Category: Current Events

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Teachers Are Superheroes

Again, from John Pavlovitz:

Comic books have lied to all of us.

Heroism isn't capes and costumes.

It doesn't come from radioactive spider bites or metal suits or gamma rays or distant planets.

It doesn't hang out in cavernous caves, palatial compounds, or hi-tech floating cities.

It isn't wielding tricked out all-terrain vehicles, gadget-laden utility belts, hammers from the heavens, or indestructible shields.

The real heroic stuff here on this planet is firmly seated in the chests of the ordinary people who embrace an extraordinary calling; those whose superhuman hearts beat quite differently than the rest of us mere mortals.

They rise before the sun does, and in the most counterintuitive fashion, they run directly, passionately, and purposefully into the thick of the flourescent-lit fray—and they simply save children.

They do this not in a grand single bound; not in some last-second, desperate flurry of force, not in the bombast and fanfare of spectacle—but through steady, loving attention to a methodical, repetitive, mundane string of a million seemingly insignificant decisions. They do this because they know how important each second is and how precious every child is. They see what we normal citizens don't see or choose to walk past.

Your kids are rubbing shoulders with superhumans.

Within a few miles of wherever you are reading this, a ragged army of sleep-deprived, woefully under supported, horribly underpaid do-gooders is willingly braving the daily bullets, bruises, and battles, so that your children can become the glorious adults they were designed to be.

To all you ordinary classroom superheroes on the planet, who may not hear it often enough, loud enough, or perhaps at all: Thank you.

Thank you for enduring the countless weird, individual quirks of dozens of kids, for learning how they specifically think and process things, and for seeking to speak their brain's personal language so that they feel heard and seen and known.

Thank you for the rest that you forfeit, the off-the-clock hours you give up, the money you take from your own pocket, and for the thousands of small sacrifices that no one will ever see from a distance. Thank you for the part of you that you give away to other people's children.

Thank you for continually fighting through defiance and shyness, through laziness and silliness, through absentee parents and violent home life, and getting intimately close to the hearts of your kids.

Though we often don't stop to say it, we know just how much you do and just how fortunate all our children are to have you battling for them every single day.

Thank you most of all, for the very heroic way that without cape or costume, you fly in and you literally save kids—and in doing so, you save the world.

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The Face of Tomorrow

They are afraid. And they should be. This is face of the future, regardless of what the knuckle draggers on the right want.

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Quote of the Day

The suggestion of arming the teachers in response to school shootings is really not that surprising As a nation we have hoisted pretty much every social problem onto teachers, expecting schools to be the solution for everything from unemployment to teen pregnancy and the war on drugs, all the while cutting their funding and lambasting them as being lazy and selfish when they demand to be paid. They are solution, scapegoat, and sacrificial lamb rolled into one." ~ Jason Read

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The Gun Is Our Moloch

From Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball:

THE GUN IS OUR MOLOCH

Garry Wills, writing for The New York Review five years ago, after the Sandy Hook grade school massacre:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god's bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Our gun laws are insane. We, collectively, have agreed that regular mass shootings, often at schools — schools! — are a reasonable price to pay as a nation for unfettered access to military-grade killing machines for anyone and everyone who wants one.

It's sick. Everyone outside the U.S. knows this. A majority of Americans knows this and supports stricter gun control.

There are new gun laws being drafted. But you know what most of them are for? For making guns even easier to purchase legally, without background checks.

This idea of gun=god was actually explored in an episode of American Gods last year.

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Let's Face It…

If the death of twenty 6- and 7-year olds (plus six adult staff members entrusted with keeping those children safe) at Sandy Hook in 2012 did not bring about gun control legislation in this country, yesterday's shooting in Florida—or the other 18 school shootings that have happened in 2018 already—won't do a thing either. THIS is what our country has become. Your elected officials—whose lips are surgically attached to the anus of the NRA and Wayne GODDAMNFUCKING LaPierre—are just fine with the continued slaughter of American children in school as long as their pockets are lined with that almighty blood money.

THIS is who we are, America—and will remain so until every last one of those MOTHERFUCKERS are removed from office and the NRA is driven back under the rock it crawled out of.

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Another Day Ending in Y

https://twitter.com/wokeluisa/status/963933277244436480

"Dear Donald Trump: you're a disgrace to the United States for too many reasons to list. You're a racist, a sexual predator, a lifelong financial criminal, and you committed treason by knowingly allowing Russia to rig the election in your favor. Every day you find a new way to embarrass decent Americans everywhere, while aligning yourself with the slimiest of gutter trash this country shamefully has to offer. This was no different.

You oppose all forms of gun control, Trump, because your slimy political base consists of the kinds of bloodthirsty lunatics who worship guns and violence. You've done your best to cut off access to mental health treatment, as you've siphoned off the funds in favor of your corrupt wealthy donors. So when a kid took an AR-15 into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School today and left at least seventeen people dead, this was entirely on your shoulders.

Would gun control and mental health treatment have stopped this shooting? Maybe. When you're the (supposed, for now) President of the United States, and you're the person who's almost single handedly preventing those things from happening, you're to blame for school shootings. Period. You should have been too ashamed to even show his face today. Instead you dared to posted this tone-deaf tweet, which based on the verbiage, you probably didn't even write yourself: "My prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting. No child, teacher or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school."

Hey Donald Trump, take your thoughts and prayers and condolences and shove them up your traitorous ass. You got those kids killed today with your evil policies. You know it too, because unlike your drooling gun-addicted base, you're just a political opportunist who's burning this country down in order to keep your shithole supporters happy. You're literally a traitor who sold this country out to Russia. You're also a murderer of children." ~ Bill Palmer