How I knew things were changing in my community....

[madfloridian]

I was still teaching, had not yet retired. Jeb was governor, and I was finding myself rapidly out of sync with most everyone around me. In part it was that the right wing was really starting to show its true colors here.....like mothers coming into class to be sure we had no Halloween decorations. (Only I did not know what was going on.)

A change in school atmosphere was taking hold. Almost punitive in nature with a new principal. The assistant principal was great but had his hands tied. The boss was the boss, you read from the Core Knowledge script, you read from the teachers' manual verbatim.

Everyone loved Jeb's new ideas for schools, even though they did not even begin to understand them. It was because all around me were Republicans, almost every single teacher. I had never even thought about it, it just did not matter. But when Jeb came it started to matter because there was divisiveness. Vague, hard to define. I kept my mouth shut as a Democrat, and only later did I find there was one other who was. We were cowardly because it was easier than arguing.

Ok, now to the morning I realized the change. We were having one of our regular teachers breakfasts before school one morning. The assistant principal started laughing about something on Imus. I was really not paying attention because I had never seen the show.

He said he did not care what anyone said, Imus was one funny guy. The others all laughed at the event (can't remember)....turns out they turned on his show as well in the mornings.

The next day I decided to watch it since these folks I worked with gave it such high recommendation. I realized that funny to them was not funny to me. It did not matter that they liked different stuff on TV, but some of the things they were laughing about were truly offensive and showed prejudice. I don't remember what was on the show, just that I had a feeling of being turned off by many of the remarks. I never said anything, but they just kept on talking about him over coffee and doughnuts and sometimes even at lunch.

That was about the time there began to be only very right wing radio in our area. I did not know that either because I only listened to music on the car radio on the way to school. So it all slipped up on me that things were different, and I did not know what it was then. I just did not belong.

After Little Boots came into power 2 years after Jeb, I was figuring it out. It was not being a Democrat, not really. It was really that one of the most intense of the fundamentalist movements was starting right in our area of Florida. Al Mohler came from our county, the one who is head of the Southern Baptist Seminary. Others from here were also in that movement that hijacked the church right out from under us while we were unaware.

It was not politics, it was a narrow ideology taking hold.

[shance]

1. "It was not politics, it was a narrow ideology taking hold."

There you go.

That is what Americans need to see.

That is what is killing our country and our planet.

Who dictates this ideology?

Does anyone have the guts to name it?

That's the question.

Its not about religion.

Thats just a comfortable mask.

The onion needs yet more peeling.

Its about money and privilege, and who dictates such vehicles.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. Public school teachers have been my children's Godsend.

They're also like our librarians. Guardians at the gate.

I ignored my first awareness of the right-wing problem encroaching into our schools. It occurred when I bumped into an old, old boyfriend and his wife. The wife was a spitting image of his mother (younger, of course) but she was far more religious than he or his family had ever been. I bumped into them on church grounds so maybe that set the tone of the conversation. He mentioned something about prayer being pushed in the public schools. I actually welcomed the idea, because at that time I associated prayer with values and I felt we had no common values being taught in school and I remembered the old world religion I was taught in my Catholic school was very inclusive. It was very community-oriented and had a big emphasis on taking care of those who were less fortunate than you.

Well, okay, I was wrong.

But here's some good news for you, Madfloridian. On the FoxNews ticker tape this morning it said that a court had turned down the voucher program because it broke a law which sound much like our Fourteenth Amendment.

[madfloridian]

5. Is that the Florida vouchers being given to private religious schools

....I need to look that up. Do you have more info? They are pushing and pushing that here, saying the public schools don't have the money for hiring credentialed teachers. Why? Because a lot of tax money is being given to "private" schools that are not held accountable.

I have not had the news on here today. Hope that is what you meant.

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. I woke up to it this morning to see it on t.v. , but the sound was off.

My t.v.'s channel 3 is FoxNews, so it defaults to the channel when I shut off the DVD. It did cross the ticker tape two or three times before I finally got up.

[mnhtnbb]

3. You're right in the middle of the rise of Christofascism.

[AuntPatsy]

4. They wanted a religious war, they have succeeded, but a war they have not

won yet, all is not lost.

[madfloridian]

7. I think you may be right.

But looking back and seeing how it happened is scary. It was strong among our teachers when I retired. Since we did not know what was going on, we did not know what to fight back against.

[rurallib]

8. Can't wait for your post in two years as they start to wake up

and realize that our country fell apart under shrubeenie and how could it have happened?

[madfloridian]

9. The word "punitive" that I used in the OP....more meaning than I thought.

I posted about Bob Herbert's column today on arresting young kids, and I can see that mindset.

Punitive was a word I chose to describe my principal's style. It was new and weird and scary, and in all my years of teaching... I had never seen anything like it.

Now it almost describes our whole society...punitive. Arresting little kids.

And most in that thread think ok, it is fine.