That's all good theory and rhetoric but this real-life circumstance here, it's green, it's thick and good to have and I'm not shifting.

And I can openly and honestly say to you I have never had a day of depression in my life, OK?

If I see anything that concerns me here, it's that the rhetoric went up a little bit in their response.

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact