This diary is part of a 24-hour blograiser for our Texas State Board of Education Candidates, Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau.
For most people, Texas is the last place you want to be during a summer vacation. I can see why.
It’s hot here. We have a $21 billion dollar budget shortfall because our career-politician Governor Rick Perry likes living in a $10,000-a-month rental mansion. But there are so many things that you can only learn in Texas.
For starters, I learned what a "Tea Party" candidate is! Apparently, if you have brown hair and blue eyes and you can wink a lot and you don’t spell good, you’re in.
You aren’t a big fan of gay marriage, but you LOVE watching Bristol Palin and men in tight pants on Dancing with the Stars. Ole!
I learned that God plays a mysterious role in our daily lives. He elects Presidents (but only the ones we don’t like), causes massive oil spills (even though we allowed the drilling to happen in the first place) and I learned that if you want to "turn back to God," you have to cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge, hang a right on Independence Avenue and have a televised rally on cable TV with about 1,000 of your closest friends on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
But the most important thing I learned over my summer vacation was something I could never learn in a textbook -- or maybe I will soon. I learned it from my Texas State Board of Education. I learned that Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall never existed, but thanks to Ken Mercer, I learned that Sean Hannity and James Dobson are our true American heroes. Radical right-wing SBOE candidate Marsha Farney warned me to stay away from "American-bashing" Democrats at a Tea Party rally on July 3rd but when that didn’t help her in the polls, she and the rest of the extremist wing of the SBOE tried to warn me about a new threat: Muslims. After successfully convincing folks that our President was a Muslim, and seeing how well that worked to help people fear him, they decided just to go after actual Muslims to drum up more votes from a radical, scared political right.
Well, that’s all I have to share with the class on what I learned over my summer vacation. Oh, wait. I learned one other thing. I learned a new vocabulary term: fear-mongering.
This really doesn't need to happen in Texas anymore. Remember, oftentimes the Texas SBOE decides what gets printed in YOUR state's textbooks. Donate to Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Judy Jennings today to help Texas kids learn good. I mean better.