Florida’s Governor Desantis is a self-righteous bully. A graduate (with honors) of both Harvard and Yale, he is certainly not a stupid man, though wisdom and intellect don’t always come in the same package. He knows his aged and conservative voters, while playing cunningly to the gallery concerning issues of race and sexual identity with unilateral precision, as though his personal time machine can take all of us back to the year 1950. The difference, however, concerns not The Red Scare of that era, but a terror that too many have, regarding race relations that, for the Desantis’s flock, signals what too many fear is the possible ebbing of white power, which our governor seems to see as the end of civilization as HE wants it to remain.
His interference in public education (including college) smacks of Russian oligarchy and unilateral control of what is taught and learned. The imagined threat of any remaining balance of power among Floridians seems to terrify him as though his royal crown of authority might somehow be compromised.
The issue, for me, is that there is little, if any, balance of power between the public and our government officials, namely Ron Desantis, instead of discussion (with others besides the governor’s pre-programmed toy soldiers). That authoritarianism is becoming more terrifyingly popular, not just in Florida, but throughout the nation. 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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