I see what kids in school today have to deal with, and I consider myself lucky...
Despite of the fact that I'm the product of an inner city school system. I don't believe that I would recognize what passes for a grade school education in the present environment. And this is in spite of the fact that all of my schooling happened in the 60's and 70's. From riots to the Disco Era in my time, it wasn't all that bad.
Instead, schooling today looks more like a war-zone to me.
I'm sure that most of you in your fifties and before feel the same way. We were all nurtured in a completely different environment. One that was all before the threat of gun daily violence, before the destruction of the public school system and the rise of for-profit education, before teaching and teachers were being treated like public enemies number one, before a massive opioid epidemic, before cyber-bullying, before the school-to-prison pipeline, before the prospect of going into massive debt just to get through college and inadequate job market wages and salaries. And without a host of other things that kids have to go through today.
Just like much of society in this country over the last forty years, kids are being set up to fail. So much of their childhoods has been taken away from them and asked of them in spite of the sacrifices. And it shows, through depression and suicide, over-medication and self-medication.
It's as if school children today are expected to be treated as if they're miniature adults. And once they become actual adults, they find out that society is ready to exploit them and dispose of them at the drop of a hat. Their so-called education has failed to prepare them for basic adult existence. Instead they find that some of them have been indoctrinated into a religious fundamentalist, white supremacist world, without civics, without the arts and sciences, without regards for the basic human rights for all. And we end up with some of these kids garishly attempting to emulate Nazis, or promoting anti-black agendas.
No wonder that so many have found empowerment through the barrel of a gun. Guns that are easier to obtain than the means of driving a car. Something that our politicians have seen fit to accomplish.
And the sheer amount of violence and neglect that kids are dealing with, both physical and emotional, both institutional and personal, it's mind-boggling. And you know what, why this has happened? It's because we are all living in a world created by regressive, right-wing Republican ideology. It's happening here and now. It's so obvious that something as tragic as seventeen people being slaughtered today in a school is only made real in the kind of world that Republicans have created of us all.
Republican dystopia is the here and the now.
We're killing the future of kids out there. We shouldn't be surprised that this becomes an endless, cynical cycle of self-destruction which creates more chaos. Can it be reversed? Not without stopping Republicans, of course.
We need a new paradigm. We need to destroy the Republican dystopia in order to save ourselves. We need to do that for ourselves and to save the kids. We owe it all to them to do that.
Otherwise, it's only going to get much, much worse.
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