Oh outrage, how thou dost tempt me.
Public employees are the new welfare queens? Really, Governor Christie? Really?
I just got off the phone with my mother. She taught for nearly 30 years. She’s from an era when what people said could matter a lot. Unlike her queer and out child, words can hurt her. I grew up helping her out in her classroom after school, helping her bring home supplies she spent a never generous paycheck on, listening to her worry about the welfare of her students and the progress of her profession. I saw her put those students and their families and the society she lived in above herself for an entire career.
My mom said, when your dad printed that out for me, and I read what he said, I burst into tears.
I was my customary philosophical self. You can’t always get social rewards for doing well, the reward is the students and their growth. Those students remember you! Generally encouraging people to take these things in stride is perhaps the best wisdom my very queer, outsider life has to offer. And my mom – always the philosophical sort – agreed, and we went on. But inside I’m thinking, you made my mother cry. She’s never done any public service but with her whole heart. How could you? Really?
I don’t know why I’m surprised. I mean, they’ve lied about people of color, they’ve lied about first peoples, they’ve lied about socialists, they’ve lied about poor people, they’ve lied to us about people who break the law. They lied us into two big wars in progress where people with so little they live for a year on my poor student’s gas budget get turned into hamburger so that Americans can feel righteous. Nobody is exempt.
But y’know…my mom actually believes in America. In a way I never will. She spent her life making sure that people learn. Her eyes don’t work as well as they used to. She can’t walk very far without great pain. She’s surrounded by school books and supplies and things from a life of teaching she can’t bear to throw away. She gave up a lot to be a teacher. She burned her life brightly so that your kids, and yours, could read and think about the world in more than black and white terms, so that people understood that play and imagination were part of life, so that people from terribly hard circumstances half a world away would come to America and have the English and mathematics skills they needed to complete their education.
And our country is offering her contempt. Served up cheerfully by demagogues and monsters.
Get thee behind me, outrage.
When I read the latest horror that our dying empire has served up, I’m normally more sanguine. I know my reaction is in large part because that contemptible son a bitch made my mother cry. She’s not the sort of person who’d appreciate being known as someone who cried about public brickbats. She’s also not the sort of person who would put her pain above any number of dead Afghanis and Iraqis and Pakistanis who won’t be growing up at all. But damnit. This is what those bastards have to offer to people who spent thirty years as educators?