Reckoning

 Against the backdrop of this country slipping into ever more chaotic states, I continue to do the job for which I was hired: teaching elementary school. Into that pot there have been a few recent updates that have made it necessary to stir to keep the whole thing from turning into the hot mess just like the rest of the planet. 

To no one's surprise, the Oakland Unified School District is wringing its institutional hands over a lack of funds. It's a simple enough thing to point at the military budget that was already an ungainly one trillion dollars, but that number has been "requested" to be bumped up to a trillion and a half. Meanwhile, the privately schooled golf cheat has ordered the Department of Education to be dismantled. 

"It's a shame if our kids are dumb, but our bombs are smart" - Oingo Boingo

In the thirty years since that song was released, working in education has not become what I would call a more financially stable decision. I have participated in a number of protests, work actions and strikes to keep reminding the public at large that we continue to bring children into a world in which education is still deemed a necessity. 

Just not compared to building more of the aforementioned bombs. 

So the cry has gone out to the educational community that we need to demand better conditions in which to make this magic happen. Teach kids to read. Prepare them for a world that is changing by the minute. Give them a chance to manage their existence in a world that seems bent on making it more difficult. The current regime would like to pay people to have more children, but I have yet to see any suggestion of how to pay for the infrastructure necessary to make those new Americans' lives possible. 

I had hoped that I might sail through to my somewhat illusory retirement without having to live through another strike, but this is where we find ourselves in 2026. No one at the top is suggesting that we might need another trillion dollars to educate our kids. And don't go thinking that taxing the billionaires will solve the problem. They'll just take their tax-free lifestyles to another state where the test scores are lower and all that whining about "the kids" can't be heard. 

I'll think more about this later, but right now I have to make sure that the fifth graders whose teacher just died have a teacher and a classroom in which they can learn.