A good starting place would be for us to frog-march Trump, the Commander & Chief Dunce, out of the White House in an orange jump-suit to match his tan & in handcuffs right into Pelican Bay & throw away the key.

 

I know, wishful thinking but hey, we don’t have much else to live on nowadays given the insatiable greed of the 1% & their lackeys in both political parties. Here are a few suggestions that came to me & in no particular order but bear in mind that the best & most important place to start is in your own home & your own life because we sure as Hell can’t rely on the putrid politicians sucking on the teats of the corporate cockroaches who make up the 1%.

 

I have spent my life seriously pursuing knowledge & by extension, wisdom & truth. I was a teacher in various guises from serving as a tutor to being a teacher. I have collected a personal library of approximately 10,000 books & have made copious notes in several hundred of my books. I have spent approximately 50,000 hours conservatively over the past 40 years reading, writing, watching documentaries, listening to radio programs, etc. about politics. And I have written probably 300 essays or better, some 20 to 30 pages. I also have two major writing projects or works in progress, one that is non-fiction is over 2,000 pages & the fiction project which is a combination of fantasy, autobiography, & politics is over 2,400 pages at present. This doesn’t mean that I believe that I’m a world authority but it does mean that I’ve done my homework & am light-years ahead of our liar in chief, the moron sitting behind the empty desk in the oval office.

 

• Prosecute Betsy DeVos for the fraud of pretending to be human & educated
• Eliminate all standardized testing
• Stop the use of Scantron tests (multiple choice & true/false questions)
• Instead of stopping the teaching of reading in the fourth grade, keep teaching every student how to read until they are able to read at their grade level (exceptions of course for those who are truly intellectually-challenged like Trump)</li>
• All people should have books (mentally stimulating books) in their homes, especially those with young children
• Reading on a regular basis sends a powerful message to your kids that reading is a worthwhile activity because it shows not just tells them that it’s good for them to do
• Read to your kids in bed for as long as they’ll allow you to without complaining that they’ve outgrown the practice
• Have students start writing stories, book reports, poems, essays, etc. as soon as possible in their public education or private education
• If the educational bureaucracy won’t get off teachers’ backs, assign a personal secretary for every teacher whose job is to take care of the bullshit paperwork
• Outlaw the stealing of public education funding & giving it to charter schools
• Charter schools reflect the power of the “Christian” evangelicals or fundamentalists over spine-less politicians</li>
• Our founding fathers insisted on the separation of Church & State precisely because they feared what is happening now, Charter schools’agenda of turning our nation into a delusional nation where rational thought is dismissed—Trump’s “alternative facts”
• Take 5% of the annual waste, fraud, & abuse in the Pentagon’s budget & give it to public education
• Pay teachers on a scale comparable to high tech professionals
• Enforce the FCC’s original mandate to provide the public with high-quality educational & cultural programming & expand it to three hours of prime-time every day of the week & make all the networks, including the cable networks, pay 20 % of their net profits to our public education system
• Limit all class sizes to 20 students as the absolute maximum allowable under law</li>
• Start teaching critical & analytical thinking skills to students as soon as they are developmentally able to comprehend them
• Every American citizen as well as resident, can attend any university they want to absolutely free (from their local community college to Harvard University)
• Expand the study of the humanities as well as the arts from kindergarten to university & bestow national recognition on their study with awards, honors, etc.
• Call out every politician who knowingly lies on national television with unbiased great scholars who publicly humiliate them
• Promote & establish community learning centers in every community where residents can get academic help, and can enjoy lively discussions/debates on any subject/topic of their choice with academic referees to moderate & guide the discussions
• Call out advertisers who purposely dumb us down with their insulting advertisements & publicly ridicule them
• Create/build high-quality public libraries in every community no matter how poor; house them in beautifully designed architectural works of art with all the latest technology, top-notch librarians, & collections worthy of the Library of Congress
• Give Writers & Educators & Artists from every form of art, the national attention, recognition, & respect as we do of our Sports stars</li>
• Subsidize students from poor circumstances in a way that isn’t personally embarrassing to the students
• Take away the tax-free status of churches & make them pay a substantial tax to their local, public schools
• Outlaw all on-line “universities” unless they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their graduates have clearly benefitted greatly from their studies
• Build, maintain, & ensure the future of a public education system that is the envy of the world in terms of its physical structures, the quality of instruction, & a sincere love for each and every student
• Start teaching students about informal fallacies of logic as soon as they are able to comprehend them so they hopefully won’t be as easily duped as so many of their parents are by Trump, the Great Deceiver!
• Develop programs to expand students’ attention spans so they can pursue self-education whether in or out of formal school settings</li>

 

Utopian? Yeah, I expect such reactions but I have always been a sort of Don Quixote chasing after windmills & I remember those immortal words of Martin Luther King; “I have a Dream!” Without our dreams to push us forward, what’s the point of our lives? To simply be able to put on our tombstones; They paid their bills & kept a clean house? It’s the dreamers who have always inspired us & who have led us to times when we weren’t just the peasants for the lords like Little Lord Fauntleroy Trump to spit on.

 

Addendum: I originally was going to end this essay here but as I was editing this, I thought; I have to share with you the man the New York Times once said was “arguably the most important intellectual alive,’ Noam Chomsky.