The Job of Thinking people

This statement is profound because the victims change but the process of scapegoating which makes the holocaust possible is always the same. I've never regretted the considerable amount of time I spent learning as much as I could about Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Popular Enlightenment, and the role Goebbels played in bringing Hitler to power and making the holocaust possible by carefully crafting the public opinion that demanded the final solution. I can’t recommend The War That Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign by Robert E. Herzstein too highly. If you want to understand FOX, Karl Rove, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell or the Southern Baptist Convention, this is the book to read.

I lived this. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Convention family and attended Ashford Academy, a religious school where the curriculum was hate and we prayed to a vengeful monster every morning that everyone who was not a Southern Baptist would burn in hell forever. To this day, I am as impressed by ordination through the Southern Baptist Convention as I am by the gaudy robes of the Klu Klux Klan, and impressed in exactly the same way. 

Muslim terrorists learn to worship this same vengeful monster in their Madrasa and go forth to serve god by blowing up buildings and shooting young girls who seek an education that teaches something other than how to serve a vengeful monster. The products of Christian Madrasas all over the south go forth filed with all the same hatred and with the same fervor for atrocity. We called our vengeful monster Jesus and they call theirs Allah. The name does not matter. Both worship a thing that would better deserve to be called a devil if it existed at all and both are transformed into devils through their worship. 

I attended a meeting of the Lake County, Florida School Board last Monday. It was not a Klan rally or a Nazi rally only because two hundred or so decent people were so offended by the hatefulness of a change in policy to be voted on by the board that we felt the need to come forth and make our disgust known. Many in the crowd were Christians, real Christians, decent people who do not think that children should be bullied to death or excluded from anything because they are different, because they are the wrong color or the wrong anything else according to the bigots who are always among us, spewing their venom and attacking their scapegoat of the moment. We were there in support of a very brave young lady named Bayli Silberstein. Bayli is 14, openly bisexual and wished to start a club called the GSA (Gay-Straight-Alliance) at Carver Middle School in Leesburg. This club would be a resource for GLBT students, a safe space for them to gather and to receive help and information from organizations like PFLAG and GLTSN. These organizations are made up of the parents of GLBT students and of educators who have come together to try to do something a little more constructive than attending the funerals of children who have been bullied right into the grave by hateful bigots.

Some of these hateful bigots are still children themselves. Others are adults like the principal who turned down Bayli’s original request based on the idea that having a club for GLBT children who were being bullied would just focus more attention on the victims and make the bullying worse. What is a woman who thinks that children should keep quiet about bullying in order not to be bullied even more doing in charge of a public school, a school supposedly open to everyone and supported by taxes under the assumption that it is a place where children will be treated with kindness and respect and learn to be good citizens and decent people who treat others with kindness and respect? Children are dying not because of the hateful bigotry of other children, but because of the callow indifference of adults like this principal. If she could not bring herself to look the other way but felt compelled to act, those of us who are too decent to stand by and do nothing would not come together at endless funerals asking ourselves why and asking ourselves what we can do to save the next child from the adult bigots who target children they would never admit to hating themselves for abuse. They do so by looking the other way while other children, the children they probably think of as the good kids, act out the values of the adults in charge. The children who are bullied to death are the children that the adults in charge can’t see as being worthy of respect or protection. Then the people who love them come together at one more funeral and ask why again and wonder as they pray over their dead what kind of god the kind of person who could just look the other way and do nothing could possibly worship. 

The Equal Access Act of federal law exists to assure that public schools provide open forum access to a broad spectrum of ideas and facilitate the expression of all points of view prevalent in the community served by the school. It is the provision that prevents a principal from allowing a Young Republican’s club to organize and meet on campus but not the Young Democrats or a Southern Heritage club helped along by the Daughters of the Confederacy but no Black History club. The Lake County Board has now realized that they are in violation of federal law. They cannot discriminate against students who want to form clubs based on their own prejudices and preferences but they are in refusing Bayli’s request to form a GSA. I don’t know if the board collectively is not bright enough to figure out that they also face civil liability the next time there is a funeral or if they are in collective denial or just don’t care how much they cost the taxpayer. Originally, all five board members publicly supported eliminating all non-academic clubs; this would keep at-risk GLBT students from getting access to the resources they need to survive bullying at the expense of killing all the other extracurricular activities enjoyed by students; it is a measure of the hateful bigotry of the current school board that it seems reasonable to them to deny all students the benefit of extracurricular activities as the price to be paid for seeing to it that one group of children who are being viciously abused in the schools they control continue to be viciously abused without access to the resources that might make this abuse less damaging. 

I find this sickening. I find it sickening as a person and, as a teacher, can’t see how anyone who does not find it sickening belongs in the classroom or on a school board. I showed up on Monday not sure what I would find there or what exactly I was going there to do or say. When I arrived, I found a huge crowd standing outside the meeting place waiting to be let in. Most of them were wearing red shirts. Most of them were there to say that bigotry was wrong, that god did not hate any child and that no child should ever be told not to speak up about bullying or learn not to expect help from the adults who are supposedly there to nurture and support them if they are bullied. I did not know about the red shirts when I walked up. I did not know that I was going there that day to join anything bigger or more substantial than my own deep sense that those who are being hurt should be helped and that calling yourself a teacher ought to mean calling ignorance hateful enough to kill a child the devil’s work.

I have a red shirt now. The good people, the decent people, gave me that to wear the way some people wear a cross or Star of David. I know who my people are and I know hateful lies when I hear them. I know the words intended to justify murder or sitting quietly in your room until the screaming stops. I know the simple truth that it is not Bill Mathias and the other bigots on the Lake County School Board who are being bullied by the ACLU but Mathias and his hateful kind who are allowing punk kids to do their dirty work in the schools they control. The good people, including the ACLU, are trying to stop this. If this feels like bullying to a simpering sissy like Bill Mathias, then that just shows again what everyone knows; bullies are cowards. Bullies will always try to change the subject when they are called on being the odious little vermin that they are by anyone who is more than half their size. Real adults, like the ACLU, like the people in the red shirts, have to protect children and anyone else who is vulnerable for whatever reason from deviants like Bill Mathias.

As I said before, I’ve lived this. I got called a nigger-lover by the good Christians back at the segregation academy because I did not use the word nigger to describe anyone at all. More of the people who graduated with me went to prison than went to college. More guys graduated than girls because so many of the girls got knocked-up and dropped out. I went to school with the son of the local Klan leader and the president of the Ambassadors; that’s the main Baptist youth group for those of you who are lucky enough not to be Baptist by background. I started believing in a just god with a sense of humor when both of them turned out to be Gay. The desegregation of the public schools in the south had an unintended benefit that is not commonly recognized but ought to be more widely appreciated. It got the hard-core bigots out of the public school. This left the public school system to those of either race who cared more about learning to read than calling anyone a nigger or praying every morning that most of the world fry in hell. What can we do to get the hard-core bigots out of the public schools in Lake County, Florida? What can we do to get the hard-core bigots off the school board in Lake County, Florida?