Audrey Watters begins each of her posts at HEWN with a description of a bird. Then she gets into the story, the story in this one being an “epistemic crisis,” a society where truth itself is doubted, experts are dismissed, and everyone is entitled to not only their own opinions but their own facts.
I particularly recommend her links. I enjoyed the one about Mr. Rogers. It compels to think about ourselves, who we are, what we believe, why. The kinds of questions we asked ourselves when we were adolescents but then got hardened into our lives as adults.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One of the oversights of many teachers that I have experienced is the assumption that everyone thinks like they do . . . about being true to ALL children and their educational needs. It’s kind of naive projection of our own good will onto others; and I think there was a time in post-WW-II that it was relatively safe to think this way–Remember Ozzie and Harriet, Donna Reed, Jack Webb, and Superman the savior? or even Dick Van Dyke and Laura?
And so it came to be that teachers were not supposed to “be political.” That was already taken care of for all of us, and we can trust them to do the right thing. Our assumptions were safe. . . . But as most fantasies do, that one has finally bit the dust thanks in part to the overreach of those who really don’t have the good of ALL of the children at heart, (regardless of what they say); and to the wakening of the political spirit of teachers who are finally realizing that their present place in Orwell’s Animal Farm epic is not good for the children, not to mention for themselves as authentic functionaries of a democratic institution (like librarians). CBK
One of the most important things teachers can do is “CREATE SAFE SPACES” for our young to learn. It’s hard to learn when one is in trauma.
What’s happened is that not only your young, but even OUR TEACHERS have been traumatized by the DEFORMS by horrendous this test and punishment environments so prevalent in America.
Those politicians / lawyers and the corporate world have “CREATED on purpose” UNSAFE places where teachers are attacked and all FOR their OWN PROFITS and campaign contributions by big money folks who don’t give a hoot about much of anything except their bank accounts.
Public Schools like Charter Schools have actually become CONCENTRATION Camps.
I just hope this stops, because the next thing that will happen is that our Public Schools become DEATH MIND and SOULS CAMPS, and Charters become “Concentration Camps.”
Public schools and teachers are viewed a impediments to the endless profiteering and greed of the 1%. The wealthy were never interested in public schools until they had a way to monetize them. Now they and their think tanks come up with a variety of devious schemes designed to move public money out of public schools and into private pockets. Their plans are void of vision. We need to vote out the political pawn enablers that allow this theft of the common good.
I went to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” without knowing much about it and I was so moved by it. I highly recommend it, especially in these troubling and anxious times. It’s a movie for adults, not kids, and to me it was a roadmap into how we all might cope in these times without losing our souls. Don’t want to spoil it but I thought a shot at the very end was important.
The message wasn’t that we shouldn’t be angry about bad things. It was about how to cope with the anger that we rightly feel so that we as individuals are not letting it affect what is most important – our relationships with the people we love.
The Shining City
The Shining City on the Hill
Was always a mirage
But shininess is like a pill
That’s sooths like a massage
Should be soothes
…parlor.
I have read and heard several positive reviews of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
I am having difficulty entering the world of that work.
I read the article “With impeachment, America’s epistemic crisis has arrived, Can the right-wing machine hold the base in an alternate reality long enough to get through the next election?” That was a link Audrey provided.
I think the answer to the question raised in the title is yes, and that is what really scares me. Trump and his tribe will not abide losing an election. They will continue to disrupt the election process by denying Russia has played any role in our elections. They are not only conjuring conspiracy theories and alt facts but repeating them again and again, using well-worn and newer techniques of propaganda. Trump’s army of enforcers are loyal, even (and perhaps especially) his evangelical Christians. Trump is functioning as a mob boss, a dictator, the would-be king. Never mind that the courts say he is not above the law.
If Trump and Republicans lose in 2020, they will not go away without ginning up as much chaos as they can and have already proven to be capable of.
I suppose the grimness of my assessment (especially at this season of the year) comes from paying attention to what has been named the “epistemic crisis.”
Now if you have the mental fortitude, read this examination of possible outcomes of the 2020 elections. The scenarios come from legal scholar and Trump watcher Neil H. Buchanan, published today and titled “Another Way That American Democracy Might End.” https://verdict.justia.com/2019/11/26/another-way-that-american-democracy-might-end
American democracy already ended, or perhaps never was.
The vast majority of the American people have very little impact on the decisions made by the President and Congress.
The research of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page supports this
As they say “economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”
The vote of the average citizen does not count, not because of anything the Russians have done, but because of what our own representatives have done.
Our so called representative democracy is actually neither a democracy nor representative.
It’s not about saving our democracy, it’s about creating it.
Even organizations like AFT which are supposedly democratic are most certainly not.
The fact that Weingarten personally decided to endorse Clinton without a vote of the union membership (which would have been the democratic thing to do) is proof of this. I am just waiting for a repeat performance.
The elite power brokers make all the important decisions.
And that’s nothing new. It was baked into the US Constitution by people like Alexander Hamilton, who thought the average citizen to be an ignorant fool (at best).
How about this goodie? Reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy into the uterus is impossible but a bill has been introduced in the Ohio legislature to make doctors face charges of ‘abortion murder’ if they don’t.
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Ohio bill orders doctors to ‘reimplant ectopic pregnancy’ or face ‘abortion murder’ charges
Friday, Nov.29. 2019
A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”.
This is the second time practising obstetricians and gynecologists have tried to tell the Ohio legislators that the idea is currently medically impossible.
The move comes amid a wave of increasingly severe anti-abortion bills introduced across much of the country as conservative Republican politicians seek to ban abortion and force a legal showdown on abortion with the supreme court.
Ohio’s move on ectopic pregnancies – where an embryo implants on the mother’s fallopian tube rather than her uterus rendering the pregnancy unviable – is one of the most extreme bills to date.
“I don’t believe I’m typing this again but, that’s impossible,” wrote Ohio obstetrician and gynecologist Dr David Hackney on Twitter. “We’ll all be going to jail,” he said…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/29/ohio-extreme-abortion-bill-reimplant-ectopic-pregnancy?CMP=share_btn_link