Friday afternoon, I drove by a few schools on the way to my own children’s elementary school for the day’s dismissal.  Or rather, I should the day’s early dismissal.  The LAUSD School Board decided to let teachers chisel on their children’s education by cutting the school day short by 35 minutes.  Other school districts throughout the state actually permitted teachers to take off an entire day to protest for higher taxes in Sacramento.

Apparently, these “devoted” teachers who are just “acting on behalf of the kids” have no compunction about abandoning them for anywhere from 35 minutes to an entire day to protest possible state education cuts.   Now I have no problem with any employee, unionized or not, to protest against salary or benefit cuts.  However, that protest should happen on their OWN DAMN TIME. I was pleased to see, and not surprised, that the outstanding teachers at my public elementary school were not out marching in red shirts with signs calling for higher taxes.   Instead, there were just 5 chairs set outside the school with the names of the teachers who might be laid off.  Simple, tasteful, poignant.  Nobody chiseled on the kids, nor should they.  The most truly devoted teacher I ever had, Edwin Barlow, never once missed a single day of school in thirty-five years.  It didn’t matter how sick he was, how hungover he might have been, or if he had a cast on a leg he’d broken the night before.  He showed up.

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The flyers and handouts and signs and banners are up at my local elementary school.  Seven teachers are scheduled to be fired on June 30th because — big surprise — there’s just not enough money to keep them.  So stand up for these beloved teachers — and they are beloved — by writing to the local School Board rep and demanding that cuts take place somewhere else.

Oh, and parents, while you’re at it, put pressure on your state legislator to vote in favor of Jerry Brown’s tax increase extension.   That would be the 5-year extension Brown failed to ram through the legislature — an even longer extension than voters smacked down in a proposition vote in 2009.   That way we can keep these teachers at further expense to our pocketbooks and the California economy.  Not that this is a scare tactic, but it is a scare tactic.  You don’t want your kid to be in a 39-student classroom, do you?  Do you?  Because the sky IS falling.

Because God forbid that the Teacher’s Union should make concessions.

In talking with unnamed Administrators they said the cuts could easily come from within Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) at many different levels.  What needs to happen is that the Board needs to communicate directly with the teachers and administrators in the trenches to learn what could be cut.   That, of course, would be far too easy.

Instead, the union trumpets the fact that everyone — from lunch personnel and bus drivers to rank-and-file teachers — voted to increase the number of unpaid furlough days from seven to eleven.  So while this is technically a cut, it’s a selfish one.  Why?  Because all it does is give teachers four extra vacation days, while chiseling on the kids.  The ballsy, and morally upstanding move, would have been to cut salary by the same percentage while actually providing instruction.  You know, being devoted to the kids.

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The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.

– Mark Twain

The internet is the worst thing that has ever happened to civil discourse in this country.

Before the internet, political disagreements were hostile.  Everyone believed the other side was wrong.  No matter the argument presented, regardless of its basis in fact, it was almost impossible to sway the other side to one’s viewpoint.

With the internet, political disagreements have become toxic and destructive.  The partisanship, the arguments, the daily slander – they have all escalated out of the realm of sanity.   There are literally fights going on the streets.   Sure, we’ve seen it before, but never with this level of ferocity.

The internet is to blame.  Why?

We look to Marcus Aurelius, who tells us, “Of each particular thing, ask: ‘What is it in itself, in its own construction?”

The internet does not exist as anything more than various forms of technology strung together.  The worlds created by it are constructs.  They are virtual worlds, not real ones.

Given that the internet itself is not human, our interaction with it only serves to depersonalize the communication it allegedly facilitates.  In point of fact, interpersonal communication has eroded since the internet became ubiquitous.

With depersonalization comes dehumanization.   We now see the Other as more inhuman than ever before, because we now longer see him face-to-face, or eye-to-eye.

All we see are the Other’s words, taken out of context, printed, reprinted, disseminated, distorted, and reworked to fit an agenda.  No different perhaps than traditional print media, except now the misinformation is created and distributed instantaneously.  With each successive iteration, the original text, subtext, and context are stripped away.  In the end, there is no there, there.

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