New Mattress Arrives

 

by Pa Rock

Plodding Typist

This morning as I was still pondering what to write about in today's blog posting, two  middle-aged fellows arrived in a pickup truck with mattresses that I ordered a couple of week ago.  After they had taken mine back to my bedroom and gotten it situated on the bed, one of the men commented on a chess set that I have set up on an end table in the bedroom.   The set and the board are ones I purchased fifteen years ago while living on Okinawa.  They are unique.

One of the men complimented the chess set and asked to take a closer look.   As he examined the pieces, which are made from a heavy metal, he began talking about his love of the game and how he had been an avid chess player in high school and had gone to the national high school chess championships three years in a row - where his best game had garnered him 10th place in his third year of competition.

Being an old high school teacher myself, I was very impressed with that achievement and said so.  I asked if he had attended one of our local high schools, hoping to learn more about the local cultural scene.   The man, who is of an age now to have children of his own in high school, said that he had gone to school in Alabama.  Sadly, he said, things like chess were not much of a priority in the local area.

But they are, or at least "were," in Alabama?  That shot some of my favorite misconceptions right in the ass!

So now I am in a funk over he way Missouri's backwater state legislature has turned its back on public education by steadily defunding our schools and keeping teacher pay at miserably low levels as a way of insuring that Missouri children are denied access cutting-edge math, science, and computer science and technology - as well as a broad exposure to the arts and humanities.  Instead our state legislature spends it few weeks a year in session figuring out ways to to divert more and more of our tax money and state revenue into religious schools that nourish right-wing politics and ferment hate.

The degradation of education by public officials from the White House (what's left of it), to the state house, to the county court house makes me very, very sad.  Out country and our future are being ravaged  by immoral greedheads and religious hucksters who want to control every aspect of our lives and ensure the masses have groups on which to focus their hate (immigrants, gays, socialists, Blacks, Jews, whatever), and are too busy hating those they want to keep down that they ignore their economic oppressors who pose the real threats to their health, safety, and financial stability.

Chess?  America don't need no stinking chess.  It might foster the ability to think and to strategize.  What America needs is a vengeful white God and an elite white (and straight) master class that will do our thinking for us.

But on the flip side, at least I have a new mattress.  Maybe it's time for Grandpa to go take a nap and restore his equanimity.