(I always refer to substitute teachers as teachers. That is what they do after all. This episode focuses on the looming substitute teacher crisis. Retirement went up in some districts and down in others.) Empty phrases such as "proud to be an American" or "American made" were used by everyone, and very few had the guts to mocks the for the hallow declarations of exceptionalism that they really were. It was not that people did not know that these phrases were meaningless. It was much more that some kiss ass would freak out and report you to Homeland Security if you so much as made a joke about their paranoid delusions of American made products manufactured with parts from China or mocked their "proud to be an American" bumper sticker after they just made an argument to expand the meaning of the second amendment to include home made pipe bombs. You just kind of learned to avoid these people. You thought to yourself, or at least you were told, that these were just "right wing nuts" and that they didn't really matter in the "real political world". Generic phrases abound in both political parties in America, leaving us without a clear understanding of what is really taking shape. One issue that got passed around the political street corners was this idea that average Americans cared about education more than the people in charge of education did. The experts had ruined the public school system with all of their rules about vaccines and teaching science instead of praying for illness to go away. What's more, these experts had also filled our children's heads with liberal ideologies that were sure to make every American child a gang of homosexual communist ne'er do-wells. Every intellectual was challenged, every teacher was criticized, every method was called into question, vast amounts of money was spent, but the grades never improved. In fact, they got worse. It turned out that not listening to the experts probably wasn't the best idea. Now, who could have seen that coming? Probably the experts. Why didn't they warn us? Those bastards! This failure continued and continued until conservatives stood up one day and decided that they didn't want to even pay teachers a living wage anymore. They then proceeded to engage on a whole campaign discouraging evangelical christains and patriots from attending the public school system. This caused a large amount of republicans to either demand creationism be taught in their school or to pull their child out of school and home school. This drained the teachers' salaries even more, and eventually led to gig workers picking up the slack, doing three times the amount of work that they were actually being paid for in most cases. All of this was already causing teacher retention rates to be low; about eight percent of teachers quit teaching in 2019. After the pandemic, that number shot up to a whopping twenty five percent quitting after the 2020 school year. Teachers cited various reasons for this, including the lack of access to technological devices. However, much more common reasons were that the teachers either felt unsafe due to covid-19 or the pay was just too low for them to risk their lives. This means that the problem we had always complained about, that we simply were not getting what we paid for when it came to our children's educations, is about to get a whole lot worse. Class sizes will undoubtedly shoot up because of the severe lack of teachers. This will cause more of likelihood for the pandemic to surge once more. Remember that there are currently new variants arriving in this country; we simply do not have enough data to conclude that the vaccine will work on said variants. If there is another surge, you will certainly see even more teachers quit. So, what exactly is the goal here? Are we trying to destroy the public school system we pretend to care so much about? Are we actually going to ensure that our teachers are well paid and safe or are we just wasting time?