Others have commented on the police response in Uvalde, but I have not. I have been waiting for facts, but there have been so few up to this point. We know a few things. First, we know that the shooter went in through a back door, we know parents begged officers to go in, and we know they did not go in for over an hour. We should probably take each of those points one at a time because each has been a huge part of this story. It was initially reported that the shooter went through a door that had been propped open by a rock. As it turned out, she closed the door and naturally assumed it was locked to those outside. Apparently, it wasn’t.

As an aside, I went through this exercise with our daughter. We had her mentally track how many doors students could legally enter at her school and settled on four. We then asked her how many total points of entry there were and settled on fourteen. Keep in mind that there are around 130,000 documented schools in the United States. That’s not counting universities and community colleges. Could you imagine the expense and manpower it would take to guard each of those doors (even just the legal ones) and to secure the rest?

Let’s pretend that your junior highs and high schools have two points of entry and exit and all the rest are successfully locked down. Let’s go with what Ted Cruz suggested and have one point of entry at the elementary schools. Mind you, this would violate fire code and present other possible dangers, but can you imagine the manpower we are talking to have an armed guard at each of those doors? We are talking about over 200,000 people.

The second fact we know is that parents begged to save their children and cops refused. Did they do the right thing? I obviously wasn’t there, haven’t had any combat training, and certainly haven’t game played through any hostage negotiations. Would there have been more dead had the police breached the school and engaged the shooter sooner? Would they have saved more lives doing that? We will never know on both counts.

What is true in this light is how absurd an idea it is to arm teachers. I can count far too many reasons why this is an absolutely horrible idea. Let’s assume that the teacher is trained to fire their weapon as those on the right have suggested. That alleviates only one concern. The second concern would be storage of the weapon. Do you want them to store it on their person or keep it secured somewhere in their classroom? What happens if they or that location is compromised?

Then we move onto the actual gaming of the mass shooter scenario. They may be trained to shoot, but are they trained in that specific scenario? What does SWAT do when they see an armed intruder AND armed teachers? What happens if a teacher has a mental breakdown and become the shooter themselves? Even in the best of cases we encountered a situation where trained police felt powerless to do anything. Whether they were negligent or justified is important but also very telling when you consider what you are asking untrained teachers to do.

There is always a non-zero chance the worst will occur and there always will be a non-zero chance no matter what we do. We start with the most obvious thing and move are way down from there. Restricting the gun is the most obvious thing. Door control, armed teachers, and armed soldiers sounds lovely but ultimately ineffective without doing the obvious thing.

There are any number of things missing from modern society. Just listen to conservative commentators long enough and you will hear a long list. There’s the broken homes, there’s the lack of God, and then you get into the really offensive stuff. If we believe them then all of these things are to blame for all of the problems we have today.

So, speaking of shame is certainly ironic. It is ironic because we spend a great deal of time talking about how all of these things are just red herrings and then we land on the shame. Yet, this is different. It is nearly impossible to articulate, but we will give it a try.  Defamation of character is a serious deal. It causes someone to experience shame when they shouldn’t. We certainly feel for Depp if that is the truth, but unfortunately, some people are taking the wrong lesson from all of this. I bet you thought Kyle Rittenhouse went away, but apparently, he has been inspired by Depp. I know you thought he went away. I know you thought his 15 minutes of fame were up. I know you thought he would at least have the presence of mind to keep quiet until everyone had forgotten who this little son of a bitch was. I was right there with you. He apparently never learned anything from that experience.

As complaints go, this is a relatively minor one. After all, three people and their families never got justice for what happened to them. They were gunned down in the street and they were treated like the criminals. Hell, you had the judge in the case refuse to call them victims and then turn around and allow the defense to defame their character in open court.

That judge doesn’t feel shame. He should, but he doesn’t. Obviously, Rittenhouse has been robbed of this experience as well. It definitely impedes his moral development. At the very least, we had hoped that he would realize deep down inside what he had done. We are robbing people of that experience. We have robbed Rittenhouse of that experience.

Shame is the thing that keeps you from seeking the limelight after something like this. Shame is the thing that makes you realize you need to seek forgiveness or some sort penance even if your privaledge somehow exonerates you. Shame is the thing that aids in moral development. It’s the thing that tells you that you’ve done a horrible thing when you’ve killed three people.

Shame is the thing that tells you to go away. It is the thing that is missing all too often. It’s missing in this case because too many people have called this jackass a hero. It’s missing because that’s what he’s internalized and so he doesn’t understand why the mainstream media would say anything different. The best defense against defamation is the truth. The MSM has that in spades. Shame would have told him to leave well enough alone. Sadly, that shame wasn’t there.

Sarah Palin sued the New York Times, claiming they defamed her in 2017.

Okay, I will give you that it’s particularly difficult to defame Sarah Palin.  If Game Change didn’t do it —

… nothing can.

Palin lost her libel case against the New York Times yesterday. To win a libel case, you have to prove that the person you are suing either knew or should have known that what they said about you is false, and that they recklessly disregarded it. Malice is the word lawyers use.

She lost. And I think the New York Times didn’t gloat as much as we all wanted them to.

It’s a little thing. But with the way the world is spinning now, little joys seem bigger.

The headlines create the kind of stir you want. As they always say, the devil is in the details. The goal of modern journalism is to get more eyeballs and clicks. Oh heck, who I am kidding? That has always been the goal of journalism. As we were told in school, “if it bleeds it leads.” Well, I would suppose race-baiting is a close second there.

The Oak Park and River Forest administrators (Chicago) have decided to change their grading system. The operative phrasing that catches the eye is that they will make allowances for skin color and the ethnicity of students. Of course, without getting into the details of the report we have no idea of what this actually means.

In the “do your own research” era of our culture we are left with probably the least amount of actual scrutiny possible. Most will watch a video on YouTube, do a quick Google search, and call themselves experts on reverse discrimination. Clearly, school officials are reacting to inequities they see in student achievement. Of course, the question is whether the changes proposed will make things better or worse.

What I can do is acknowledge what I have seen in 24 years in education. That involves the difficult process of taking a giant step back to avoid the “back in my day” portion of the proceedings. All of us walked five miles to school, in the snow, uphill and uphill both ways. We had to beat off grizzly bears with our Trapper Keepers, and we always got docked for late assignments and were ever kept at bay with the fear of the dreaded zero.

One of the barriers to progress is the memory of how “tough” we had it. That toughness was always seen as an important rite of passage. It was something we needed to learn to be fully functioning adults. It taught us responsibility. It matured us. It made us who we are. Then again, maybe that wasn’t the best way for us to learn. Maybe there was a better way to do things. Maybe a different way would actually measure learning more accurately.

Education (like most other fields) evolves slowly over time. Over the course of those 24 years, I have seen education evolve from assessing zeroes and taking off points for late work, to simply grading for mastery. Students can retake tests to demonstrate mastery. They are not assessed penalties for late work. Absences matter less and less. We have students that miss 20, 30, and sometimes 40 days that somehow get credit anyway. They get that credit if they demonstrate mastery.

Is this a good thing? That is the ultimate question and it is a loaded question for those in the profession. Older teachers remember the days when students were docked for missing school and missing assignments. They were docked for tardies and dress code violations. They were docked for disrupting class and other minor infractions. Docking in all of these scenarios felt like the right thing to do. How else will someone learn responsibility?

This is obviously open for debate. We want students to learn responsibility and become fully functioning adults. We also want them to master the content we teach them. The question is whether these two things should be married together. It sounds like this is what the schools in question above are aiming to do. They are aiming to make sure that student achievement is separated from student behaviors. Clearly, that’s not the way we were brought up. Sometimes we just have to learn to accept that and move on.

You’ll recall that in the last session, Texas passed another stupid law, trying to make it illegal to take down inflammatory and false rhetoric from social media platforms.  They were targeting Facebook and Twitter, which, after years of comatose moderation FINALLY started taking down posts from white supremacists, insurrectionists, QAnon enthusiasts, and other weirdos pumping manure to the public.  The court blocked the law in a mixed opinion with the liberal justices, except for Kagen, plus Roberts making the ruling with the conservatives (and Kagen) voting no.  It was a relief, but it’s not over as the court sent the case back to the courts.

But that’s not the interesting part.  What’s interesting was Alito’s dissent.  He took the same side that he did in the Texas Bounty law on abortion, wanting to have a clearly unconstitutional law stand while it wound its way through the courts; but this time he said that the court will have to visit this case at some point. In his opinion he said:

“This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this court’s review,” he wrote. “Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a groundbreaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

I agree that laws like this that threaten what little is left of civility in public debate are important, but I find it interesting that Alito is most concerned about social media moderation but is OK with taking away the right to vote and women’s rights to choose their own healthcare, while at the same time taking a completely hands off approach to gerrymandering, the greatest clear and present danger to the survival of our democracy.

The court’s problem is much larger than this particular opinion, and adds fuel to the fire that millions of Americans see the court now as illegitimate; I most certainly do, especially after the latest Trump/McConnell court packing that’s happened over the last decade.  The conservative super majority is cemented in now for future decades and that was accomplished by McConnell’s blatant cheating seeking retribution for Bork’s rejection by Democrats decades ago.  The court has transformed our country from a teetering and weak democracy to an oligarchy that protects the rich at the cost of everyone else.  The court now rules almost 90% in favor of corporations and has completely failed at its main responsibility, protecting the rule of law.

I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Our politics seems to have hit a single note these days and I would love to apologize for that. However, we’ve hit an existential crisis and we seemingly have any number of solutions that people are throwing out there. Then, there’s this guy.

It’s not the gun. It’s the evil. Raise your damn kids. Take them to church. Spank them when they deserve it. Be good to your neighbors. Throw this woke shit out of the window. Fire the blue-haired school teachers. Get in the room when the babies need you. Man up. — Robert J. O’Neill

He was a part of the seal team that took out Osama Bin Laden, so as much as I would love to throw all the snark I can at this guy, let’s treat him with the respect he deserves. So, let’s take these shots seriously. Asserting that a mass shooter is evil is like saying water is wet. A mass shooter must be evil or disturbed to shoot a room of strangers. So, saying the problem is evil is not particularly helpful. How does one identify evil before it acts? Therein lies the question.

Well, based on statistics on church attendance, 41 percent of Christians in the United States attend weekly or more as of 2018. Believe it or not, that puts the U.S. at about the midpoint in the world. Most of the countries in front of them reside exclusively in Central America, South America, and Africa. Japan is the notable exception to that. Of course, this is the percentage of Christians that attend at least once a week. It doesn’t count people that don’t identify as Christians. Poland comes in tied at 41 percent. Otherwise, every other industrialized country in Europe comes in below that. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United Kingdom all came in at five percent or lower.

Of course, then we get to the parenting advice portion of the tweet. We should spank our kids when they deserve it and be good to our neighbors. I’m not sure about the spanking part, but clearly something is going on when 18 year old kids want to rush out and buy a military grade weapon. Something is missing there. So, I’m not tossing this sentiment away. We can reasonably debate the best way to raise kids, but I think most reasonable people would agree that an 18 year old (or anyone else) shouldn’t have access to semi-automatic weapons or enough bullets to take out an entire elementary school.

Of course, the focus of the message was probably the reference to “woke shit” and blue haired teachers. I’ve only worked with one that I remember, so I’m not quite sure what he thinks is going on in schools. Naturally, it is a lot easier to simply say “woke shit” and not define your terms. I can imagine the very worst that way. The truth of the matter is that teachers encounter the world and the whole gamut of options on a daily basis. Most of us deal with that compassionately. A few of us don’t. We tolerate all of our students because that’s what compassionate people do. We certainly don’t preach one way or the other. We accept. I suppose if that qualifies as “woke shit” then call me guilty.

I certainly don’t mean to pick on Mr. O’Neill too much. After all, he is a legitimate war hero and he deserves our respect. That being said, he is trying really hard to blame anything else for these tragedies except the one thing we know is at fault. It is the one thing that separates us from the rest of the industrialized world. There are bad parents, Godless heathens, and mentally ill teenagers everywhere. What there isn’t is easy access to guns. Let’s keep our eye on the ball here.