School Days, School Days, Good Ole Socialist Rule Days
This whole Third Red Scare thing with Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders out there scaring the wits out of people, having them think that soon they’ll be dividing up their bank accounts, homes, cars, shoelaces, and Tic Tacs with able-bodied humans who just don’t feel like working but who spend those eight hours a day dividing their time between safe spaces, cry rooms, and places to get high is nothing new.
More specifically, I could provide a list of state-side failed paper tigers from Eugene V. Debs to Huey Long, as well as other one-dimensionalists who came before and after, but today we’re going to talk instead about an even bigger moron who tried to infect perfectly good minds. So the winner of today’s contest (drum roll, please) is my 11th grade history teacher.
This man gave a whole new meaning to not having a life. He would start each class – and then burn through three-quarters of it – with a spittle-infused, liberation theology based rant that went nowhere, provided no practical solutions, yet seemed to be crafted for the one and only purpose of trying to make a group of teenage boys feel guilty for receiving three meals a day and having parents who could afford to send them to a school where they could be told that it was wrong to be able to afford to go there, after which it was ‘splained to us that he passed up a lot of better careers to be here caring about us the way he did. Then, with about fifteen minutes to the bell we usually were told that the class period did not provide enough time for him to teach us the material that he was [being paid] to teach us and that we should memorize the textbook verbatim if we hoped to pass any tests or quizzes.
What really got him the Academy Award, though, was the day that he came in all worked up because he just found out there was such a thing as billionaires. Frankly, I’ve always had my doubts about this one. I mean, it was the late eighties. Billionaires were nothing new. How could an educated man not know this? (Of course, morons were nothing new either.)
So he starts going off on how no one can count to a billion in their lifetime, that it is morally wrong for anyone to have a billion dollars, that money can’t make you happy, that extravagance is revolting, that a billion dollars could have helped his favorite charities, and that he has been able to find happiness based on his current salary and needs no more.
Around that time he seemed to have run out of steam, discourse, and asininity. So I raised my hand. You ever get one of those looks like the last thing you’re supposed to do is raise your hand? Yeah, that’s the look he gave me. And there wasn’t any sort of “Oh, sure, you have a question? Go right ahead.” Instead, I received a terse “What!” (Looking back, however, I’m wondering if, hidden in his coarse brevity, there were some message like this is your last chance to surrender, or all prisoners will be summarily executed after we secure victory.) And so I went ahead and asked my question. Imperious blowhards don’t scare me.
My question was straightforward and logical. I prefaced it by pointing out his own comment about requiring nothing more than his current salary to serve his wants and needs. Then I reinforced my argument by citing the very real fact that money does make people happy when they use it to make other people happy. At that, I pulled the trigger. I asked why he didn’t just use his education to become a billionaire so that he could simply give away his money to the causes he deemed worthy while keeping for himself only the equivalent of his current salary.
Well, that pretty much did it. It was like that scene in the movie Airplane! with the electric fan. I thought his little liberal brains were going to explode all over the classroom like you see in one of those low-budget horror films. From what I remember his response went something like this. No, it went exactly like this:
“Son, what are you, some kind of a smart ass?! Do you wanna spend the entire next week in the disciplinarian’s office?! Does none of what I just took my precious time to explain make a damn bit of sense to you?!”
It was so tempting to answer that last question. But I had poked a liberal with a stick long enough, and being a good Christian I believed in showing mercy. So I gave no verbal reply and just shrugged my shoulders. Then the bell rang.
