NVN Friday: RULES FOR TEACHERS, SOMEWHERE IN THE USA, 2023
by Cecil Morris
Attending a drag show at Hamburger Mary’s, and later posting about it on social media, led to Kristi Maris losing her teaching job of nearly 20 years, she wrote on Facebook. —Houston Public Media, July 26, 2023
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You shall not attend drag shows as drag might rub off on you like the contagion we disbelieve and you might drag it then to school where you indoctrinate children in the unspeakable pleasures of women’s undergarments and torture shoes and cult behavior. You shall not mention slavery in the same breath as oppression or affirmative action or reparations though you can note how slavery afforded some slaves with advantageous skills they used to their own betterment later. You shall not criticize your boss or your boss’s lackeys for their support of policies or practices either ignorant, ill-informed, or cruel, or, really, speak any words not explicitly spelled out in the approved curriculum. You shall as much as humanly possible act and speak and dress and think in the same Godly way as your employer does or says he or she or they does or do.
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Cecil Morris taught high school English for 37 years. Now retired, he spends his time writing poems and shaking his head at the news. He has poems in or forthcoming from Cimarron Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Sugar House Review, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.