Tales From The Crypt

 I get to work by seven each morning, and I start to work preparing for a new day. The bathrooms need to be unlocked. The cart with the PE equipment gets rolled out onto the playground. If it has been warm the day before, I prop open doors and windows to encourage air circulation. Before I go to my classroom to make things ready for the education adventure, I stop by the office to make sure that there are no large parcels in need of dissemination before the day begins. My principal and I confer about the challenges ahead: which staff members are out, who had a substitute, who does not, will there be a fire drill?

This is a quick peed behind the scenes of the hour before kids arrive at the gate, ready and for the most part raring to go for another day of school. 

That's when the busy-ness of my job really begins. Lessons in how to share the ball, using respectful words, and listening for the bell that means it is time to move on to the next part of the day. 

At no point during all this rushing about do I or anyone else on our staff have time to perform gender affirming surgery. I am not sure what dark recess of the brain of the convicted felon who is running for president came up with the scenario in which children who attend public schools. He asked a crowd in Wisconsin, “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?” 

No. I cannot imagine this. As a matter of fact, I am very uncomfortable with the type of mind that could come up with such a scenario. 

This is, of course, the same mind that conjured up "post-birth abortions." 

Not in the world in which I live and work. As a matter of fact, funding for health care in our schools is such that we only have a nurse on our site once a week. She is not performing any sort of operation or treatment. She is filling out the paperwork that allows us to keep her for the very limited time that we do have her on site. 

The lies have become more surreal and desperate. We have a little over a month and a half before we have to choose which version of reality we want to live in. The challenging future that is full of things we have to fix, or the terror-filled version from the lunatic mind of an adjudicated homophobe, racist, rapist and con man. 

I'll take the challenging future, thank you.