Looking at the Big Picture

I’m going to look at this for a while, just to recharge my soul.

The Thing that Really Bugs Me about the School System

I’m not saying the accusations of trying to resegregate the school system don’t bug me. Obviously, they do. But at a level, I can almost appreciate it. You don’t want your kids to have to deal with some situation.  It may be fucked up. It may be evil, but it’s about putting what you think are the best interests of your child first.

But look at this:

“He believed it was not so much about race, but it was about socioeconomics,” Maynard said of Schulz. “He believed that it wasn’t about getting black kids out of Hillwood and Hillsboro, but rather it was about getting out kids who are poor who do not share the same values of parents who live in the area around Hillsboro and Hillwood.”

How is this not worse? Now it’s not even about the kids who actually attend schools but making sure some parents don’t have to come into contact with parents who don’t share their same values?

If this is the truth?

I wish we could get a list of parents who felt this way–that they should be able to pressure the school system to move children to other schools so that they wouldn’t have to associate with those childrens’ parents–so that we could avoid associating with those assholes.

Good god.

All I Have To Say

All I have to say about yesterday’s incident is this–the burden of these wars falls unequally. A very small group of men and women return again and again to do something the vast majority of families in this country have kept their sons and daughters out of the way of.

People willing to risk their lives for us, especially over and over again, deserve to have their lives watched out for as well as we can by the rest of us and we have not done that well as a country, ever.

As more of the story comes out and we discover whether this man was motivated by religious or political beliefs or reacting to the stress of being sent back to war or racial discrimination or whatever reasons we come up with for this terrible tragedy, we owed it to our service people to ferret him out long before this.

Moving him around so that he was someone else’s problem just doesn’t cut it.

Obviously.

We owed his victims more than that.