The trickle of visitors left over from the January 6 demonstration in the nation’s capital was pretty much what I expected in terms of its message. The self-righteous determination on the faces of carriers of our American flag reminded me of the looks on the faces of Germans carrying their Swastika flags in the 1930’s. It was almost as though having an American flag legitimized the white power message that has lurked behind every other such demonstration for the past four years in a transparent attempt to announce that the nation really belongs to them and them alone. They will never understand or respect the differences between democracy and oligarchy, because they actually favor dictatorship, as long as it comes from their own icon and only for their purposes.
It saddens me to see people abuse the icon of our flag, making it their own symbol of lies and oppression in the guise of freedom for only the chosen few (their few). “With liberty and justice for all” seems foreign to them, the operative word being “foreign.” It remains a comfort for them to continue believing the national election was a fraud (no proof…just the former president’s wishful assumption and assertion, as a worse than poor loser), despite his extraordinary track record of lies and rancor. There is somewhere here the material for a remake of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and remember what happened to the rats in THAT story! 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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I am a citizen of (2)nations – the USA and Mexico – I celebrated 25 years of NAFTA (what I believe to be the greatest trade pact in the history of the world, I do business in all three nations involved and see each day the booming economies of the USA, Mexico and Canada growing at breakneck speed.) 1994-2019 25 years! The change in Mexico and Canada in these 25 years is incredible! The example our nation (USA) has had on the 120 million Mexican lives and the 38 million of Canada is incredible to say the least. It has been hard to speak of the greatness of nation to Mexican businessmen while we continue to see the great divide , that I thought had been resolved in the times of Kennedy, Martin Luther King and George Wallace . The only solice I find is the simple fact that while simple mentalities rest on the gretness of our countries past – hungry immigrants continue to apply themselves in the traditional manner of those who walked thru Ellis Island and prospered! Capitalism continues being the great equalizer!