The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.
Could there possibly be anything more outrageous and disgusting than this curriculum? What year is this? 2023 or 1859? Surely the teachers and citizens of Florida are not going to accept this without protest?!!
“I’m an AICE General Paper/ELA teacher in Florida.”
“Though I don’t explicitly teach history, so much literature and current event topics for the courses are often connected. I’m terrified to say the ‘wrong’ thing, share the ‘wrong’ book, allow students to share ideas the state says are ‘wrong’ … in all honesty, I’m just dreading going back August 4th 😔 Florida reminds me of the ways Germany was slipping into fascism in the 1930s.”
—V.H.
“I am incensed that I’m expected to teach my 4th graders about Martin Luther King Jr. without being able to explain what he fought for.”
“What am I supposed to say? He just liked marching? If 4th graders are old enough to experience discrimination, they’re old enough to learn about it.”
—M.R.
“I’m a former Florida teacher turned literacy advocate.”
“I left the classroom last year. I am disgusted by the decisions the Florida Department of Education is making. Book banning, censorship, and the voucher system are ruining public education in this state.”
—J.F.
“This is a cheap and cowardly move from DeSantis to prove his ‘anti-wokeness.'”
“I mean cheap literally—it’s an inexpensive campaign move to make him seem like a trigger-happy sheriff in the Woke Frontier. But I’m sad it comes at the cost of students knowing the truth.”
—J.M.
“I have a long, perfect history of faking compliance.”
“When people with little to no teaching experience roll out these kinds of rules, I’ve learned to pretend. They care far more about the appearance of compliance than actual compliance. This will be no different. I will continue to teach as I always have.”
—A.B.
“I will not be doing that.”
—J.D.
'Andrew Spar, president of Florida’s largest teachers’ union, said the new standards are “a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
“How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them.”
'Educators in Florida certainly have their work cut out for them, deciding how to tell a version of the “full truth” that many say is neither full nor true.' (WeAreTeachers) See link below.
'Teachers React to Florida's New Black History Standards'
Thank you Fern. These quotes paint quite a grim picture. Sounds too much like the beginning of an Orwell or Huxley novel.
I choose to believe that there will be a strong reaction to DeSantis and his fascistic agenda - a backlash, if you will. Florida is not a monolith of bigoted "crackers". Just like Texas, it is evolving. DeSantis is looking more and more clumsy every day. Call me naive, but I had my optimistic coffee just now.
You are welcome, Bill. While novels can be gripping and often reflect aspects of reality, these teachers are addressing what is literally happening in Florida now.
According to the US Census Bureau: July 1, 2022, the estimated number of people in Florida was 22,244,823, as of Aril 1, 2020, Black or African American alone, was 17.0%.
There have been some protests, but no one can know what the future will bring. There has been a strong negative response to the new social studies curriculum. At the moment, I do not see any movement to withdraw or change it.
I want Republicans to damage their chances in 2024 while I am concerned and confused at the lack of kickback in Florida and Texas. Are we lacking leadership?
'Are we sheep without a shepherd?' I'm afraid that your question, repeated here in my response, would be an apt statement in too many places in the USA.
You have TX agents refusing water to undocumented migrants. How many more are there like them? Teaching their kids that slavery was a good thing and blacks are inferior would not be a stretch.
Sadly, that last point is correct, christofascism has become a political party. And these are the same folks who sing hymns like "Gentle Shepherd", and "god is love", and the like. Nauseating indeed.
Read "Jesus and John Wayne" by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. It is about exactly that - how Christianity was turned into a (hugely successful) political party.
It is so sad and yet, there are people in Florida that think DeathSantis walks on water...hopefully people who do not share this view will stand up and vote him out when the time comes but then they will have to work very hard to undo the damage he has done.
I, too, think this White shame, shame which, either consciously or unconsciously, leads to feelings of guilt, is what is some of what is driving this. They know, even in their White privileged little hearts, what the truths of Black enslavement really entailed. They're just so afraid that their little dears might actually feel a nanosecond of remorse and shame at what the (and by extension, "THEIR") White forebears inflicted on a race of people. White-washing truths NEVER leads to their eradication. Truth has a funny way of always prevailing, even when at a time its chances appear dim.
Not that I consider myself any perfect example, but I do speak as a White Southerner, a Southerner whose ancestors owned some slaves. (My maternal great-grandfather's family was a very old, established family in NC.) I don't know the exact number, but I don't think it was huge. Looking at wills, the house and personal slaves were part of an inheritance, and some slaves were even given their choice of freedom upon the death of their "owner". Finding this out, I WAS appalled. I WAS ashamed. However, what I resolved to do was to turn that shame I felt into a resolve to ensuring that such a barbaric, horrendous system would be thrown into the dustbin of history, and along with it the whole post-Civil War system of disenfranchisement of the Black race. I grew up with and witnessed the last vestiges of the Jim Crow South, which I believe all the more increased that resolve, because even as a kid, I somehow saw that something just wasn't right about that. (This was surely reinforced because in my early youth we had a Black domestic in our home who was like a second mother to me. I'm sure that contributed to my not comprehending (as much as a child of 6 or 7 could) why there was so much animosity directed to someone Black. I genuinely believe that I carried the love I had for her with me into the rest of my life. She was special.)
A few pangs of shame and remorse for the sins of our forefathers is not at all a bad thing, but it's what we DO with those feelings that matter. We MUST turn that shame into a commitment to seeing that such things never happen again. Hatred, bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc. -- what I call a basic "fear of the 'other'" -- hold us back from evolving as human beings. My ancestors were products of their times and did what was then done. It doesn't excuse or pardon them. If I could I would tell my great-grandfather and other relatives who fought and died for the Confederacy that what they did was just plain WRONG. Glorifying them and their "cause" in this day and time is still just as WRONG. I am NOT proud for what they did, but instead I try and turn that shame into action. Sorry this went on so long . . .
There are a helluvalot of whites who have a helluvalot to be ashamed of. And they know it, but don't want to accept it about themselves or their beloved family members, and are ashamed they cannot cope with it or work to fix things, so out of shame squared, as it were, they deny it and support DeSauron and his ilk.
If he doesn't walk on water, he won't have any place to stand soon enough, as the Gulf and the Atlantic swamp the swamp. And apparently no one can get flood insurance. The vulgarly rich will be okay, not being in need of insurance, but no one else, come the next few hurricanes.
Thanks for putting the teacher’s’ perspective out there, Fern, it’s a vital one. I accept that they’re afraid but also know, historically, that if people give in to fear, things will only get worse. Whitewashed history erases the story of how progress happens: through the actions of a few brave souls that multiplies. We can’t give in or give up! Find the few and join them!
Hi, Fern-Yes, I gathered that you were passing along what you'd seen, which I appreciate! I long for some sort of "Scopes trial" that would put this lunacy on the stand. It would take somebody willing and able to defy the state, but it has been done before. Scopes lost his battle and was fined $100 (although his case was thrown out on a technicality), but you can also argue that the trial helped win something larger! At least temporarily. This fearful, oppressive mentality keeps resurfacing, so we gotta stay vigilant!
My Floridian friends and family tell me this doesn’t concern them because Florida public schools have never been good so they send their kids to private schools. Yikes!
Are these parents taking a close look atthe content of their own kids' schoolbooks? Are their kids' friends also only in private schools? And what happens when their well-educated kids have conversations about race with their non-private-school friends, as must be inevitable in Florida? What happens to these kids when they go out in public, or watch the news, and see or experience first-hand racist activity in their state, or want to or can only get into a Florida state college or university? What happens to your friends and their kids when all these non-private-school-educated unconsciously-indoctrinated kids grow up and vote in individuals like DeSauron (or his successors) because they buy into his lies? Do all these kids intend not to live in Florida? I have no kids, I live in Maine, and this issue affects ME! Frankly, WSJAbraham, I'm incredulous!
I heard an interesting interview with the new head of the Florida Democratic Party, Nikki Fried (it was on Rick Wilson's podcast). As I understood it, Dems in Florida have largely outsourced voter registration to affiliated groups outside of the party, and Florida law says that if a non-party group registers someone, they can't register them as a member of a party, but only as an unaffiliated voter.
It was an interesting interview. She said that they are basically starting from scratch in rebuilding the party in the state, and acknowledged that they have a long way to go.
It's bad right now, and I don't live in Florida, so maybe I'm talking out of my hat, but I just can't believe that the various DeSantis outrages are landing well with most Floridians who have children in school. Yes, there are a lot of conservative retirees there, but the GOP policies towards civil rights, the environment and guns are toxic to young people everywhere--and that has to include Florida. Change can't come fast enough, but we can't give up on a state as big and important as Florida.
Ellen, thank you for your alert, as a result I did some research and voting in Florida has been made more difficult.
'Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year.'
'The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.'
'In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.'
'Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they're organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts. '
“It’s doing exactly what they intended it to do, which is suppress voters and take resources,” said Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Instead of focusing our money, resources and time on other endeavors and talking to voters, we’re having to spend resources to get people back on the rolls.”
'Campaigns and volunteers who might have connected with voters once or twice to remind them to return their mail-in ballots may now need to connect with them three and four times to turn out a vote, Fried said.'
“I’ll be very honest with you: In the Black community, it’s very top of mind,” said Shevrin Jones, a state senator who represents part of Miami-Dade County. He runs a group called Operation BlackOut, which focuses on getting Black voters to sign up for mail ballot requests. They are just one of the many groups mobilizing to get voters of color on the mail-in voting list, he said.'
'Election officials, too, say they’re sending out mailers and text messages and reminding voters of the change whenever they get the chance. But in the six months since the ballot requests were canceled, less than a third of voters in three large counties have taken steps to request mail ballots again.'
'Republicans up the personal attacks on Biden and his family
Miami-Dade County received 438,000 mail ballot requests at the end of last year; by July 1, its mail ballot list had more than 92,000 voters. Hillsborough County had 320,000 voters on its list at the end of last year, and now has at least 70,000 voters signed up for mail ballots. Broward County said its records reflect the totals on Election Day in November, when it sent out 428,000 mail ballots to voters. At the beginning of July, Broward had just 35,000 voters set up to receive mail ballots.'
'A significant number of those ballot requests would have required renewal before the 2024 election, but Democratic strategist Ashley Walker said local candidates and campaigns — like in this year’s Jacksonville mayoral race — are feeling the effects this year. High turnout in federal elections can drive turnout in local races, because voters who signed up for mail ballots will automatically receive their ballot in the mail.'
"Do I think it’s gonna affect the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump or whoever ends up being the ultimate nominee? Probably not. It’s probably your primary elections, your local elections folks that’s going to be impacted most by this decision,” Walker said.'
'Walker said Florida Republicans had long bested Democrats in the state with mail-in voters, but in recent years Democrats invested in promoting mail-in voting.'
"The rule was devised in a way to try to eliminate any kind of advantage that Democrats have gained," she said. "But at the end of the day the task is the same. The task at hand is still the same: you gotta turn people out." (NBCnews) See link below.
Fern, thank you for this share from NBC News, too. Stunning ... The length to which the right wing will go grows like kudzu -- a prolific, fast-growing invasive plant without a single virtue. We in the South are used to it; we gave up decades ago trying to deal with it, now just accommodate it. This analogy needs to end right here: We cannot become accustomed to this evil that is springing up in places like Florida & taking root elsewhere. We cannot.
Good info. Thanks again. Glad to hear the Democratic committee has new leadership. I met a local FL Democratic leader at a party on a recent visit. She and her crew are fired up.
Pennsylvania went to large-scale (no excuse) mail-in voting in 2019 just in time for the Pandemic, but voters have to reapply every year for primary and general election ballots. Ballots are rejected if anyone forgets to sign and/or date the outside envelope. Dating the outside envelope is absolutely meaningless since the ballots are tracked by the SOS on line but was required by the Legislature. Despite these impediments, 2.6 million out of a total of 7 million people voted by mail in the 2022 general election and had their votes counted. The League of Women Voters and several other groups spend a lot of time and effort educating people about how to apply for vote by mail. As activists, we just know, it's what we have to do.
Unfortunately the Rs grew substantially since 2017 and the Ds actually declined while the unaffiliated grew instead. Apparently latino immigrants from right wing countries may have contributed to these changes but voter suppression laws also played a big part.
DeSantis’ reelection was due in large part because it came soon after the hurricane. He was on TV every day taking credit for things the Federal Government was doing. He even appeared with Biden. His opponent got no air time at all.
Yup Fascism loves propaganda. Figures. In Acadia National Park yesterday I watched as a Dad told his three teen/preteens to break the law and lie about it. 🤦🏻♀️ Lying, and law breaking have become normalized.
Make no mistake, here in my beautiful home state we've gotten exactly what we've paid for in this Gang Of Parasites , GOP politicians. Here, small donor contributions to Democrats are historically small. And they are scarce. Small donors of both parties are typically weak. See the NY Times piece describing Biden's team awaiting small donor funds to show up later. Don't hold your breath sir! Until we shed our appetite for apathy our desired outcomes will continue to disappoint us, as well as the rest of the free world. America is no longer a "free country". The millions of dollars our candidates spend in their appeals to us bears out that fact. They are our best, and surest firewall to insulate us from the current madness in our country. I've found means to contribute more by ditching my fancy Belgian ale hab.... er, hobby. Big dollars! Small ones count too though. Disparaging oneself, saying 2 dollars won't matter is simply untrue. That, or just plain lazy! Let's all stand up and own this election cycle. Please, let us NOT leave our candidates waiting for the could'uh would'uh, should'uh potential small donorsalong with Joe. This election of Cosmic Proportions would be a sad, and tragic thing to lose.
Jim, I completely agree. Last election I ignored pleas from Adam Frisch only to see him lose to Boebert by 549 votes. I assumed he couldn’t win and then watched in the recognition that I and a few more might have made the difference. Lesson learned. This time I am seeking every to help good candidates and help them now, not waiting until the late weeks prior to the election.
Thank you for the encouragement, Jim. You are right of course. While it's crazy to add up the amount of money I've contributed to campaigns since Trump was elected, I'm in a better position to do so than lots of others so I'll continue to do so. Also writing postcards and letters to voters. Whatever I can do, I feel I must do.
Not surprised that teachers are leaving and will leave. Floridians are effed and the only way out of the mess they have put themselves in is by voting out the fascists they have voted into office. Perhaps they will become a state of retired old folks reveling in living in the past when life was “grand” (not!) to find that everyone capable of doing anything moved out of state leaving them to wallow in their own excrement. The Florida swamp grows.
Christy I am also interested in the accreditation of Florida’s public colleges and universities. DeSantis has shoved non-academic right-wing Republicans into the presidencies of various state colleges, doubled their compensation, and imposed draconian conditions on tenured 1st Amendment-adhering professors.
Shattering academic standards should impact accreditation.
Somebody has to find a way to dismantle the Florida voter suppression and gerrymandering. They are not the majority, just the power brokers who don’t give a damn about governing for the majority but rather holding the majority hostage.
Thank you for reading these quotes, Mike S. Hearing from the students and teachers is crucial; they are the ones most directly impacted by people who erase our history and hide the truth. For this, however, everyone loses, unless we stop the false 'facts' and fascism from poisoning our society.
"I have a long history of faking compliance." is my favorite, I think. I used to hear this from teachers in Texas, who claimed to say what they liked behind a closed door, but the problem is that now I suspect some child, coached by a parent, will snitch. Thanks for sharing these.
Thank you Fern for these quotes from the field. In the progwoman's post I note one of the big problems, that some students will act as snitches. We had this happen in the school where I worked when some of us were suing the principal. As it turned out it was the son of one of the principal's chief buddies who was probably put up to it by his parents. The wife made the complaint. I had something similar happen when I gave a student a very low grade.....I should have given her a F. Her mother went on a campaign against me including calling the parents of my other students one of whom lied and said I hadn't helped their son. These were independent study students and I spent plenty of time with all of them. Of course, I didn't find anything wrong with the student's paper because it is likely that his father wrote it for him. He also turned in his paper without a needed part and I allowed him to add that late. Btw, I had several students thank me for insisting on high standards after they were in college. I can't imagine being the librarian which I was or teaching in today's atmosphere. I am sorry for teachers and children in Florida. In the meantime the christofascists who support Stumpy Boots DeSatan can enjoy being swamped by rising sea levels, stronger hurricanes and tornadoes, baking horrible temps, lack of being able to get home insurance or paying through the nose for it, etc.
Bravo for you! And I have two adult daughters who are teachers. They LOVE teaching and the kids (most of them) love them right back. But the shenanigans that some of them pull--aided and abetted by their parents--it outrageous! I could go on and on, and I sometimes have on this forum.
The unions and teachers have so much power. They need you. Organize and walk out and protest on day one and make a statement. They cannot replace you that fast and the system will be devastated. You will be creating an example for the students.
Small note, Abbutt and years of republicans in charge, have left Texas a “right to work state.” Which means teachers cannot unionize. Hasn’t stopped many from resigning! We lost 17 employees last school year. So many great teachers! But if we walk out, we lose everything! Certification, retirement. I’m two and a half years from retirement. So Texas teachers are really screwed!
Understand. My state, NC, also is a “right to work” state. And many teachers have left public schools in NC, and some have left NC. If walkouts mean too great of a sacrifice -- which that would be in your example -- we need to find other ways to fight back. I’ve referred in some other comments to the “underground” -- inspired by the teacher’s comment in Fern’s post about being well-practiced in “faking compliance.” Use all available weapons that advance the effort but certainly not ones that hurt it.
I notice the list of race riots skips the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 which Carl Sandburg memorialized with the most erudite and elegant record of race and reaction to establishment indifference at a turning point in history of the diaspora from Jim Crow.
In these discussions the fact that slavery begins with the denial of humanity of the victims is not emphasized enough. Slavery is an imposed condition of Slave and Master that Abe Lincoln pointed out is not entirely comfortable by either.
And yes, slavery existed in other places and times, but it was usually by conquest or raids which were not based on race. It was western Europeans who added the element of race.
Thank you Fern for researching these quotes from teachers in Florida. My fear is though, not enough teachers will stand up to teach the truth and they will not be given the tools to teach it even if they want to. New teachers will come into the system and only be given materials that reflect this AWFUL decision coming from their idiot governor and his racist board of education. It is just outrageous!
I saw this coming with the fantasy revisioning of CRT--there go the teachers...
These quotes confirm my fears, thank you. Unfortunately, barring some sort of court intervention, here's what I see happening next: I see the tide turning in homeschooling. Up until now it were the Evangelicals that homeschooled their children who will view the new curriculum as "safer" to send them to public school. It is the progressives who now will have no choice but be burdened with homeschooling their children....
Today’s youth and thus students in Florida do not live in a bubble, even though The Florida Board of Education and Governor would like to see that happen. Young people question. They observe. They are resourceful and are able to search for information and find a wealth of it at their fingertips. As a retired educator, I believe the students will be the ones to call out this fraud. I also have hope that national teacher organizations will have ways to support teachers who bring the truth into classroom discussions.
If they are motivated enough (how many are?), and they’ll have to look beyond the school library resources because the materials are no longer there. What a very sad state our country has fallen to. This comment from Mitt Romney often comes to mind: ‘Corporations are people too, my friend.’ Powerful dark money has wrought terrible damage to our democracy.
Most of them and many adults have no idea about evaluating sources, something I taught my students to do. Someone once told me to dig deeper citing Judicial Watch.
Michele: My point is, what is the use of going to school if you are going to question what you are taught and doing your own research? And would that apply to every subject?
I think the key here is evaluating sources in terms of their biases. I think this goes along with critical thinking. There is a difference between indoctrination and education. What is happening in Florida in other places is the former. I want students to question and learn the difference between reliable sources and ideology. One of the exercises in my writing class early on was to look at an internet article and determine its bias and reliability. I did encounter students who thought if it was on the internet, it was true even if it made no sense. Now I encounter adults all the time who just look at sites that reinforce their nonsense. Often i can't get them even to give me a citation.
Thank you for this. It is difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on in Florida from the outside. All I know is that DeSantis was elected by a landslide so that makes it seem like every one goes along with this. I know that’s not true, but it’s so good to hear that straight from Floridians.🙏
You've done it again, Fern. Great quotes and addition to Heather's letter. Yes, MLK Jr. just liked marching! Good for that teacher to call it out! I'd be laughing if what's happening wasn't so outrageous.
All the teachers' quotes hit home, but the one about MLK Jr. felt very personal. Whatever my instinctive connection to civil rights, he was my inspiration.
This is good news, if there is a meaningful revolt. We as citizens are being called to partake in our democracy and to fight for truth and enlightenment..what we believe in that is moral.
We are not a country that is founded upon one religion, or one view, but, as Walt Whitman said, we are multitudes.
Bonnie, I don't know the answer to your question. What we do understand is that the far-right is doing everything it can to control us. There are differences of opinion among us about many subjects, but this is something different. The far-right's agenda is to dictate what we think, what we learn and what we do. Autocracy, a system of government by one person with absolute power, and Fascism, an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, and forcible suppression of opposition. We have seen aspects of both growing in our country. Respect for the facts, the truth and the rights of the people have no place in their movements. I hope that enough Americans see what is happening, while we loose our our rights, bit by bit. The Biden administration is working hard to combat these threats, and there are many Americans working 24/7 to keep Democracy alive.
It all has become so shocking as to the depth of lies, violence, deceptions, hate, and greed.
I have gained so much information and hopefully deeper insight from Heather’s letters and contributions from her readers to the profound misinformation and lack of actually caring (other than for themselves?) that exist in so many Americans.
My focus has tended to be more with environmental concerns over the years, yet, when Obama was running for his first term as President, my interest in politics grew. And has swelled since Trump became the President.
I won’t go on for now. Your response to me is greatly appreciated, Fern.
Bonnie, our exchanges inform and support us. Let us continue to communicate with one another from time to time. This life and time is extremely difficult. Communication between us helps me to figure out how to move forward. Be well.
Exactly, the governor and his new curriculum only reflect strongly held beliefs of much of the citizenry. Fantasy is much more comfortable than a true history.
These whitewashed standards are akin to a German chancellor standing in a concentration camp and denying the history and results of Nazi rule --the Holocaust, costing millions of Jewish lives, millions of deaths from World War II, cities and towns obliterated, families decimated.
FYI--a number of Founding Fathers were NOT Christian. They were Deists, who believed God existed and that was the end of it.
And JennSH, the mythical gods and the mythical Ronald Reagan are all part of the mix. They are living on fantasy and supporting the creation of a dystopian society. Read 1984 and everything happening is explained in a book written in 1946!!! Hard to wrap one’s head around it, but it is our reality.
Charlie Crist was not a strong candidate. He was on the correct side of most issues. A decent guy. But he wasn't going to bring out the votes of young people and people of color. We have family in Florida. Believe me, there will be a backlash at the next election.
Consider that DeSantis has now alienated the farmers and some of the titans of industry in Florida by chasing out desperately needed workers. There are 55 applicants for every 100 job openings in Florida. Things won't get done. Money flows will suffer. Follow the money.
The situation here is bad. MAGA Republicans are in fact the KKK, striving for a white Protestant theocracy, democracy and the democratic process be damned. They don't care for the one person, one vote, majority rule.
One thing that you can do is to work with your local Democratic Party to help Democrats win elections. This helps to dilute the political clout of Florida Republican politicians.
For us here in Florida, we are doing everything - registering voters, working with college students, collecting money to pay for mailings, etc. We are also writing letters to the papers. This one of mine was published in today's Lakeland Ledger:
Editor:
The report, "Is student debt relief still possible?" [7/13/2023] sets in sharp relief the way in which a small minority has managed to manipulate the U.S. economy to its benefit, almost exclusive benefit, as the Middle Class is now close to disappearing. The argument comes down to whether forty million students who have a combined student loan debt of $1.6 trillion should receive any relief. Interestingly, the concerns here, is this a giveaway, do they deserve it, etc. did not phase the minds of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and the other Republican politicians when they voted to grant the wealthy and large corporations a $2.0 trillion tax break in 2017, doing nothing for the economy and helping to increase the federal debt $7.8 trillion during Trump's four years in office, a record.
What would $1.6 trillion in the pockets of forty million Americans do to the economy? Here we have a stark contrast between Supply Side Economics and Demand Side Economics. If, instead of giving the wealthy and large corporations an unneeded dole of $2 trillion [Supply Side Economics] Congress had decided in favor of student loan forgiveness, [Demand Side Economics] this would have been a huge boost for the economy, $1.6 trillion going into the checking accounts of consumers. And what do consumers do? They spend that money and that creates economy activity. What did the big corporations and wealthy do with the $2.0 trillion tax break? They bought back their own stock, primarily, doing absolutely nothing to spur the economy and dumping more debt on average Americans. At what point do we start thinking critically and stop being suckers?
Further to the point that I make in my letter, this from a friend of mine in California responding to my letter published in today's edition of the Lakeland Ledger:
The irony and contrast are completely lost on the likes of Trump, DeSantis and team MAGA. They simply look at it as Corporations are deserving because they think of them as “one of them” but consumers are not because they see them as immigrants, black, brown and other minorities getting something that they don’t deserve regardless of the benefit that, you rightly point out, helps the economy unlike the handouts that go to Corporations that do nothing – indeed, I witnessed up close how Cisco took the extra cash handouts from the give backs and the amnesty on cash re-patriating and proudly put 93% of it to stock buybacks and minimal to employees.
OK I must say that the state of Florida has lost its collective mind. I can’t believe that they all agree with this. It’s time to grab the scissors and trim off one of our states. I’m sorry Professor that you had to teach us another extreme lesson of uncommon sense. Thank you, it makes me realize that the fight is on to correct these wrongs and it’s up to all of us to make the change. Thank you. Peace and love always wins out.
With most of Florida underwater... salt water... crawfish thrive... then die. Alligators take over raised areas. Sharks will terrify swimmers. ALL high rise apartment buildings will collapse with rebar rusting within rotting concrete walls, concrete destroyed, killing residents in their sleep, one building after the other, co-ops all, and Disney will never return.
I guess its good that white folks thought black folks could "go to heaven" too since all the white folks I met in the Southern Baptist Church, no matter what nasty stuff they were doing or how they treated others, in their own minds, were all headed to heaven.
And, many of them were quite positive of who was NOT going to heaven (anyone not like them).
My first wake up call to the Southern Baptist Church, as a late adolescent when I started thinking for myself, was when the preacher, after years of scorching our hair off with stories of how easy it was to go to hell, was caught sleeping with one of the deacon's wives (btw, catching a preacher sleeping with someone else wife is one of the most common occurrences in the Southern Baptist Church).
My family was Southern Baptist and I was dragged to church until my late teens when it was apparent I was Agnostic and didn't buy it. I had an uncle in MS, deacon of his Southern Baptist church who not only had extra-marital affairs, which got a divorce from wife #1, but he was also in the KKK. How does one rectify such Hypocrisy? From what I've read of he writings about Jesus, he would not approve.
So Mike, how exactly will you "make the change"? With your pair of scissors! Really sir? Peace , love, AND funding the right candidates might just win out, yes!
'Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.'
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.'
'DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate who is lagging in polls against the front-runner, former president Donald Trump, and is trying to reset his campaign, quickly drew criticism from educators and even some in his party. He has built his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on attacking what he calls the radical liberal policies of President Biden and the Democratic Party, but the latest remarks could alienate Black voters just as the GOP tries to court them.'
'Former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.'
“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
'Civil rights leaders, educators and others have expressed revulsion at the idea that enslaved people benefited from the experience.'
'As Biden’s running mate, Vice President Harris has stepped up her attack-dog role, and on Friday traveled to Jacksonville to assail DeSantis’s policies in his home state. She emphasized that slavery involved rape, torture and “some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
'Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to become House Democratic Leader, called DeSantis’s latest remarks a continuation of DeSantis’s “assault on Black history.”
“Let’s really dissect what he’s saying here,” she said. “He’s saying that to be ripped away from your homelands and brought to another country against your will, or to be born into the atrocity of the dehumanizing institution that was slavery, that those horrors are some way somehow outweighed by the benefit that you get a trade. Are you kidding me?”
'DeSantis issued a statement Friday saying, “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.” His campaign did not respond to an email on Saturday requesting comment.'
'Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and author of “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” said DeSantis would gain no political advantage from his argument because “it is so outrageous that people are going to reject it.”
“These children know in their hearts and in their minds that slavery was evil,” he said.
“One of the main things about slavery, beyond the physical damage that it did to people of so many generations, was that it prevented people from becoming what they could have become,” he said.'
“So what if you became a carpenter or a blacksmith or a good maid? Your chances of that were not determined by you, it was determined by somebody else. That’s not a rationalization for enslavement.” (WAPO) See link to article below. Sorry, gifting not available.
Fern, you include this piece: "Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to become House Democratic Leader, called DeSantis’s latest remarks a continuation of DeSantis’s “assault on Black history.”
Respectfully, Rep. Driskell, it is an all-out assault on democracy, which includes huge lies about our past (including Black history. ) In short, it is what Fascists do. DeSantis is a Fascist. "By their fruits, so shall you know them."
The comparisons to ancient history show that slavery of some sort has been around forever in many societies around the world. The only thing that is common to all examples is the belief that the “other” is less than the enslaver. And it remains so to this day. The enslaved were not given choices about what “job training” they wanted for themselves, nor could they quit a job they didn’t like. This is heartbreaking and public acknowledgment of deeply embedded intolerance of “others” across the centuries and the world. The human condition hasn’t changed much...the cruel and evil injustices are still with us.
And, once separated from their native country and enslaved, these people were then subjected to further separation - husbands from wives, children from parents - at the whim, and for the profit, of their owners.
I was actually going somewhere with this comment and got waylaid. I was thinking how the separation of slave’s families connected to the trump administration’s separation of children from their families at the border.
Fern, first, I want to thank you fir adding this spectacular breakdown to my post. H you ou have taken what I was trying to say and spelled it out rather nicely, scholarly, and understandable. I greatly appreciate that.
There’s not one thing I can add that the other folks that responded haven’t added. I just wanted to thank you gif pointing all this out to us all.
This country has no use gif the lines of Trump, DeSantis, or ANY of the other Republicans who are currently running for ANY public office. State, Federal, Local. None of them. Every one of them needs to be replaced. The Republican Party, as it USED to be is no more. It is gone.
[Our kin were so debased that they were eager to kidnap, murder, steal property and buy and sell people for personal profit, and to this day our kin still think it wasn’t such a bad idea]
• Our kin thought god said it was OK
[God said it was OK – even the evil Muslim one]
• Our kin gave them trade skills for a better life
[Our kin worked people unto death – some of them got pretty good at some sort of forced labor before they died]
{Corollary: Our kin were so unskilled, uneducated and incompetent that they had to force other people at the point of a gun to do their work for them}
• Our kin made certain that the prevailing mercantile system benefited the maximum number of people
[Our kin worked people to death without recourse or compensation, thereby maximizing profit]
• Our kin ended it for them, then we changed our justice system around just for them
[Our kin practically tore apart the nation they professed was the best nation ever, by resisting universal human rights unto death, then, at the point of a gun aimed at us by those nasty Army guys from up north, passed a few simple laws that, once the unpleasantness of 1876 was sorted out, they were quickly able to reverse, and thence to enforce via the proud, brave KKK operatives]
• Despite our kin’s everlasting commitment to maximizing personal freedom and economic security some people still rebelled and committed violence in a misguided attempt to elevated their own individual preferences
[Inexplicably, some people tried to run away from, or fight our kin, and our children today might be upset at the very thought of it]
Ding ding ding, the school bell is ringing. MAGA Parents’ radar across America is on alert as they prepare to move en mass to Florida to get that “good patriotic teachin’ for their youngins”
Some scientists, schooled in the Florida way, are predicting the added weight of such immigration (the good kind) will add to the flooding of some coastal areas but El Duce de Ronni pooh poohed such concern saying “the influx will be good for the service economy helping businesses fill open positions at restaurants, hotels, and landscaping companies that current “Real Floridians” refuse to do”
Tommy Tuberville immediately contacted the Florida School System for a copy of the new teaching instructions to implement in Alabama
I am old enough to have lived through Jim Crow and the civil rights movement of the 60s. Ron DeSantis is not; the Florida Board of Education members are not. I’m not a historian but I know what I saw and what I continue to see, systemic racism and the rise of fascism that are whitewashing our history. As I am an engineer and not a historian, I invite each of you who are historians to write letters, send emails, do what you can to apply your unique knowledge to this disgusting and quite frightening movement. Our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids deserve the truth. Without the truth, positive change is impossible. Mythical belief is not truth, not reality. Please help our next generations.
Another amazing column. I heard and read about the new curriculum time and time again through the lens of the single extraction from the syllabus about “Blacks learning useful skills”. So much so that I began to wonder if this was manufactured outrage with nothing more substantive behind it.
Then Heather wrote. Her analysis of the curriculum is masterful. As a teacher I was fascinated to see how the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods were bereft of detail and left to the the teacher to “Explain and evaluate”.
What a trap. What Florida teacher with eyes to see and ears to hear is going to Wade into those eras and overturn the sanitation purpose of the rest of the curriculum? Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era will become land mines in the curriculum that could put your job in danger because there will be nothing in the syllabus for you to fall back upon.
I give full marks to the team that wrote (and probably rewrote many time) this document. They have managed to demean and disavow the history of a proud people without producing something cartoonishly ugly as other states have done.
The syllabus is a masterpiece of cunning and treachery - at a level that only people such as Professor Cox Richardson can instantly evaluate for the poison that it is.
Woe to them that they didn’t see the lightning rod that “useful skills” instantly became.
Actually I should probably retract the word “woe”. This flare up is, regrettably a speed bump only. They will wait a bit, announce some “public consultation”, go through the sham of that and then hold another press conference in which they announce “revisions based on a wealth of public input”. Then they will put out a final draft, cosmetically changed - the “skills and trades” sentence gone, and to put more lipstick on the pig a few other non-substantive changes. And then it will hit the schools of Florida.
The document will remain an erasure of Black suffering, filled with false equivalencies - entirely devoid of anything that might hurt the unfortunate white children/parents. Kudos to Florida for a masterclass in treachery.
I hear that the number of millionaires in Florida (refugees from New York taxation) grows daily. If the hurricanes don’t drive them out, they will support this education happily. People are scared. The more money you have, the more money you’ll have to eat (“But where’s the catsup”?) when climate change, which the Republican Party and SCOTUS support with all their ignorance, oil and coal money, takes over. Maybe the Dems can scrape up enough funds to win the state and bring it back to a semblance of sanity, but it will take more than Disney money, from a state reeling from hurricane destruction, to beat the DeSanctus crowd.
In 50 yrs Florida and everything else south of Kansas will be uninhabitable. The bread basket will have moved up to Minnesota. Let’s pray all these idiots just burn up.
It is, indeed, outrageous. I'm struck by how much of it was taught this way to me back in the 1960s in Los Angeles. It's not just the South or just Florida. I remember clearly when a new history textbook was introduced into the high school curriculum which included the role of black people in American history for the first time. It was an epiphany in my all-white upper middle class school. I am deeply saddened that we now seem to be moving quickly backwards.
We have been moving backward well before 2016 but TFG and right wing conservatives have dragged this country to lows equal to and worse than pre-civil war. How can I make such a statement. Easy! This curriculum is being promoted by people who certainly know this is a big lie and who are leading the biggest assault on gender identity and women’s health. It represents an attack on every value and principle long understood by people living in the United States of America.
Florida has a record shortage of teachers, because many are quitting the system. Florida Senate Bill 896, signed by DeSantis in June, allows veterans to apply for a temporary teaching certificate good for five years without first earning a Bachelors degree, which is normally required to teach. The average salary for a teacher in Florida is $51,230, ranking #48th in the nation.
Oh good. So, pretty much anyone who is a veteran can apply for a teaching certificate with no training or education at all? What a slap in the face to teachers everywhere who worked hard to become educators. Surreal.
It IS a slap in the face of teachers and will continue in the trend to dumb down America. An uninformed population is a compliant one or so the fascist doctrine says. The fact that DeSatan won so big in Florida somehow attests to this.
Nothing new there: in 1985, when I escaped from Florida, the starting salary for a rookie police officer in Boca Raton was higher than the salary of a high school teacher with a master's degree.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that also the spouse of a veteran could ALSO become a teacher.
What an insult to teachers! BTW, I wonder what they will teach? I am thinking about my two children who teach HS English: they routinely spend about 60 hours a week working, since so much time is needed to plan curriculum, create and give make-up tests and quizzes after school, tutor after work hours, spend hours grading every night, and on HOLIDAYS and weekends. This doesn't take into account the amount of time the work during the infamous "summer vacation" where they attend mandatory workkshops, and often rewrite their curriculums when some new trend comes out of Washington. ("No Child Left Behind" anyone?) Heck, one daughter's dreary classroom was not scheduled to be painted for several years. SHE bought the paint and painted it herself, after getting permission from the administration, who kindly offered to reimburse the paint. We're talking a room with 12' ceilings, folks.
Average salary over $50K in FL? In many states, even blue ones, rural teachers make much less than that!
Between irate school boards, shootings, book banning, low salary, long hours--I wonder how much longer my daughters can carry on?
My bad for giving so much respect to teachers, such that two of my kids decided to become teachers!
I think many, if not most of those who comment have children long out of school. Perhaps if they have grandkids, or if the reader has kids in school, may I make this suggestion:
When Christmas, Teacher Appreciation or end of year comes (or all of them) please recognize the sacrifice teachers make for your kids. Do not send them a mug or teacher ornament, they have tons of them. IF you can afford it, send them a gift card. If you can't afford that, write a note or email thanking them. And if nothing else, SHOW UP TO PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE and LISTEN respectfully to what they have to say about your kid.
You are correct. The spouse of a veteran can also get a temporary teaching certificate.
You are also correct that this is an insult to the many dedicated, hard-working teachers who continue to sacrifice to instruct our children.
That dollar figure paid to teachers in Florida is an average, certainly not the lowest salary paid. There are a lot of different “averages” given on the internet, but this dollar figure is not the highest, & includes private school as well as public teachers.
Exactly. I think it was HCR a few months/weeks ago who listed all the factors around education: teacher pay, teacher background, state funding for education, higher ed prep for education, etc - FLA falls within the BOTTOM 10% of the 50 states when all these factors are analyzed.
Could be, I don't recall. It was one of "The Party's" key slogans in "1984", along with, "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery" and "Make America Great Again", though I might be mixing memories on that last one. Something like that.
Sandy, have you seen this? I posted it in response to commenters on yesterday’s LFAA….reading it, I thought it might be from the Onion…still can’t take in (wrap my head around) what it says….I mean, seriously? This site links to the whole publication which I have skimmed part of….find it appalling, very scary and revving my engines to oppose such a take-over strategy: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025
You should read Miles Taylor's new book, "blowback." He spent two years talking to the people who are planning to "hit the deck running" on January 20, 2025 and turn this country into a theocratic christofascist dictatorship under the "leadership" of their fearless tenth-rate failed circus clown Trump. The only "good Republicans" now are the ones in the graveyards, as Harry Truman pointed out back in 1948.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat,scholar on facism and authoritarian leaders:⬇️
“Authoritarians tell you what they’re going to do, but we often don’t listen, don’t take them seriously, or don’t have the understanding and framework to assess the threats they pose.”
“Those plans, as reported by The New York Times on Monday, are consistent with a 21st century playbook for authoritarians: Tell the public how you will set up an authoritarian state. Frame your intended expansion of executive powers as a streamlining of government. Don’t forget to repeatedly praise dictators as “brilliant” and “top of the line” people so there’ll be no surprises when you act in a similar manner. And whet your followers’ appetites for destruction of existing norms by advertising how you will purge ‘the sick political class that hates our country’ from government.”
It's sickening. Fits like a glove. And yet there were millions of intelligent, educated Germans... But there was the Treaty of Versailles, ignominy, terrible management and then the hyperinflation, it's easy to understand them losing the plot. They were desperate. The enemy are saying Look, just look - it's all horrible! Only we can save America! And Biden is saying Look, just take a look: it's all going better than it's been for decades.
(And little Marjie has declared it loud and clear on Twitter - nothing like it since FDR!!)
I don't know how the President can stand the pressure. We're all at snapping point. Well, we can't afford to be. All strong behind the President.
A few days after the 2016 election, Masha Gessen wrote this for the New York Review. We dodged a bullet that time. We won't in 2025 if Trump succeeds in getting back into the White House.
I’ve only just opened the lid, so to speak….so haven’t fully digested it (kinda lack the stomach to do so honestly!). At first i really thought it was a spoof…then I listened to some recent recorded (ugh) Trump comments that seemed to echo stuff written in the Heritage Foundation intro piece I linked to….then wondered is this for real? I kinda felt like I shouldn’t ignore it if it IS real. And, yeah, I wondered what it might portend.
TC, I tried to read it a couple of days ago with an open mind…thinking I might understand a point of view or maybe to find some common ground. However, the further I read I kept thinking “wait, that’s not actually correct” or “that’s a meme/propaganda”…and wondered why would they post this? Do they REALLY, cross their hearts, believe this stuff? I try to understand (everyone’s entitled to their own opinions after all, even if I don’t agree), but it’s quite a stretch to wrap my head around some of the statements/opinions proffered. I find it very scary.
Thanks for sharing this. It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who talked extensively about Project 2025 but you won't hear it discussed by our dear mainstream media that are billionaire owned. It is truly frightening.
Gack--I can't finish that article at one gulp--it is unbelievably sick-making. I'll take another whack at it after breakfast and see if I can stomach it then....
The Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and Dominionist groups (others?) are the trifecta seemingly pulling us farther right towards a Christian theocracy/autocracy/oligarchy & appear to be quietly bankrolled by some pretty big bucks.
I couldn't get past the second bullet point. But thanks for making us aware of the skullduggery that's being crafted. (Not that I'd expect anything less from Heritage)
The "Reagan Revolution" was always about throwing the progress of social and economic justice into reverse. Democracy and egalitarianism was mocked, while the Lords of wealth canonized. MAGA, which posits an unspecified era of greater glory, is reminiscent of the Fascist harkening to the (predatory) glory that was the Roman Empire. For the right wing, the best days seem always to have been in a mythical past, yet to be recaptured; while for progressives, the best has yet to come, should we strive to make it so.
Alas, we realistically must expect unpleasant developments and losses that might once have been avoidable; but which approach is most responsible for that?
Rebecca, the new Florida curriculum mirrors what I was taught in the 80s & 90’s in Maryland. I grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a region where enslaved people were forced into reproduction, forgive me for saying ‘bred’. In other words an industry of forcing enslaved humans to procreate & selling them their children.
We barely learned about Frederick Douglas & Harriet Tubman, who each lived in neighboring counties. Nobody bothered to celebrate their heroics, or their remarkable contributions to the anti-slavery or suffrage movements. To think these two national heroes are apart of our local history, and yet teaching of who they were and what they accomplished was ignored.
The Florida curriculum will have its desired effect, as it has where I grew up. Ignorance, white supremacy, and racism will become further entrenched, especially in Florida’s rural communities, where opportunities to challenge the ideas perpetuated by the curriculum is limited.
‘It just hurts me:‘ Florida students left hanging'
'Victoria McQueen, 17, of Tallahassee, Florida, was looking forward to taking AP African American Studies her senior year. She said that when she heard the class was rejected by the DeSantis administration, she felt defeated.'
“It just hurts me, especially as a young African American female, that 400 years later they’re still trying to sweep the history of African Americans under the rug after all they did,” the rising senior said. “The way that America has broken African Americans and people of color in general, broken them down from top to bottom, not giving them the credit they deserve behind the scenes and in front of the camera − it just hurts to know that even in the classroom they can't be acknowledged.”
'Victoria McQueen, a Leon High School student, spoke at the "Stop the Black Attack" rally in the Florida Capitol in January. McQueen contemplated suing Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration over the ban of AP African American Studies in Florida high schools.'
'McQueen, who is her high school’s student body president, already has taken six AP classes. When she realized AP African American Studies wouldn’t be offered, she looked into learning the subject matter in an actual college course. '
“I took it upon myself to see if I could take it at the community college, only for me to find out a few months later, these last few months, that the state is now regulating what even the colleges can teach about African American history and diversity because of critical race theory,” she said.'
'DeSantis, who is running to be the Republican nominee for president, has cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion programs on Florida college campuses. The governor recently signed a bill that restricts state funding from going to any programs or campus activities “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.”
“Ask the students if they want the class,” she said, “not the parents, the students, because the parents aren’t sitting in the classroom every day.” (USAToday) See link below.
I think about the use of words, Daniel. 'Porcine': 'resembling a pig', poor 'pig'. In our common usage, we relegate this animal to a very low place, a slur, an insult. How about 'pig headed'? In fact, '...pigs are highly intelligent, social animals, displaying elaborate maternal, communicative, and affiliative behavior. …' In fact, DeSantis acts with disrespect for others, particularly, some groups. He demeans and demotes us all by his words and actions, thereby, exhibiting his own poor character.
Fern, I too think about the use of words. Having spent summers as a kid on a farm in Southern Minnesota, I can confirm that pigs are highly intelligent and very social - and honestly pretty interesting to be around. You can see the family bonds at work as the piglets grow, and while they aren’t quite as cute as puppies or kitties, they are just as rambunctious and fun to watch.
But pigs are also incredibly dangerous, particularly the boars. The reason for sayings like “pig-headed” are rooted in experience managing these critters and have long traditions in our language, at least here in the Midwest. Boars challenge anything and everything that enters their territory and will kill you if they can catch you. I have seen a man gored in the thigh - he was lucky not to bleed to death or be crippled for life!
Let’s not romanticize the dangers based on knowledge that pigs are intelligent and social creatures. So are most humans. DeSantis is using political “tusks” to gore democracy. This Midwesterner finds the analogy porcine and pig-headed for DeSantis to be quite apt. I will add dangerous and deadly.
As to pigs, 'Let's not romanticize...' Let's not, Sheila. Why did you respond to me with that admonition?
Our exchange was about domestic pigs, so 'incredibly dangerous' as you offered did not seem apt. You may not be alone in failing to recognize that
our subject was domesticated pigs.
All pigs are members of the Suidae family, which includes eight genera and 16 species. Among those species are wild boars, warthogs, pygmy hogs and domestic pigs.' (LiveScience)
'When talking about pigs, most people only think of one thing – the livestock from which pork comes.' That was Daniel and I to a T.
'It may surprise people, but the term “pig” actually encompasses many other species that sport different characteristics. However, the term typically and generally refers to domesticated animals used for livestock. Their wild counterparts, on the other hand, are called wild boars.'
Aside from differences is size and weight, a very big difference between domestic pigs and wild boars are their set of teeth. 'Although they share identical dentition or dental structures, the wild boar’s teeth are significantly larger than domesticated pigs. One indication that you are facing a wild boar rather than an ordinary pig is their lower canines protruding too long from their bottom jaws.'
'Generally, pigs refer to all species found across Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. Wild boars, warty pigs, and warthogs belong to the pig family. Domesticated pigs have been the common species called pigs, but these domestic pigs came from wild boars, thus their similarities.'
We didn't mention or consider 'wild boars', but thank you for your lecture Sheila.
The etymology of pig-headed: pig-headed (adj.)
also pigheaded; 1610s, "having a head resembling a pig;" 1788 as "stupid and obstinate, unreasonably set in mind;" see pig (n.1) + -headed. Usually, but not always, figurative. (etymonline) See link below.
Quotes about the difference between wild boars and domesticated pigs were taken from 'az animals'. See the link at the bottom of this response.
I'm encouraged to see that I used the same words "swept under the rug" as Victoria McQueen.
That said, attempts to proclaim only the light and negate the shadow aspect of a people's history have, time and again, been a prelude to sweeping human beings under the rug and trampling them underfoot.
At this moment I am, for some reason, seeing the gigantic image of Chairman Mao, seeing the shining faces of Red Guard "positive heroes" emblazoned on vast posters, while real Red Guards burned books, smashed museums, works of art and musicians' fingers, forced students to beat beloved teachers to death and drove respected elders to suicide.
'Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966* Youqin Wang'
'The author investigated the so-called “Red August” of 1966, the start of large-scale violent persecution during China's Cultural Revolution. She interviewed hundreds of teachers and students from ninety-six schools and reviewed all available written materials. This article provides a detailed description of how educators were insulted, tortured, and even killed by their students. Mobilized as members of a new youth organization named “Red Guards,” the students attacked the educators for being “capitalist intellectuals.”
'In those schools, twenty-seven educators were murdered; more committed suicide subsequent to torture. Cruel oppression silenced resistance. Stories about bloody campus persecutions were too politically sensitive following the Cultural Revolution, so have heretofore received scant attention in the historical narrative. As the author shows, given the high regard China has traditionally held for education, the brutalizing of educators in China was an unprecedented act. The objective of this article is to reveal the texture and significance of this underreported and underappreciated part of China’s history. Causes and ramifications are discussed and analyzed.' (UniversityofChicago) See link below.
It makes me reflect how Progress happens and those in power push back. It will take all of us to not only keep progressing but fight to maintain what has been achieved. We can’t forget that victory isn’t static.
But must also remember to be careful if we push beyond where the majority is comfortable as the backlash then is even stronger.
I’m vacationing in Warsaw. Yesterday the guide spoke to how much the history books changed in Poland after the Soviet Union released their hold on the country. It’s a real learning to understand how fluid the narrative of history is.
And the history books in Poland are changing now, as the christofascists of the "Law and Justice" Party turn Poland back into the semi-fascist state it was before World War II.
Still dealing with hints of fascism over there, after all, Russia and Putin, Eastern Europe and the HRC combine, it’s historic, women cannot serve, the priests molest, the press is crushed, Russia always threatens, corruption always thrives, remaining Jews flee, yet they help their Ukrainian brothers and sisters, run long trains to Kiev, defy the Bear, and think Chopin... Stravinsky... Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. Where there’s music and poetry, there’s hope.
The difference is that citizens of the United States have access to multiple news and information sources. Many people, some who are educated enough to know better, choose to get their information and direction from one source. That's the Orwellian side of this whole thing. The autocracies in some countries are fully Orwellian. If the Republicans have their way we will be an autocracy too. It's time to reread 1984.
George Orwell smelled it. Published. His fiction is today’s fact. Substack is not news. It’s mostly gossip. Cable and network news are not news. They are a mix of gossip and linear access journalism without fact editing that drains newsrooms of talent with money and smothers our silent suppressed academia with easy money and freelanced media and substack that’s not well researched. Hometown small newspapers are a mess, dropping like flies, most failing. Publishers - local newspaper publishers - are starving. Many big city newspapers have failed. Most. Reporting is failing. With few exceptions. Magazines are few with mixed quality. Buy to kill is liquidating like the Denver Free Press.
Democracy fails in the dark. Cable television is entertainment and news, about 70/30 - tribal to its core. Not news when tribal.
Ads track tribal. FOX is an example. There are many.
The history that was taught before these "reforms" was paltry to begin with. This is just the Lost Cause narrative redux. The far right has been attacking "snowflakes" on the left for years, but think their own children are so fragile that they will melt upon hearing historic truths. The reactionaries probably think that if you held up books like "The Color of Law" and the "Sum of Us" in front of their children, their children would shrink away like a vampire faced with a Bible. SO SAD!
Thing is, the kids could probably take it, integrate it and let it inform their lives. It’s the parents who can’t deal with it…why scapegoat their kids? Oh wait, they don’t want their kids “woke”.
Barbara, I've written enough in our comment sections over the past year about the sorry history of my maternal family, repleat with the KKK, etc. I remember cheering when JFK was assassinated just to fit into the family. I recall so many stories.
And yet, here I am - a Democratic Socialist and Union Theological Seminary graduate in Social Ethics who had my eyes opened over the course of years of friends: the Gay Broadway dancers that babysat my kids, the friend who had me and my kids stuffing envelopes for Democratic Socialist presidential Candidate Michael Harrington - I could go on.
At some point even those of us who were raised with the deepest kind of racism have an opportunity to see beyond the cancer of racism.
Rosalind, that’s the one thing about the human species I like….we (mostly) don’t seem to have a hive-mind (like the Borg in Star Trek), and can throw off and evolve from conditioning. Working at a Univ for decades I got to witness examples of students having their minds and perceptions opened, widened and stimulated…..I guess becoming the “woke” that so many seem afraid of. I was brought up in a generations-long secular family who, to me, were open and honest though I didn’t think of them as such at the time…they just were what I knew. As a kid hearing words school mates used describing people I’d be confused as I didn’t know what the words meant and would ask my parents. They’d explain about not using those words (slurs) and what they meant, I couldn’t understand why people would want to say such things. I recall as a kid seeing the movie South Pacific and being very moved by this song as it very simply explained so much in a way that a kid could understand…You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk
I think we do and don't have hive-like minds and that the former is our specie's most tragic flaw. Event's such as the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult demonstrate that the logical/empirical content of cult belief is virtually arbitrary, so long as it bars the acolyte from peer reviewing values, and pumps wishful thinking. Within my circle of contacts and extended family are clever, educated, even otherwise amiable people who embrace MAGA doctrine chapter and verse. That's not entirely spontaneous; there are some very self-serving and powerful people conspiring (think the Koch family for example) to set the trap. It seems to me that all cults promote a self-reinforceing belief in one's exclusive specialness as a cohort, and I think few if any people have no vulnerability to comforting themselves in such thinking, to some degree., which I know I do. But taken to extremes, disconnection becomes demonstrably dangerous.
Like addictions of one sort or another that at some point impede our best interests, the most direct defense, it seems to me, is good-faith self-reflection, while noting the defining patterns of known unhealthy behaviors. I think this is related to "The Golden Rule", but perhaps subsumes it, because it involves asking questions of how we see and deal with ourselves, and of the legitimacy of of what others may want that differs from our own choices.
Well said! In my family & friend group most are center to center-left, tho’ there is one friend we avoid talking politics to & she to us, so I don’t really know, but much is implied (she’d be the lone adherent). The need to have “a savior”/powerful leader is indeed a draw for many. Not in my mindset I guess, never has been…lol..was even a big deal for me to join the Brownies as a kid. I recall several years ago that my SIL (then in her mid-60’s) discovered (well, her daughter did) thru 23 & Me that she had a “surprise!” younger half-sister. As is so like my kind & caring SIL, she welcomed her in, as did the whole family. One Christmas season (pre-covid) I was visiting them (out of state) and her “new” half-sister traveled to spend time with a family she hadn’t known existed either (a surprise all around). It was a splendid visit as we all got to know one another. One afternoon as the women of the family (the “elders”: me, my sis, my SIL & her new sis) were sitting around the kitchen table talking ‘bout all sorts of things when the subject turned to politics. New-sis paused a bit, hung her head sheepishly and then said she was SO thankful and relieved, and that she’d be so worried about meeting us in case we were Trump-cult supporters. Well, we all got a good belly laugh out of that. As far as I’m aware even those in my extended family (cousins, grand-cousins, etc) do not support what to me is an irrational magical thinking adoration of that man. The whole Trump-train is the closet I’ve come to experiencing (and only because he was our president) a cult as a critical thinking observer. I posted, and perhaps you’ve already seen this, about the differences in conservative vs liberal brains—an interesting article to mull over and could explain what we as individuals are drawn to: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/
It reminds me of a single panel cartoon I cut out of the paper many years ago: There is a young boy, grade school age, wearing a suit and tie & carrying a briefcase….he is standing facing his hippy parents sitting on the couch. The caption is one parent saying to the other “Where did we go wrong?”. It is good that parents can teach values, hopefully Golden Rule-ish, but that the kids will be their own selves…hopefully critically thinking, tho’ the pull of a large social group-think is hard to buck. Earlier today I read this very long posting to Daily Kos—it is a heart wrenching tale of someone, as a kid, who was shunned for NOT belonging. As I said it is a long read, but shocked me as to the power of “othering” people be it race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. etc. etc. Here’s a link in case you want to check it out, sadly has affected his whole life:
What's the end game of this attempt in Florida to create an outrageous false reality? To brainwash everyone into believing that Blacks are treated without racism and enjoy the same economic benefits of a white-dominated culture? That in America today everything is just hunky dory?
Imagine being a Black student, and you're subjected to this compendium of lies. Do you get a knee on the neck if you challenge lessons with the truth?
I'm guessing that "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Journey of America's Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson won't be part of the curriculum. It details the stories of Black people who fled Florida, as well as other states, because of the prevalence of lynchings, brutal Jim Crow laws, and semi-servitude work as sharecroppers.
Six million people migrated from the South between 1915 to 1970. Florida has 3.3 million Blacks. Why would they stay if they have the wherewithal to leave?
Michael, explain to me, or someone please explain to me, why Trump GAINED minority support across all minority groups comparing 2016 to 2020 elections. This is emblematic of GOP gains nationally across minority groups in recent elections. I'm perplexed. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389
Growing up in Miami along with the first wave of Cuban refugees, who came in their yachts and money, education and oh, of course white skin, most of my friends were kids with far better education than the american kids. When Castro emptied his prisons and poor people, sending them to Florida, things changed. I'm no expert in this - just an onlooker of the time. It seems to have become bred in the bone of subsequent Latin immigrants who have made the southern USA their homes. Lest I forget to mention, Mexico lost what became Texas just a century plus years ago.
Really?!? Trump wanted black people to vote for him?!?
Other than the Stepin Fetchits like Clarence Thomas and Tim Scott, or the nutjob ignoramuses like Kanye "Ye" West, I suspect we could count the number of black Americans who voted for the Seditionist Sociopath on just a few hands.
Or, as J.C. Watts' father famously said, "Black people voting for Republicans are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders"
As another bad Republican President would say, "There you go again "
Projecting ignorance upon me will not mitigate the irrelevance of your comment. Trump's "higher" percentage than Bush's, is still way below the Mendoza line. Black Americans overwhelmingly voted for Biden.
They are jaded with ignorance and not educated. Who knows, if they would of gone to college and studied about their culture and the abuse their people indured, maybe they wouldn't of joined these extremist groups.
Michael, Thank you for mentioning Isabel Wilkerson's award-winning book,"The Warmth of Other Suns". After I read about the FL State Board of Education's new history curriculum guide, I was thinking of her book & the section about George Starling, who fled the citrus growing area of Florida around Sanford (not far from today's Disney World) in the 1940s because of his involvement in trying to organize the citrus workers. He probably would have been lynched, had he not taken that train North!
Until I read George Starling's story, I didn't know how racist Florida was. I knew states like Alabama, North & South Carolina, & Mississippi were very bad, but for some reason I didn't know how horrible Florida was.
I don’t even know what to say about this. It is sickening and unbelievable at best. At worst it perpetuates lies that prevent us from moving forward as a society.
For the record, I am a proud 81 year old American Jew who can’t wait for the Israeli teaching guidelines on how Israel helped residents of Palestine by assisting them in moving out of their homes so they could relocate to better neighborhoods.
Barry Gerber, How about...since we (cough, MAGA Republicans) whitewash atrocities and 'balance' atrocities with the 'good' that they provided....tell me, Republicans, about how the extermination of Jews by Hitler had benefits. Maybe they learned skills in the work camps also?
Republicans, tell me the 'benefits' of 9/11. Let's not stop there. Any atrocities that we can think of, there should be 'balance' to any criticisms of, or the retelling of the stories to identify the 'benefits' of large numbers of people being murdered or dehumanized for centuries, or whose children are ripped from their mothers and born in to slavery for their entire lives. Let's not stop there Republicans who support this.
There must be 'benefits' identified in all these atrocious cases.
Many years ago, I interviewed a painter who was also a union organizer in New York. Ralph Fasanella. He told me how incensed he was about the foolish myth, that because we were Americans, we would always end up doing the right thing. He pointed out that every right achieved in our history was accomplished with the blood and tears of many people and extraordinary efforts of bravery. Honestly, he was the best history teacher I had until Heather Cox Richardson.
Remarkable and so disheartening. The right wing republicans and the rabid religious right are perpetrating a mass hypnosis on their "subjects". Some will see through it and speak up and others will not...and on and on and on. Garbage in - Garbage out.
Far more profound than hypnosis. If you look at some of the extreme cults, the adepts become encapsulated in an utterly delusional sense of reality. A state that can motivate extreme and dangerous behaviors.
Yes, "True Believers"! and such. In a parallel irony, some of the most staunch climate deniers level the same claim at the "Climate Extremists" as suffering from some sort of mass, shared delusion re the end of the world...Pot calling the kettle black.
The new Florida curriculum looks a lot like the over-cooked pablum we were taught in public schools in the 1950’s and 60’’s, before widespread demonstrations, boycotts, etc. in the late 1960’s began to bring about the teaching of a more realistic US history through black studies programs etc.
There is much in our history beyond the gross injustice of slavery that has been whitewashed. The willful, systematic genocide of native North Americans tops that list. It needs also to be understood that the Puritans who founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620 didn’t come to North America to escape religious intolerance, they came here to institutionalize religious intolerance as a fundamental pillar of society. One might say they were quite successful.
Could there possibly be anything more outrageous and disgusting than this curriculum? What year is this? 2023 or 1859? Surely the teachers and citizens of Florida are not going to accept this without protest?!!
'How teachers are reacting:'
“I’m an AICE General Paper/ELA teacher in Florida.”
“Though I don’t explicitly teach history, so much literature and current event topics for the courses are often connected. I’m terrified to say the ‘wrong’ thing, share the ‘wrong’ book, allow students to share ideas the state says are ‘wrong’ … in all honesty, I’m just dreading going back August 4th 😔 Florida reminds me of the ways Germany was slipping into fascism in the 1930s.”
—V.H.
“I am incensed that I’m expected to teach my 4th graders about Martin Luther King Jr. without being able to explain what he fought for.”
“What am I supposed to say? He just liked marching? If 4th graders are old enough to experience discrimination, they’re old enough to learn about it.”
—M.R.
“I’m a former Florida teacher turned literacy advocate.”
“I left the classroom last year. I am disgusted by the decisions the Florida Department of Education is making. Book banning, censorship, and the voucher system are ruining public education in this state.”
—J.F.
“This is a cheap and cowardly move from DeSantis to prove his ‘anti-wokeness.'”
“I mean cheap literally—it’s an inexpensive campaign move to make him seem like a trigger-happy sheriff in the Woke Frontier. But I’m sad it comes at the cost of students knowing the truth.”
—J.M.
“I have a long, perfect history of faking compliance.”
“When people with little to no teaching experience roll out these kinds of rules, I’ve learned to pretend. They care far more about the appearance of compliance than actual compliance. This will be no different. I will continue to teach as I always have.”
—A.B.
“I will not be doing that.”
—J.D.
'Andrew Spar, president of Florida’s largest teachers’ union, said the new standards are “a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
“How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them.”
'Educators in Florida certainly have their work cut out for them, deciding how to tell a version of the “full truth” that many say is neither full nor true.' (WeAreTeachers) See link below.
'Teachers React to Florida's New Black History Standards'
https://www.weareteachers.com/florida-black-history-standards/
Thank you Fern. These quotes paint quite a grim picture. Sounds too much like the beginning of an Orwell or Huxley novel.
I choose to believe that there will be a strong reaction to DeSantis and his fascistic agenda - a backlash, if you will. Florida is not a monolith of bigoted "crackers". Just like Texas, it is evolving. DeSantis is looking more and more clumsy every day. Call me naive, but I had my optimistic coffee just now.
You are welcome, Bill. While novels can be gripping and often reflect aspects of reality, these teachers are addressing what is literally happening in Florida now.
According to the US Census Bureau: July 1, 2022, the estimated number of people in Florida was 22,244,823, as of Aril 1, 2020, Black or African American alone, was 17.0%.
There have been some protests, but no one can know what the future will bring. There has been a strong negative response to the new social studies curriculum. At the moment, I do not see any movement to withdraw or change it.
I want Republicans to damage their chances in 2024 while I am concerned and confused at the lack of kickback in Florida and Texas. Are we lacking leadership?
Are we sheep without a shepherd?
'Are we sheep without a shepherd?' I'm afraid that your question, repeated here in my response, would be an apt statement in too many places in the USA.
We may not have many decent shepherds but we sure have an abundance of sheep shearers. Fleecing the sheep is the Republican plan.
But, they have a shepherd. It just happens to be an evil one leading them off an eventual cliff!!
You have TX agents refusing water to undocumented migrants. How many more are there like them? Teaching their kids that slavery was a good thing and blacks are inferior would not be a stretch.
War is Peace, Orwell says. Truth lies. Racism is helpful. Christianity is a political party. This is nauseating.
Sadly, that last point is correct, christofascism has become a political party. And these are the same folks who sing hymns like "Gentle Shepherd", and "god is love", and the like. Nauseating indeed.
Pass the buck so I can get a new jet.
Read "Jesus and John Wayne" by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. It is about exactly that - how Christianity was turned into a (hugely successful) political party.
Have you come across
"The Big Myth" by Oreskes and Conway?
Is very new, may be at your local book store.
If nothing else, suggest reading the 14 page introduction.
You could do that in the store...
"Jesus and John Wayne" just went on my tbr list. Thanks for the rec, Mary Pat.
Thanks MaryPat and Lynn, Really Nauseating. John Wayne in a shoot-out with Jesus?
It is so sad and yet, there are people in Florida that think DeathSantis walks on water...hopefully people who do not share this view will stand up and vote him out when the time comes but then they will have to work very hard to undo the damage he has done.
On the bright side, he probably won't get the nomination (unless trump ends up in jail) and this is his last term as governor.
His last day as governor can't come a day too soon!
Nikole Hannah-Jones attributes all this to white shame. A powerful draw.
I, too, think this White shame, shame which, either consciously or unconsciously, leads to feelings of guilt, is what is some of what is driving this. They know, even in their White privileged little hearts, what the truths of Black enslavement really entailed. They're just so afraid that their little dears might actually feel a nanosecond of remorse and shame at what the (and by extension, "THEIR") White forebears inflicted on a race of people. White-washing truths NEVER leads to their eradication. Truth has a funny way of always prevailing, even when at a time its chances appear dim.
Not that I consider myself any perfect example, but I do speak as a White Southerner, a Southerner whose ancestors owned some slaves. (My maternal great-grandfather's family was a very old, established family in NC.) I don't know the exact number, but I don't think it was huge. Looking at wills, the house and personal slaves were part of an inheritance, and some slaves were even given their choice of freedom upon the death of their "owner". Finding this out, I WAS appalled. I WAS ashamed. However, what I resolved to do was to turn that shame I felt into a resolve to ensuring that such a barbaric, horrendous system would be thrown into the dustbin of history, and along with it the whole post-Civil War system of disenfranchisement of the Black race. I grew up with and witnessed the last vestiges of the Jim Crow South, which I believe all the more increased that resolve, because even as a kid, I somehow saw that something just wasn't right about that. (This was surely reinforced because in my early youth we had a Black domestic in our home who was like a second mother to me. I'm sure that contributed to my not comprehending (as much as a child of 6 or 7 could) why there was so much animosity directed to someone Black. I genuinely believe that I carried the love I had for her with me into the rest of my life. She was special.)
A few pangs of shame and remorse for the sins of our forefathers is not at all a bad thing, but it's what we DO with those feelings that matter. We MUST turn that shame into a commitment to seeing that such things never happen again. Hatred, bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc. -- what I call a basic "fear of the 'other'" -- hold us back from evolving as human beings. My ancestors were products of their times and did what was then done. It doesn't excuse or pardon them. If I could I would tell my great-grandfather and other relatives who fought and died for the Confederacy that what they did was just plain WRONG. Glorifying them and their "cause" in this day and time is still just as WRONG. I am NOT proud for what they did, but instead I try and turn that shame into action. Sorry this went on so long . . .
There are a helluvalot of whites who have a helluvalot to be ashamed of. And they know it, but don't want to accept it about themselves or their beloved family members, and are ashamed they cannot cope with it or work to fix things, so out of shame squared, as it were, they deny it and support DeSauron and his ilk.
If he doesn't walk on water, he won't have any place to stand soon enough, as the Gulf and the Atlantic swamp the swamp. And apparently no one can get flood insurance. The vulgarly rich will be okay, not being in need of insurance, but no one else, come the next few hurricanes.
Thanks for putting the teacher’s’ perspective out there, Fern, it’s a vital one. I accept that they’re afraid but also know, historically, that if people give in to fear, things will only get worse. Whitewashed history erases the story of how progress happens: through the actions of a few brave souls that multiplies. We can’t give in or give up! Find the few and join them!
Thank you, Marla. I am not a teacher but a subscriber as you are. Those quotes by teachers are on the 'We are teachers' site as listed in my comment.
Hi, Fern-Yes, I gathered that you were passing along what you'd seen, which I appreciate! I long for some sort of "Scopes trial" that would put this lunacy on the stand. It would take somebody willing and able to defy the state, but it has been done before. Scopes lost his battle and was fined $100 (although his case was thrown out on a technicality), but you can also argue that the trial helped win something larger! At least temporarily. This fearful, oppressive mentality keeps resurfacing, so we gotta stay vigilant!
When I speak with my Floridian relatives and friends, they just tell
me it doesn’t concern them because their kids go to private schools. I’m horrified.
Might be interesting to find out what history is taught in those private schools, many of which were founded when public schools were integrated.
My Floridian friends and family tell me this doesn’t concern them because Florida public schools have never been good so they send their kids to private schools. Yikes!
Are these parents taking a close look atthe content of their own kids' schoolbooks? Are their kids' friends also only in private schools? And what happens when their well-educated kids have conversations about race with their non-private-school friends, as must be inevitable in Florida? What happens to these kids when they go out in public, or watch the news, and see or experience first-hand racist activity in their state, or want to or can only get into a Florida state college or university? What happens to your friends and their kids when all these non-private-school-educated unconsciously-indoctrinated kids grow up and vote in individuals like DeSauron (or his successors) because they buy into his lies? Do all these kids intend not to live in Florida? I have no kids, I live in Maine, and this issue affects ME! Frankly, WSJAbraham, I'm incredulous!
Look at the party registration stats in Florida. Republican do NOT have a huge majority. And there are almost 4 million unaffiliated voters. https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/data-statistics/voter-registration-statistics/voter-registration-reports/voter-registration-by-party-affiliation/
I heard an interesting interview with the new head of the Florida Democratic Party, Nikki Fried (it was on Rick Wilson's podcast). As I understood it, Dems in Florida have largely outsourced voter registration to affiliated groups outside of the party, and Florida law says that if a non-party group registers someone, they can't register them as a member of a party, but only as an unaffiliated voter.
It was an interesting interview. She said that they are basically starting from scratch in rebuilding the party in the state, and acknowledged that they have a long way to go.
It's bad right now, and I don't live in Florida, so maybe I'm talking out of my hat, but I just can't believe that the various DeSantis outrages are landing well with most Floridians who have children in school. Yes, there are a lot of conservative retirees there, but the GOP policies towards civil rights, the environment and guns are toxic to young people everywhere--and that has to include Florida. Change can't come fast enough, but we can't give up on a state as big and important as Florida.
Ellen, thank you for your alert, as a result I did some research and voting in Florida has been made more difficult.
'Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year.'
'The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.'
'In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.'
'Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they're organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts. '
“It’s doing exactly what they intended it to do, which is suppress voters and take resources,” said Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Instead of focusing our money, resources and time on other endeavors and talking to voters, we’re having to spend resources to get people back on the rolls.”
'Campaigns and volunteers who might have connected with voters once or twice to remind them to return their mail-in ballots may now need to connect with them three and four times to turn out a vote, Fried said.'
“I’ll be very honest with you: In the Black community, it’s very top of mind,” said Shevrin Jones, a state senator who represents part of Miami-Dade County. He runs a group called Operation BlackOut, which focuses on getting Black voters to sign up for mail ballot requests. They are just one of the many groups mobilizing to get voters of color on the mail-in voting list, he said.'
'Election officials, too, say they’re sending out mailers and text messages and reminding voters of the change whenever they get the chance. But in the six months since the ballot requests were canceled, less than a third of voters in three large counties have taken steps to request mail ballots again.'
'Republicans up the personal attacks on Biden and his family
Miami-Dade County received 438,000 mail ballot requests at the end of last year; by July 1, its mail ballot list had more than 92,000 voters. Hillsborough County had 320,000 voters on its list at the end of last year, and now has at least 70,000 voters signed up for mail ballots. Broward County said its records reflect the totals on Election Day in November, when it sent out 428,000 mail ballots to voters. At the beginning of July, Broward had just 35,000 voters set up to receive mail ballots.'
'A significant number of those ballot requests would have required renewal before the 2024 election, but Democratic strategist Ashley Walker said local candidates and campaigns — like in this year’s Jacksonville mayoral race — are feeling the effects this year. High turnout in federal elections can drive turnout in local races, because voters who signed up for mail ballots will automatically receive their ballot in the mail.'
"Do I think it’s gonna affect the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump or whoever ends up being the ultimate nominee? Probably not. It’s probably your primary elections, your local elections folks that’s going to be impacted most by this decision,” Walker said.'
'Walker said Florida Republicans had long bested Democrats in the state with mail-in voters, but in recent years Democrats invested in promoting mail-in voting.'
"The rule was devised in a way to try to eliminate any kind of advantage that Democrats have gained," she said. "But at the end of the day the task is the same. The task at hand is still the same: you gotta turn people out." (NBCnews) See link below.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-scramble-reach-voters-florida-cancels-mail-ballot-requests-rcna91294
Fern, thank you for this share from NBC News, too. Stunning ... The length to which the right wing will go grows like kudzu -- a prolific, fast-growing invasive plant without a single virtue. We in the South are used to it; we gave up decades ago trying to deal with it, now just accommodate it. This analogy needs to end right here: We cannot become accustomed to this evil that is springing up in places like Florida & taking root elsewhere. We cannot.
Good info. Thanks again. Glad to hear the Democratic committee has new leadership. I met a local FL Democratic leader at a party on a recent visit. She and her crew are fired up.
Pennsylvania went to large-scale (no excuse) mail-in voting in 2019 just in time for the Pandemic, but voters have to reapply every year for primary and general election ballots. Ballots are rejected if anyone forgets to sign and/or date the outside envelope. Dating the outside envelope is absolutely meaningless since the ballots are tracked by the SOS on line but was required by the Legislature. Despite these impediments, 2.6 million out of a total of 7 million people voted by mail in the 2022 general election and had their votes counted. The League of Women Voters and several other groups spend a lot of time and effort educating people about how to apply for vote by mail. As activists, we just know, it's what we have to do.
Unfortunately the Rs grew substantially since 2017 and the Ds actually declined while the unaffiliated grew instead. Apparently latino immigrants from right wing countries may have contributed to these changes but voter suppression laws also played a big part.
Then why did TheSatan win by a landslide just last November? Shenanigans?
(I would not be in the least surprised!)
DeSantis’ reelection was due in large part because it came soon after the hurricane. He was on TV every day taking credit for things the Federal Government was doing. He even appeared with Biden. His opponent got no air time at all.
Yup Fascism loves propaganda. Figures. In Acadia National Park yesterday I watched as a Dad told his three teen/preteens to break the law and lie about it. 🤦🏻♀️ Lying, and law breaking have become normalized.
I’m very glad you did and i really hope you’re right!
Make no mistake, here in my beautiful home state we've gotten exactly what we've paid for in this Gang Of Parasites , GOP politicians. Here, small donor contributions to Democrats are historically small. And they are scarce. Small donors of both parties are typically weak. See the NY Times piece describing Biden's team awaiting small donor funds to show up later. Don't hold your breath sir! Until we shed our appetite for apathy our desired outcomes will continue to disappoint us, as well as the rest of the free world. America is no longer a "free country". The millions of dollars our candidates spend in their appeals to us bears out that fact. They are our best, and surest firewall to insulate us from the current madness in our country. I've found means to contribute more by ditching my fancy Belgian ale hab.... er, hobby. Big dollars! Small ones count too though. Disparaging oneself, saying 2 dollars won't matter is simply untrue. That, or just plain lazy! Let's all stand up and own this election cycle. Please, let us NOT leave our candidates waiting for the could'uh would'uh, should'uh potential small donorsalong with Joe. This election of Cosmic Proportions would be a sad, and tragic thing to lose.
“Gang of Parasites”...best yet 🙌
Quite short but succinct. Well done.
Thank you
You are very welcome Patricia!
Jim, I completely agree. Last election I ignored pleas from Adam Frisch only to see him lose to Boebert by 549 votes. I assumed he couldn’t win and then watched in the recognition that I and a few more might have made the difference. Lesson learned. This time I am seeking every to help good candidates and help them now, not waiting until the late weeks prior to the election.
We must dig in and fight hard and wide and deep.
Here, here , well said.
Thank you for the encouragement, Jim. You are right of course. While it's crazy to add up the amount of money I've contributed to campaigns since Trump was elected, I'm in a better position to do so than lots of others so I'll continue to do so. Also writing postcards and letters to voters. Whatever I can do, I feel I must do.
You are welcome Trish. Together, all of us, we can do this!
Not surprised that teachers are leaving and will leave. Floridians are effed and the only way out of the mess they have put themselves in is by voting out the fascists they have voted into office. Perhaps they will become a state of retired old folks reveling in living in the past when life was “grand” (not!) to find that everyone capable of doing anything moved out of state leaving them to wallow in their own excrement. The Florida swamp grows.
And it looks as if this is starting to happen. The farm workers leaving…
The insurance companies fleeing
Teachers giving up
Looks pretty dismal to me
Other states will be very happy to see more teachers and the worker bees!!
It would really help if all those who go to Florida for the winter would just stop doing so. They should feel the heat in lost dollars as well.
And the doctors and other health care professionals are also leaving.
Christy I am also interested in the accreditation of Florida’s public colleges and universities. DeSantis has shoved non-academic right-wing Republicans into the presidencies of various state colleges, doubled their compensation, and imposed draconian conditions on tenured 1st Amendment-adhering professors.
Shattering academic standards should impact accreditation.
Yup!! He’s an emboldened Fascist following the playbook!! When you win by a landslide, I’m sure it feels like full speed ahead with their goals!
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/why-the-koch-brothers-find-higher-education-worth-their-money/
Somebody has to find a way to dismantle the Florida voter suppression and gerrymandering. They are not the majority, just the power brokers who don’t give a damn about governing for the majority but rather holding the majority hostage.
John Almost all of the Florida Republican House members have declared for Trump—a ringing vote of disenchantment for DeSantis.
Then they can enjoy all the climate change events and the cost of those things. Can you imagine living in something like the Villages.
Great set of quotes. Thank you.
Thank you for reading these quotes, Mike S. Hearing from the students and teachers is crucial; they are the ones most directly impacted by people who erase our history and hide the truth. For this, however, everyone loses, unless we stop the false 'facts' and fascism from poisoning our society.
"I have a long history of faking compliance." is my favorite, I think. I used to hear this from teachers in Texas, who claimed to say what they liked behind a closed door, but the problem is that now I suspect some child, coached by a parent, will snitch. Thanks for sharing these.
I agree. This is different. TheSatan is hellbent on his fascist, dominionist mission.
Agree. The fight, the pushback includes an underground effort. Fight on every front.
Thank you Fern for these quotes from the field. In the progwoman's post I note one of the big problems, that some students will act as snitches. We had this happen in the school where I worked when some of us were suing the principal. As it turned out it was the son of one of the principal's chief buddies who was probably put up to it by his parents. The wife made the complaint. I had something similar happen when I gave a student a very low grade.....I should have given her a F. Her mother went on a campaign against me including calling the parents of my other students one of whom lied and said I hadn't helped their son. These were independent study students and I spent plenty of time with all of them. Of course, I didn't find anything wrong with the student's paper because it is likely that his father wrote it for him. He also turned in his paper without a needed part and I allowed him to add that late. Btw, I had several students thank me for insisting on high standards after they were in college. I can't imagine being the librarian which I was or teaching in today's atmosphere. I am sorry for teachers and children in Florida. In the meantime the christofascists who support Stumpy Boots DeSatan can enjoy being swamped by rising sea levels, stronger hurricanes and tornadoes, baking horrible temps, lack of being able to get home insurance or paying through the nose for it, etc.
Bravo for you! And I have two adult daughters who are teachers. They LOVE teaching and the kids (most of them) love them right back. But the shenanigans that some of them pull--aided and abetted by their parents--it outrageous! I could go on and on, and I sometimes have on this forum.
Yes, there will be snitches. Underground resistance always has spies. Keeping fighting back.
Right now i would say it's above ground resistance.
The unions and teachers have so much power. They need you. Organize and walk out and protest on day one and make a statement. They cannot replace you that fast and the system will be devastated. You will be creating an example for the students.
They will have to listen!
Small note, Abbutt and years of republicans in charge, have left Texas a “right to work state.” Which means teachers cannot unionize. Hasn’t stopped many from resigning! We lost 17 employees last school year. So many great teachers! But if we walk out, we lose everything! Certification, retirement. I’m two and a half years from retirement. So Texas teachers are really screwed!
Understand. My state, NC, also is a “right to work” state. And many teachers have left public schools in NC, and some have left NC. If walkouts mean too great of a sacrifice -- which that would be in your example -- we need to find other ways to fight back. I’ve referred in some other comments to the “underground” -- inspired by the teacher’s comment in Fern’s post about being well-practiced in “faking compliance.” Use all available weapons that advance the effort but certainly not ones that hurt it.
I’m so sorry to read this info. I wonder if FL are allowed to unionize.
Yes. Exactly. Fight back.
Thanks for the we are teachers url: too.
I notice the list of race riots skips the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 which Carl Sandburg memorialized with the most erudite and elegant record of race and reaction to establishment indifference at a turning point in history of the diaspora from Jim Crow.
In these discussions the fact that slavery begins with the denial of humanity of the victims is not emphasized enough. Slavery is an imposed condition of Slave and Master that Abe Lincoln pointed out is not entirely comfortable by either.
And yes, slavery existed in other places and times, but it was usually by conquest or raids which were not based on race. It was western Europeans who added the element of race.
Thank you Fern for researching these quotes from teachers in Florida. My fear is though, not enough teachers will stand up to teach the truth and they will not be given the tools to teach it even if they want to. New teachers will come into the system and only be given materials that reflect this AWFUL decision coming from their idiot governor and his racist board of education. It is just outrageous!
Thank you, Fern.
I saw this coming with the fantasy revisioning of CRT--there go the teachers...
These quotes confirm my fears, thank you. Unfortunately, barring some sort of court intervention, here's what I see happening next: I see the tide turning in homeschooling. Up until now it were the Evangelicals that homeschooled their children who will view the new curriculum as "safer" to send them to public school. It is the progressives who now will have no choice but be burdened with homeschooling their children....
Are students allowed to do their own research with trusted sources and form their own conclusions?
Today’s youth and thus students in Florida do not live in a bubble, even though The Florida Board of Education and Governor would like to see that happen. Young people question. They observe. They are resourceful and are able to search for information and find a wealth of it at their fingertips. As a retired educator, I believe the students will be the ones to call out this fraud. I also have hope that national teacher organizations will have ways to support teachers who bring the truth into classroom discussions.
If they are motivated enough (how many are?), and they’ll have to look beyond the school library resources because the materials are no longer there. What a very sad state our country has fallen to. This comment from Mitt Romney often comes to mind: ‘Corporations are people too, my friend.’ Powerful dark money has wrought terrible damage to our democracy.
Patricia S Duffy - "Are students allowed to do their own research with trusted sources and form their own conclusions?"
Even if so, how many, realistically, would?
Most of them and many adults have no idea about evaluating sources, something I taught my students to do. Someone once told me to dig deeper citing Judicial Watch.
Michele: My point is, what is the use of going to school if you are going to question what you are taught and doing your own research? And would that apply to every subject?
I think the key here is evaluating sources in terms of their biases. I think this goes along with critical thinking. There is a difference between indoctrination and education. What is happening in Florida in other places is the former. I want students to question and learn the difference between reliable sources and ideology. One of the exercises in my writing class early on was to look at an internet article and determine its bias and reliability. I did encounter students who thought if it was on the internet, it was true even if it made no sense. Now I encounter adults all the time who just look at sites that reinforce their nonsense. Often i can't get them even to give me a citation.
Patricia, I do not know of any law concerning the students' research and or sources they may use.
Thank you for this. It is difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on in Florida from the outside. All I know is that DeSantis was elected by a landslide so that makes it seem like every one goes along with this. I know that’s not true, but it’s so good to hear that straight from Floridians.🙏
Thank you, Susan, for reading what the teachers have to say.
The 'personal enrichment' of slavery in Florida's teaching is indistinguishable from the 'personal enrichment' of prisoners making license plates.
You've done it again, Fern. Great quotes and addition to Heather's letter. Yes, MLK Jr. just liked marching! Good for that teacher to call it out! I'd be laughing if what's happening wasn't so outrageous.
All the teachers' quotes hit home, but the one about MLK Jr. felt very personal. Whatever my instinctive connection to civil rights, he was my inspiration.
I'm proud to say my late husband, Bryce Nelson, marched with MLK Jr.
This is good news, if there is a meaningful revolt. We as citizens are being called to partake in our democracy and to fight for truth and enlightenment..what we believe in that is moral.
We are not a country that is founded upon one religion, or one view, but, as Walt Whitman said, we are multitudes.
Fern, so powerful to hear these voices. Thank you for elevating them.
Thank you so much for these quotes, Fern. And that last link weareteachers!
Is it even possible they’re in the majority?
Bonnie, I don't know the answer to your question. What we do understand is that the far-right is doing everything it can to control us. There are differences of opinion among us about many subjects, but this is something different. The far-right's agenda is to dictate what we think, what we learn and what we do. Autocracy, a system of government by one person with absolute power, and Fascism, an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, and forcible suppression of opposition. We have seen aspects of both growing in our country. Respect for the facts, the truth and the rights of the people have no place in their movements. I hope that enough Americans see what is happening, while we loose our our rights, bit by bit. The Biden administration is working hard to combat these threats, and there are many Americans working 24/7 to keep Democracy alive.
It all has become so shocking as to the depth of lies, violence, deceptions, hate, and greed.
I have gained so much information and hopefully deeper insight from Heather’s letters and contributions from her readers to the profound misinformation and lack of actually caring (other than for themselves?) that exist in so many Americans.
My focus has tended to be more with environmental concerns over the years, yet, when Obama was running for his first term as President, my interest in politics grew. And has swelled since Trump became the President.
I won’t go on for now. Your response to me is greatly appreciated, Fern.
Thank you for taking the time.
Bonnie
Bonnie, our exchanges inform and support us. Let us continue to communicate with one another from time to time. This life and time is extremely difficult. Communication between us helps me to figure out how to move forward. Be well.
Agree completely. Thank you, Fern
Citizens of Florida voted overwhelmingly for DeSantis. Who will protest in this red state?
Exactly, the governor and his new curriculum only reflect strongly held beliefs of much of the citizenry. Fantasy is much more comfortable than a true history.
These whitewashed standards are akin to a German chancellor standing in a concentration camp and denying the history and results of Nazi rule --the Holocaust, costing millions of Jewish lives, millions of deaths from World War II, cities and towns obliterated, families decimated.
FYI--a number of Founding Fathers were NOT Christian. They were Deists, who believed God existed and that was the end of it.
Thank you. Now I have a label for my own belief about God. God is there, period.
And JennSH, the mythical gods and the mythical Ronald Reagan are all part of the mix. They are living on fantasy and supporting the creation of a dystopian society. Read 1984 and everything happening is explained in a book written in 1946!!! Hard to wrap one’s head around it, but it is our reality.
A very harsh and worrisome reality…
Charlie Crist was not a strong candidate. He was on the correct side of most issues. A decent guy. But he wasn't going to bring out the votes of young people and people of color. We have family in Florida. Believe me, there will be a backlash at the next election.
Consider that DeSantis has now alienated the farmers and some of the titans of industry in Florida by chasing out desperately needed workers. There are 55 applicants for every 100 job openings in Florida. Things won't get done. Money flows will suffer. Follow the money.
https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/the-states-suffering-most-from-the-labor-shortage?state=fl
I know it's a very tough battle, but the pendulum always swings both ways.
I am, for one. And there are others. Giving up is not an option.
How can we outside Florida help support you? This must be so difficult and painful right now.
The situation here is bad. MAGA Republicans are in fact the KKK, striving for a white Protestant theocracy, democracy and the democratic process be damned. They don't care for the one person, one vote, majority rule.
One thing that you can do is to work with your local Democratic Party to help Democrats win elections. This helps to dilute the political clout of Florida Republican politicians.
For us here in Florida, we are doing everything - registering voters, working with college students, collecting money to pay for mailings, etc. We are also writing letters to the papers. This one of mine was published in today's Lakeland Ledger:
Editor:
The report, "Is student debt relief still possible?" [7/13/2023] sets in sharp relief the way in which a small minority has managed to manipulate the U.S. economy to its benefit, almost exclusive benefit, as the Middle Class is now close to disappearing. The argument comes down to whether forty million students who have a combined student loan debt of $1.6 trillion should receive any relief. Interestingly, the concerns here, is this a giveaway, do they deserve it, etc. did not phase the minds of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and the other Republican politicians when they voted to grant the wealthy and large corporations a $2.0 trillion tax break in 2017, doing nothing for the economy and helping to increase the federal debt $7.8 trillion during Trump's four years in office, a record.
What would $1.6 trillion in the pockets of forty million Americans do to the economy? Here we have a stark contrast between Supply Side Economics and Demand Side Economics. If, instead of giving the wealthy and large corporations an unneeded dole of $2 trillion [Supply Side Economics] Congress had decided in favor of student loan forgiveness, [Demand Side Economics] this would have been a huge boost for the economy, $1.6 trillion going into the checking accounts of consumers. And what do consumers do? They spend that money and that creates economy activity. What did the big corporations and wealthy do with the $2.0 trillion tax break? They bought back their own stock, primarily, doing absolutely nothing to spur the economy and dumping more debt on average Americans. At what point do we start thinking critically and stop being suckers?
Richard Sutherland
Further to the point that I make in my letter, this from a friend of mine in California responding to my letter published in today's edition of the Lakeland Ledger:
The irony and contrast are completely lost on the likes of Trump, DeSantis and team MAGA. They simply look at it as Corporations are deserving because they think of them as “one of them” but consumers are not because they see them as immigrants, black, brown and other minorities getting something that they don’t deserve regardless of the benefit that, you rightly point out, helps the economy unlike the handouts that go to Corporations that do nothing – indeed, I witnessed up close how Cisco took the extra cash handouts from the give backs and the amnesty on cash re-patriating and proudly put 93% of it to stock buybacks and minimal to employees.
Very few... publicly..
OK I must say that the state of Florida has lost its collective mind. I can’t believe that they all agree with this. It’s time to grab the scissors and trim off one of our states. I’m sorry Professor that you had to teach us another extreme lesson of uncommon sense. Thank you, it makes me realize that the fight is on to correct these wrongs and it’s up to all of us to make the change. Thank you. Peace and love always wins out.
I can't wait for global warming to turn Florida into the raised mount undersea.
Florida is pretty damned flat, it won't even raise a blip.
It will literally be the biggest swamp full of swamp creatures like djt and Satan himself
With most of Florida underwater... salt water... crawfish thrive... then die. Alligators take over raised areas. Sharks will terrify swimmers. ALL high rise apartment buildings will collapse with rebar rusting within rotting concrete walls, concrete destroyed, killing residents in their sleep, one building after the other, co-ops all, and Disney will never return.
God, that is brilliant sir. What a perfect outcome!
Thank you TC !
Here are the lyrics of a little lullaby that my family used to gather around the piano and sing:
Mamie's little baby feelin' blue - so many troubles don't know what to do.
seem like he gonna cry.
Oh jus' because a little white boy said, "you can't get to heaven with a kinky head. White boy done told a lie:
For there's a corner up in heaven where the angels set aside
Just for little pickaninnies, and the gates are open wide
Pickaninnies will be welcome, they'll be glad to have them too!
Plenty angels up in heaven just as black as you.
There's a corner up in heaven JUST FOR YOU!
... I swear, the white folks loved to sing that song.
Rosalind,
I guess its good that white folks thought black folks could "go to heaven" too since all the white folks I met in the Southern Baptist Church, no matter what nasty stuff they were doing or how they treated others, in their own minds, were all headed to heaven.
And, many of them were quite positive of who was NOT going to heaven (anyone not like them).
My first wake up call to the Southern Baptist Church, as a late adolescent when I started thinking for myself, was when the preacher, after years of scorching our hair off with stories of how easy it was to go to hell, was caught sleeping with one of the deacon's wives (btw, catching a preacher sleeping with someone else wife is one of the most common occurrences in the Southern Baptist Church).
Mike, did you catch the "corner" up in heaven bit? The angels set aside a "CORNER" for the "pickaninnies."
My family was Southern Baptist and I was dragged to church until my late teens when it was apparent I was Agnostic and didn't buy it. I had an uncle in MS, deacon of his Southern Baptist church who not only had extra-marital affairs, which got a divorce from wife #1, but he was also in the KKK. How does one rectify such Hypocrisy? From what I've read of he writings about Jesus, he would not approve.
Rosalind, that is as illuminating as it is appalling. Thanks for posting.
So Mike, how exactly will you "make the change"? With your pair of scissors! Really sir? Peace , love, AND funding the right candidates might just win out, yes!
Thank you Rosalind.
And how many of them were Florida’s educators? Not just teachers but others who work in the education system…
“1984”
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
George Orwell
You’d be surprised, John. We are talking about DeSantisville. The Authoritarian Regime of Russia!
'Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.'
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.'
'DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate who is lagging in polls against the front-runner, former president Donald Trump, and is trying to reset his campaign, quickly drew criticism from educators and even some in his party. He has built his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on attacking what he calls the radical liberal policies of President Biden and the Democratic Party, but the latest remarks could alienate Black voters just as the GOP tries to court them.'
'Former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.'
“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
'Civil rights leaders, educators and others have expressed revulsion at the idea that enslaved people benefited from the experience.'
'As Biden’s running mate, Vice President Harris has stepped up her attack-dog role, and on Friday traveled to Jacksonville to assail DeSantis’s policies in his home state. She emphasized that slavery involved rape, torture and “some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
'Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to become House Democratic Leader, called DeSantis’s latest remarks a continuation of DeSantis’s “assault on Black history.”
“Let’s really dissect what he’s saying here,” she said. “He’s saying that to be ripped away from your homelands and brought to another country against your will, or to be born into the atrocity of the dehumanizing institution that was slavery, that those horrors are some way somehow outweighed by the benefit that you get a trade. Are you kidding me?”
'DeSantis issued a statement Friday saying, “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.” His campaign did not respond to an email on Saturday requesting comment.'
'Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and author of “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” said DeSantis would gain no political advantage from his argument because “it is so outrageous that people are going to reject it.”
“These children know in their hearts and in their minds that slavery was evil,” he said.
“One of the main things about slavery, beyond the physical damage that it did to people of so many generations, was that it prevented people from becoming what they could have become,” he said.'
“So what if you became a carpenter or a blacksmith or a good maid? Your chances of that were not determined by you, it was determined by somebody else. That’s not a rationalization for enslavement.” (WAPO) See link to article below. Sorry, gifting not available.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/22/desantis-slavery-curriculum/
Fern, you include this piece: "Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to become House Democratic Leader, called DeSantis’s latest remarks a continuation of DeSantis’s “assault on Black history.”
Respectfully, Rep. Driskell, it is an all-out assault on democracy, which includes huge lies about our past (including Black history. ) In short, it is what Fascists do. DeSantis is a Fascist. "By their fruits, so shall you know them."
Agree. This isn’t just a white-washing of black or Afroamerican history—it’s an assault on all US history.
Thank you, Richard.
Thank you, Fern.
The comparisons to ancient history show that slavery of some sort has been around forever in many societies around the world. The only thing that is common to all examples is the belief that the “other” is less than the enslaver. And it remains so to this day. The enslaved were not given choices about what “job training” they wanted for themselves, nor could they quit a job they didn’t like. This is heartbreaking and public acknowledgment of deeply embedded intolerance of “others” across the centuries and the world. The human condition hasn’t changed much...the cruel and evil injustices are still with us.
And, once separated from their native country and enslaved, these people were then subjected to further separation - husbands from wives, children from parents - at the whim, and for the profit, of their owners.
I was actually going somewhere with this comment and got waylaid. I was thinking how the separation of slave’s families connected to the trump administration’s separation of children from their families at the border.
FERN MCBRIDE (NYC) - " (WAPO) See link to article below. Sorry, gifting not available."
[Gift Link]
https://wapo.st/473cuxq
Ron, thank you for your generous gifting.
Fern, first, I want to thank you fir adding this spectacular breakdown to my post. H you ou have taken what I was trying to say and spelled it out rather nicely, scholarly, and understandable. I greatly appreciate that.
There’s not one thing I can add that the other folks that responded haven’t added. I just wanted to thank you gif pointing all this out to us all.
This country has no use gif the lines of Trump, DeSantis, or ANY of the other Republicans who are currently running for ANY public office. State, Federal, Local. None of them. Every one of them needs to be replaced. The Republican Party, as it USED to be is no more. It is gone.
Hello, Daniel, great to see you. We are a team, and you are a wonderful member of us!
I appreciate that!
Slavery, Florida style
• Everybody did it – our kin only copied
[Our kin were so debased that they were eager to kidnap, murder, steal property and buy and sell people for personal profit, and to this day our kin still think it wasn’t such a bad idea]
• Our kin thought god said it was OK
[God said it was OK – even the evil Muslim one]
• Our kin gave them trade skills for a better life
[Our kin worked people unto death – some of them got pretty good at some sort of forced labor before they died]
{Corollary: Our kin were so unskilled, uneducated and incompetent that they had to force other people at the point of a gun to do their work for them}
• Our kin made certain that the prevailing mercantile system benefited the maximum number of people
[Our kin worked people to death without recourse or compensation, thereby maximizing profit]
• Our kin ended it for them, then we changed our justice system around just for them
[Our kin practically tore apart the nation they professed was the best nation ever, by resisting universal human rights unto death, then, at the point of a gun aimed at us by those nasty Army guys from up north, passed a few simple laws that, once the unpleasantness of 1876 was sorted out, they were quickly able to reverse, and thence to enforce via the proud, brave KKK operatives]
• Despite our kin’s everlasting commitment to maximizing personal freedom and economic security some people still rebelled and committed violence in a misguided attempt to elevated their own individual preferences
[Inexplicably, some people tried to run away from, or fight our kin, and our children today might be upset at the very thought of it]
More like pre-Enlightenment 1400s!
John D. Cooper, it’s Midnight in Washington DC, and Tallahassee.
Ding ding ding, the school bell is ringing. MAGA Parents’ radar across America is on alert as they prepare to move en mass to Florida to get that “good patriotic teachin’ for their youngins”
Some scientists, schooled in the Florida way, are predicting the added weight of such immigration (the good kind) will add to the flooding of some coastal areas but El Duce de Ronni pooh poohed such concern saying “the influx will be good for the service economy helping businesses fill open positions at restaurants, hotels, and landscaping companies that current “Real Floridians” refuse to do”
Tommy Tuberville immediately contacted the Florida School System for a copy of the new teaching instructions to implement in Alabama
Respectfully submitted by Dave Fake Bews
Yes,I totally agree.How do Florida’s teachers feel about teaching this travesty to students?I am truly appalled.
Oh yes - many of them will. Among them will be my family in and around the Florida Bluegrass area. They will nod their heads and say this is correct.
I am old enough to have lived through Jim Crow and the civil rights movement of the 60s. Ron DeSantis is not; the Florida Board of Education members are not. I’m not a historian but I know what I saw and what I continue to see, systemic racism and the rise of fascism that are whitewashing our history. As I am an engineer and not a historian, I invite each of you who are historians to write letters, send emails, do what you can to apply your unique knowledge to this disgusting and quite frightening movement. Our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids deserve the truth. Without the truth, positive change is impossible. Mythical belief is not truth, not reality. Please help our next generations.
Another amazing column. I heard and read about the new curriculum time and time again through the lens of the single extraction from the syllabus about “Blacks learning useful skills”. So much so that I began to wonder if this was manufactured outrage with nothing more substantive behind it.
Then Heather wrote. Her analysis of the curriculum is masterful. As a teacher I was fascinated to see how the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods were bereft of detail and left to the the teacher to “Explain and evaluate”.
What a trap. What Florida teacher with eyes to see and ears to hear is going to Wade into those eras and overturn the sanitation purpose of the rest of the curriculum? Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era will become land mines in the curriculum that could put your job in danger because there will be nothing in the syllabus for you to fall back upon.
I give full marks to the team that wrote (and probably rewrote many time) this document. They have managed to demean and disavow the history of a proud people without producing something cartoonishly ugly as other states have done.
The syllabus is a masterpiece of cunning and treachery - at a level that only people such as Professor Cox Richardson can instantly evaluate for the poison that it is.
Woe to them that they didn’t see the lightning rod that “useful skills” instantly became.
Actually I should probably retract the word “woe”. This flare up is, regrettably a speed bump only. They will wait a bit, announce some “public consultation”, go through the sham of that and then hold another press conference in which they announce “revisions based on a wealth of public input”. Then they will put out a final draft, cosmetically changed - the “skills and trades” sentence gone, and to put more lipstick on the pig a few other non-substantive changes. And then it will hit the schools of Florida.
The document will remain an erasure of Black suffering, filled with false equivalencies - entirely devoid of anything that might hurt the unfortunate white children/parents. Kudos to Florida for a masterclass in treachery.
I hear that the number of millionaires in Florida (refugees from New York taxation) grows daily. If the hurricanes don’t drive them out, they will support this education happily. People are scared. The more money you have, the more money you’ll have to eat (“But where’s the catsup”?) when climate change, which the Republican Party and SCOTUS support with all their ignorance, oil and coal money, takes over. Maybe the Dems can scrape up enough funds to win the state and bring it back to a semblance of sanity, but it will take more than Disney money, from a state reeling from hurricane destruction, to beat the DeSanctus crowd.
In 50 yrs Florida and everything else south of Kansas will be uninhabitable. The bread basket will have moved up to Minnesota. Let’s pray all these idiots just burn up.
Or better, accept the truth, move and contribute to their new communities.
Florida's curriculum has become a disgraceful national issue, and merits loud objection across the states....
They elected DeSantis. Reds seem to be very pushy and loud. For instance one woman got 10 books banned. Where were the protesters then?
Would it even matter?
It is, indeed, outrageous. I'm struck by how much of it was taught this way to me back in the 1960s in Los Angeles. It's not just the South or just Florida. I remember clearly when a new history textbook was introduced into the high school curriculum which included the role of black people in American history for the first time. It was an epiphany in my all-white upper middle class school. I am deeply saddened that we now seem to be moving quickly backwards.
We have been moving backward well before 2016 but TFG and right wing conservatives have dragged this country to lows equal to and worse than pre-civil war. How can I make such a statement. Easy! This curriculum is being promoted by people who certainly know this is a big lie and who are leading the biggest assault on gender identity and women’s health. It represents an attack on every value and principle long understood by people living in the United States of America.
How can a Teacher teach this hogwash!
Florida has a record shortage of teachers, because many are quitting the system. Florida Senate Bill 896, signed by DeSantis in June, allows veterans to apply for a temporary teaching certificate good for five years without first earning a Bachelors degree, which is normally required to teach. The average salary for a teacher in Florida is $51,230, ranking #48th in the nation.
Oh good. So, pretty much anyone who is a veteran can apply for a teaching certificate with no training or education at all? What a slap in the face to teachers everywhere who worked hard to become educators. Surreal.
DeSantis owns the Florida Congress with a super majority, & they rubber stamp anything he wants.
Yes. It is so wrong. So very wrong.
It IS a slap in the face of teachers and will continue in the trend to dumb down America. An uninformed population is a compliant one or so the fascist doctrine says. The fact that DeSatan won so big in Florida somehow attests to this.
Nothing new there: in 1985, when I escaped from Florida, the starting salary for a rookie police officer in Boca Raton was higher than the salary of a high school teacher with a master's degree.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that also the spouse of a veteran could ALSO become a teacher.
What an insult to teachers! BTW, I wonder what they will teach? I am thinking about my two children who teach HS English: they routinely spend about 60 hours a week working, since so much time is needed to plan curriculum, create and give make-up tests and quizzes after school, tutor after work hours, spend hours grading every night, and on HOLIDAYS and weekends. This doesn't take into account the amount of time the work during the infamous "summer vacation" where they attend mandatory workkshops, and often rewrite their curriculums when some new trend comes out of Washington. ("No Child Left Behind" anyone?) Heck, one daughter's dreary classroom was not scheduled to be painted for several years. SHE bought the paint and painted it herself, after getting permission from the administration, who kindly offered to reimburse the paint. We're talking a room with 12' ceilings, folks.
Average salary over $50K in FL? In many states, even blue ones, rural teachers make much less than that!
Between irate school boards, shootings, book banning, low salary, long hours--I wonder how much longer my daughters can carry on?
My bad for giving so much respect to teachers, such that two of my kids decided to become teachers!
I think many, if not most of those who comment have children long out of school. Perhaps if they have grandkids, or if the reader has kids in school, may I make this suggestion:
When Christmas, Teacher Appreciation or end of year comes (or all of them) please recognize the sacrifice teachers make for your kids. Do not send them a mug or teacher ornament, they have tons of them. IF you can afford it, send them a gift card. If you can't afford that, write a note or email thanking them. And if nothing else, SHOW UP TO PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE and LISTEN respectfully to what they have to say about your kid.
Thank you. End of rant.
You are correct. The spouse of a veteran can also get a temporary teaching certificate.
You are also correct that this is an insult to the many dedicated, hard-working teachers who continue to sacrifice to instruct our children.
That dollar figure paid to teachers in Florida is an average, certainly not the lowest salary paid. There are a lot of different “averages” given on the internet, but this dollar figure is not the highest, & includes private school as well as public teachers.
Exactly. I think it was HCR a few months/weeks ago who listed all the factors around education: teacher pay, teacher background, state funding for education, higher ed prep for education, etc - FLA falls within the BOTTOM 10% of the 50 states when all these factors are analyzed.
Ignorance is strength. I read that somewhere.
Yes in some things.........ha!
Mostly for keeping a lie going.
In George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
Could be, I don't recall. It was one of "The Party's" key slogans in "1984", along with, "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery" and "Make America Great Again", though I might be mixing memories on that last one. Something like that.
Republican doctrine c. 2023.
Sandy, have you seen this? I posted it in response to commenters on yesterday’s LFAA….reading it, I thought it might be from the Onion…still can’t take in (wrap my head around) what it says….I mean, seriously? This site links to the whole publication which I have skimmed part of….find it appalling, very scary and revving my engines to oppose such a take-over strategy: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025
You should read Miles Taylor's new book, "blowback." He spent two years talking to the people who are planning to "hit the deck running" on January 20, 2025 and turn this country into a theocratic christofascist dictatorship under the "leadership" of their fearless tenth-rate failed circus clown Trump. The only "good Republicans" now are the ones in the graveyards, as Harry Truman pointed out back in 1948.
Thanks, TCinLA. It's on my wish list. Must be time to go ahead and buy it!
Reading it as we speak. Excellent.
If this is meant to be taken seriously, there's more than an insurrection ahead.
Do you see what his name is? Look up "chretien".
Ruth Ben-Ghiat,scholar on facism and authoritarian leaders:⬇️
“Authoritarians tell you what they’re going to do, but we often don’t listen, don’t take them seriously, or don’t have the understanding and framework to assess the threats they pose.”
“Those plans, as reported by The New York Times on Monday, are consistent with a 21st century playbook for authoritarians: Tell the public how you will set up an authoritarian state. Frame your intended expansion of executive powers as a streamlining of government. Don’t forget to repeatedly praise dictators as “brilliant” and “top of the line” people so there’ll be no surprises when you act in a similar manner. And whet your followers’ appetites for destruction of existing norms by advertising how you will purge ‘the sick political class that hates our country’ from government.”
https://lucid.substack.com/p/no-q-and-a-today-taking-trumps-threats
It's sickening. Fits like a glove. And yet there were millions of intelligent, educated Germans... But there was the Treaty of Versailles, ignominy, terrible management and then the hyperinflation, it's easy to understand them losing the plot. They were desperate. The enemy are saying Look, just look - it's all horrible! Only we can save America! And Biden is saying Look, just take a look: it's all going better than it's been for decades.
(And little Marjie has declared it loud and clear on Twitter - nothing like it since FDR!!)
I don't know how the President can stand the pressure. We're all at snapping point. Well, we can't afford to be. All strong behind the President.
A few days after the 2016 election, Masha Gessen wrote this for the New York Review. We dodged a bullet that time. We won't in 2025 if Trump succeeds in getting back into the White House.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/
A most informative substack. The message can not be said often enough... There are a slew of writers who have sounding the alarm for years!!!
I’ve only just opened the lid, so to speak….so haven’t fully digested it (kinda lack the stomach to do so honestly!). At first i really thought it was a spoof…then I listened to some recent recorded (ugh) Trump comments that seemed to echo stuff written in the Heritage Foundation intro piece I linked to….then wondered is this for real? I kinda felt like I shouldn’t ignore it if it IS real. And, yeah, I wondered what it might portend.
It is most definitely NOT a spoof.
TC, I tried to read it a couple of days ago with an open mind…thinking I might understand a point of view or maybe to find some common ground. However, the further I read I kept thinking “wait, that’s not actually correct” or “that’s a meme/propaganda”…and wondered why would they post this? Do they REALLY, cross their hearts, believe this stuff? I try to understand (everyone’s entitled to their own opinions after all, even if I don’t agree), but it’s quite a stretch to wrap my head around some of the statements/opinions proffered. I find it very scary.
Thanks for sharing this. It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who talked extensively about Project 2025 but you won't hear it discussed by our dear mainstream media that are billionaire owned. It is truly frightening.
It is so scary about what they plan on doing if dumpster gets back in !
Gack--I can't finish that article at one gulp--it is unbelievably sick-making. I'll take another whack at it after breakfast and see if I can stomach it then....
"Heritage" has gone full fascist.
The Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and Dominionist groups (others?) are the trifecta seemingly pulling us farther right towards a Christian theocracy/autocracy/oligarchy & appear to be quietly bankrolled by some pretty big bucks.
I couldn't get past the second bullet point. But thanks for making us aware of the skullduggery that's being crafted. (Not that I'd expect anything less from Heritage)
Yeah, you need an airline barf bag nearby to delve into more than a few sentences of it!
Thank you for the link. I took a deep dive on the site. YIKES! I'm horrified but grateful I better understand why we're up against.
Republican doctored doctrine.
The "Reagan Revolution" was always about throwing the progress of social and economic justice into reverse. Democracy and egalitarianism was mocked, while the Lords of wealth canonized. MAGA, which posits an unspecified era of greater glory, is reminiscent of the Fascist harkening to the (predatory) glory that was the Roman Empire. For the right wing, the best days seem always to have been in a mythical past, yet to be recaptured; while for progressives, the best has yet to come, should we strive to make it so.
Alas, we realistically must expect unpleasant developments and losses that might once have been avoidable; but which approach is most responsible for that?
Let’s not let that happen. Teaching lies and whitewashing history hurts all of us.
Rebecca, the new Florida curriculum mirrors what I was taught in the 80s & 90’s in Maryland. I grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a region where enslaved people were forced into reproduction, forgive me for saying ‘bred’. In other words an industry of forcing enslaved humans to procreate & selling them their children.
We barely learned about Frederick Douglas & Harriet Tubman, who each lived in neighboring counties. Nobody bothered to celebrate their heroics, or their remarkable contributions to the anti-slavery or suffrage movements. To think these two national heroes are apart of our local history, and yet teaching of who they were and what they accomplished was ignored.
The Florida curriculum will have its desired effect, as it has where I grew up. Ignorance, white supremacy, and racism will become further entrenched, especially in Florida’s rural communities, where opportunities to challenge the ideas perpetuated by the curriculum is limited.
I was born in the 1950's. I also went to school in Los Angeles. This is what we were taught, too.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
-- Martin Niemöller
And we must speak out!
‘It just hurts me:‘ Florida students left hanging'
'Victoria McQueen, 17, of Tallahassee, Florida, was looking forward to taking AP African American Studies her senior year. She said that when she heard the class was rejected by the DeSantis administration, she felt defeated.'
“It just hurts me, especially as a young African American female, that 400 years later they’re still trying to sweep the history of African Americans under the rug after all they did,” the rising senior said. “The way that America has broken African Americans and people of color in general, broken them down from top to bottom, not giving them the credit they deserve behind the scenes and in front of the camera − it just hurts to know that even in the classroom they can't be acknowledged.”
'Victoria McQueen, a Leon High School student, spoke at the "Stop the Black Attack" rally in the Florida Capitol in January. McQueen contemplated suing Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration over the ban of AP African American Studies in Florida high schools.'
'McQueen, who is her high school’s student body president, already has taken six AP classes. When she realized AP African American Studies wouldn’t be offered, she looked into learning the subject matter in an actual college course. '
“I took it upon myself to see if I could take it at the community college, only for me to find out a few months later, these last few months, that the state is now regulating what even the colleges can teach about African American history and diversity because of critical race theory,” she said.'
'DeSantis, who is running to be the Republican nominee for president, has cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion programs on Florida college campuses. The governor recently signed a bill that restricts state funding from going to any programs or campus activities “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.”
“Ask the students if they want the class,” she said, “not the parents, the students, because the parents aren’t sitting in the classroom every day.” (USAToday) See link below.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/07/21/ap-african-american-studies-rising-popularity/70388116007/
This young woman, it should go without saying, is a far, FAR better exemplar of Florida than its cowardly, porcine Governor
I think about the use of words, Daniel. 'Porcine': 'resembling a pig', poor 'pig'. In our common usage, we relegate this animal to a very low place, a slur, an insult. How about 'pig headed'? In fact, '...pigs are highly intelligent, social animals, displaying elaborate maternal, communicative, and affiliative behavior. …' In fact, DeSantis acts with disrespect for others, particularly, some groups. He demeans and demotes us all by his words and actions, thereby, exhibiting his own poor character.
Fern, I too think about the use of words. Having spent summers as a kid on a farm in Southern Minnesota, I can confirm that pigs are highly intelligent and very social - and honestly pretty interesting to be around. You can see the family bonds at work as the piglets grow, and while they aren’t quite as cute as puppies or kitties, they are just as rambunctious and fun to watch.
But pigs are also incredibly dangerous, particularly the boars. The reason for sayings like “pig-headed” are rooted in experience managing these critters and have long traditions in our language, at least here in the Midwest. Boars challenge anything and everything that enters their territory and will kill you if they can catch you. I have seen a man gored in the thigh - he was lucky not to bleed to death or be crippled for life!
Let’s not romanticize the dangers based on knowledge that pigs are intelligent and social creatures. So are most humans. DeSantis is using political “tusks” to gore democracy. This Midwesterner finds the analogy porcine and pig-headed for DeSantis to be quite apt. I will add dangerous and deadly.
As to pigs, 'Let's not romanticize...' Let's not, Sheila. Why did you respond to me with that admonition?
Our exchange was about domestic pigs, so 'incredibly dangerous' as you offered did not seem apt. You may not be alone in failing to recognize that
our subject was domesticated pigs.
All pigs are members of the Suidae family, which includes eight genera and 16 species. Among those species are wild boars, warthogs, pygmy hogs and domestic pigs.' (LiveScience)
'When talking about pigs, most people only think of one thing – the livestock from which pork comes.' That was Daniel and I to a T.
'It may surprise people, but the term “pig” actually encompasses many other species that sport different characteristics. However, the term typically and generally refers to domesticated animals used for livestock. Their wild counterparts, on the other hand, are called wild boars.'
Aside from differences is size and weight, a very big difference between domestic pigs and wild boars are their set of teeth. 'Although they share identical dentition or dental structures, the wild boar’s teeth are significantly larger than domesticated pigs. One indication that you are facing a wild boar rather than an ordinary pig is their lower canines protruding too long from their bottom jaws.'
'Generally, pigs refer to all species found across Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. Wild boars, warty pigs, and warthogs belong to the pig family. Domesticated pigs have been the common species called pigs, but these domestic pigs came from wild boars, thus their similarities.'
We didn't mention or consider 'wild boars', but thank you for your lecture Sheila.
The etymology of pig-headed: pig-headed (adj.)
also pigheaded; 1610s, "having a head resembling a pig;" 1788 as "stupid and obstinate, unreasonably set in mind;" see pig (n.1) + -headed. Usually, but not always, figurative. (etymonline) See link below.
Quotes about the difference between wild boars and domesticated pigs were taken from 'az animals'. See the link at the bottom of this response.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/pig-headed#:~:text=pig%2Dheaded%20(adj.),%2C%20but%20not%20always%2C%20figurative
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/wild-boar-vs-pig-what-are-the-differences/#:~:text=Wild%20Boar%20vs%20Pig%3A%20Color,wild%20boars%20have%20darker%20skin.&text=One%20of%20the%20most%20significant,they%20typically%20have%20darker%20skin.
You are correct, Fern. I agree that pigs are both cute and quite intelligent.
That being said, I used that term purposely, hoping that the proper porcine community would understand. Sows' ear, and all that!
But we eat them. Denial of facts allows us to do this just as it allows ongoing institutional disparities and ongoing carbon emissions. Very handy.
May I suggest "swinish"? Except in this case, it's swine feeding swill to children, instead of the other way around.
Swine is a synonym for pig.
Yep.
I went to 'swine' as well, Lynn, so we traveled the same route. Cheers!
I'm encouraged to see that I used the same words "swept under the rug" as Victoria McQueen.
That said, attempts to proclaim only the light and negate the shadow aspect of a people's history have, time and again, been a prelude to sweeping human beings under the rug and trampling them underfoot.
At this moment I am, for some reason, seeing the gigantic image of Chairman Mao, seeing the shining faces of Red Guard "positive heroes" emblazoned on vast posters, while real Red Guards burned books, smashed museums, works of art and musicians' fingers, forced students to beat beloved teachers to death and drove respected elders to suicide.
'Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966* Youqin Wang'
'The author investigated the so-called “Red August” of 1966, the start of large-scale violent persecution during China's Cultural Revolution. She interviewed hundreds of teachers and students from ninety-six schools and reviewed all available written materials. This article provides a detailed description of how educators were insulted, tortured, and even killed by their students. Mobilized as members of a new youth organization named “Red Guards,” the students attacked the educators for being “capitalist intellectuals.”
'In those schools, twenty-seven educators were murdered; more committed suicide subsequent to torture. Cruel oppression silenced resistance. Stories about bloody campus persecutions were too politically sensitive following the Cultural Revolution, so have heretofore received scant attention in the historical narrative. As the author shows, given the high regard China has traditionally held for education, the brutalizing of educators in China was an unprecedented act. The objective of this article is to reveal the texture and significance of this underreported and underappreciated part of China’s history. Causes and ramifications are discussed and analyzed.' (UniversityofChicago) See link below.
https://ywang.uchicago.edu/history/docs/2001_03_05.pdf
Chilling. I never heard of this, but (sadly) it does not surprise me.
Wow.
It makes me reflect how Progress happens and those in power push back. It will take all of us to not only keep progressing but fight to maintain what has been achieved. We can’t forget that victory isn’t static.
But must also remember to be careful if we push beyond where the majority is comfortable as the backlash then is even stronger.
I’m vacationing in Warsaw. Yesterday the guide spoke to how much the history books changed in Poland after the Soviet Union released their hold on the country. It’s a real learning to understand how fluid the narrative of history is.
And the history books in Poland are changing now, as the christofascists of the "Law and Justice" Party turn Poland back into the semi-fascist state it was before World War II.
I fear how fluid it 'can' be and has been when entrusted in the wrong hands.
Still dealing with hints of fascism over there, after all, Russia and Putin, Eastern Europe and the HRC combine, it’s historic, women cannot serve, the priests molest, the press is crushed, Russia always threatens, corruption always thrives, remaining Jews flee, yet they help their Ukrainian brothers and sisters, run long trains to Kiev, defy the Bear, and think Chopin... Stravinsky... Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. Where there’s music and poetry, there’s hope.
I see again the distant echoes of the fall of the Weimar Republic. Germany late 20s and early30s.
ORWELLIAN NEO-NAZI FASCISM - FLORIDA’S FASCISM, REPUBLICAN FASCISM... VIKTOR ORBAN BRAINWASHING.. TRUMP - PUTIN TRUTH SQUAD... GEORGE ORWELL LIVES... IN Tallahassee.
The difference is that citizens of the United States have access to multiple news and information sources. Many people, some who are educated enough to know better, choose to get their information and direction from one source. That's the Orwellian side of this whole thing. The autocracies in some countries are fully Orwellian. If the Republicans have their way we will be an autocracy too. It's time to reread 1984.
George Orwell smelled it. Published. His fiction is today’s fact. Substack is not news. It’s mostly gossip. Cable and network news are not news. They are a mix of gossip and linear access journalism without fact editing that drains newsrooms of talent with money and smothers our silent suppressed academia with easy money and freelanced media and substack that’s not well researched. Hometown small newspapers are a mess, dropping like flies, most failing. Publishers - local newspaper publishers - are starving. Many big city newspapers have failed. Most. Reporting is failing. With few exceptions. Magazines are few with mixed quality. Buy to kill is liquidating like the Denver Free Press.
Democracy fails in the dark. Cable television is entertainment and news, about 70/30 - tribal to its core. Not news when tribal.
Ads track tribal. FOX is an example. There are many.
Indeed.
That's EXACTLY what i see too. I hope i am either dead, or living somewhere else beside the Fascist States of America. with Dictator TUMP.
D-Mark useless knee deep, Dollar 💵 supreme and scarce.
I don’t know how you even managed to write this.
And thank you. We need to be aware.
The history that was taught before these "reforms" was paltry to begin with. This is just the Lost Cause narrative redux. The far right has been attacking "snowflakes" on the left for years, but think their own children are so fragile that they will melt upon hearing historic truths. The reactionaries probably think that if you held up books like "The Color of Law" and the "Sum of Us" in front of their children, their children would shrink away like a vampire faced with a Bible. SO SAD!
Thing is, the kids could probably take it, integrate it and let it inform their lives. It’s the parents who can’t deal with it…why scapegoat their kids? Oh wait, they don’t want their kids “woke”.
Don't look up.
JL, last scene!!!
Dang, haven’t seen it yet….don’t have streaming, nor a smart TV….oh well, it will show up one of these days on something I can see!
Barbara, I've written enough in our comment sections over the past year about the sorry history of my maternal family, repleat with the KKK, etc. I remember cheering when JFK was assassinated just to fit into the family. I recall so many stories.
And yet, here I am - a Democratic Socialist and Union Theological Seminary graduate in Social Ethics who had my eyes opened over the course of years of friends: the Gay Broadway dancers that babysat my kids, the friend who had me and my kids stuffing envelopes for Democratic Socialist presidential Candidate Michael Harrington - I could go on.
At some point even those of us who were raised with the deepest kind of racism have an opportunity to see beyond the cancer of racism.
Rosalind, that’s the one thing about the human species I like….we (mostly) don’t seem to have a hive-mind (like the Borg in Star Trek), and can throw off and evolve from conditioning. Working at a Univ for decades I got to witness examples of students having their minds and perceptions opened, widened and stimulated…..I guess becoming the “woke” that so many seem afraid of. I was brought up in a generations-long secular family who, to me, were open and honest though I didn’t think of them as such at the time…they just were what I knew. As a kid hearing words school mates used describing people I’d be confused as I didn’t know what the words meant and would ask my parents. They’d explain about not using those words (slurs) and what they meant, I couldn’t understand why people would want to say such things. I recall as a kid seeing the movie South Pacific and being very moved by this song as it very simply explained so much in a way that a kid could understand…You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk
I think we do and don't have hive-like minds and that the former is our specie's most tragic flaw. Event's such as the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult demonstrate that the logical/empirical content of cult belief is virtually arbitrary, so long as it bars the acolyte from peer reviewing values, and pumps wishful thinking. Within my circle of contacts and extended family are clever, educated, even otherwise amiable people who embrace MAGA doctrine chapter and verse. That's not entirely spontaneous; there are some very self-serving and powerful people conspiring (think the Koch family for example) to set the trap. It seems to me that all cults promote a self-reinforceing belief in one's exclusive specialness as a cohort, and I think few if any people have no vulnerability to comforting themselves in such thinking, to some degree., which I know I do. But taken to extremes, disconnection becomes demonstrably dangerous.
Like addictions of one sort or another that at some point impede our best interests, the most direct defense, it seems to me, is good-faith self-reflection, while noting the defining patterns of known unhealthy behaviors. I think this is related to "The Golden Rule", but perhaps subsumes it, because it involves asking questions of how we see and deal with ourselves, and of the legitimacy of of what others may want that differs from our own choices.
Well said! In my family & friend group most are center to center-left, tho’ there is one friend we avoid talking politics to & she to us, so I don’t really know, but much is implied (she’d be the lone adherent). The need to have “a savior”/powerful leader is indeed a draw for many. Not in my mindset I guess, never has been…lol..was even a big deal for me to join the Brownies as a kid. I recall several years ago that my SIL (then in her mid-60’s) discovered (well, her daughter did) thru 23 & Me that she had a “surprise!” younger half-sister. As is so like my kind & caring SIL, she welcomed her in, as did the whole family. One Christmas season (pre-covid) I was visiting them (out of state) and her “new” half-sister traveled to spend time with a family she hadn’t known existed either (a surprise all around). It was a splendid visit as we all got to know one another. One afternoon as the women of the family (the “elders”: me, my sis, my SIL & her new sis) were sitting around the kitchen table talking ‘bout all sorts of things when the subject turned to politics. New-sis paused a bit, hung her head sheepishly and then said she was SO thankful and relieved, and that she’d be so worried about meeting us in case we were Trump-cult supporters. Well, we all got a good belly laugh out of that. As far as I’m aware even those in my extended family (cousins, grand-cousins, etc) do not support what to me is an irrational magical thinking adoration of that man. The whole Trump-train is the closet I’ve come to experiencing (and only because he was our president) a cult as a critical thinking observer. I posted, and perhaps you’ve already seen this, about the differences in conservative vs liberal brains—an interesting article to mull over and could explain what we as individuals are drawn to: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/
It reminds me of a single panel cartoon I cut out of the paper many years ago: There is a young boy, grade school age, wearing a suit and tie & carrying a briefcase….he is standing facing his hippy parents sitting on the couch. The caption is one parent saying to the other “Where did we go wrong?”. It is good that parents can teach values, hopefully Golden Rule-ish, but that the kids will be their own selves…hopefully critically thinking, tho’ the pull of a large social group-think is hard to buck. Earlier today I read this very long posting to Daily Kos—it is a heart wrenching tale of someone, as a kid, who was shunned for NOT belonging. As I said it is a long read, but shocked me as to the power of “othering” people be it race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. etc. etc. Here’s a link in case you want to check it out, sadly has affected his whole life:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/25/2183258/-I-was-shunned-growing-up-in-Utah-It-destroyed-me-mentally-The-practice-is-alive-and-well?detail=emaildkre&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email
Yes. And thanks for putting this very important song in this thread.
It really does say it all doesn’t it….and set to music as well! Oh, so many many great tunes (many with import on social justice) in that film!!!
What's the end game of this attempt in Florida to create an outrageous false reality? To brainwash everyone into believing that Blacks are treated without racism and enjoy the same economic benefits of a white-dominated culture? That in America today everything is just hunky dory?
Imagine being a Black student, and you're subjected to this compendium of lies. Do you get a knee on the neck if you challenge lessons with the truth?
I'm guessing that "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Journey of America's Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson won't be part of the curriculum. It details the stories of Black people who fled Florida, as well as other states, because of the prevalence of lynchings, brutal Jim Crow laws, and semi-servitude work as sharecroppers.
Six million people migrated from the South between 1915 to 1970. Florida has 3.3 million Blacks. Why would they stay if they have the wherewithal to leave?
Michael, explain to me, or someone please explain to me, why Trump GAINED minority support across all minority groups comparing 2016 to 2020 elections. This is emblematic of GOP gains nationally across minority groups in recent elections. I'm perplexed. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389
Fox News?
Growing up in Miami along with the first wave of Cuban refugees, who came in their yachts and money, education and oh, of course white skin, most of my friends were kids with far better education than the american kids. When Castro emptied his prisons and poor people, sending them to Florida, things changed. I'm no expert in this - just an onlooker of the time. It seems to have become bred in the bone of subsequent Latin immigrants who have made the southern USA their homes. Lest I forget to mention, Mexico lost what became Texas just a century plus years ago.
Trump in 2020 made a point of wanting Black people to vote for him.
Latinos include a good number of social conservatives who are inclined to gravitate toward the Republican Party if they feel welcome.
The leader of the Proud Boys was Cuban -- mixed White, Black and Native American.
Really?!? Trump wanted black people to vote for him?!?
Other than the Stepin Fetchits like Clarence Thomas and Tim Scott, or the nutjob ignoramuses like Kanye "Ye" West, I suspect we could count the number of black Americans who voted for the Seditionist Sociopath on just a few hands.
Or, as J.C. Watts' father famously said, "Black people voting for Republicans are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders"
Trump got a higher percentage of of the Black vote than Bush did.
Once again you parade both your ignorance and your elevated blood pressure.
As another bad Republican President would say, "There you go again "
Projecting ignorance upon me will not mitigate the irrelevance of your comment. Trump's "higher" percentage than Bush's, is still way below the Mendoza line. Black Americans overwhelmingly voted for Biden.
So you agree with me while stating the obvious.
Go drop dead you Putin cocksucker.
That certainly sheds more heat than light on the issue
They are jaded with ignorance and not educated. Who knows, if they would of gone to college and studied about their culture and the abuse their people indured, maybe they wouldn't of joined these extremist groups.
Also,
Wilkerson's book "Caste" which was a template for Nazis is unlikely to be taught.
Caste was a template for Nazis? How's that?
Michael, Thank you for mentioning Isabel Wilkerson's award-winning book,"The Warmth of Other Suns". After I read about the FL State Board of Education's new history curriculum guide, I was thinking of her book & the section about George Starling, who fled the citrus growing area of Florida around Sanford (not far from today's Disney World) in the 1940s because of his involvement in trying to organize the citrus workers. He probably would have been lynched, had he not taken that train North!
Until I read George Starling's story, I didn't know how racist Florida was. I knew states like Alabama, North & South Carolina, & Mississippi were very bad, but for some reason I didn't know how horrible Florida was.
I don’t even know what to say about this. It is sickening and unbelievable at best. At worst it perpetuates lies that prevent us from moving forward as a society.
There is always a manufactured pretext to excuse inexcusable behavior. Bush II preparing to invade Iraq, or Putin justifying his aggression.
For the record, I am a proud 81 year old American Jew who can’t wait for the Israeli teaching guidelines on how Israel helped residents of Palestine by assisting them in moving out of their homes so they could relocate to better neighborhoods.
Spot on, Barry. Spot on!
Barry Gerber, How about...since we (cough, MAGA Republicans) whitewash atrocities and 'balance' atrocities with the 'good' that they provided....tell me, Republicans, about how the extermination of Jews by Hitler had benefits. Maybe they learned skills in the work camps also?
Republicans, tell me the 'benefits' of 9/11. Let's not stop there. Any atrocities that we can think of, there should be 'balance' to any criticisms of, or the retelling of the stories to identify the 'benefits' of large numbers of people being murdered or dehumanized for centuries, or whose children are ripped from their mothers and born in to slavery for their entire lives. Let's not stop there Republicans who support this.
There must be 'benefits' identified in all these atrocious cases.
Many years ago, I interviewed a painter who was also a union organizer in New York. Ralph Fasanella. He told me how incensed he was about the foolish myth, that because we were Americans, we would always end up doing the right thing. He pointed out that every right achieved in our history was accomplished with the blood and tears of many people and extraordinary efforts of bravery. Honestly, he was the best history teacher I had until Heather Cox Richardson.
How many Florida teachers are going to be fired for trying to teach Truth instead of this disgusting revisionist State curriculum.
Frankly it sounds like the sugar coated history I was taught in parochial school in the 1950s.
Teachers MUST boycott Florida
Whose truth, yours or theirs? The winners write the history books.
Remarkable and so disheartening. The right wing republicans and the rabid religious right are perpetrating a mass hypnosis on their "subjects". Some will see through it and speak up and others will not...and on and on and on. Garbage in - Garbage out.
Far more profound than hypnosis. If you look at some of the extreme cults, the adepts become encapsulated in an utterly delusional sense of reality. A state that can motivate extreme and dangerous behaviors.
Yes, "True Believers"! and such. In a parallel irony, some of the most staunch climate deniers level the same claim at the "Climate Extremists" as suffering from some sort of mass, shared delusion re the end of the world...Pot calling the kettle black.
The BIGGEST BIG Lie is alive and well - in Florida and the Republican Party of Governor Ron DeSantis.
Lest we forget, Texas and Missouri are working real hard to overtake FLA.
The new Florida curriculum looks a lot like the over-cooked pablum we were taught in public schools in the 1950’s and 60’’s, before widespread demonstrations, boycotts, etc. in the late 1960’s began to bring about the teaching of a more realistic US history through black studies programs etc.
There is much in our history beyond the gross injustice of slavery that has been whitewashed. The willful, systematic genocide of native North Americans tops that list. It needs also to be understood that the Puritans who founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620 didn’t come to North America to escape religious intolerance, they came here to institutionalize religious intolerance as a fundamental pillar of society. One might say they were quite successful.
Spot on, Ralph.