You are well aware that there are certain curse words I do not permit on the blog. This is my small way of fighting the coarsening of our culture. I know I stand against the tide, but standing against the tide is very often the right thing to do because it eventually goes out, and who knows, might never come back again.
Nonetheless, this was the best sign at any of the airport rallies against the ban on Muslims.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I got misty-eyed the morning when I saw the photo of the crowd in Boston’s Copley Square.
This sign snapped me back into reality with a good laugh! This will be a long, hard slog with a lot of collateral damage in human pain and frustration.
Got that right. We HAVE to hang together or else the neo-totalitarians will drag us to their Tower of London and hang us separately.
Thank you, Diane. I’ve been sending around a related sign from yesterday’s Battery Park City rally. Can’t post the picture, so here’s the text:
In 1939, a boat with 937 Jewish refugees were denied entry and forced to return.
NOT TODAY YOU MTHRFCKNG MONSTER
#NoBanNoWall
We note the author’s sensitivity to public vulgarity, and forgive her a subject-verb disagreement that no doubt results from barely controllable fury.
Do you have a link that we can access, Bill? TIA, Duane
Sorry, Duane — no link right now. I have neither a Website nor any social-media account on which I can post photographs. My wife might have it on her Facebook page — I’ll ask her.
In the meantime, if you send a message to brosent@hunter.cuny.edu, I’ll get it to you tout le suite. (This offer is open to anyone reading this note.)
Thanks post hoc,
Bill
Thanks, Bill, got it and passed it on!
Well Diane you already posted the one I would have posted . I can’t say I,m shocked Trump has that effect on us.
So instead Charles Blow has recovered from his relapse into identity politics and came up with this excellent opinion piece.
“America will not stand for this, so if obsequious conservative politicians or lily-livered liberal ones won’t sufficiently stand up to this demagogic dictator, then the American people will do the job themselves”
Whatever the “Reichstag burning moment” will be in this country, you can bet that Charles Blow will be high on the official list of retribution. Every one of his columns vents a lot of pressure. But it keeps building up to higher levels in between.
Oh Diane, it is interesting that many have called me intolerant. I was told I was a hypocrite because we liberals are suppose to tolerate all ideas. I told this person that is not true if the idea will destroy the very foundation that makes liberalism possible. I accepted every other GOP president in my political life from Nixon onward. With Nixon, he understood that his violations of constitutional authority had consequences and he was man enough to resign. As for the others, for the most part, they accepted core American values although a few did try to fray those values. However, I cannot accept Trump because he is ripping apart the very foundation of the nation I love so much. It is a nation where a penniless baker would come from Galicia and in which all his grandchildren and great grandchildren would acquire college educations and become professionals. I will not allow a mentally I’ll megalomaniac destroy the spirit of what America stands for. We have never been a perfect union but we have tried in these two centuries to learn from our mistakes to be a better nation. We are suppose to be a beacon of light in a world of so much darkness. Not this.
Well said
Once again, I’m with Joel.
I share your feelings about the use of “curse words” while still granting an exception for the “rally sign.” I felt the same contradictory feelings about John Oliver’s LastNight Tonight show on HBO in his rants about “Charter Schools” and “Standardized Tests,” but much enjoyed them all the same. They’re posted on YouTube.
I agree entirely. In a similar jugular, there was a sign at one rally with the F-word in numerous parts of speech followed by a comment to the effect that what T***p is trying to do to our democracy and values is far more obscene than anything written on the sign.
Did you mean T$$$P?
Is it possible that malignant narcissist Littlefingers Donald Trump is his own father? Have you seen the film “Back to the Future” or “Hot Tub Time Machine”?
“Hot tub Time Machine ” is that the video of Trump and Russian hookers coming to a theater near you soon.
I’m sure it is, but I understand there will be golden showers in that film.
My favorite at the moment: 2/3 of Trump’s wives were immigrants…proving once again we need immigrants to do the jobs most Americans WOULDN’T DO
Can you put that on a poster . Better yet I might just in fringe on you’re property rights
:0)
Oh, That’s good!!!
Re: curse words, an excerpt from Wallace Stegner’s essay “Good Bye to All T—t!” in “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”:
“Some acts, like some words, were never meant to be casual. That is why houses contain bedrooms and bathrooms. Profanity and so-called obscenities are literary resources, verbal ways of rendering strong emotion. They are not meant to occur every ten seconds, any more than—Norman Mailer to the contrary notwithstanding—orgasms are.
“So I am not going to say shit before any more ladies. I am going to hunt words that have not lost their sting, and it may be I shall have to go back to gentility to find them. Pleasant though it is to know that finally a writer can make use of any word that fits his occasion, I am going to investigate the possibilities latent in restraint.
“I remember my uncle, a farmer who had used four-letter words ten to the sentence ever since I learned to talk. One day he came too near the circular saw and cut half his fingers off. While we stared in horror, he stood watching the bright arterial blood pump from his ruined hand. Then he spoke, and he did not speak loud. ‘Aw, the dickens,’ he said.
“I think he understood, better than some sophomore girls and better than some novelists, the nature of emphasis.”
I also think Stegner would would have had a big smile on his face if he could have seen that sign…especially because of context and nature of emphasis.
It got my attention!
Mine, too; it brought me to tears. I feel as you do about profanity, but this cut straight to the heart of the matter. Thank you for posting, and for all of the work you do on behalf of education. Your blog helps keep me steady and focused as I do my best to teach well and with integrity.