Another State Goes Fascist

There was yet another school shooting two Mondays ago, at a Christian school in Nashville, TN. Three little kids and three adults were shot and killed by yet another rampaging person trying to murder as many people as possible. The police responded quickly, thankfully, and killed the shooter.

And what was the response of Rethuglican lawmakers in Washington? Crickets.

But some of the Rethug legislators in TN did say something, mostly having to do with a cowardly it sure was horrible but "we're not gonna fix it." Cowardly because they all depend on their campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association. I knew nobody was going to do anything productive. The best the Rethugs could offer was more hypocritical and useless “thoughts and prayers”.

Something very encouraging happened the other day. Thousands of young people, the Gen Z folk, walked out of their high schools and colleges and began to march. They were joined by other supportive adults but these were mostly the young.

I was so proud of them. They reminded me of my generation once upon a time. It was a time when we Boomers were young, had enough of Establishment ways, and took to the streets. Gen Z were on a march to save their lives. They’d had enough of Rethuglican excuses and deflections and denials. Now they wanted action. They were amazing.

They flooded the capitol building, where most of the legislators there just brushed right by them. There was one State Assemblyman that did agree to meet with them and why he did, I couldn’t begin to guess. He was the most useless Rethuglican spokesman ever. All he did was ask the young people to show him which firearm they’d be most comfortable being shot with. What the fuck was that?

Three legislators inside interrupted the session briefly to support the protestors and they were promptly kicked out. The angry Rethug majority threatened to expel them permanently. They voted to do so and then truly showed their racist colors! Two of the legislators were young Black men. The other was a middle-aged white woman. Two were expelled; one was not. Guess who. If you guessed only the Black guys were expelled, you’d be spot on.

They were initially accused of instigating an insurrection ala January 6^th. Then I guess the charge was disorderly behavior. But still: why was the white woman spared?

So, does the Tennessee state government reject the First Amendment? Or is it only when it’s the minority objecting to the majority’s way of doing things?

And while we’re talking about disruptive behavior, why do we still have traitors and legislators who engaged in treasonous behavior still service in the nation’s House and Senate?

This is in-your-face-we-don’t-give-a-fuck-how-it-looks fascism, racism, suppression, and repression going on right out in the open for everyone to see.

Rev. Barber might ask: “What are we going to do with this?”

Our votes aren’t enough. People need to be speaking up and pulling a Howard Beale: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” We need to get into “good trouble” like the Tennessee Three. We need to be joining with other organizations that are fighting fascism and the attacks on democracy. We need to start paying attention to what’s happening around us.

I felt better this morning and into the afternoon when I began reading and hearing about the pushback going on over what happened to the two Black legislators. I’ve been reading articles today in which the Tennessee Assembly is condemned for an illegal action in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

One of the expelled legislators is from the Nashville area and their city council is moving to reinstate Mr. Jones to his seat. They are outraged by what happened.

Mr. Pearson is from the Memphis area and there’s no word on what will happen with that council. He should be reinstated too.

I will not set foot in any fascist state. Increasingly more and more red states like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and now Tennessee are going on my do-not-go-there list.

We are having issues with spreading fascism because once the Rethugs began to realize they weren’t going to be able to steal elections by crying they’d been cheated of a win, they began stacking the school boards, township councils, city councils, and state legislators with ultra-right wing conservative and/or evangelical MAGA QAnoners. Now we have these people trying to run democracy into the ground.

I got an email from an organization called Run for Something. They are encouraging that WE start running for these positions too. I thought about Rev. Barber again. “What are we going to do with this?” I thought about what I could do. I saw that there would be a position on my district’s school board, and I decided I would run for it.

We must DO something.

Other worthy articles I read yesterday and today:

Dan Rather

Alternet

Truthout

Huff-Post

Raw Story 

Bullying

 An 11-year-old middle schooler committed suicide in a bathroom stall at her school on February 6^th. I’ve only begun to see stories about it here on Friday and here today. The child went to a middle school here in Burlington County, not terribly far from where I live. How could this happen? I know how: nothing seems to effectively stop bullies, especially if the adults in the picture don’t act.

Why do children and adults bully? Is it a result of growing up in a home where they, themselves, are or have been bullied? I don’t know and I really don’t care. It’s never okay to be a bully.

Many of us have been bullied and have different ways of responding to get through it. I was bullied in junior high school. I was socially naïve when I entered seventh grade in 1967. My bullying began with a childish story I wrote for a creative writing assignment in English. The other students were brutal and continued to be throughout the year.

I had one friend, a quiet student who probably would’ve caught the brunt if the class hadn’t descended on me first. We were all in the enrichment track because of how we’d performed academically the year before.

It got so I didn’t want to go to school. Every morning, my stomach began to hurt. I couldn’t eat. I was filled with dread. At first, my parents thought I might have a virus and that saved me for a blessed week. After that, they realized it wasn’t a virus as I continued balking about going to school. It got to the point they’d have to literally drag me to the car and drive me to school.

My homeroom teacher noticed something was wrong and brought me out to the hallway to discuss it. I told her what was happening. She had me meet with my guidance counselor, who tried to convince me that it would be different next year. The thought of having to go through my junior high school years with this group of students made me burst into tears. I wanted off the track.

The counselor couldn’t believe his ears.  Didn’t I realize that I would be bored if I left this enrichment track? I didn’t care. I preferred boredom to the daily torment of one classmate after the other. Reluctantly, he agreed to switch me to the next track down the following school year. I just had to get through the last few months of seventh grade.

The following year, I made friends with the other kids in my class. I was happy the rest of my time in junior high. I wasn’t bullied there anymore, nor in high school. I am very happy that I dropped that track because whenever I encountered any of those students in the halls during 8^th and 9^th grades, they attempted to insult and intimidate me. But I was confident, surrounded by friends who accepted me and so I laughed at them.

What would have happened if I’d stayed with that group? It might have been different later, as we got older. But what would have happened to me, emotionally? I don’t credit that counselor for saving me. I think it was the homeroom teacher who saw how unhappy I was. The rest of it was me, saving myself.

Two of my children were bullied. My son is on the spectrum, high functioning and brilliant. He was successful in elementary school but encountered bullies in middle school. His initial response was to humiliate them in the classroom by exposing their ignorance of topics. That didn’t endear him to some students. In shop class, one person got his revenge by throwing sawdust into my son’s eyes. Another vandalized his jacket and backpack. I went to the school and made a big stink and then something was done. In high school, my son took to practicing martial arts moves and successfully kept the bullies away during lunch.

My youngest daughter got bullied in elementary school. And why? Because she had a pixie haircut, the girls in her class told her that she must be a boy because her hair was short. With very straight hair, my daughter preferred to keep the length short and so this kind of thing followed her throughout high school. Then her sexuality was questioned in earnest. My daughter did have a group of friends she was close to throughout and so she ignored her tormentors as I did.

But it still hurts.

It’s terrible that bullying still runs rampant in schools, even when the parents and victimized students speak up. It’s not dealt with adequately or is minimized or, at worst, completely ignored. That seems to be what happened in the case of this young student from Mt. Holly.

Her mother has become very vocal about what’s happened.  Both she and her daughter attempted to have the issue addressed and redressed, but complaints were ignored. And now that mom is without her child.

As for the bullies, do they feel any guilt for the death they caused? I’ll bet they don’t. They’ll have somehow put the blame on the child they victimized, leaving themselves free to torment the next student they want to bully.

The day President Reagan was shot

 

On Monday, March 27, 2023, a shooter got into a Christian school in Nashville, TN. The shooter killed three children and three adults before being killed by responding police. The usual tug of war has been going on between the Rethuglicans, who want to continue loosening gun control laws, and Democrats, who want to at least ban automatic weapons. People who have survived school shootings, parents, and other reasonably minded folk march, contact their legislators, and speak out against school shootings/mass shootings which just continue to occur more frequently.

Nothing will get done this time either.

Nothing will get done until the children of the Rethuglican legislators are shot up.  It’s inevitable such a thing could happen. Violent people have already begun attacking legislators and their families.

I get a newsletter called This Day in History. On Thursday, I was reminded that President Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington D.C. on March 30, 1981. He’d only taken office in January. He was at the Washington Hilton for a meeting. He had his entire entourage with him as he exited the hotel and headed toward his limo.

There were people standing by, watching. I suppose the Secret Service had asked them to stay in place. Nevertheless, a young man came forward, his gun came up and he started shooting. The agent closest to President Reagan grabbed him and literally shoved him into the limo. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, was down and gravely wounded. Another Secret Service agent and a D.C. policeman were also wounded.

The other agents grabbed the shooter and pushed him up against the wall, disarming him. The young man’s name was John Hinckley. If ever a shooter was disturbed, it was Mr. Hinckley.  He’d seen the movie Taxi Driver, starring Robert DeNiro. Co-starring was Jodie Foster, then a young teenager. She was playing a hooker the taxi driver apparently wanted to rescue. For some reason, the taxi driver decided shooting a politician was the way to do it.

Well, Hinckley watched this movie over and over and over. He was entranced by Jodie Foster. In 1981, she was just beginning college. Hinckley got it into his head that he could impress and maybe woo Foster if he acted out the role of the taxi driver. Why shoot just any old politician? Why not go for the President?

It turned out that President Reagan had been wounded too. The bullet collapsed one lung and just missed his heart. Still, he kept his sense of humor, telling the doctors he hoped they were all Republicans. And when his wife came in to see him after his surgery, he said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

I remember it very well. I was in shock. How could the President, surrounded by the Secret Service and police, get shot on a public street in Washington, D.C.?  Did the President get thoughts and prayers from his party in Congress?  I don’t remember that part.

I do remember that James Brady, the Press Secretary, had a severe brain injury and was never the same. He and his wife wanted a gun bill passed but, of course, there was resistance from the Republican party. The Bradys and other safe-gun-law activists worked on legislators to pass a bill that would…gasp! Require background checks and a waiting period.

The Brady bill was first introduced in Congress in 1987. President Reagan had recovered from his gunshot wound and so did the Secret Service agent and DC policeman. James Brady did not, not fully. Again, he was never the same and needed intensive therapy to improve to the point at which he was.

The bill didn’t pass the first time, nor the second, nor the third. On and on it went until Rep. Chuck Schumer introduced it for the last time in 1993. Who even remembered what happened in 1981, right?  James Brady who? But this time it finally passed.

It didn’t go far enough.

In 1994, somehow legislation got through that banned automatic weapons, and President Clinton signed it into effect. Unfortunately, the ban was for ten years only. Did it help much? Results were mixed and the ban lapsed in 2014.

I remember Columbine. That was another unheard-of event. Two kids shot up their classmates and teachers. How was that possible? Sandy Hook was heartbreaking. Among those killed were too many babies, just six or seven years old. Surely something would be done. Thoughts and prayers, that was it.

It feels like every time I turn around, there is a new school shooting or a mass shooting.  Every time, I feel sick at heart. I know nothing will be done. Rethuglicans will offer their useless and hypocritical “thoughts and prayers” but that’s all.

Why are these legislators so willing to allow children to be slaughtered like that? It’s because they are controlled by the National Rifle Association. There are lists of legislators and the obscene amounts of money they receive from the NRA.

What can I do but vote them out? However, I don’t live in a state that puts guns ahead of children. It’s up to the voters there, the grandparents, parents, and Gen Z kids who need to go to the polls and vote out those legislators. They must stop voting against their own best interests, but that means they need to wake the fuck up.

I’ve written before about my “I didn’t think this would ever happen to me day”. That was December 13, 1972. A custodian went berserk, pulled out a machete, stabbed a security guard, and took a hostage. He held the hostage in his office, which was right next to my classroom. Anyway, now when there’s a school shooting, I always remember lying on the cold floor while the crisis played out. I also have wondered: what if that custodian had had a gun instead of a machete? He began his rampage in our crowded cafeteria.   How many people could he have potentially killed?

Yes, But... Rattlebone

 Yes, I know he's been indicted. I know there may be 30 charges in the indictment. Maybe he'll be arraigned on Tuesday. The media is going crazy with information about Turnip Man and totally forgetting there was another school shooting, fascism is spreading across the red states, and treasonous legislators not only still walk around free spouting their poison, they're still seated in the Congress wasting taxpayer money and doing nothing to help our country.

So I'm numb to the news about HIM. I want to see more accountability for instigating and/or assisting in the violent coup attempt on January 6th.  Dan Rather said it best anyway.

I did, however, just finish a really good book.

The display table as I walked into our library got me again! I cannot go by it without my eye falling upon a book that pulls me toward it. This time it was Rattlebone by Maxine Clair.  I hadn’t heard of the author, but the unusual title attracted me and I had to pick it up. The review on the back promised plot twists and new interesting characters.  I looked at the inside jacket and learned that Rattlebone is a real place. I had to check it out and read it.

 

There are different featured characters in this series of vignettes but one shows up most of the time: Irene Wilson, just beginning adolescence at the beginning. By the end, she is a senior in high school. In between, she does a lot of growing up with a lot of events in her young life.

 

I learned that Rattlebone is or was a Black community within Kansas City. The story begins in the early 1950s, before Brown Vs. Board of Education, so Irene attends a segregated school.  She has a troubled home life because her parents don’t get along. Still, she has a close friend or two throughout her teen years. She also keeps a secret journal. In that way, she reminds me of myself. I used my journals to pour out my heart with secrets I couldn’t share with others.

 

There is humor; there is drama; there is tragedy and trauma. I wouldn’t say that it would keep you on the edge of your seat with suspense, but it is a page-turner. I couldn’t put the book down. I would recommend it to anyone, especially those who enjoy historical fiction. I can’t believe I’m labeling this as historical fiction, lol, because the story mostly takes place just a few years before I was born.