An educator asks us to dig deeper
In the wake of the latest school shooting, educator and blogger Peter Greene asks us to consider some things.
First, it IS the guns.
Second, there’s more.
It’s the guns. It has always been the guns. It’s the worship of a distorted view of the Second Amendment that says your right to own the means of killing other humans matters more than my child’s right not to be killed. Your pursuit of happiness beats my life and liberty. Heck, just last week, a conservative federal district judge ruled that there’s a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. We’re about to mark the anniversary of 9/11, an event so shocking that we still tightly regulate riding on an airplane.
Greene adds that the heat of our rhetoric is also problematic:
I have to believe that it’s past time to look hard at our own culture. It’s not just that the past fifteen or so years have seen the country more divided and polarized. It’s how some of us talk about that polarization.
We’re going to destroy the opposition, obliterate them, use power and force to dominate them and silence them, drive them out of the public arena. So many of our conflicts are discussed with the language of violence and war. This is not new, but the intensity and frequency is.
He notes:
We don’t talk about how to get along with people that we think are wrong. We talk about how to wipe them out.
And if you are young, it has been like this for most of your life.
It’s hard to argue with his conclusion.
It’s also hard to argue that policymakers make kids a priority.
Not only do we continue to see lack of action on gun violence, but we also see policymakers who fail to invest in schools – and in the teachers in those schools.
We see a crisis in the Department of Children’s Services that continues to fester.
We see a failure to provide free meals at school to all kids, every day.
Our policies indicate our priorities – and for policymakers in Tennessee and in many parts of the country, kids just aren’t a priority.
