Dahlia Lithwick - Call for nation wide school teachers strike in US on gun laws // Andrew Cohen - Our Children Deserve Better Than This
NB: To America's schoolchildren: I'm old enough to be your grandfather; and am not an American. I speak only as someone who cares about the wave of violence that is engulfing the world. I belong to the '68 generation - we fought injustice, and we remain proud of it. It's 50 years since 1968. Today all I can say is - stand up and tell your elders that if they allow the situation to go back to 'normal' after this latest massacre of innocents, they are destroying not only the lives of the younger generation of Americans, they are also saying goodbye to their consciences. Children please understand - the NRA and their associate political careerists are stoned on platitudes like 'our thoughts and prayers are with you'. They are beyond reason and logic. Political ideologies are a means of destroying the conscience. A part of your elder generation has lost the capacity to empathise with human suffering or speak reasonably on social issues.
The machismo brigade can't protect their children; the defenders of 'family values' can't protect their families. They talk about mental health, when it is their moral depravity and spinelessness that lies at the back of this. It's worse: its seems there's a criminal streak running through the establishment.
The political defenders of the NRA (and that includes your President) will not do a thing to stop this cycle of murder in the classrooms unless you launch a non-violent campaign of mass awareness and civil disobedience. Take a look at what's happening right now, at the Miami Gun Show. You have to demonstrate, shame them, speak out at every opportunity, use every possible forum, and destroy their respectable pretensions. They are ruthless sociopaths, no less, and only a massive effort will shake their haughty power.
Political life is meant to provide you with a forum for talking about and resolving matters of public concern. If the very possibility of living through your schooldays is under threat because of the perverted values of the political class and their funders, then it's clear American democracy has failed you. It's up to you to take back your rights. In my country Mahatma Gandhi called this kind of struggle satyagraha - holding fast to truth.
Grasp the truth children, and speak out, come out on the roads. A society that cannot rise above selfishness in order to protect its children is an unfolding disaster. Schoolchildren and their teachers have to take the lead on gun control. Remember the Vietnam generation and the outspoken courage of the Berrigan brothers. Don't be afraid, you've been shoved into a front line in your schools - what remains to be afraid of? Don't take the lies and propaganda any longer. Take to the streets - you'll succeed. With love and best wishes. DS
***************
On Wednesday, as the nation grieved one of the worst school shootings in American history, journalists republished old articles that had been written about previous mass shootings in American history. Elected officials, too, recycled the same threadbare thoughts and prayers that were left over from the last tragedy, although they have at least stopped saying “thoughts and prayers.” I did, though, encounter one new idea—a proposal made by educational psychologist David C. Berliner that was posted on Diane Ravitch’s education blog:
The machismo brigade can't protect their children; the defenders of 'family values' can't protect their families. They talk about mental health, when it is their moral depravity and spinelessness that lies at the back of this. It's worse: its seems there's a criminal streak running through the establishment.
The political defenders of the NRA (and that includes your President) will not do a thing to stop this cycle of murder in the classrooms unless you launch a non-violent campaign of mass awareness and civil disobedience. Take a look at what's happening right now, at the Miami Gun Show. You have to demonstrate, shame them, speak out at every opportunity, use every possible forum, and destroy their respectable pretensions. They are ruthless sociopaths, no less, and only a massive effort will shake their haughty power.
Political life is meant to provide you with a forum for talking about and resolving matters of public concern. If the very possibility of living through your schooldays is under threat because of the perverted values of the political class and their funders, then it's clear American democracy has failed you. It's up to you to take back your rights. In my country Mahatma Gandhi called this kind of struggle satyagraha - holding fast to truth.
Grasp the truth children, and speak out, come out on the roads. A society that cannot rise above selfishness in order to protect its children is an unfolding disaster. Schoolchildren and their teachers have to take the lead on gun control. Remember the Vietnam generation and the outspoken courage of the Berrigan brothers. Don't be afraid, you've been shoved into a front line in your schools - what remains to be afraid of? Don't take the lies and propaganda any longer. Take to the streets - you'll succeed. With love and best wishes. DS
***************
On Wednesday, as the nation grieved one of the worst school shootings in American history, journalists republished old articles that had been written about previous mass shootings in American history. Elected officials, too, recycled the same threadbare thoughts and prayers that were left over from the last tragedy, although they have at least stopped saying “thoughts and prayers.” I did, though, encounter one new idea—a proposal made by educational psychologist David C. Berliner that was posted on Diane Ravitch’s education blog:
It is way past time.
Between now and May 1st teachers have to agree on the gun legislation they
want. They can consult with [Gabby] Giffords and [Mark] Kelly, and others who
have suffered, such as the parents who have already lost children to this
horrible characteristic of our culture. If by May 1st they have not received
assurance that their legislation for sanity in gun ownership will be acted on
soon, they need to walk out of our schools. It would be May Day, when workers
should exert their strength.
Our country’s
legislators, and the voters who send them to make our laws, can then choose:
Teachers and (most) parents for sane gun laws, or, the NRA that provides our
legislators money to avoid making the laws that could reduce the carnage we see
too frequently.
Almost all of
America’s 3 million teachers—nurturers and guardians of our youth—want sensible
gun laws. They deserve that. But they have to be ready to exert the power they
have by walking out of their schools if they do not get what they want. They have
to exert the reputational power that 3 million of our most admired voters have.
Neither the NRA nor their legislative puppets will be able stand up to that. My
advice is to start meeting now, write model legislation, submit it to state and
federal legislators, and if rebuffed, close down our schools until you get what
you (and the rest of us) deserve.
Save our children.
Berliner’s solution
was at once the most proactive and elegant thing I’d seen in a day
characterized by hopelessness and paralysis. I’ve been struck by the fact that
teachers have the smartest things to say about school
violence, masculinity, saving
lives, and guns.
That’s because unlike craven politicians and the NRA, teachers don’t get
to hide
from the victims of gun violence, or predetermine when the moment
for hopes and prayers has lapsed into the moment for business
as usual (an ever narrowing time span). We should listen to the
teachers, who aren’t allowed to grow bored and move on. I reached out to
Berliner—a regents’ professor emeritus at Arizona State University, and a past
president of the American Educational Research Association and the division of
educational psychology of the American Psychological Association—to ask where
his idea came from and how he feels about the notion of “politicizing tragedy.”
Our conversation, edited for clarity, follows...
read more:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/a-nationwide-teacher-walkout-could-shake-us-out-of-our-mass-shooting-stupor.htmlOur Children Deserve Better Than This
This week’s shooter reportedly managed to get off 150 rounds with his AR-15, a weapon he lawfully
purchased in the same society that deems him too young, too immature, to order
a beer....
.. there are countless
other child victims and survivors of gun violence whose voices are no less
eloquent but which aren’t amplified by cable news shows and the crush of media
coverage that comes from a mass shooting like this. Kids like Kavan Collins, of
Chicago, who at the age of five already has been struck twice by a bullet. Or
students at Excel Academy in Baltimore, where at least seven students have been murdered in the past 16
months. Or little boys like Chris Hill, in Cleveland, shot in a drive-bywhile he rode in the back of his
mother’s car. Or kids trying to grow up in Wilmington, Delaware, which leads the nation in teenager shootings.
Their stories, like
the stories from Parkland this week, coalesce to make meaning of the statistics
that are hard to understand in the abstract. The truth is, something equivalent
to the mass shooting we just experienced happens every day in
America. Every day in this country of guns and madness and talking heads
arguing over the Second Amendment about two dozen children, our kids, our neighbors’ kids,
our grandkids, are killed or wounded by guns. That figure comes from 2015
statistics, the most recently available. Anyone want to bet against the notion
that the figure only got worse in 2016 and 2017? Sometimes it’s a mass
shooting. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it’s the brutal reality of the
dangerous neighborhoods we refuse to fix. Everyday a Columbine. Everyday a
Parkland. Everyday a Virginia Tech. Thoughts and prayers and candlelight vigils
and longform news coverage when the body count gets high enough. Maybe a local
news report or two when it’s just a single child gunned down on a street. Maybe
nothing when a kid finds his parent’s gun and accidentally shoots himself in the head. The
survivors of these senseless acts have a right to be as angry as the teenagers
who survived Parkland this week... read more:
Richard Wolffe: The heartbreaking stupidity of America's gun laws // The Weapons Of War Used In Mass Shootings
