monsters, boredom, disengagement, and feeling like the young poet betrayed by the teacher in the video. While I always, in my teaching, fought to creatively present learning opportunities, I found good teaching to be a rare thing in Texas. It was sometimes actively discouraged. And it is getting rarer. The people who think teaching English means diagramming sentences and circling the adverbs are winning the battle for young minds. I am left at a point of futility where the only thing I can do about the brick-making is write rants like this one about it.
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos should be pleased with themselves. The sausage factories in our schools are turning out sausages. Sausages don’t think for themselves. Sausages are easy to control. And when the time comes, some corporate fat cat will eat them and become fatter (hopefully only in the metaphorical sense). And I am guessing here, but I’ll bet sausages make up most of the Republican voting public.
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