As one elementary school teacher aptly summarized, “Politics, greed, and mismanagement have made [teaching] incompatible with physical and mental health” (p. 90, Libby).

Well, one more disheartening report on how our society’s pillars are crumbling, and it couldn’t be more infuriating. Education is the bedrock of any advanced society; well, education and overall health, and good health is attained through solid education. The United States of Hypocrisy is failing dramatically at both of these keystones, and the parallelisms are flagrant.

”Between 2020 and 2022, there was a marked increase in parents harassing, intimidating, and threatening school staff; in several states, parents physically assaulted teachers because they were upset about school mask policies even during virus surges. NBC News reported in 2021, ‘The teacher is now viewed by a small, loud contingent not as a public servant but as a public enemy.’ The following spring, FOX News host Tucker Carlson said that teachers should be ‘beaten up’—and encouraged viewers to ‘thrash the teacher’” (p. 68, Libby).

This mirrors how certain demographics in America have likewise railed against science and healthcare, and just about everything else that scares them. Now, look at education attainment within the United States (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html). It is terribly sad, but terribly telling too.

Any wonder such a drastic shift has happened in such a short period of time with a toddler tyrant and his sycophants in the White House, entire news networks pandering and puppeteering and propagandizing their virulent misinformation and weaponized disinformation, and global social media-empires profiting off such clickbait bs, to truly influence too many towards an undereducated and incredibly gullible Idiocracy, just so the entitled can reap all the rewards from it while the mindless mobs fight to hold onto xenophobic-based White Christian Nationalism (despite all the data saying it’s the absolute minority in this country now)? All the screeching Karens in Moms For Liberty exemplify this brainwashed desperation, and the GOP couldn’t work harder at watering these poisonous weeds at every opportunity. Heck, the GOP fights against anything that would best benefit the middle and lower classes, seemingly hell-bent on doing everything possible to reinforce systemic poverty. I wonder why. Now, teachers and librarians are under attack, verbally and physically, from emotionally stunted adults who have lost the skills required for good parenting, wanting instant gratification through their bullying and tantrums. The American Psychological Association (APA) has been tracking this well (https://www.apa.org/education-career/k12/violence-educators.pdf), which of course NPR cares about too (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087137571/school-violence-teachers-covid).

I’ve written this so many times, but the priorities of this country are painfully delusive. Affordable health care and quality education SHOULD BE foundational rights for every single person, and free of charge. Teachers and police officers SHOULD BE the highest trained and best paid public servants on every budget. This is what creates an educated (dare I say “enlightened”), multicultural, vibrant and empathetic, and safe-for-all society. We need to trust our teachers; they are some of the most educated people in society, having to be experts in child development, social-emotional development, curriculum development and assessment, as well as unpaid tutors, parent liaisons, book buyers, charity workers, therapists, social workers, crisis managers, security staff, and human shields. Tell me you do more at whatever job you currently have.

Robbins gives some painfully clear examples of how both “the system” itself, and society at large, work to undermine education in America, save for the lily-white and wealthy enclaves and their for-profit charter school islands (even if teachers form cliques of their own, and fall into patterns of childish bullying, petty rumormongering, and mindless sabotage upon their colleagues). Systemic racism is baked into every fiber of this nation, and education is historically a glaring fault line. Read Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond for kicks, and look at Florida for the reactionary, clownish insanity of today (and watch as the state slowly, ignorantly allows the sea to reclaim the peninsula in a constantly warming world).

From Columbine High to Robb Elementary, nothing has been done to stop mass murder in schools except to make teachers frontline shields for your children. All of this is a glaring national crisis that reaches the heart of what a nation is.

So: 1. We have a seriously undereducated populace . . . 2. The deep-rooted problems with tech addiction and an unregulated internet erode an undereducated society in all-too apparent ways . . . 3. Parenting, in so many ways for so many children, has changed over the past three generations to be another symptom of a deteriorating society . . . 4. And small-minded, primitive-brained people suck.

For two semesters, I was a counseling intern at an outpatient day-treatment center for kids and teens whose schools deemed them unfit due to behavioral issues. This was a partnership with the county school district, and we had an inpatient facility too. Individual, group, and family sessions were mixed into their weekly coursework, which we continued through licensed educators. Our goal was to help these kids, and their families, find some equilibrium with diagnosed conditions and help them reintegrate back to their home schools. This was, without a doubt, the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. While some conditions are biological or genetic in origin, all too many were direct products of toxic family dynamics. It takes a village to help a child; it takes a village to help a family help their child. Teachers, therapists, child psychologists, a psychiatrist, and all the supporting staff all worked as that village for every single kid. The emotionally, if not physically abandoned, the sexually molested, the physically abused, the psychologically tormented, and the otherwise traumatized were cared for through tears and screams and tantrums of furious energy, but they ultimately knew they were safe and protected, at least for eight hours each day. This is what every school should look like, working as interdisciplinary teams to help every child succeed and thrive. Every child should be given access to every resource imaginable in the wealthiest nation in human history. The future depends upon such a seismic shift in societal priorities.

Robbins also highlights the existential issues alongside viable solutions, which she apparently shared with the Next Big Idea Club (https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/teachers-year-inside-americas-vulnerable-important-profession-bookbite/41045/). Solutions are very possible with enough public willpower. We can dynamically transform society in radical ways that can empower the lower classes to thrive with the resources, infrastructure, and opportunities to do so. Ensuring teaching professions are “worth their weight in gold” is a crucial first step. This means giving them the respect and trust they deserve, safe working environments, fair and effective protections, collective bargaining, more staffing, loan forgiveness, supply-rich classes and small class sizes, well-defined and realistic job descriptions, and of course well-paid salaries with encouraging incentives. It takes a certain type of person to be a good teacher; it takes a system that nurtures those good people to pursue education as a life-long career. Again, this is the bedrock of a modern society.

Helping all struggling parents is a future-focused second step that benefits society holistically.

Let the Lost Cause racists scream into the ether, since our bought-out politicians can’t do anything about regulating and policing up the internet, AI, autonomous weapons, and whatever the whole thing evolves into (it will happen sooner than we realize). However, in the meantime, our police forces need the power and motivation to track, prosecute, and punish every ignoramus who bullies, assaults, and casts death threats at everything they don’t like, and protect our public servants from the slathering public, from brick-throwing dads to AR-15-toting teens. (I do realize the bind this puts me in: power to the people, but only those who behave themselves like the adults they’re supposed to be.) Behaviors have consequences, and we need to start policing up such behaviors, collectively. Online public shaming doesn’t seem to affect enough of them, and oftentimes they’re simply parroting their elected officials and media darlings. Adults who lack emotional intelligence will surely produce children doing likewise. The “moral majority” have turned into rabid dogs since the 1960s, and classrooms filled with gunned-down kids don’t phase them one bit. Instead of harassing teachers, they should be parenting their children and grandchildren, helping them prepare for a highly uncertain future. Education will help them. It takes a village, right?

We need to move forward, overturn the priorities of this country, and rebuild our infrastructure from the ground skyward. Education, health care, labor, and pensions. However, this country looks to be a sinking ship captained by selfish, deluded morons voted into office by equally selfish, deluded, and poorly educated idiots. Idiocracy, here we come as climate change falls like a hammer on humanity.

I read Dr. Michael Kazin’s piece on LitHub a couple of weeks ago (https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-american-socialism/), about the long history of “socialism” in the United States of Hypocrisy, and saw that it’s part of this new and trending (on Barnes & Noble) compilation of essays written by concerned historians sticking their thumbs into the eyes of all the pathological liars and fantasyland grifters on the paleoconservative Right, backing everything up with cited sources everyone has access to. I then bought the e-book. From FDR’s “New Deal” to the negation of Native American voices to the chronic boogeyman of immigration to the grand delusions of “the magical market” to just about every other conjured chimera the GOP has exhaustively played out for the last one-hundred years, Myth America attempts to drive a stake through the heart of all its monstrous disinformation. But the GOP keeps conjuring demons out of their delusional idiocracy (i.e., Critical Race Theory [which their banning of only reinforces the need for CRT], the LBGTQ+ community and its striving for actual equal rights, women’s right to bodily autonomy, gas stoves, “woke-ness” [which is actually called Progressivism, morons], the “Welfare State” [just not corporate welfare!], Hunter Biden’s stupid laptop, microchips secreted into vaccines, Helter Skelter and “the Great Replacement”, “systemic voter fraud”, and every other b.s. devil they fear the most). Toffler’s Future Shock seems to have diseased the Right far faster and deeper than the Left. (A Vietnam vet I work with asked me a few weeks ago, “When was it OK to stick a sign in your front yard with [the f-bomb] on it?” That’s a very good question worthy of understanding just how far societal norms have deteriorated. Sociologists, earn your pay.)

Look, the “Left” is far from perfect, but it’s nowhere near the shores of clownish Insanityland as the Right is. There can be intelligent, sober debates about the role of government and the nature of capitalism, but you know where I stand on those. Of course no book will truly matter to exorcizing the demonic belief system of the GOP disinformation machine. It was bad under Nixon, but now it’s just flirting with power-mad authoritarianism. From the crackpot politicians white-knuckling the levers of power, to Fox News and it’s lesser ilk spouting manure and backed by billionaires who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, to all the Alex Jones types selling garbage to yokels, to every poorly educated American who feeds off their fearmongering, and to every educated American voting against their own interests and the future of the planet, this is an entrenched strategy decades in the making, exacerbated by an unregulated internet with other billionaires not wanting to police up the destructive lies propagated on their precious, Pavlovian social-media machines.

This is a great book to have as a reference for contemporary issues and tracing their taproots back into the past. Of course there are other books that perform deep dives into each issue, but if factual nonfiction is not to your liking or attention span, Myth America works great. As one of the essayists concludes her piece (and the entire book), “Myths masquerading as reality do enormous damage” (p. 322). We have overwhelming evidence of that too. The United States and so many other parts of the world have been poisoned by flagrant disinformation pushed by unregulated media outlets and the unregulated internet. We have to understand that there will be no armistice in the culture wars with one side weaponized by disinformation and abject pathological lies, until their media outlets are neutralized and the internet is appropriately policed. Since that is unlikely to happen, the onus falls on each and every one of us to be properly informed, to vet our sources of information, to understand the anatomy of propaganda and the ultimate agents behind its propagation, and to vote these vacuous puppets out. Oftentimes this is tough work, but the future of the country depends upon it.

When President Lyndon Johnson “marveled that the issues he saw as a Congressman in 1937 were still painfully apparent in 1963—and we should be stupefied that they are still painfully present TODAY—shows how little has actually been accomplished to better society and the world at large. Civil rights, healthcare, education, senior care, poverty and homelessness, mental healthcare, higher education, and nutrition are still septic wounds on society. Yes, things have certainly improved, but obviously not far enough nor fast enough. As Michael Herrington presciently wrote in 1962, “[t]he fate of the poor hangs upon the decision of the better-off. If this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the other America a generation from now and it will be the same or worse. Until these facts shame us, until they stir I us to action, the other America will continue to exist, a monstrous example of needless suffering in the most advanced society in the world.” We’re three generations from then and inequality has reached grotesque proportions. The filthy rich manipulate white backlash on everything they can, being the undereducated, easily manipulated, and easily enraged “Christians” they are. There will be no peace made with them. We have to mobilize everyone to fight against it, to drown their voices out, and allow them to see how progressivism (call if whatever you like) is the ONLY way forward if we are to save humanity from itself, and save what remains of the bio-systems of the Earth from humanity’s wanton, selfish, voracious greed.

Earnest May and Richard Neustadt explored the ways clumsy misapplications of history can create catastrophes in public policy in their 1988 book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. We’re now in an era of people trying to create their alternative histories, post-truths and post-facts, thanks in large part to the f-ing internet. This is what authoritarians do, and what Orwell illustrated perfectly with: “Who controls the past controls the future.”