Kyle at Kenosha, with fists closed

Note: This post was basically finished before the tragedy in Oxford. One of the difficulties in completing it has been that something new happens every day. I haven't dealt with that incident here as this piece is concerned with adult violence. I'll address student violence in a future post.

I've really been struggling with this post--feeling like I need to say something but not knowing exactly what to say. I'd love to get down to writing about how to run a classroom or handle a shitty colleague or bad principal, or how to make the most of retirement (hint: this isn't it). But there's just too much going on right now that seems so much bigger. I'm sure that's not the way it feels for lots of you still out there slugging it out day after day and I get that. I guess I'll do this one and call it the third installment in my Teachers Under Attack trilogy. Then on to something new.

As I may have mentioned, teachers, along with other education professionals and school board members have become targets of aggression in an attempt to intimidate us with respect to how we do our jobs. "Moms for Liberty" offered a reward to vigilantes for catching us teaching the truth about race and racism in this country. 

Unfortunately, in today's political climate this experience is not unique to educators. Election volunteers are being accosted in their homes. Any number of service workers have been ridiculed and even assaulted for doing a good job. We've got members of Congress killing their political opponents in cartoons and referring to them as terrorists. You know, just in case somebody wants to do something about it.

For teachers this is not unfamiliar ground. We were purged at the beginning of the Cold War when the country was running Red Scared. Sputnik shocked Americans and focused their attention on purported shortcomings in American education as non-educators fashioned comparisons between Russian and U.S. schooling. And of course, Ronald Reagan took the time to pimp the idea that our entire Nation was At Risk (a report built on fear and preconceptions), which was then followed by No Child Left Behind (who could argue with that?) and Race to the Top. Embedded in all this bashing is a devotion to tests and scores (in an upcoming episode of Answer Key: "Data is bullshit." Stay tuned.) and, of course, a hostility toward Teachers! Teachers! Teachers! Because, again, that train is never late.

So educators are regularly vilified and scapegoated. What's new? I've been thinking about that and it seems to me that the convergence of some specific elements makes today's world different, harder, and much more dangerous.

First, there is a reflexive othering and demonization of those who disagree with us (fueled by cynically manipulated disinformation). And no, this insanity is not equally distributed, so before your head explodes: BOTH SIDES DON'T. 

Other ingredients in this current toxic brew include the devaluation of expertise (Fuck the elites!), Covid anger, and Second Amendment fanaticism (fetishism?). These elements combine to create a combustible grievance stew that poses a novel threat for all of us. 

So you take a bunch of thugs who are desperate to hold on to the privilege to which they have become so accustomed they don't even see it and you radicalize those desperate thugs by hooking them up to a never-ending shitstream of fearmongering, enemies lists, and victim stroking, all pumped directly into their hardwired Matrix pod brains, and now they are pissed. And they have guns. Use 'em or lose 'em, kids. 

It's the plan. As the great Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic: 

"Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products." 

And the planners know what they are doing. In a magic mixture of cynicism and True Belief, the Right signals its endorsement of violence as a political strategy as it glorifies the Jan.6 insurrectionists and invites killer Kyle Rittenhouse to make the conservative media rounds, even offering him the official endorsement of Republican lawmakers. 

As Serwer puts it:

"The principle that canonizes Rittenhouse as a saint for defending his city from rioters, and the mob that stormed the Capitol as martyrs, is the principle that the slaughter of the right’s enemies is no crime." 

So what does happen next? 

It feels like only a matter of time before a teacher in a classroom enforcing mask regulations or teaching about Jim Crow or redlining, or a school board member speaking in favor of a vaccination mandate gets Rittenhoused. I'm sure that feeling is a factor in schools across the country finding it impossible to hire staff, and not just teachers. This is bigger than you and me, your school, my district. 

May sound a bit gloomy, but I figure we can't win if we don't understand the game. 

In the meantime, of course, things are still happening in classrooms. I talk to my friends who are still battling every day and the challenges they describe are (all too) familiar and still need to be acknowledged and addressed, notwithstanding the elephant in the room. Next time--after one short rant at the New York Times--an excerpt from my book Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide. It's called "Data is bullshit" and I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Until then...