Set aside that being vaccinated could help stop the virus from mutating beyond the reach of the vaccines, this Us v. Them thinking is just dumb but indicative of way too much of the right.
— Drew Perkins (@dperkinsed) April 27, 2021
And yes, the left has their own versions of this stupidity.https://t.co/U3mA68G6Yj
As down payment on my sins, I spent time on a post on “NextDoor” about a local school board election.
Seriously.
I spent time there because it got heated and lots of nonsense was thrown around (yes, that says more about me than I should admit. I said it was payment for my sins, after all.) I won’t bore you with the details (I’d have to explain Texas law on unions, for one thing; trust me, it’s not worth it), but it involved: fear of teacher’s unions (outlawed in Texas), fear of Critical Race Theory (no, no one knew what it meant), fear of election fraud (sound familiar?), etc.
Now, in Texas, all elections below the county level are non-partisan. That is, candidates don’t run as nominees of a party. We know who’s who, but we officially overlook them from time to time. School board elections are non-partisan, and usually the candidates are unopposed or all pretty much in agreement on what policies the schools should operate under. The school board is mostly a homogenous group if only because it’s a lot of work (volunteer; they aren’t paid for their services) and most people below a certain income level don’t have the time to spare. But the people who started that post at NextDoor wanted to make this race, for one position on a six-member board, a hotly contested one.
Why? So they could claim a “win.”
Again: context. The last school board election garnered 1544 votes. There are more people than that in any one school in the district. Most people, IOW, don’t bother with these elections. They don’t bother with what’s going on in the schools, either. For decades Texas has been transferring local school taxes to the state for redistribution. This is not hidden, secret, or concealed. It’s discussed in board meetings, posted on the district website, covered in the school budget which is a public record. Still, nobody “knew” about it until the largest school district in the state was affected by this redistribution. And that was a few years ago; everyone’s forgotten again.
Because of this practice, the local school district has laid off employees and teachers for over 10 years now. Again, almost no one has noticed. On the NextDoor comments, one person alleged there were “millions of dollars” behind the administration and teachers, all bent on teaching CRT and unionizing teachers. The same person claimed “tens of thousands” in the district were going to “stand up and punch back.” Tens of thousands of residents in the district aren’t even aware of the election on Saturday. Yeah, they were that out of touch with reality. And that unaware of what’s really going on in the schools, or what the School Board is really doing.
All they wanted was a win. If their candidate wins (the election is Saturday), they will declare victory over the specter of teachers unions and CRT (oh, and 1619, the NYT study of slavery in America). They will, in other words, have kept the elephants away. They only want an electoral win. What their candidate does on the board, one among many, shut out if he tries to press an agenda not shared by the board, doesn’t matter. What the board actually does, doesn’t matter to them. Sound familiar? Except board members don’t command media attention or command followers on Twitter or Facebook (these people have never heard of Instagram; probably don’t know Twitter, either, come to think of it). All they want is to be able to declare “victory,” because their champion lost in November, and they are in the wilderness now. And the school board election is a small enough segment of the region, a tiny enough slice of a tiny electorate, they think they might have a chance. Harris County won’t do this for them. The City Council district is too large for them now, too diverse. Their hope is reduced to a school board position, that really amounts to nothing except public service.
They don’t understand what that is, either. And what does that tweet have to do with it, you wonder? Significant of how many people want attention, and how they want to get it. Oh, and why they want to get it; which is the more important point. The author of the post linked in that tweet wants to bravely protest the vaccine because he will “own” the libs. Or he thinks it’s clever commentary to say so. At any rate, it gets attention. And for a lot of people, that’s all they want. The author of the article (I don’t recommend it; it’s a terrible read), claims: “He considers himself a political outsider who seeks to give a voice to the long-forgotten American working class.” Yeah, don’t we all think we’re that important.
This is what we allowed to happen for four years. Gonna take a long time for the adults to get all the children and adolescents out of the building again.
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