A nightmare is a bad dream from which you will awake. Discrimination is a bad dream you will live every day while you are awake. American teachers in states like Wisconsin are experiencing discrimination. They’re experiencing unnecessary, horrific nightmares caused by vindictive, greedy, immoral republican leaders, whose actions under the guise of balancing their budgets, have subjected a wonderful, hard-working, high moral, undeserving group of innocent role models to ongoing horrifying ordeals.
It is difficult for me to look at my fellow teachers these days. Many of them have the blank stare and numb look of soldiers and marines returning from the battlefield. I suspect that several of them pinch themselves every day hoping that it is all a bad dream. I also suspect their thoughts of events in their lives are tormenting them. And I am certain, giving what they been through, that many may be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, for they have experienced real losses. They lost their identities and they lost their precious self-perception: After all, they go to work hours before the start of the school day and leave work hours after it ends, they did not expect anyone to suggest that they are so lazy that a 40-hour work-week must be mandated. After all, they often reach into their wallets to buy classroom supplies from their salaries, they did not expect anyone to all them “inconsiderate,” “cheap,” or “greedy.” After all, they are constantly taking graduate courses in education, attending education workshops, participating in teaching seminars, reading the latest studies in teaching and learning best practices; they did not expect anyone to call them “incompetent” or “unskilled.” And certainly, they, who have spent their lifetimes trying to be excellent role models for the children they teach, did not expect anyone to suggest that they are “unscrupulous.” These negative accusations ― “lazy,” “greedy,” “incompetent,” and “unscrupulous, attack the public’s image of them by trying, convicting, and sentencing them on these charges although they know that they’re innocent.
The sad fact of the matter is teachers are a part of the collateral damages and civilian casualties in the political war between the democrats and the republicans. In this case the republicans accused the teachers and their unions of providing aid to the enemy (the democrats), so the republicans decided to treat teachers like enemy combatants by attacking and destroying them. And this is ironic because teaches were instrumental in helping the republicans to gain majorities at several levels of government.
Nonetheless, the republicans’ attacks will continue, and discrimination against teachers will continue until ―hopefully, the operative in all teachers’ vocabulary becomes the word “RECALL!”
