California Parents- We Can Do Better…………Therefore We Must

Dear Parents around the world,

We all want our children to be productive members of society. We want to believe that they will be “special” for contributing something and “making a name for themselves”.

My question, then, is this. If that is what we all want, then why teach them the kind of racism portrayed here:

https://twitter.com/_SJPeace_/status/1038071417122840581?s=19

It contributes nothing, and only creates a divisiveness in the world that prevents others from being at their best to contribute as fully as they would otherwise be capable?

When you were bullied as a child (and most of us were, at some time) it took some time for you to be able to get back to class and study, or to get back to playing at your best, during recess.

If you were sexually harrassed, at work, then that distracted you from your task, there, as you tried to decide how to deal with the aftermath and emotional upheaval.

Maybe you think that teaching your child to do that to others before others can do it to him/her is the best way to protect them.

The problem that you’re going to create for yourself, is this: When your child has alienated everyone around, who will be left for them to rely on, in a pinch? No man is an Island unto himself. I’m quoting, and I don’t remember who I’m quoting, but the point is that we all rely on each other for skills that someone else has.

We don’t need anymore of this backwards thinking, in our world. We are already at the point where a little Black child, risks getting shot, when they knock on a door to ask directions. A White, handicapped child was knocked out of his wheelchair, at a tRump rally. Another child was beaten, by two grown men and tossed off a bus, for playing music for whatever coins he might have been able to gather in his hat, from more tolerant folk.

How much more intolerance do we really want to teach?

We were on our way to being a truly great country. Immigrants had almost singlehandedly built this company for us, by starting at least half the Fortune 500 companies, and big companies pay a lot more taxes than individuals. They have always been more likely to own other companies as well, than their “White” counterparts- Asian restaurants, drycleaners, nail salons, etc.

Immigrants have been our inventors and innovators: Plastic; ATMs; tvs; automatic transmission; blue jeans; bicycles; universities; higher math; vaccines; hypodermic syringes; refrigerators; the Dewy Decimal System; the algorithm; and many more.

Without the algorithm, we wouldn’t have computer programming. Without computer programming, we wouldn’t have Yahoo, Macbooks, Google or the Internet. Our kids would still be having to study from library books, and they would still be having to rely, heavily, on librarians to help them find those books, because ……….no Dewy.

No Einstein, (relativity) either. No flight and no telegraph.

This intolerance that we are teaching our kids is undermining the safety in which our people have been capable of doing their best work. No one (especially children) can be capable of doing their best work, when they are constantly looking over their shoulders for a bully getting ready to hit them with a text book, or worse. No one is as capable of contributing all they can, to a team effort, when they are being harrassed or when their property was defaced with messages of hate earlier that day.

A woman who is no heroine of mine, used an admirable turn of phrase. She said that a certain idea should be consigned to “the ash heap of history”. In her mind it was the idea of a separation of Church and State. I beg to differ on that point. I say that the idea of religion is fraught with folly and hazard, (the kind that makes us think that we are better than others, and more deserving of a wonderous after-life).

In my mind, it’s a great phrase to use, when considering what should be done about the long and disgraceful history of bigotry, in America.

American history didn’t begin when WE arrived here, from Europe, so we don’t have any real claim to the land, here. The animals were here, before the people, and the people that we, mistakenly, called “Indians”, were here before we were, as well. Even the Spanish, invaded before we did.

We had no right to the land or the children that we stole from the people that lived here, when we invaded. We self-righteously called their parents “Unchristian Savages” and “heathens”, to justify our theft and brainwashing of their children and our “gifting” the adults with small pox infected blankets and resource lacking lands, on which they would finish living out their natural lives.

We have a chance, still, to make reparations. Some of those Indigenous Peoples are still trying to live on those lands that we gave them “out of the goodness of our hearts”. They are still trying to remind us of the preciousness and scarcity of our natural resources. They are still trying to help us to protect those natural resources, and doing so at risk of life and limb.

Some have, recently, been shot with water canon, in freezing night, so that they lost limbs in the force of the blast or to hypothermia. Others have been dragged to jail, to languish there for over a year, awaiting their day in court. ……….Their families wait too.

We owe these people better.

They were the first TRUE Americans, and had much to teach us about how to survive in this new, untamed land. We owe them better than our outdated bigotry. Their Code Talkers helped us to win wars, and their art work adorns many of our homes- baskets, dream catchers, feather earings……

Currently, the world scorns us, because we follow a man who sets the example of this same ignorance that has shamed us throughout history. The evidence is plain to see in the video above, and on the streets around us, every day, now.

This newly elevated level of hate crimes born of our own unwillingness to grow and mature, as a people, is only going to hold us back from creating more Fortune 500 companies, and innovations like plastic and solar power and solar powered inventions. It’ll hold us back from financial solvency and ease.

Here it is in a nutshell:

THE BIGOTRY IS A SIGN OF OUR STUPIDITY, BECAUSE WHEN WE ENGAGE IN IT, AND SUFFER IT TO CONTINUE, WE ARE ONLY HURTING OURSELVES, AND LIMITING OUR OWN POTENTIAL.

Let’s do better then that, California, because WE CAN.

Update- 9/10/18:

Just found this info. on Twitter- It’s simply another facet of this thing that holds our students back, and it has its roots in this same bigotry that our children are seeing around them at their schools. It’s subtle, but the bigotry is there. It’s bigotry against all students:

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1039370756147355648?s=19

Students can’t learn when they’re afraid. And who can be unfearful in an environment, where they know that they are expected to require restraint and roughing up by security guards, before being hauled off to prison? The students see more of these guards now, than they do counselors to help them understand and deal with the grief of losing friends in mass shootings at their schools. ………

This is just more proof, that our Federal Government is trying to keep your kids UNEDUCATED. They are trying to condition them to believe that they belong in juvenile detention or jail, rather than in a school.

Once such a black mark is on a person’s record, even if that person was a MINOR, when it was put there, it is a MAJOR impediment when they enter the workforce.

So not only does your government want your students to not succeed at school, they don’t care about the economy that keeps us all afloat, because they don’t care that they are ruining the futures of our students by intimidating them, and showing them, daily, that they aren’t worth treating with respect, and compassion.

https://www.scarymommy.com/school-officer-taser-sleeping-student/

So I repeat:

LET’S DO BETTER THAN THIS, CALIFORNIA, BECAUSE WE CAN.