I was reading the newspaper the other day and I came across a word that I didn’t understand. Common sense told me to read it again, use context clues, basically the stuff that I learned in earlier years prior to high school in reading comprehension. I didn’t quite get the meaning of the word so I decided to skip the whole sentence all together. Next sentence, new word, new problem, skipped it. Rinse, wash, repeat. My ears are squeaky clean; my head-not a single blemish, stain, dust mite. Give me a break, I just wasted my time reading- no, passing my eyes over paper and didn’t learn anything. Someone should tell the writer to dumb down his writing.

I’m the writer. I’m not going to lower my standards for your inability to comprehend words; I am not going to be another cog in the system; another monkey wrench in the broken machine of education; I am not going to wrestle you in my arms and pat your head. The world’s not alright. The world can’t read. The world is blind and so are you and so is your teacher. You’re not the good kind of disability either. You’re a burden on society. You’re a stain on the face of humanity. Your stifling, crippled, broken mind and spirit is loosened upon this world like a plague poisoning all you touch with a scent of stupidity. My mind corrodes at the very passing of the thought that you might breed.

This is an opinion piece on kids that can’t read in our school and the parents that bred this incest; this degenerate demographic that limp through life sterile of any intelligence, lacking the seeds of thought or the fervour to learn. I cannot stand by without setting these words on paper and having my frustration manifested. I am dumbing myself down.

To think that I might want to take on those reigns and break along the pathway that might lead towards your institutions-your virtues that run along perverted streets guiding our wasted youth towards a higher education—is horrendous. My fingers, taut and calloused, grow tired of typing, giving you the breath of light. I am merely placing a sterile lamp above the nakedness of parents that fail to teach; that fail to apprehend the poisons of laziness by distilling that same wretchedness in their children. I can only assume that that is the case; that parents and teachers are to blame in all of this.

Your position, I hold to high esteem; but it seems to me that because the majority of students lack in the departments of basic reading comprehension that so must teachers. You’re poisoning our future. I’m not quite sure how you do it. I don’t know if it’s the lack of machismo or the over abundance of passiveness. Are you hopeless? Are you infuriated when faced with unruly cretins? Are you as tired as I am, beating a dead horse? I should hope that you do not blame the spawn of your loins for your lack in spirit and courage or perhaps the blame falls on those that came before you? It must have been the parents, the teenage pregnancies with rotten brood. Wrong, it falls on you just as it falls on those parents (but just to save my skin will put it on parents mostly) and how it falls limply on the shrivelled shoulders of those students that cannot bare the stench of fresh ink on a canvas whether it be a book or a paper.

And if it must be said, I will say it. Those kids that cannot read this have a place in the blame but I do feel a token of doubt and remorse with saying this knowing that their eyes can only pass over this piece. They have given up. They gave up a long time ago which is to say that the cycle can only be complimented by an insurmountable amount of years and months and weeks and days and seconds wasted. I, sadly but more so frightened, can only reply that they have little hope without teachers that impress upon their temples some passion to learn and to see past the shadows in the cave of their mind.