Now this is how you do it: Oakland, CA parents occupy Parker Elementary School after the district announces its closure for next year. They’ve stayed there 50 days, even opening a “Parker community school” offering free summer programs to kids and adults. The district wanted to close, shrink, or merge 11 schools, mostly serving Black and Brown kids almost like that was the whole idea, but folks ain’t putting up with it, with occupations and hunger strikes and legal complaints. The right-wing parents get all the ink these days, but you’ll more likely remember these parents, even if they don’t win every battle this time around.
But alas, right-wing “education” organizations like Moms for Liberty don’t just get all the ink – they get all the corporate money, too, so says at least one observer who says the organization has grown “at a pace that only a corporation's monetary resources could manage.” These are some bat-guano insane folks at Moms for Liberty, and I don’t say that because they gave Ron DeSantis a wooden sword at their convention – I count two instances of defamation and one instance of a terrorist threat just in paragraph 7, and I think the victim of all three needs to file charges post-haste. Having feelings about stuff doesn’t make threats and defamation legal, let alone OK. Why do I feel like the conservative in every conversation about right-wing behavior?
In a peripherally-related note, Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old Ohio girl a month back, is planning to sue Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, in part for suggesting she failed to report the abortion to state authorities when, ah, she did. I hope this ends Mr. Rokita’s career, since he seems like the kind of guy who’ll say anything to induce rage in the easily-enraged – many of whom have dutifully followed up with terroristic threats against Dr. Bernard. I’d like all of them in jail, too, partly because I believe in law and order, and partly because, again, assholes need to start paying a price for their behavior in America.
Nicole Martins and Erica Scharrer at The Conversation discuss how to help young kids cope with violence on news programs. They give lots of good advice – chiefly, to limit their exposure to it! – but I have to say I was struck to read that “(v)ery young children will not understand that what they see are replays of the same event and not another tragedy happening again,” because I suspect that adults aren’t much better at this – adults will better understand that they’re seeing the same footage again, sure, but they’ll also readily turn three video clips into a crime wave. I still think we’re all much better off reading the news than watching it.
Finally, Laura Bassett at Jezebel instructs us that ”Just Three Weeks Post-Roe, the Stories Emerging Are Worse Than Anyone Imagined” – in the sense that stories didn’t “trickle out over the next six months to maybe a year” but instead “sprayed out like a firehose.” I guess I worry that folks will tune out the sheer volume of the horror, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell these stories, since that could be anyone’s wife, mother, or daughter who has to travel hundreds of miles to another state to deal with an ectopic pregnancy because their home state Republicans say no exceptions ever.
Comments