For The Person That I Do Have
It all starts with a broken heart, a disillusionment about the statues your youth asks you to revere.
I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, but it’s the truth. We who have ever felt this abandonment from our fathers went through stages of pain throughout our lives we never fully reconcile. We become victims of the ideal of a nuclear family, where the father provides the strength and grounded reason while the mother provides the emotion and the tenderness for this fantasy family. Those of us who only had our mothers around may have grown up to resent that sort of set up, even when we saw a plethora of examples where such a setup wasn’t a fantasy for anyone involved.
Then, we see we’re not alone. We’re OK with having been left, but not with the person who did the leaving … and the title bestowed upon that person.
For years, I held this resentment with me, and, no matter how much I saw him after I became a man, I couldn’t shake the idea that I missed out on all these life lessons from him, and that the void I felt for so much of my life
I want to thank United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) for being the only thing standing between our communies and Eli Broad's malevolent designs. For better or worse, UTLA members agreed once more to take a drastic pay cut so that they could save the jobs of many of their colleagues, who, in turn, serve our community. Educators have made these amazing personal sacrifices year after year, while simultaneously being vilified as greedy and self serving by the corporate press, unprincipled politicians, and the avaricious opportunists in the so-called non-profit sector. Notice too that none of the no-excuses reformers ever make sacrifices of any kind on behalf of our communities. The only "shared sacrifices" I've seen are by working people, and more to the point, predominantly by librarians, counselors, teachers and other educators.
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