"While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." -- Eugene V. Debs
I had a short confab yesterday with four elementary teachers after doing my substituting for a 6th grade class whose teacher -- 21 years at the same school -- had to deal with her father who was placed in a memory care facility 60 miles away more than 10 years ago.
That in itself is one entire tome's worth of discussion, how the elite and both money-drenched parties and their governors and round-table "movers and shakers" and the entire death machine that is Capitalism have put middle class people like a public school teacher behind the eight ball to figure out how to take care of a father with dementia.
That teacher -- who has won awards for her science teaching, her classroom dynamics, and was gracious when handing off her class to me -- is, believe it or not, in a much better position in her precarity and the entire false for-profit rigged system that is extracting money-money-money for a case of dementia that will/does hit people in this country every second.
What do small communities like Lincoln City or Newport, populations of 11,000 more or less, do when the old start or not-so-old begin to have infirmities that demand 12-hour care, or 24-hour care? Many people living in these cities are working in service jobs, serving meals to tourists, or packing crab and fish at the fish plant, or are in some of the county government jobs, and a few working for the hospitals, and schools.
This is the story that never makes the bubble butt and bubble head national news feeds, because, it isn't what these millionaires want to juggle with, because, Americans, the top 20 percent (economically) -- and "top" doesn't apply to these 20 percenters' intelligence, ethical standards, humanity, caring, humility, fairness -- want the perversion of the cult of celebrity, cult of crime reporting, cult of money-money money.
We are up a sh*t creek without a paddle in every form possible as a community of group of communities. The endless traffic down 101 increases as more and more homes and apartments are taken out of the rental/housing markets, and put into the hands of these rental home criminal enterprise organizations. Rentals for a weekend at the beach.
Endless streams of tourists looking for crab cakes, some pipeline on the Pacific for a backdrop of drinking booze, gorging on food and then yammer on and on how backward and bumpkin we living in these communities are?
The reader can research how broken this country's people are: more than 150 million citizens have a chronic illness/multiple chronic illnesses; the suicide rate in the USA is sky high; more and more people have dissociative disease; more children are chronically distracted, anxiety-heavy, physically deteriorated; more and more families will have one, two or more people in their circle that will need lifetime medical, mental, occupational, psychological assistance.
The chickens have come back to roost, but let's be clear readers -- blame the One Percent, the Prostitutes in Politics, the CEOs like the Boeing murderer who should be in shackles now, instead of making off with his $23 million a year theft while he bullshits his way in Seattle.
This teacher, 21 years in the profession, has seen many changes herself. She was not complaining, and I was probing. Children in her class-- more and more each year -- have specialized education plans, IEPs, for various issues tied to learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, behavioral issues, and even physical ailments. Many are having big issues of standing still, and learning. Many are so tied to the junk of consumer culture, the celebrity junk, the superficial junk, the digital dungeons out there, just more and more kids more and more focused on themselves -- the me-myself-and-I angst that America manufactures every single minute in this Propaganda Madness.
I did the class, probed the youth about their projects -- genius projects that include a 3 to 5 minute presentation on topics of their interest, their passions. At a time when the genius should be flourishing at age 12, these children for the most part are flagging, because even the stalwarts, they are being dragged down by the commonest denominators of superficial childlike Pavlovian reactions to life itself. These kids have no form to show gumption and to carry on with their un-bloomed genius because public spaces are almost degraded totally, and parents are working for the mills and paper product and timber processors and have been themselves degraded into work mules and consumer cows.
Parents who hand off kids to the schools, but have no interest in or abilities to assist the learning and critical exploration processes these little geniuses in the making need.
I talked with a 60-ish teacher, who came to the profession doing many things before getting credentials in 2011. She posits that all the behavioral issues she has seen spiking are attributed to the fact that children have no negative consequences for bad behavior. That the society in general has allowed that permissiveness, but also parents specifically. She sees the lack of respect to teachers as incredible, and she seems flummoxed by that fact.
A teacher in her late thirties posited that it's the epigenetics of past trauma in the parents' and grandparents' and family circles' that have added to the DNA changes in offspring. She mentioned the total war this country has been in since 1940s, and we talked about the war-like conditions at home and in the communities that children pick up in the womb with mother's cortisol flooding them as fetuses and the same cortisol inside their tiny tot's lives once out into gravity and absorbing the constant fear, anger, anxiety, chaos, discord, fracturing and yelling and possibly physical punishment in their lives as parents and fractured caretakers themselves are broken by the One Percent's plan to gouge every last glimmer of hope from people that this democracy is, for, and because of THE People, and that systems will be there for them if they work hard.
No health care system for all, so instead, parents are paying exorbitant amounts for rents, for food, for the daily fees, tolls, fines, levies, add-ons, triple-taxations just to live in a community. Parents that are confused in this Psychological Torture that is Consumer-Predatory-Parasitic-Casino Capitalism.
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