From The New Yorker, here’s Margaret Talbot on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her ideological allies: “The America of 2022 is quite plainly not a country where citizens’ ability to worship freely is in jeopardy. Nor is the nation on the cusp of canceling gun rights. Yet the conservative justices often act as if they were alone in a broken elevator, jabbing the emergency button and hollering for help.”
Yes, this is from an opinion piece and this quote does not include the sorts of evidence that a an academic persuasive essay demands, but it captures the confusion and angst that many Americans must feel right now.
The default for everyone -- no matter where they lie on the political spectrum -- is to search for the worst case scenarios, for the furthest stretch. Many choose phrases like "...could result in..." or "...the end result of x may be y."
Douglas County, as I have mentioned several times in this blog, is among America's richest counties. It boasts a very strong school system with all sorts of private and charter options. It's about as homogeneous a place as you can find, with 87 percent of residents being white and nearly everyone having plenty of money.
But DougCo, somehow, has become a joke in which the wealthy battle it our over nonexistent problems and go off the deep end at the drop of a hat.
There is no war on Christianity, for instance, unless it is a civil war of attrition as most churches shed members in droves. No one with any power or influence seems interested in anything that might decrease school shootings, much less take away any of our national arsenal of over 300 million guns. No public school teachers know much about critical race theory and no one teaches it, whatever it might be.
Republican leaders seem determined to push disagreements and fears as far as they can go, and to even contemplate compromise is a sign of moral flaws (and that applies to both ideological extremes).
A prominent local Republican is George Brauchler, who (of course) has a podcast and often is a right wing radio guest. He was one of the first to call for publication of the names of every DougCo employee who had called in sick a couple weeks ago protesting school board overreach. He's a lawyer and former district attorney, BTW, but other lawyers confronted the school board with the threat of lawsuits if a single employee suffered harm due to such publication and the board backed off.
Brauchler himself did not file the freedom of information request for those names, which mostly reminds us that the rich and powerful prefer to find others to handle the messy detail work. He's a chickenshit, to be coarse but accurate, but that is hardly unusual.
Soon the local school district will have yet another superintendent, and the radicals in the majority evidently have someone in mind who runs a local charter school. They can and almost certainly will ram her selection through, no matter what. Might makes right, right?
But that person stands no chance at all of being successful in the long term. Much as most of America will never be able to quite trust Amy Coney Barrett due to her rushed nomination and confirmation, most of Douglas County will always suspect that the new super is a puppet -- or worse, that the entire fiasco was planned all along to make certain a person who is not a staunch public school supporter can further disrupt the schools.
Get enough rich people together and they can create their own schools. Public education is for losers.
No comments:
Post a Comment