NVN Monday: AN OPEN LETTER EXPLAINING ELEMENTS OF OUR NEW, IMPROVED, AND DECIDEDLY UNWOKE CURRICULUM
by Dick Westheimer
Dear Parent,
We believe in children. We believe in padded playgrounds and unscuffed knees and helmets and a bubble wrapped curriculum lined with velvet and free from troubled ideas. We believe our teachers should teach that enslaved Africans got vocational skills like painting and planting for their personal benefit, that residents of Auschwitz knew the trick of how to lose weight and look so fit, that members of the Five Tribes, removed for their own good, got to “pursue happiness in their own way.” We believe those seeking refuge (whose boats overturn) might learn to swim, that those with black-lung get to sit in front of their TVs in their BarcaLoungers with their very own government issued oxygen tanks, that Catholic boys get personal tutoring in anatomy from respected men in their white collared shirts, that trafficked girls get to travel the world and meet new friends. We believe children should learn nothing about those pre-teens head-bent in sweatshops sewing their shoes, or two-year-olds toddling in electronics junk yards recycling their PCs or tweens armed and taught to harm their kin. We do this for you, dear parent because, we are committed to protect you from Judgement Day when Johnny or Susie asks what you could have done and why, dear parent, you didn’t.
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Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, One Art, and Cutthroat. His chapbook A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine is published by SheilaNaGig.
Dick Westheimer speaks for so many! Thank you!
Chapeau!