At one time or another everyone needs to reduce something to its lowest terms. Most of us want clarity and simplicity in understanding daily occurrences. What happens in our nation’s capital, a place where vagueness is often a way of life for Congress, that group so gifted at casting a sheer verbal veil over issues and their solutions? Having observed friends and even members of my own family reach boiling points, I’ve tried at times to reduce all the lacy hyperbole down to basic explanations for angst, at least for hyper-Republicans, whose bitterness over The Orange Man losing the election has raised their blood pressure to explosive levels that could clear a dining room, even without anything being said. If I had to reduce their anxiety down to one thought, it would be their profound concern that somewhere, someone at this moment is getting something for nothing and freeloading on the labor and income of Republicans everywhere. Of course, none of them would phrase it quite that way, but their postings on Facebook, the innuendos in their conversations, strongly imply their distress over those spendthrift Dems in D.C.
The view of “pure” Republicans (if there is such a thing) on abortion is also a tad contradictory or illusory and illogical in the desire to ban abortion, because “it kills innocent humans.” Well, folks, so do chemical spills and gun rampages in our schools and shopping Centers. So does starvation because mothers can’t earn a sufficient wage, even working sixty hours per week, and that parents don’t always have access to affordable healthcare. Yet politicians continue to interfere with family planning choices and have blithely opposed every attempt at safety regulations, gun control, raising the minimum wage, etc. Such hypocrisy would be laughable if it weren’t so smugly tragic.
On most other political issues, my views are moderate enough that I don’t have to fear having an apoplectic seizure over our Thanksgiving dinner with extended family, but it does seem at times that we as Americans are being manipulated like marionettes by some dark, sinister power out there, hell-bent on creating another civil war as our possible downfall. 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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