Guest Column: Certified Trashcan Woman

Morgan Stough, Online Editor

My personal Twitter feed, once full of self-deprecating jokes and whimsical observances of the world around me, has turned into a cesspool of political disarray all thanks to the one and only Betsy DeVos.

I’m not known for keeping my opinion to myself, nor am I recognized for being the most conservative Christian of all time, but I can typically hold my cyber tongue on the discourse of the world.

That was until The Donald came barreling into the front door of the house I had built for myself, made of blissful political ignorance.

When he became the GOP nominee for this past election, and subsequently won, I had no choice but to unleash my innate ability to argue with anyone and everyone (I got it from you, Mom) in the name of saving the nation from Donald J. Trump. And boy oh boy, did he bless me with a lot of arguments when he named Betsy DeVos as his Secretary of Education nominee.

THIS WOMAN. I have never seen any one person sit so gleefully in her own corruption. She made no effort to hide the fact that she was wholly unqualified to be our Secretary of Education and was only nominated in the name of $200,000,000. She was grilled with questions about her experience in public education, and she sat with a smile on her face and an “I don’t know” ready on her lips.

Side note: Has anyone else been obsessively listening to “Hamilton: An American Musical” for the past year? Aaron Burr’s famous catchphrase that he tells Hamilton, and eventually uses as an election slogan, is “talk less, smile more.”

Watching Betsy DeVos fail to answer questions at her hearing felt like her only political advice came from a semi-fictional caricature of Aaron Burr, the only vice president to kill someone in a duel (maybe he inspired the guns in schools comment too?). Her smile on the stand seemed to say, “It’s amusing that you think I’m not going to get this job.”

It. Is. Infuriating.

She is a billionaire who has never been involved with public schooling in any way, and has every intention of tearing down the public education system we currently have in place. I’ll be the first to admit that public schools have their own set of issues, but the answer definitely isn’t to get rid of them.

Charter schools and private schools leave a lot of children out of the race for getting a good education—children who are living in poverty, children in the foster system, LGBTQ+ kids and children of immigrants, just to name a few.

If you’ve ever ventured into the big, bad city of Omaha, you know that a huge amount of kids fit the bill.

Yesterday, in a historic senate vote ending in Vice President Mike Pence casting the deciding vote, Betsy DeVos was officially named Secretary of Education of the United States of America.

Which leads me to a very important question: Deb Fischer—where you at???

Our very own Nebraska senator was one of the last republicans to make her decision, and much to my dismay, and the dismay of many, she voted for DeVos.

For the past week, constituents across the state tried calling, emailing and mailing our dear senator in hopes that she would uphold her promise to listen to those she represents.

She ignored every last one of us, so much so that people resorted to leaving notes on the door of all three of her Nebraska offices.

So here we are with Betsy DeVos, Certified Trashcan Woman, as our secretary of Education, a state full of politicians who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what their constituents want, and four years’ worth of material for my twitter feed.

But hey, what am I getting so upset for?

It’s all fake news anyways.