I’m at a serious crossroads in my life.  As our education system implodes, I find it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to challenge my students.  Their apathy for their own education has drained me of the passion and energy I once carried into the classroom.  The endless tunnel of bureaucracy burrowed by the administrators and bean counters has become such a hindrance to our mission as educators that many of us want to throw up our hands and walk away.  If a major publisher or a Hollywood executive came calling right now, I would not hesitate to jump ship.

If only it were that simple.  If only I could walk out the doors and start a new career tomorrow, one that would nourish my creative side and provide for my children at the same time.  I did it once, walked away from education and started a new career.  I went into sales, and after washing out in the insurance business, I was actually quite good in the car business and even better in timeshare.  Then, the economy tanked and the money dried up.  I saw the writing on the wall that my child support wasn’t going to get paid if I didn’t find a secure job, so I went back to education.

This time, I feel trapped.  The blade of child support dangles just over my neck, and the ex has proven that she will hound me ceaselessly and use the full extent of the law to punish me if I cannot make the payments.  It’s not that I don’t want to provide for my kids.  If I could verify that every penny of the money is spent on them, I wouldn’t resent it at all, but something tells me that it’s being funneled to other expenses that have little to do with the direct needs of my sons.  That’s only a suspicion, though.  The only facts I know are the amount I owe each month and her greed at collecting it.  When it comes to compassion and understanding, let’s just say that she has been found wanting.

So I need to make a change, but I’m lost as to where to begin.  I have to have steady income, and I need to use my creative skills.  There are a handful of ideas I keep kicking around, but they are all risky long-shots.  One thing is absolutely certain — a change must be made.  This generation is too passive, too apathetic, and too unread.  They have no sense of history beyond what’s on Facebook and no sense of the importance of language.  Give them the quick answer, the microwavable meal, the convenience store service.  Anything beyond that is too complex.

I will find my way, and I will do it on my terms.

www.thirdaxe.com

After 9/11, there was a minor uproar from a small segment of the population that was furious that the families of firefighters and police officers were receiving the same compensation as the families of investment bankers.  After all, they argued, the investment bankers paid much more money in taxes than the civil servants.  Their families should receive a larger share of the settlement.  Obviously, the idea gained no traction and went nowhere because it’s utterly ridiculous, but it’s a sign of how out of touch with reality some people are.

Yeah, I’m pretty bitter about how certain things in my life have worked out, and yeah, I feel a lot of resentment towards the elite of this nation who have looked down their noses at me their entire lives and dismiss the inequities of our society as the fault of those without.  I heard countless times while I was growing up that education mattered, that staying in school and working hard would one day pay off.  So far, that’s been an empty promise.

The haves use Social Darwinism to rationalize to themselves why they are successful and others aren’t.  They are of superior quality; therefore they are successful.  To them, it’s a simple equation.  If you aren’t successful in this great nation, it’s your own fault.  You are too lazy to get ahead.  I’ve heard it all a million times.  I acknowledge that there are plenty of lazy people in this country, and sometimes, I think they are much smarter than I am.  Instead of busting my ass 18 hours a day in graduate school, maybe I should have laid around and collected welfare.  I would be better off because I wouldn’t have a mountain of student loan debt looming over me.

Maybe the elites don’t understand the necessity of infrastructure.  Society needs police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and other civil servants to keep things running, and the human beings who work in those professions need to earn a wage that allows them to participate fully in the economy of this nation.  If we continue to slip deeper and deeper into second-class citizen status, the infrastructure will continue to erode more and more.  The education system is already imploding.  All Children Left Behind was the final nail in the broken system’s coffin.  Each year, the students coming out of the public system are a little worse; those of us who teach in college see it and talk about it amongst ourselves.  It’s not necessarily the fault of the individual teachers in grade school, either.  It’s the system that has failed.

The haves will continue to defend their rights to greed and corruption, and one day, when the nation is gone, they’ll probably still blame the have-nots for not doing more to keep them in luxury.  Those of us without, the ones who do work and contribute, will continue to struggle for our rights to participate in this system.  I never expected to get wealthy teaching, but I did expect to earn a livable wage.  So far, that’s not been the case, and I’ve taught for both private and state institutions.  Maybe one day the elites will figure out that labor is not disposable, that the people who make them money are valuable and deserve just compensation for their efforts.

The reason the movement to give investment bankers more settlement money than the firefighters didn’t gain traction was because life is about more than the balance sheet, and the people who give their lives in service to others are just as valuable, if not more so, than the ones who generate vast wealth.  We are not second-class citizens.  We are highly trained professionals who deserve to earn enough money to send our children to college and save for retirement and own homes and maintain our health.  Right now, for many of us, this simply isn’t the case.  That has to change or the nation will fail.  It is a simple equation.

www.thirdaxe.com

Because of my deeply-rooted disdain for conservatives, I’m often labeled a liberal, which makes my truly liberal friends giggle because to them my views are too conservative, but I’d like to take a moment to explain my dislike for and disgust of most things conservative.

My paternal grandfather fought in the Korean War and was badly wounded by a mortar shell.  He lived his entire adult life with shrapnel in his neck, but he rarely complained and worked for 33 years as a rural mail carrier.  He was a good and decent man who did his duty and then, despite a lifetime of pain, provided for his family as best as he could.  In 1995, he came to Memphis to watch my commencement ceremony, which was held in the Pyramid.  At that point, Papaw had trouble walking so he and I rode the elevator down to the floor to find the handicapped seating for him, but that section was already full.  Beside it, there was a section roped off for the business leaders of the city.  Over half of the seats were empty, so I asked the dean who was serving as usher if my grandfather could please sit there since the handicapped section had filled up.

The dean, who was glad-handing with the big-wigs, looked at us as if we were servants and with a stone-faced expression replied, “No.”  I tried to explain about Papaw’s injuries from Korea, but he cut me off and pointed to the “public” sections on the second and third levels.  I’ve only felt so helpless and insignificant a couple of other times, and I offered to walk with my grandfather to help him find a seat, but he put his hand on my shoulder and told me it was okay.  He could make it.

I will guarantee that dean and those big-shots sit in their socialite churches every Sunday, listening to their pastor tell them how they deserve all their good fortune because they believe in the savior Jesus Christ, and come election time, they hide behind their gilded religious beliefs and patriotism to appear as righteous men, but they know nothing of Christian love and cannot be sullied by the likes of the rank and file.  In my experience, the overwhelming majority of conservatives are just like this.  Religion is a social event to appear upstanding in the eyes of the community, but if Christ himself were to walk into their church, stinking of the addicts and whores he had spent the night helping, they would summarily march him back outside because smelling like that he couldn’t possibly be as righteous as they are.

My entire life is full of moments like that, where the well-to-do conservatives have looked down their noses at me and my family because we have less than them, but then they put on a front of moral righteousness when the social situation calls for it.  I cannot and will not stomach such hypocrisy.  I believe in the free market, and I believe in democracy, but both of those are dependent upon men like my grandfather who are brave enough to go to war to defend it, and it depends upon the muscle and sweat of the working class to keep things moving.  Until ALL of our citizens have access to education and healthcare, this nation is not truly free.  Until ALL of our citizens have an equal opportunity to compete, the work of our forefathers is not complete.  And it’s funny to me that conservatives quote our founding fathers.  Conservatives would have been Tories during the revolution, trying to preserve the status quo and hindering the progress of democracy.

That’s just one reason why I see conservatives as the enemy.

www.thirdaxe.com