The Fourteen Year Filibuster:
Life Imitates Seventy Year Old Art

If you want to understand teacher abuse, I recommend that you rent the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The main character in the movie, Jimmy Stewart, a former boy scout leader, is a naïve, appointed senator, grossly unprepared for the political games in government. Teachers answer a calling to teach and also often find themselves overwhelmed by the graft and politics in education and find themselves equally unprepared.

The movie is about fighting lost causes. Trying to expose White Chalk Crime, the game that has allowed bullying to replace rule of law in education, is clearly of that same category. I know because I have tried everything in my power to expose this for over 14 years now. Just as Jimmy Stewart's opponents framed him so that he appeared to be the bad guy, the EducRAT$ at my district framed me.

They altered documents and the truth to bury me for the same reasons they had to get rid of Jimmy Stewart - good people get in the way of a corrupt system.

However, protecting our children and safeguarding our democracy cannot be a lost cause. Accepting that as a fact is akin to giving up on America. And so I continue to explain, prove and reach people with power figuring that one day my filibuster of words and its residual shame will do what Jimmy Stewart's filibuster did - break down the other senator from his state engaged in graft and wrongdoing - so the political thief finally admitted that Stewart was telling the truth and that Washington was a big, corrupt mess, with greed rather than service in the driver's seat.

We know that a picture is worth many words. I say watch that picture and think about all of us dedicated teachers trying to do the right thing while up against a system with the power to ruin us. See Jimmy Stewart literally run away from his own obviously fixed hearing, aware that anything he said would be ignored or twisted. Watch the almost cartoon-like portrayal of the "expert" witnesses that "knew" it was Jimmy Stewart's signature on a document that made him look guilty when it was clearly a forged signature.

Compare that with how psychiatrist, Dr. Fink, found me "imagining harassment," forming the contrived justification for cleansing me from the system. Maybe a movie will help you understand how teachers like us feel being set up and trashed with no ability to be heard. This is why we needed to each create our own filibusters. We simply could not allow the American dream to become a lost cause. Karen Horwitz, President, NAPTA

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