Our nation is filled with mistrust and rage right now, but it’s also filled with good people. If it weren’t, then there would be no hope and no reason for an election or striving to overcome what is already wrong. We’re all in this together, so we need to begin sharing some common goals. Personal attacks have not helped and have served only to distance people we believe are against us. It’s been an ugly campaign from both sides, but if we don’t find some common ground…beyond character assassination, our country will suffer even more from our energies being spent in creating a war zone in which nothing will ever get done.
There has to be a middle ground. We can’t be a half-nation or two nations in constant and ugly opposition. Otherwise we’re doomed to keep enduring more of the same. This election has been based much more upon suspicion, innuendo, and hysteria than upon cool reason, facts, and realistic goals. The stalemate is going to cost us a lot, if we’re not more level-headed and prudent. I still believe that our worst enemy is our love of self-righteous indignation. Nothing gives a better rush…but it’s dangerously destructive and blinding. Already, $5 billion dollars has been spent on leading us toward one candidate or the other.
I just read again George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949). Mind control isn’t just a myth, and it scares me that so many are so gullible to believe either candidate is without flaw that the zeal to elect one or the other is of religious intensity. Neither one deserves worship. They both have flaws, and we need to sift through them realistically and dispassionately.
God, I’m tired of all this! JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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