Like most other people, I try to get news about our nation and the rest of the world from varied sources that I’ve come to trust. Most people believe that their info comes from reliable sources, especially when those sources encourage and confirm already established prejudices and points of view. The distance between liberal and conservative outlooks can be vast, leaving the two extremes as distant from one another as distant solar systems. I think, for example, of differences between CNN and Fox (Faux) News and am amazed by the reliably smug quality of the latter’s delivery of turning each item into some level of martyrdom over which viewers are expected to become rabid in their condemnation of whatever target the network has invented for that day. The result is too often a cult of dangerous, harmful misinformation and misplaced rage amid a deplorable absence of factual data and where innuendo becomes entertainment.
I sometimes believe that Tucker Carlson should be doing stand-up comedy until I remember each time that it is already what he’s doing. The problem is that his many gullible fans actually believe everything he says. That exciting adrenalin rush is apparently too stimulating to sacrifice. It’s where the ratings, power and money are.
Yesterday an acquaintance was complaining about the money President Biden was wasting on the $1400 stimulus checks in this time of uncertainty. I then asked the fellow if he had, in good conscience, returned the money to the government. His reply was the expected, “of course not.” He then whined about the anticipated hike in grocery prices, so that I said that when all the little price hikes of his groceries came to $1400, he could (should) in good conscience then begin to gripe about Washington’s over-spending. He, of course, didn’t see the intended humor in my comment, but I told him that by the time those price hikes reached the amount he had been given, we would probably have a new president anyway about whom he could complain regarding something else.
In any event, our new American civil war continues with little end in sight until rabid Republicans (not all are rabid) decide that we are actually one nation, all of us with the same leader in a united republic, where the Tsar was overthrown in 2021. 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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