Today, Donald Trump became our country’s President. Today is also Friday. These two statements are both true. Friday will last until Saturday comes around. Trump will last as long as he can serve the American people.
I think of Trump as nothing but an entertainer, and entertainers are allowed to entertain as long as they make money for the people they serve. Happens in music, movies, and TV all the time. We’ll see how long he lasts–I’m sure there are tons of betting odds out there based on his Presidential longevity. He most definitely inherits a country that seems to either hate him or love him, and offers plenty of sound bites for people to feel certain ways about him.
Me? I didn’t vote for him or Hillary because I live in California. No matter who I wanted to get those 55 electoral votes, they were going to Hillary. I’m also not looting, or telling others what to do to undermine his Presidency, or filling people’s absent memories with a hagiography of our previous administration.
Today is Friday and Trump is the President of the United States of America. What are you going to do? I mean, there is a Chrome extension that replaces every picture of Trump with a picture of a kitten. That’s fun, right?
My biggest worry with Trump is that nothing will change in education, the place where I have spent the large majority of my adult life. You can appoint the greatest minds in the world, show them other countries where education is valued at a premium, make success an incentive, but I don’t know how we are going to make schools great again. And saying it is not enough (though I believe that if you say something enough times people will buy into it as Gospel truth).
Last year, our principal claimed we had alleviated our bullying problem at school. Many teachers applauded. Others laughed. There will always be bullies–in school and in life. Move along. Yesterday I was shown a video of a North High kid who was being goaded into bouncing up and down while saying “Ass.” The kid is a freshman, in Special Education, and had a video of him bouncing and saying “Ass” while a caption read something like “What do you enjoy eating?” That’s bullying. The girl that showed it to me was in my room at lunch, we saw the dean walk by, I told her to catch him and report the video. She did and the dean said he would look into it.
Today I addressed the video with my students, who claimed it would disappear in 24 hours on Instagram anyway. Many had seen it, but didn’t care much because they knew it would be gone in a day. Because that was Thursday. Today is Friday. The video probably is gone now. Hence, no more bullying and the world is a great place.
It all comes back to entertainment. We have to keep upping that ante to get people to watch, to get them to hit those like buttons. I mean, drinking urine was so yesterday.