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"Do you see how this economic system is at odds with humanity? At odds with caring and compassion? It's at odds with human rights!" - Jay Bennish, instructor, Overland High School, Aurora, Colorado, January 29, 2006

There are some things that reach me on such a primal level that it is occasionally difficult for me to keep my emotions in check when they rear up. The last thing I want to do is provide the far Left with any more ammunition by intimating policies or actions that wax extreme or fascistic; hopefully I can avoid this to some degree by properly framing this episode in light of my personal experience -- and of course, logic.

Since I live in Colorado, not only am I often exposed to certain facts surrounding occurrences out here that don't always make it "down the lane" intact (read "accurately"), I also feel obliged to provide national readers with a local take on things that occur in my backyard.

As you probably know by now, Jay Bennish, a tenth-grade "World Geography" instructor at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado (a suburb of Denver) has made the national news due to the fact that an audiotape recorded on January 29 by one of his students was made public. The tape, which contained Bennish shrilling some of the most vile and seditious anti-American propaganda resulted in his being placed on administrative leave. He is, of course, suing the school district. I'm sure you're surprised.

At this point, transcripts and mp3s of this rant are available online and have been broadcast on radio and television. Yes, it is old, tired, Marxist-Leninist swill, but for my local conservative media buddies, this was big news. Now, I'm not one of those jaded conservatives who thinks that Fox News has (completely) sold itself out commercially; I'm still very glad it's out there, but the fact that certain issues don't seem to merit newsworthiness on the conservative side until they make "The O'Reilly Factor" bothers me, because incidents of this sort are absolutely rampant -- and have been for a long time. An Overland student told a Denver television news reporter that Bennish's Leninist oratory was "the usual thing in our school." Indeed.

One of the reasons I escaped from New York 20 years ago was to extricate myself from the choking miasma of liberalism in which I had been raised. Throughout my childhood in public education, I was exposed to things by "caring, compassionate" intellectual teachers and administrators that are prosecutable in civil court these days. When my children started public school, though I had long since moved to Colorado, I was still scared witless. So do try to put it into perspective when I say that if I were the parent of an Overland High student, I might very well be camped outside of Bennish's home with a ski mask and baseball bat.

Granted that there ought to be a somewhat greater degree of latitude with regard to adult discussions at the collegiate level. But these were high school sophomores being exposed to statements such as the U.S. being "probably the single most violent nation on planet Earth", and leading lines of questioning that one might expect from a cult leader or professional interrogator rather than a high school teacher. Never mind that Bennish's convictions are the quintessentially naïve, immature conclusions of a brainwashed member of the Left's deluded base. It's always all about "caring, compassion and human rights" until the people running this con come to power. Then let's see which system actually values and enhances human rights.

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