"Do you ever get the feeling that the story's too damn real and in the present tense? That everybody's on the stage, and it feels like you're the only one in the audience? ... Skating away on the thin ice of a new day." -Jethro Tull
Sometimes, I think everything is a joke. Just a surreal practical joke, and Ashton Kutcher is going to jump out and punk me. Almost every moment of every day.
COVID happened, and then we all went weird and hermit-y. Then we get back to relative "normal" and here comes more police officers shooting black people, school shootings, mass shootings, and sex trafficking (literally just on today's news).
I think the coup-de-gras for me today was my school district apologizing for reading a book to young people about race. In the paper, and on social media, they apologized for showing a book about racism in America in 2021. A couple of parents objected to their children being exposed to the reality of systemic racism, so the district said they were sorry, for subjecting students to ... what's on the news every, single day. What people face, every day, just by looking the way they do.
You can't hide your children from reality. Trust me - I have three, and they are all adults now. They know far more than you think, and no video ring bell is going to change anything. You have to talk to your children and your students. You can't just spy on them and feed them platitudes.
We have to be better.
We have to move forward.
We are allowing the fall to happen, as a society.
How many minutes can we wait to resist?
Is it a minute and 40 seconds, when you're getting pulled over and you're a person of color and you want to get to a lighted space? (2nd Lt. Caron Nazario)
Is it having a police office shoot and kill you when they're yelling "taser" the whole time? (Duante Wright)
Is it going to school and having a student-on-edge start shooting into the crowd? (Knoxville, TN)
Is it Israel blowing up Iran's nuclear facilities?
Or does it come back to a white guy kneeling on a black man for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, in order to exert "police control".
(I literally can't even explain the disintegration of this country to my students anymore. If I am embarrassed at the total inadequacy of my own place of work - how can I even begin to explain/understand America as a whole?)
I'm over it. I'm over this whole patriarchal bullshit that disenfranchises women, people of color, and anything which doesn't fit their system of empowerment. I am tired of people getting special favors from their "bros" in order for the "person in charge" to simply outsource responsibilities to people who don't make as much money. I am tired of watching secretaries and nurses and teachers and health care workers be totally fucked by a system which tells then, "hey, you have enough money - you're fine". And I am tired of Tucker Carlson feeding Fox News watchers - in his words - "every time they import an new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter." (literally, his words; literally un-American)
That's xenophobia, and that should NOT be American.
But whatever. I'll just play it off and pretend that America is free. That I am free. That my choices are mine. That I am not a cog in the machine. That my voice makes any difference in a place of work where no one responds unless it's an emergency and no one seems to be in charge of anything specific.
We can be better than all of this bureaucracy, but we have to try to dismantle it, rather than leaning into the silent majority. Those who are silent are those who make a fool of themselves by drinking the Flavor-Aid.
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