I wasn’t trying to desert. As a storyteller and special education (SpEd) teacher, more kid whisperer than liberal hack, I was sickened by my St. Paul, Minnesota bosses at Como Park High School cutting programming for vulnerable kids while blood, fights, and prostitution spread. In one Facebook post on February 29, 2016, about school iPads being used for bullying, drugs, fights, and whoring, I freaked parents out and wrecked my career.
I was patient zero in the oncoming race-plague that peaked with George Floyd’s death and the Summer of Love and ended with millions of dollars of destruction, thousands of reputations ruined, and the cruel deaths of people during what Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so flippantly referred to as “Woke 1.”
Every year since I started teaching in 1999, the district has poured tax dollars into problems and failed. My boss called kids “scholars” and cut their programming minutes in 2012; cut my minutes; cut adult living skills like learning their Social Security numbers, using deodorant, and riding the bus; administrators dropped them into algebra when they couldn’t subtract, into analyzing “Raisin in the Sun” when they couldn’t read. Kids were bullied, scared, crying at me to do something, and those who didn’t started fights.
I wrote to my boss in 2014 about illegal placement and bullying; she told me to get with it, or she would “find someone who would,” meaning fire me; I wrote to the union and school board in 2015; there was a forest fire coming, and no one smelled the smoke. I wrote to parent social groups. But what parent would speak up for their “special,” slow child?
In a December 2015 SpEd meeting, I heard a colleague tell another that the whole Como Park football team lined up in a train for $10 blowjobs on school property. This was in the midst of Como making TV news too often because of police calls, guns in lockers, and riots.
I found myself caught in a shocking crunch. I asked on Facebook if someone would show me this “school-to-prison pipeline?” I warned parents that we had no recourse with fights, drugs, and “whoring,” and they freaked out. It was horrifying. Rather than confront the truth of my questions, they labeled me a racist and a white supremacist.
Security took my laptop, keys, and badge and marched me to the parking lot, and my life was immediately turned upside down.
Television, radio, and social media went insane. Fox and CBS called. Radio stations asked my brother for my contact information. Friends in Italy asked if I was okay. At home, I shut off the lights and closed the shades. My union lawyer, Meg Luger, called my fiction stories racist, and gagged me. Police offered protection from cars slow-rolling my house. My wife left to care for her dying mom. I had to shop at midnight. Friends and family who first supported me have long since unfriended and blocked me. The only leftist friends remaining I can count on one hand. Meanwhile, conservatives welcomed me despite my liberal leanings.
After 250 applications, I found three more teaching jobs and was fired from each one. At the last school where I worked, a state union leader spotted me in Grand Marais, 250 miles from home, squinted, and said, “I know you from somewhere.” Three weeks later I was fired, despite good job reviews. Minnesota pulled my license in 2019, but though I fought it and got it reinstated, I couldn’t work anymore. I was dead.
I didn’t mean to desert, but I left the Left. Then I wandered the woods eyeing tree branches for rope to hang myself, and might have, were it not for a reticent therapist and a job counselor who said she’d found jobs for paroled murderers and pedophiles.
Now, I’m fine. New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise spent over three hours in 2019 buying pizza and interviewing me, but none of it made the paper or The Daily. It’s history; Woke 1.
Except that Chauntyll Allen, the Black Lives Matter leader and school board member who called me racist in 2016, now faces federal felony charges for storming Cities Church during the ICE surge in January, and in June, called for dogs to “piss on white corpses” in “white Christian cemeteries.” When I confronted her last month, she invoked the memories of Melissa Hortman, the former DFL Speaker of the Minnesota House, and her husband Mark, and asked if I hadn’t harassed them, too, before they were murdered.
So, what are we to do when Rep. Ocasio-Cortez appears on ABC’s “This Week” and says, “Woke 1 was crazy,” laughing off 2020, while she supports the insane policies to decriminalize illegal immigration, defund police, and let kids medically switch genders? It’s not funny to let criminal immigrants walk free, not funny to take cops off the streets in poor neighborhoods, not funny to permanently mutilate healthy girls and boys.
Wokeness was deadly when antiracist lecturer Kike Ojo-Thompson repeatedly mocked liberal Toronto Principal Richard Bilkszto until he leaped to his death off a building ledge. It wasn’t funny when NBC’s Minnesota affiliate Kare 11 News leaked an email to Minneapolis police, got worker Al Ditty fired, and he hung himself. It was not funny when I looked for the right tree branch to hang myself neatly.
In the blink of an eye, my life and the lives of countless others were destroyed by a season of horror and destruction. It bears remembering how “crazy” that time was, and only the foolish or the cruel would rewrite that history to absolve themselves of responsibility.
In 2016 I lost my job, reputation, livelihood, and for a time, my will to live. In 2016, AOC was 26 and pouring drinks. She still should be.
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Theodore Olson is a writer and former special education teacher living in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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