Trump Metastasizes Cultural Cancers

Donald Trump has secured the number of Republican delegates to become the Republican nominee for President of the United States.  Wow.  Trump could be our next President.  If so, I believe our nation will survive.  However, I believe we will do an about face on the march to a healthier nation, a better nation, a world leader, and a nation that stands for what is right.  We would become a sick nation if Trump were elected President.  I am aghast that so many do not see this.  Or perhaps it is not that so many do not see it, it is that so many want to endorse and spread the diseases Trump promotes.  I will use the term cultural cancers to attempt to capture the nature of those diseases.  Diseases that make us weak and make us sick.

But before that, we need to discuss the attributes of a healthy national culture.  As I think about America I want a nation of people who value diversity.  People who do not discriminate based on any variable that is determined at birth including gender, sexual preference, gender identity, race, and ethnicity.  I picture a nation where people do not discriminate based on many attributes that are self-selected such as religious preference, hair color, addictions and weight.  I picture a nation of people who promote and protect the minority, the underdog, knowing that God does not make junk.  I picture a nation of people who stand for justice, who do not shoot from the hip, who do not judge at first glance, and who respect the law and the peacekeepers.  I picture a nation of people who are positive, open, welcoming and free of fear.  I picture a nation of people who are generous to all who are in need whether they are our own or are victims abroad.  I picture a nation where protecting your rights means more to me than implementing my beliefs in law.  I picture a nation of people who value the arts, creativity, knowledge and learning.  I picture a nation of people who understand that by protecting industries such oil and guns that we are hurting everyone and are spreading cancers.  I picture a nation where human beings mean more than wealth accumulation.  I picture a nation where the people know that we should judge our success by the fate and status of the least among us.  And I picture a nation who will stand for democracy and human rights abroad.  Those are attributes of a healthy culture and a culture where I would want to live.

But cultures can be sick, can be cancerous.  The cancers I fear in our culture are those attributes that are the antithesis of those listed above.  Discrimination, prejudice in any form is a cancer.  Insistence that my way is the right way is a cancer.  Demanding that my religious beliefs entitle me to discriminate, to judge, to damn others and demanding that such beliefs whatever they are become the law of the land.  Believing that building walls against other human beings based on geography and damning other human beings based on religious belief is a good thing.  It is not.  It is a cancerous belief.  Promoting strategies that help those who need it the least at the expense of those who need it the most is cancerous.  Promoting industries that are resulting in untold deaths and untold damages to our planet is cancerous.  Promoting fear to attain power is a cancer.  Promoting ignorance rather than knowledge is cancerous.  Promoting my way of thinking by attacking others is a cancer.  Sending the message that self-service and self-defense are superior to serving and defending others is a cancer.

You will likely not agree with everything I have listed both healthy and cancerous.  But those are my beliefs.  In a healthy culture it will be OK for me to have those beliefs and I will not merit assault.  Our culture grows ill if we attack folks with differing beliefs.

Given all that, Donald Trump is not promoting the attributes that I believe would make our nation healthier, happier and better.  He is promoting the spread of cancerous beliefs.  From his views of women, Mexicans, Muslims, the families of terrorists, foreign policy, gun accessibility and wealth accumulation he is metastasizing cancer in our national body.  It is my fervent hope that enough Americans see what Trump represents, rejects those notions, and when those Americans go to the polls in November they opt to stop the spread of cancers.

How do we stop promoting the spread of such cancers?  I do not believe chemotherapy will work.  Drinking more scotch will not make him go away.  It is going to take surgical amputation.  Such amputation is only accomplished by thoughtful educated voters.  This fall, please amputate the cancer.

Straight, Not Narrow

I share my thoughts about politics, public schools, and religious beliefs on my blogs.  Only controversial topic left to discuss is sex.  So in keeping with all the headlines I’ll throw in my two cents, which I know is really cheap when it comes to sex.  I do this in the context of the ongoing hurrah over bathroom use by transgender people. 

Disclosures first.  I am a flaming heterosexual.  I am a male, have always felt like a male and have no problem with that sexual identity.  I celebrate the differences in males and females, but am only curious about, intrigued by, dumbfounded by and aroused by females.  I am straight.

One of the most unique attributes of our democracy is our willingness to limit the power of the majority to protect minority rights.  Many nations vote, have legislatures, have presidents, etc., but few protect minority rights.  Since Jefferson we have been concerned about the possibility of the “tyranny of the majority”.  Nations in the mid-east, Asia, South America and Africa as well as elsewhere demand allegiance to the majority perspective.  Failure to do so can result in death.  Not here.

We sometimes get the majority/minority protection issue backwards, but not always.  We are approaching an understanding of bullying in that the person who decides whether bullying actually occurred is the victim, not the perp.  If a kid feels bullied, by definition, he or she is bullied.  In that case the minority perspective is protected because the parents of bullied kids absolutely demand protection of their kids.  The same is true for racial perspective.  We recognize that a member of a racial minority who feels discrimination is much more important to hear than the perspective of the discriminator.  That makes sense.  Most of the bullies and bigots I know fiercely claim they are not bullies or bigots.  And those bullies and bigots tend to be in the majority.

But in other areas we continue to seek to protect the majority perspective at the expense of the minority.  Homosexuality is one of those areas.  The number of homosexuals is vastly smaller than the number of heterosexuals, and yet we seem hell-bent to persecute that minority and protect the majority.  We now allow private sector organizations to discriminate against homosexuals and we see governmental entities prohibiting same-sex marriage.  We are doing this backwards.  It is always the minority that needs protection, not the majority.  (I feel that very strongly as a progressive thinker in Texas!)

The North Carolina bathroom bill requires people to use the bathroom of their gender, not their gender identity.  If your birth certificate says you are a male, you must use the men’s’ restroom, and vice-versa.  I hear the fears that male predators may dress like women and enter female bathrooms to molest women or girls.  I have not heard, though it may be out there, that females may dress like males to enter male bathrooms to molest males, but if our society were truly equal we would hear such tales.  I have seen the videos of local vigilantes and police removing people from bathrooms if they do not pass the appearance test, i.e. a female whose clothes and hair may appear too masculine to the likes of these bigots.  They are women, but they are not “feminine” women.  Worse, or at least as confirmation of the worst, it appears that only male officers and vigilantes are out there enforcing this archaic practice.  Clearly, women need protecting and only men can do so.  What a terrible message!  And I wonder, good Lord, how far have we now moved backward on the path to enlightenment. 

Twelve states have had anti-discrimination laws regarding bathrooms and transgender people for multiple years.  Those states allow people to choose the restroom that is consistent with their sexual identity.  In none of those states where people choose their restroom based on sexual identity rather than sexual equipment has any sexual assault been recorded by transgender people.  None.  Risk of such is a myth, perpetrated by transphobic and homophobic people.  What has been reported is that boys are sexually assaulted by males in the men’s’ restroom.  Rarely are girls sexually assaulted by women in the women’s’ restroom, though there are cases where men hid in women’s restrooms and assaulted girls.  But sexual assault in public restrooms is rare.  It is much more likely that a child sexual assault victim, or an adult for that matter, will be sexually assaulted by someone they know at their own home or the home of someone they know.

So, why write such a law if it addresses a non-issue?  It is popular to promote fear, especially by those who fear folks with different sexual orientations than what those folks believe to be the “right” sexual identity.  This is no different than Jim Crow laws where it was clear that Anglos had rights that Blacks did not have and that segregation was sanctioned by law.  Fortunately, our laws have moved beyond that, though many Anglos have not.  The same folks write laws prohibiting certain sexual practices of consenting adults.  Amazing.  If we now have bathroom police will we soon have bedroom police?

Homosexuality and transgender people have always been a small portion of the general population.  If such human beings make you nervous or angry or fearful, then do some research other than listening to Fox News.  In America we protect the rights of the minorities against the tendency of the majority to enforce their perspective.  Such protection of minorities is evidence of a truly free nation.  The North Carolina bathroom bill is un-American.

I am straight, but I am not narrow.

Public School Atheists

I belong to one of those protestant churches where a bishop assigns and moves preachers around based on, well, whatever it is based on.  So, I imagine the possibility of a bishop appointing a preacher to my church who is secretly an atheist.  Wouldn’t that be interesting?  A person who does not believe and who is positioned in opposition to the church is now leading the church!  What chaos might ensue?  From the pulpit each week we hear about how the world would be better off if there were no religions, we hear how science and reason are in a direct conflict with religious belief, and we hear how the belief in an imaginary man in a magic kingdom is absolute nonsense that lacks any evidence of reality.  I suspect the congregation would shrink in size, or complain a lot, or may even demand another preacher.  But the important thing is it makes no sense to ordain a non-believer as the leader of a belief system.

It feels no differently to me to observe current leaders in the education community in Texas.  Those of us who believe in public education find ourselves managed (in good conscience I cannot say “led”) by public school atheists.  These are people who do not believe in public schools and who do not believe public schools can be successful.  They have given up on the public school model and instead support a model that both competes with public schools and siphons off public school funding.  They are called school reformers.  But I think of them as atheists, as non-believers, and as doubters.

They believe that somehow a new charter school better serves students than a public school despite the evidence that they do not.  Regardless, they deeply believe that entrepreneurs should be able to get rich off the public money ear marked for kids.  They believe that more standardized testing and more rigorous testing somehow improves student performance when the evidence is that such testing may improve the students’ ability to take the test and score well, it in no ways improves learning, knowledge and understanding.  Regardless, they deeply believe that entrepreneurs who develop tests should be able to get rich off the public money ear marked for kids.  They believe that billionaires who know little to nothing about education should direct our educational processes when the evidence is that when they do so they create more chaos than learning.  Regardless, they believe that making money in the private sector somehow bestows wisdom in all other domains.  If these folks believed in public schools they would never support or consider allowing wealthy parents to take state money to pay for their child’s private education.  That process is called “vouchers” and has not worked anywhere.  Regardless, they believe that the wealthy should reap certain benefits not available to the poor even if the poof suffer more because of the benefit to the wealthy.  School reformers are public school atheists.

Public school folks, those of us who deeply believe that we have a duty to educate all children, recognize that we are providing a service to kids aged 6 to 18 (sometimes 21 or 25) that is critical to the survival of our democracy.  We know we are employees of the largest socialized system in the country.  We will provide the best we know to each and every child who walks through our doors regardless of their wealth, their race, their gender, their religious beliefs, and/or their sexual preference.  We have a mission that does not include generating wealth for entrepreneurs.  We have a mission that does not include creating competitors and test-takers more than learners and leaders.  We stand in philosophical opposition to school reformers.

So, who are the public school atheists in Texas?  Governor Abbot is one.  Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is one.  The governor’s appointed Commissioner of Education Mike Morath is one.  The governor’s appointed Chair of the State Board of Education Donna Bahorich is one.  In other words, people who do not believe in public schools are now the appointed leaders of public education in Texas.  They keep it hidden, they hide behind jargon like school reformer, charter school supporter, more teacher accountability, more rigorous standards, etc., etc.  But each one of those initiatives is anti-public schools.  Over 5 million kids go to public schools.  Imagine learning that 5 million kids are being schooled each Sunday in church by an atheist?  The fact that public schools are being led by people who do not believe in public schools should scare you to death. 

I think they should come out of the closet, then resign.  I think everyone who thinks like they do whether it is a superintendent or a school board member should come out of the closet and resign.

We need a Governor, a Lt. Governor, a commissioner and a state board that supports public education.  People in such leader positions should be arguing for smaller class sizes which we know makes a positive difference for kids.  They should be arguing for higher teacher salaries and more respect of teachers which we know makes a difference.  They should be arguing for teachers to take their rightful place in the professional ranks and resist non-educators from attempting to script educator performance.  They should be arguing that students must learn critical thinking skills and problem solving skills which includes learning every side of a given issue and not just the side the atheist supports.  They should be promoting textbooks and lessons that encourage students to approach issues from both sides.  They should vehemently resist any strategy that reduces funding for the public schools and allows private sector entrepreneurs to grow rich.

None of our current ilk are likely to fight for public education.  They have all taken stands that will harm public education.  They will not come out and tell you they oppose public education, but that is how they act.  They will not confess they are public school atheists, but they are.  It is time we call them what they are.

And they should not be running our schools.