Page 4 • March 2020
A VIEW FROM THE LEFT
A VIEW FROM THE RIGHT
Not Wasting a Serious Crisis
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EDITORIAL &
Opinions
y sainted mother was a public school teacher until she married my father and immediately, as a married woman, was forced by local Massachusetts rules then in force to leave the classroom. (My own grade school teachers included Miss Galvin, Miss Harrington, Miss Donahue, Miss Keohane, Miss Condrick, Miss Loud ... you get the picture.) One happy adult memory is a lunch with my then-90-year-old mother in the leading Italian restaurant in our hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts. The world-weary expression on our waitress’s face, herself already a grandmother, brightened immediately when she recognized my mother from more than 60 years earlier: “Miss Fallon,” she announced, “You were the best teacher I ever had. Remember me from the Jefferson School ... Marie?” My mother did in fact remember and later unsentimentally recalled Marie’s losing encounters with the eights table in multiplication. In addition to my mother, my only sister was a public school teacher. My only daughter was a teacher. After leaving the Marine Corps, I, too, taught high school history. I agree with former Democratic Texas Gov. Ann Richards who, before seeking and winning public office, had been a junior high school teacher. She said, “Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I’ve done.” Republican presidential candidate and former Sen. John McCain echoed the same sentiment when he argued that a good teacher should not be paid less than a bad congressman. Former White House Chief of Staff and later Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel shrewdly noted, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” meaning, “the opportunity for us to do things you
Mark Shields could not before.” The current national and international crisis has closed schools and required parents to share confined indoor space with their children for hours and days on end. All over America, mothers and fathers who had not thought much about it have been forced to confront, understand and appreciate what the American public school teacher does every day of the school year: manage, inspire, organize, discipline, inform and educate not one or two children but 30 children, all day long -- some, sadly, with the attention span of a fruit fly. While safeguarding people’s health and providing treatment to all afflicted are our overriding priorities, it may also be time for us Americans, beginning with parents, to recognize just how demanding, difficult and indispensable the work of the public school teacher is and that a school teacher deserves to be paid much more than the median salary, which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is $58,230 for an elementary school teacher in the U.S. Recontinued on page 6
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hen I think of “essential” workers in America, the smear merchants of the Anti-Defamation League are at the bottom of the barrel. For decades, they’ve demonized conservatives and Christians as agents of “hate” and treated our very existence as incitements to violence. The ADL’s manufactured outrage machine has broadened its target list to anyone remotely critical of Israel for any reason, President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, “America First” college students, innocuous hand gestures, cartoon frogs and anyone who dares to think or write that “It’s OK to be white.” Now, in the wake of the “Chinese flu” pandemic, ADL is lining up with all the other federal bailout vultures clamoring for free money. This week, the group issued a statement calling on Congress to include “relief for charities” in any COVID-19 legislation. “In times of crisis,” ADL self-righteously urged, “nonprofits are on the front lines, ready to respond and serve communities across the nation -- but funds are needed to continue doing so.” The “relief package” pushed by ADL and several hundred other groups demands $60 billion in “emergency stimulus funding to support our work... during this time of crisis and need.” What a crock. The primary “front lines” ADL occupies are on the battlefields against American sovereignty and free speech. By my count, the open borders zealots of ADL have filed 17 amicus briefs in our courts supporting obstruction of Trump’s immigration enforcement and national security measures. The group is particularly proud of its brief in Trump v. Hawaii, in
Michelle Malkin which it “led a coalition of six Jewish organizations using our unique moral voice to passionately argue against the so-called Muslim ban, citing three historical examples when our nation later recognized that we were wrong to turn our back, including denying refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazis.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the travel restrictions and affirmed the broad plenary powers of the executive branch over immigration. On top of the $60 billion ADL wants for itself and its ideological fellow travelers (including tax-funded refugee resettlement contractors Catholic Charities, Church World Service and Lutheran Services), the group called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week to include Medicaid coverage and tax rebates for illegal immigrants in her Chinese flu rescue package. ADL’s full-throated promotion of America’s demographic transformation through mass migration stands in stark contrast to its unapologetic defense of Israel’s restrictionist immigration policies and continued on page 6
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