All the crazy MAGA QANON hate points to a failure of our public education

[Genki Hikari]

49. I was in school during the 60s and 70s

People were patriotic.

We hardly ever said the Pledge. Waste of time when we had more important things to do. Like learn stuff we needed to know.

We didn't go to church, or at least not often. After my parents divorced, we lived with my grandparents for several years, and they were closet atheists who never set foot in a church the entire time I lived with them. My mother was a believer who was usually too tired from shift work as a nurse to have the energy for church. Not always. But usually. I hated going on the occasions when she bullied us into it. I was always wishing I was back on the farm, even doing my chores, rather than listening to some maniac screaming at me about the Devil coming to get us all. When my mom went off to get postgraduate skills in her field, it meant no more church, which meant no more screaming, no more hate and no more BS. I learned better values from being on that farm with my grandparents than I ever learned from any stupid church. Or ever would have learned.

My grandparents and mom never complained about the curriculum at school, really. And I got an education, but it could have been a better one if my stupid mother had listened to all the teachers who begged her to move me up, I was bored to death in the classes of my age peers, and they knew they were losing me to brilliant underachievement from my boredom with being stuck in a grade two or more years behind where my brain was.

We did have the loons who wanted religion back in public schools rising up like vomit after swallowing a bad plate of etouffe, but neither my family figures nor the majority of people we knew had any respect for that idea or the people peddling it. Church was about X (stupid) stuff to know, and school was about not X stuff (reality) to know. That's how it was.