In Iran, The Children Are Not All Right

Hamas has long established a combination of an educational curriculum brainwashing pupils to hate and kill Jews and military boot camp for gym classes wherein the skills necessary to apply the lessons are taught and learned. The IslamoNazi Gaza leadership took its cue from the best. No country has the proven history of sacrificing its young for war time or political objectives than Iran, unless you go back to 1945 when Hitler pulled teens from school to fight the incoming allies.  The IRGC announced it is recruiting and encouraging twelve-year-olds to join in ‘non-combat’ military operations such as logistics and checkpoints.

This is not exactly the same pay grade as washing a blackboard. Checkpoints and logistics are military targets in war times. All these kids now work in high-risk areas, especially with an enemy whose primary strategy is attacking from the airHamas has long established a combination of an educational curriculum brainwashing pupils to hate and kill Jews and military boot camp for gym classes wherein the skills necessary to apply the lessons are taught and learned.  The IslamoNazi Gaza leadership took its cue from the best. No country has the proven history of sacrificing its young for war time objectives than Iran, unless you go back to 1945 when Hitler pulled teens from class to fight the incoming allies.  The IRGC announced it is recruiting and encouraging twelve-year-olds to join in ‘non-combat’ military operations such as logistics and checkpoints.

This is not exactly the same pay grade as washing a blackboard. Checkpoints and logistics are military targets in war times. All these kids now work in high-risk areas, especially with an enemy whose primary strategy is attacking from the air using multiple weapons. In the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, close to 40,000 Iranian 16-20 year olds died in the war. Many between 12 and fifteen also perished. Thousands of them were blown apart as human mine detectors. They wore keys to show their permission to enter paradise as martyrs. Don’t worry, we’ll leave a light on fer ya.

 We now have the specter of a ground war as more troops—10,000, approximately—newly arrived in the region. Who really believes these kids will not be engaged in real combat situations in a wider war? Iran believes a ground war is coming, and they are preparing.  The military wants their expendable pubescent corps in place for wherever needed to plow the road for its soldiers. Don’t ask how many high-school age teens are among them. using multiple weapons. In the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, close to 40,000. Thousands of them were blown apart as human mine detectors. They wore keys to show their permission to enter paradise as martyrs. Don’t worry, we’ll leave a light on fer ya.

 We now have the specter of a ground war as more troops—10,000, approximately—newly arrived in the region. Who really believes these kids will not be engaged in real combat situations in a wider war? Iran believes a ground war is coming, and they are preparing.  The military wants their expendable pubescent corps in place for wherever needed to plow the road for its soldiers. Don’t ask how many middle and high-school aged teens are among them.

Recently a promising nineteen-year-old wrestler was hanged publicly for participating in the demonstrations for a modern, democratic society One of 50,000 mostly young protest victims of the tyrannous state of Iran. While the provilegesd college teens ion Ameericxan colleges and unicersities ask “When will this war end?” Their Iranian counterparts ask the same question for a different kind of war.

Two Wars, Same Old Story

                  

Early in the war sparked by the ineffably sadistic carnage of Hamas’ Oct 7, 2023 invasion, a Gaza hospital suffered an explosion caused by ordnance. International IslamoNazi sympathizers gleefully jumped all over the Jewish state, relishing an opportunity to show the inhumanity of one of the planet’s most humane nations. The percussive cacophony accused the Jewish-majority state of war crimes and genocide. Deliberate act? accidental? Who cared?! It was Israel bashing time once more. Oh happy days are here again. The death toll climbed faster than you could say Mehdi Assan-- 40, 50, 200, 500, 900. Going once, going twice, SOLD! Jew-hating Israelophobic propaganda brought to you by the Hamas auctioneers. In the face of irrefutable proof, Hamas admitted an own goal, a failed rocket hit their own hospital. The Hamas official death toll dropped faster than a hippo tied to a bungee cord; 50 became the new 900.  

        A short time into the war against Iran, media began reporting a girls school was bombed by the US or, if you were al Jazeera, Israel. The death toll was reported around 175, mostly female elementary ‘students.     

 Wash, rinse, repeat.

The Minab school incident evinced the lack of journalistic standards in today’s reporting on anything in the Mideast.  Given the decades’ long buildup of an Islamist propaganda network to overwhelm the news with their own narrative, very similar to the Republican conservative model begun in the ‘70s, one would think real journalists would cast suspicion on initial reports from IslamoNazi sources –especially from the at-war-with-the West terre de couer du terrorisme, Iran.

 The issue is the process, not whether the initial reporting proved correct. News media flushed their outlets with the Iranian death count, information received without the newsperson’s skeptical eye. In the Gaza hospital incident and the wider war, we know Hamas inflated casualty numbers by including everyone who died regardless of cause or time. The reality was ignored for the better story of blaming Israel for bombing a hospital and a three-digit death count. The Iranian figures were absent reliable confirming evidence, breakdowns of the casualties, circumstances and background story. In the case of the Al-Ahli Gaza hospital, the media remained steadfastly unconvinced of Israeli disclaimers. In the end, the media grudgingly reported the truth, licking its wounds and waiting for revenge.

 When Trump stated an Iranian missile hit the Minab school, the media chorus shouted “Prove it!” Good for them—but where was that backbone when the US/Israel was accused?  

It took days for news media to note the school building’s active military history and its location on the IRGC naval complex. This was the segue to launch negative reaction to Trump, Israel, and the war. “Why didn’t the US know it was a school?”  came the accusatory posit. Well, why didn’t you, the press, try to find out by investigating before going public?  TGBL believes they didn’t want to know. If it were found to still be used for military purposes of any kind, it would then become a legitimate target, regardless if it fronted as a school. Their drama ballon filled with indignation would go boom as if struck by an IED—and a good anti-Trump, anti-Israel narrative blows up.

Not one reporter or commentator asked another relevant question: If there was a war going on, why would the school still conduct classes on prime real estate for targeting? Or locate one in a prime enemy target? Instead of digging for an answer, the media took a page out of the lawyer’s playbook: Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. The Iranians  co-opted Hamas’ education rule number one—dead kids, especially girls, make terrific propaganda against Little Satan and Big Satan. This was the answer the mostly left media didn’t want to know.

 

What Bondi Beach Means to Me

It took Elie Wiesel a full ten years to come to grips with the Holocaust before producing a masterpiece of 20th Century literature, “Night”. I did not require Weisel’s long walkabout of the soul; I had no family suffer in the Australian massacre.  However, in my own humble, Jewish way I had to absorb the Bondi mass murder. I needed to process its meaning before writing about it.  

The 1200 people killed by Hamas and its allies roughly equal the same number of Jews rescued by Oskar Schindler. The 1993 movie’s postscript noted that their descendants were approaching 10,000. Given the number of young people and babies murdered by IslamoNazis on Oct 7 alone, the Jewish people suffered the loss of generations far greater than the number of his rescued progeny. The PalArab population has grown significantly since 1967, adding to the 1.5 billion Muslims, approximately 20% of the world’s people. The Jews continue their desperate but determined battle to regenerate out of the ashes from 100 years ago. From thousands of years ago. And one of the largest majority groups in the world keeps killing them.  IslamoNazis, joined by  Western  progressive national socialist democrats and neo-Nazi Christian nationalists, accuse Jews—0.02% of the global population--of genocide against a minority. As characters in Stranger Things would say, we live in the Upside Down.

 IslamoNazis vow future Oct 7’s, its “resistance” against Jewish men, women, and children, be it those who are taking their first breaths or those whose lungs have breathed the air of Auschwitz. Shooting, gassing, burning, raping , beating Jews constitute the poisoned culture in its war on Judaica. It is a long established Islamic norm, practiced before the current iteration of the state of Israel; barbarity handed down like a precious heirloom, bellowing its Jewicidal orders of jihad across history, reverberating from its 7th Century origins into the 21st.

IslamoNazis, euphemistically called pro-Palestinians, claim a divine right to commit “by any means necessary” all crimes against Jews, a self-licensed power granted to themselves  using “opposition to Israeli policy” as the pretext for legal immunity. Any Israel-hating anti-semite presides over their street-held kangaroo courts, as  judge, jury, and executioner simultaneously with every attack; the guilty verdict for being Jewish never wavers,  punished always by death.

 Allah’s messenger said, “The hour will not be established until You fight with the Jews. And the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me so kill him! (Book 56, Hadith 139, quoted from SUNNAH.COM)).

 

Be they Romans, Christians, EuroNazis or Islamist ones, all have delivered a Sophie’s choice to Jews throughout the ages: convert or die.  The accusers protest an apartheid Israel in the streets, on campuses, at government halls but are themselves the most severe practitioners. They demand Jews be subjugated, isolated, scorned, separated, excluded from all aspects of society—the very definition of apartheid.

 “Break the mind, break the heart, break the spirit”, the German Nazi mantra motivating their unspeakable onslaught against Jews, emulated by their myriad anti-Semitic, anti-Israel enablers.  With relentless assault and societal excoriation, they want to kill the soul’s Jewish existence by exacting a price too high to continue Jewish identity--epitomized  on a beach where Hanukkah celebrants were shot to pieces on the happiest of Jewish holidays. Either way, the Jew dies, spiritually and/or physically.  Oct 7 wasn’t new, only the latest clarion call from hell, the global intifada’s signal that the extermination of the Jews has begun anew.

 Jews are not hated because of Israel--Israel is hated because of its Jewishness. Arbeit Macht Frei morphed into Globalize the Intifada. For the Jewhating Israelophobic world, Zionists have no rights or freedoms, whether for the individual Jew or the world’s only Jewish nation. Any act of self defense is a crime because they believe, like their 20th century mentors, the very existence of Jewish life—or a Jewish nation in their ancestral homeland, or anywhere else for that matter—is inherently illegitimate. 

Israel’s founding by international law and then its defense in the 1948 War of Independence broke the Islamic monopoly in the midEast. The Naqba is the Arabs’ five armies’ failure to finish what Nazi Germany started—Jewish annihilation. Oct 7, Bondi and every attack before represent a proxy victory to redo history for the multiple defeats in the wars the Islamists started.  Peace is not a goal; it is strategic propaganda for the western mind. The intoxicating joy they felt at the horrific crimes and truce-breaking invasion on Simchat Torah in 2023 clearly shows a greater love of mass murder of Jews than a wish for cessation of hostilities.

  If you still remain perplexed why no Palestinian Arab state exists in Judea/Sumaria, or why peace has been so unattainable, you will find all your answers in the bloodied sands of Bondi Beach.

 

Janus 1: The Richest Man, the Poorest Kids, the Cruellest Bite

While the rest of the world gets ready to celebrate the New Year 2026 (Happy will have to wait until the jury comes back), K-12 schools will round second as their year passes the halfway mark, and college-level will head into the next semester. With the Trump administration having taken the reins of government in January, the consequences of the 2024 election writ large.

But President Trump’s hand is not the only one shaping the education world. Looking into a crystal ball filled with a swirling whiteout enveloped in an opaque fog, The Green B identifies issues that will continue dominating and influencing education ecology as all their tributaries conflate the K-H Ed universe in which students live.  Consider the recent Hello Measles, My Old Friend, commentary on RFK and his HHS leadership the “soft opening” of several “Janus” essays on where we came from, where we are, and where it may lead as we journey ahead through the headwinds blowing 2026 ever closer.

LeatherMusk’s atomic chainsaw gnashed a future nuclear winter for decades to come. A major study by international scholars published the findings in the Lancelet, a well-respected medical journal. Among their predictions is 4.5 million children dead by 2030, a rate of 700,000 per year; 14 million adults as well. A staggering 91 million lives served and saved by USAID from 2001-2021. The lethal DOGE weapon chopped and mutilated programs in nutrition, medical care, education, cutting off access to impoverished populations looking to the rich, democratic, and humanitarian America as the god-send the USA is idolized for. As of November, Boston University’s Brooke Nichols said in the New Yorker the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children, have already succumbed to the fatal dismemberment of life saving programs. As William Gates said so savagely, sarcastically  correct: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times. Gates added “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money”.

We now witness a mass killing, based not on ethnicity or religion, but a genocide in the name of the wealthy class. Let them eat…nothing. The Trump-Musk version spins Hitler’s unnutzer Esser, the “useless eaters” euthanized by the Reich because they were a burden on the govt, a cost center, a noble sacrifice of the most vulnerable on the socioeconomic scale for the state’s greater good. Hitler was preparing for a war effort; Trump for filling the budget gaps of a gargantuan tax break for the monied elite.  

 We have yet to see the domestic and geopolitical ramifications looming large on the horizon. Prof Nichols’ scenarios include government instability, with a United States now resented by embittered survivors and their shaken leaders. Payback is a bitch, and the debt may come due anytime between now and the next whenever. If Democrats gain control of the House and or Senate in 2026, and the White House in 2028, they may resurrect USAID or build something similar to stem the ineffable numbers worked out by the mathematical models as reported in Lancelet. It may be too late by then. What the chainsaw takes apart is not so easily put back whole. The dead will not revive, and the luster of democracy’s humanitarianism will be dulled by its own cruelty, a worthy target of a tyrant’s mockery.  

With a billion dollars’ worth of aid and invaluable American goodwill rotting around the world, is there anything more fraudulent, wasteful, and abusive than the now flamed-out DOGE?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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BEELINES

Sunday, Sept. 28, 2025…Trump raising import taxes on medicines by 100%, risking more family social instability and personal financial chaos. Whatever happened to Republican family values?  Maybe they never really understood what that meant…RFK said in a Congressional hearing “I don’t think people should take medical advice from me”. Well, STOP GIVING IT! The Tylenol turmoil created by the Secretary and Trump further sabotages our country’s wellness—especially pregnant women—to a dangerous level of ignorance and hostility to modern medicine. Speak with a trusted, competent doctor for professional opinions on this issue…Kimmel’s return was a First Amendment victory in America’s battle to keep it…We are only in Trump’s 9th month. His administration’s blitzkrieg against America’s Constitutional architecture has left it in ruins with more attacks in the offing. Good luck to social studies teachers trying to explain American democracy… Comey indictment one more nail in the coffin of American freedom as we knew it…Comey boldly stated on Instagram to bring on his trial—that he’s looking forward to it. J Edgar Hoover, the drag queen who headed the FBI for decades was famous for his trove of sleazy, confidential files on just about every VIP, blackmail material for all. No doubt Comey has his own private dossier of notes, in a locked draw or in his head. What better place than under oath in a courtroom to reveal more on Trump’s dubious presidential actions. The question is: Will the Epstein file damage Trump more than Comey’s dirt?...if anyone thought Biden’s pardon of son Hunter was illegitimate, this administration’s trampling of the DOJ for the retributive list of the president’s messenger vitiates that position. For a president accused of being too feeble and cognitively deficient, Ol’ Joe was smarter than all of you.

Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2025…Russia has kidnapped at least 20,000 kids according to Ukraine’s “Bring Kids Back”, an unconscionable crime too little discussed…While we’re at uit, I have not heard or seen a word of protest from national socialist progressives against Russia’s crimes and its imperial aims in Europe, not the IslamoNazi’s mass murder and enslavement across Africa. Very selective outrage and self-righteous declarations of morality. Kids are suffering horrifically on a scale of millions, but only silence from the progressive front...A 27 year old coach was shot in the shoulder and airlifted from the field for medical attention. Apparently a recreational shooting was taking place in proximity to the field and a stray bullet hit him. You can’t make this stuff up.

Thursday, June 1, 2023. As the underpinnings of our government and society seem to be unraveling, the longstanding respect for sportsmanship also has gone out of bounds. Parents and athletes both have shown an unhinged willingness to attack the referees, the coaches, the other teams, each other. It is a metaphor for our times…The Republican Party, long the self-proclaimed party of family rights and minimal government interference in our day-to-day lives, has declared war on family decision making and young people. The entire LGBTQ community, pregnant women, Holocaust studies, entertainment decisions, child labor laws—even the country itself by kidnapping the debt ceiling and demanding ransom-- all under a fusillade by an increasingly authoritarian, reactionary unhinged GOP…Not to be outdone, the national; socialist Democrats, led by Tlaib the Terrible, staunch Israelophobic and Palestinian jihadist, held a Nakba event in the Capitol Building. This get-together was an orgy of Jewhatred never seen in Congress. While Speaker McCarthy denied them the public flogging of the world’s only Jewish majority state, the Squad’s pet Jew, Sen Sanders, rushed to their rescue, finding a Senate room for them, thereby giving the event an ersatz patina of respectability…Now that a deb celling deal has been reached, I can’t say I’m not disappointed President Biden did not invoke the 14th Amendment. It would’ve have vitiated budget terrorism forever. It would ‘ve backed into a corner all the strict constructionists” who say do what the Constitution says the way it was written. “The validity of the public debt…shall not be questioned.” It would force these mostly hard right wingers to decide on their oft-invoked principle or their politics. Would’ve been fun.

 Tuesday, April 25,2023. According to news media and a UN report, over 500 children have been killed in the Russian attack on Ukraine. Defectors from the Wagner Group, the mercenary outfit supplying thugs for Putin’s wet dream, have confessed to executing about forty of threm. Europe hasn’t seen such savagery since the Third Reich…Russia has also transported Ukrainian children to Russia for repatriation. The sadistic nature of such a policy recalls the cruelty of Trump-era kidnapping and family demolition at the US southern border.  As of Feb 2023, nearly 1,000 kids are still separated from their families, according to Reuters…A shocking study by the CDC sounds the alarm on the deteriorating mental and emotional health of our young people. To Democrats and Republicans, I’ll repeat law officer Jim Malone’s mantra to Eliot Ness in The Untouchables: “What are you prepared to do!?”…As George Santos (R-NY) sports an AR-15 lapel pin advocating it be named the country’s national gun, I have only one question for the voters of New York’s 3rd Congressional District: “What are you prepared to do?”

Wednesday, Mar 22, 2023…A new competition is on among the Red states. Which self-proclaimed but misnomered “pro-life” government will be the first to execute a 16-year-old girl for aborting a pregnancy, a proposal being led by South Carolina…Ron DeSantis and his state GOP now want bloggers located in Florida who write about politics register with his regime. The mere suggestion reeks of Nazi Germany’s Reichskulturkammer, to which all writers and artists were obligated to join. The price of admission was your Nazi Party membership card; to maintain your good standing professionally, you had to toe the party line. Given the Governor’s other repressive measures, I wonder where democracy would go under a Chancellor--oops--President DeSantis…Speaking of Florida, Republican legislator Stan McClain is sponsoring a bill to prohibit talk of menstruation in schools until 6th grade, along with other restrictions on sexuality topics. I now understand what Governor DeS means by the Free State of Florida free from gays, free from books, free from medical defenses against disease, free from women’s health services, and free from menstruation before the age of 12. Perhaps we will see some Red state legislator write a bill making that illegal. Violations would be punishable by death for any girl who has her period before 6th grade.The Sunshine State and the Palmetto State race neck-and-neck to the finish line of history: Which will be the first one to hang a teenage girl for an abortion next to her fifth grade sister for menstruating. Does the TGBL blog now have to register in Florida? I guess Florida is free from the First Amendment too…The New York Post quoted the Staten Island DA Michael McMahon on a recent spate of student shootings and stabbings, offering his view on why: ” …bad laws and young people who are disconnected from responsible behavior”. While that’s not the whole picture, McMahon’s dart is close to the bullseye. The progressives’ au courant negative discipline over the last ten years has given rise to a cottage industry around restorative justice, education lawyers, consultants , counselors, comp jobs, and ersatz therapy sessions. Everybody’s a winner--except the victims of school crime.   

Wednesday, March 8,2023: After an extended absence, it’s good to be back writing on the myriad issues affecting our kids and our kids at school. I look forward to a more regular posting of new commentary, dollops and stingers, the daily beelines, and other additions from the educational underground. TGBL will also have eyes on international education impacting the health of the world’s young…I’m still trying to see how Gov De Santis’ war on Disney World upholds conservative values, considering his rants about government overreach against Covid mandates in a pubic health emergency, who now punishes a private business for internal policies. Are we witnessing the end of the Republican conservativism and the birth of a  mutated party?...The GOP movement taking aim at naming the AR-15 assault rifle as the national gun manifests irresponsibility as lawmakers and, as people, contempt for adults and kids killed by the hands of active shooters—especially school mass murderers whose weapon of choice is the made-for-war assault rifle AR-15--also the principle weapon in the 2017 attack in Las Vegas, killing 58 people…Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl’s works for more acceptable sensibilities violates the first amendment and attacks free expression. It is no different than the Popes or John Ashcroft covering the private parts of public statuary. The Left and the Right meet again, to everyone’s detriment. TGL will explore this issue more fully later this month… One of the worst commercials appearing in the last year was a mom slinking down in her Infiniti, shutting her window to block out a school orchestra’s cacophony of 2001 A Space Odyssey’s famous opening. Besides selling a car to moms who can’t stand listening to a kids’ concert, we now have a car company ad modeling today’s parenting technique…give ‘em hell, mommy!

  September 1, 2021. Texas district suffered two teachers’ deaths by COVID. They taught at the same school. All five campuses in the district now shut down. Can someone please talk sense into the Texas state government, or have they lost their minds totally?… North Carolina suffered two school shootings in one week in this nascent year. While not many details have emerged from both incidents, The first shooting victim will survive; the second died from his wounds. It is not just gun control, it is the gun culture. We will have more such incidents, as we are up to 14 for the year… and counting. August 17, 2021. From now on, the first person “I” shall be used much more frequently instead of the third person eponymous Green B Letter or TGBL. While a rule of journalism says op/ed pieces should use first person, internet standards allow blogs and websites to use either one. So, I’m going with first person singular but will synonymously  interject TGBL a time or two…TGBL is not ready to award any dollops to Kentucky Senator  Mitch McConnell, but his urging Covid vaccinations, backed by his personal history of polio, can only be praised and applauded. Late to the party, but welcome nonetheless…New York state has sent a bill to Gov. Cuomo banning child marriage. You will have to be 18 to tie the knot, eliminating the judge’s power to consent for a 17 year-old. Having experienced firsthand the anguish of a middle-school girl already promised to wed a mature man, such protection cannot arrive any sooner. Congrats to NYS, which ended permission for even younger girls to marry several years ago…Whatever happened to protecting the health and welfare of the children as our first priority? Supporters of the COVID19 pandemic has no problem throwing children on the altar of political sacrifice. So much for family values.             

 August 2, 2021. From now on, the first person “I” shall be used much more frequently instead of the third person eponymous Green B Letter or TGBL. While a rule of journalism says op/ed pieces should use first person, internet standards allow blogs and websites to use either one. So, I’m going with first person singular but will synonymously  interject TGBL a time or two…TGBL (told you) is not ready to award any dollops to Kentucky senator Moscow Mitch McConnell, but his urging Covid vaccinations, backed by his personal history of polio, can only be praised and applauded. Late to the party, but welcome nonetheless…New York state has sent a bill to Gov. Cuomo banning child marriage. You will have to be 18 to tie the knot, eliminating the judge’s power to consent for a 17 year-old. Having experienced first hand the anguish of a middle-school girl already promised to wed a mature man, such protection cannot arrive any sooner. Congrats to NYS, which ended permission for even younger girls to marry several years ago…Showmatch, an Argentine TV talent show, used Anne Frank’s picture as a background for a song about women who don’t want to stay home but seek worldy pursuits. Exploiting a murdered girl from one of the history’s greatest crimes for a snicker or two manifests bad judgment and awful taste. It only reinforces antiJewish attitudes and mocks the Holocaust. Perhaps that was the intent, maybe not. But they could have used a Black slave too, but didn’t. Not that that would be any better, but one can’t help but feel a callous disregard. At least an apology by the producers was offered, admitting a terrible mistake. I believe in a full and robust freedom of speech, but that also includes a responsibility for how you use it. Hopefully, lesson learned.

 June 7, 2021. Covid-19 took no adolescent lives from Jan 1- Mar 31, which is great news. However, a recent uptick of cases in young people, including the need for ICU beds and ventilators, has some medical and scientific professionals worried. Mask wearing, distancing and increased vaccinations—the troika of right wing (and some left anti-vaxxers) efforts to thwart recovery from the disease—must continue for us to beat down COVID-19, as we have been doing…A concern has arisen regarding giving the vaccines to teens in which tissues around the heart become enflamed, a rare cardiac occurrence. Evidence says the statistics are normal for the appearance of the rare affliction, and nothing suggests a nexus to vaccines in kids. Experts will be monitoring nonetheless.  Given the deaths of hundreds of children and hospitalization of thousands, it would seem contracting COVID is far worse than what appears a non-existent risk from the vaccine.

June 1, 2021. COVID-19 took a toll not only on our lives, but the way we live them. Routines broken, relationships separated, quarantine and isolation, alone or with family. huddled together as our caves offered shelter from the threatening outside, a virus shelter wed prayed would be invasion-proof. Responsibilities took new and difficult turns, even for those who escaped infection. TGBL once again had to suspend operations as more immediate and personal needs took precedence. Right now, we give one glance in the rearview mirror reflecting the path driven. With the past year retreating, it is eyes forward, as we step on the back-to-business pedal and accelerate down the bumpy, mine-filled roads ahead. Hold onto your hats.

Feb. 11 2021. Still cannot find the right balance or formula to resume schooling and high-risk athletics, though many school districts are expanding their varsity sports…Las Vegas teen suicides spiked so high that Clark County opened up its doors earlier than expected as the isolation and lack of normalcy were cited as major contributing factors…Conservatives, and frustrated liberal parents who actually have to raise their own kids blame teachers and their unions for delaying full school openings due to health concerns, labeling them fraidy cats and imperious as others face work-related COVID hazards without bitchin’. What a terrible thing of these teachers to expect high standards of protection against a pandemic that has cost 500,000 lives in the US. Most schools, especially urban ones have poor ventilation broken windows, and kids who will deliberately spit on door handles or people these days yelling “COVID!” at the target. Schools are not you’re your typical business office...Rochester, NY police cuffed and pepper sprayed what appeared to be  a nine year old girl in a violent fit whose threats of suicide and killing her mother prompted calls to the police in the first place. If you don’t want such incidents repeated, don’t call the police--have a special team of pediatric mental health workers who respond to acute crises of out of control, suicidal, matricidal threatening children or adults in similar cases of mentally disturbed people. Only teachers and others who work with all kinds of children know the injury and risk children pose in the midst of a rage. Before the two RPD heads roll, maybe Rochester and other cities ought to think about how they want to handle these situations going forward. We’re sure RPD would love to hand this off to professionals in juvenile mental heath. Scapegoating two officers for bad optics in a scenario they were ill-prepared for is an injustice and costs the city two officers with ruined careers. Lost in all the mess is the fact that the girl was unhurt and the mother wasn’t killed, the possibilities of which were why the cops were there…The Long Island Grinch Who stole the post-holiday spirit deserves the Bronx Cheer. The perp sent out letters to a family who continued to display Christmas decorations to honor two relatives who died of COVID. “Take down your Christmas decorations. It’s Valentine’s Day!” read the note. Maybe we need to change the biblical “We are our brother’s keeper” to “Everybody is everybody else’s boss.” The community is rallying around the aggrieved neighbor. Let’s have a thousand points of light!

JAN. 28, 2021. MIS-C in children has often flown under the radar, mostly because its numbers are not high compared to the general COVID devastation. However, the virus’ numbers are rising among kids: 350,000 cases, 7 deaths in CAL; Omaha, NB’s Children’s Hospital and Medical Center  reports largest number of COVID related MIS-C cases, several of whom had to go on heart-lung machines. Other states report similar situations…It will be very interesting to see how school curricula teaches about Jan 6, now taking its place next to April 12, 1865, Dec. 7, 1941, and Sept. 11, 2001 as the most heinous dates in American history…Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, our first Congresswoman to represent both a district in the United States (R-GA) and a planet in an alternate universe. Her belief that the massacre of 17 in Parkwood was a false flag and Sandy Hook’s 26 dead was staged were found on her Twitter account. As far as TGBL knows, it was expressed in English and not in her native tongue, originating somewhere in the Horsehead Nebula. We can only hope her brain cells recover because if such stupidity votes on vital matters of life and death, war and peace, we can only paraphrase Shakespeare: if more be brained like her, the state totters…Washington Post did a story on the need for civility and etiquette’s return to travel, especially in the on-edge pandemic age: “Travelers should be patient, civil, and courteous to each other”. Geez, how un-American can you get?

Dec 15 to Jan. 8, 2021. Happy New Year to All! TGBL’s extended time off is over and now its back to work…In Texas an 18 year old football player—who is also a wrestling star—got thrown out of a game for a cheap shot on an opponent. He walks to the sideline and then sprints across the field, blindsiding the 58 yr old referee sent flying to the turf. In NYC two dozen bicyclists stopped traffic and began to beat up a BMW as the occupants feared for their lives. We are firmly convinced the underlying cause of such incidents relates to the evisceration of true character building through acceptance of one’s responsibility for his or her own actions through effective school discipline. TGBL bets the farm that no study will be done to ascertain a nexus between adolescent anti-social oppositional activity and the end of real consequences for poor school behavior. Teachers and other school community members experience it every day, and now innocent citizens get their own taste of kids gone wild…Earlier in the year a dean at New York City’s CUNY Law School upheld the right to immolate a student because, according to her, lighting up a fellow student falls within free speech. More on this in a future issue of the Green B Letter…Dr. Nahid Bhadelina.an infectious disease expert said “our health care system is facing collapse” given the number of patients for whom doctors must make life-and-death decisions that must be made in hospitals overtaken by a viral tsunami…Children are more susceptible to the new mutant COVID strain recently discovered. While not more lethal but more contagious, this means more kids getting COOVID will result in more once-healthy kids suffering from MIS-C –multiple system inflammatory syndrome. How many politicians who were killing off your grandparents to fully open their states and cities will now demand we sacrifice kids for the greater good? Assemble at the public square and bring your swaddled. COVID has exposed our health care system as pathetically behind in affordable care and mass epidemic preparation. We need to get away from work-based insurance and for-profit HMOs.

An old radio host used to sign off: “Your influence counts--use it! A lesson learned by the Big  Med –Political--Economic complex…Stay safe.

Dec 5 -12 2020: Good news on one front: Vaping among teens, especially middle schoolers, is way down. Let’s hope the trend continues…Put aside the vast seriousness of the situation for just a moment and admit the Queens street fight between Cuomo and Trump rivals the climax of “Enter the Dragon” as Lee and Norris duke it out in the Roman Colosseum …Wayne Sebastianelli, from CNN, reports Penn State Univ Director of Athletic Medicine, said 30-35% of all Covid-19 positive athletes had an inflamed heart. If you want college football and basketball, tell your leaders to fix the problem instead of trying to sacrifice the players’ health and lives for their own political advantage.

Can Pres Trump stop his war on America? If he knew what he was doing and cared for anyone but himself, America’s economy and cities would be in a much better economic position. Trump’s threat to withhold        federal funds just adds to destabilizing America and punishing people whom he perceives are against him. He not only rejects the idea of being a president for all the people, he actively seeks their harm as sacrifices to his re-election. TGBL finds this an unmitigated attack on families and children, who are suffering enough in this health emergency. The president awaits the mantle of a Stalin, a Mao, a Pol Pot. Of course, he wouldn’t even know who Pol Pot was…Teachers, especially in New York, have received a fair amount of criticism for their push back via union leadership about opening the schools. NYC finally decided to delay the opening too late September. What the critics need to understand is that nothing in the NYC Department of Education goes according to plan, nor do they do what is promised. When teachers hear the DOE will do everything necessary to keep them safe, the skepticism remains high – ventilation, air conditioning, social distancing—even the city recognizes they were not ready to open…22 teachers have tested positive, and that’s without the kids. College Administrations fret like parents as the students party till dawn and face Covid-19 rather than mere hangovers. SUNY Oneonta, NYU, Univ of Iowa among others across the country are either shutting down,  going strictly online, or the admins are laying on the floor in a fetal position with their thumbs deeply planted in their mouths.     

WEDNESDAY, AUG. 19, 2020: Gov Andrew Cuomo, a speaker at the DNC virtual convention, was asked if he felt any pressure from his father, the late Gov Mario Cuomo whose 1984 speech at the Democratic get-together still resonates 35 years later. “Do I feel pressure from my father’s legacy? Everyday!”, he responded. A nice personal confession so many sons of far less famous fathers feel…Postmaster General DeJoy suspended “reforms” until after the election. The outcry and outrage of sabotaging the mail delivery sent shivers through American spines that always stood tall and strong for American loyalty and values. Not only were the changes premeditated attempts to disrupt our elections, but our people rely on the USPS for medicine, checks, goods from stores and family, important information and documents, just about anything. They are stamped not only with postage, but with reassurance and relief that in these times no matter what, the mail will go through. Families’ disrupted lives are now hard enough under the pandemic, and those precious pieces of mail help households stay sane. Whoever thought that Costner’s film “The Postman”, a forgettable concoction centering on a letter carrier and the mail, would suddenly emanate prescience.   

 

Culture Must Change to Support Policy Initiatives to Reduce Mass Shootings

      Some years ago I was at an U12 soccer tournament in an upscale Southern New England town. One squad worked through pregame warmups in tony outfits with a warning for opponents printed on their backs: “We work our butts off so we can kick yours.” A TV sitcom aired an episode with two young women sharing a lunch break. One abruptly announced she had to go because someone in her office is getting fired. Her friend asked, “Why do you have to go?” “Because I’m the one doing the firing!” she answered, all smiles and giggles. In a TV news feature, a group of new principals was interviewed. One was asked how it felt to be appointed: “powerful!” she said, as if she just ingested a large can of educational spinach a la Popeye. Before interstate banking was normalized, a New York City based financial institution told a corporate division it was moving big time into smaller western states despite local resistance. The speaker challenged the states and local banks to sue them bec “we’d bankrupt them if they tried,” sounding more like Dillinger than Rockefeller.

Now-candidate Donald Trump told his followers earlier this month:

In 2016 I declared I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed—I am your retribution.” I am your retribution.” Godhood personified.

What common thread connects these disparate tableaus of Americana? The power imperative. In American secular society, power sits upon its podium, worshipped, desired, coveted. It’s what we mean when asked, “What you do for a living?” The inquirer isn’t being sociable or showing interest, the question is a probe to discern the pecking order. The euphemistic question really asks how much wealth you have compared to me. Only the ones with money and the aura of power it emits ask the question. Cab drivers and waiters and data processors don’t ask because they lack the economic power and its social prestige to win. Know your enemy.        

In feminist language, words have changed to neutralize what they view as male dominance. History becomes herstory (even though the word has no gender relevance). “Women” becomes the emasculated ‘womyn”. However, the word “manager” has never been amended for gender language because it connotes a woman executive having power over individuals—especially men. E Pluribus Unum may be our nation’s motto, but it lives by Leo Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last.” 

The power imperative describes the realms we want to rule: socio-economic, personal relationships, work and career, the internal power of self-actualization. None of these are necessarily evil or wrong. However, the moral compass breaks as we aspire to dominate, to be a winner at all costs. It’s not how you play the game, it’s that you win. It’s about the cruelty. Trumpworld rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear   (Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, Oct 3, 2018).   

We worship the material success, the money makers, the fabulously popular, the celebrity. Reality television means anyone can be a star, and we live vicariously through the neighbor next door surviving the jungle, the singer from Noplace bowing to a standing ovation when last month she was a waitress on Main street, now sipping cocktails at a penthouse party, all shining brightly on tv as we whisper to ourselves ”I could be that person”.

No place has ever personified Nietzsche’s will to power as the American way of life. “Only Americans can make birding a competition”, said a British birder watching the frenetic intensity to be number 1 in the film The Big Year. Donald Trump’s The Apprentice made the words “You’re fired!” part of our cultural argot, as we all shouted collectively at the victim. In 2006 Time magazine put a mirror on its cover and proclaimed “You” its recipient for “Person of the Year” Award. Now anyone can look into the Time’s mirror and see in his/her reflection a rarified individual of historic proportions. It feeds the ego with empty accomplishment and faux superiority, just like the Disneyworld magazine covers you buy with your face pictured under Best___________ of the Year (choose your sport or alter ego).

Own the libs. So we can kick your butt. Cancel culture. You’re fired!        Master–slave. The Powerful—the powerless. 

If you  have no girlfriend, no money, students shun you in class, bullies seem to be everywhere against you. In the adult world you’ve lost things dear to you, or you obsess over a world not spinning to your Weltanschauung; everyday nothing changes except your deepening desperation. What do you do in a society so permeated by the climb to to the top when you’re the bottom rung of anonymity and rejection.

You buy the great equalizer. Several of them. Pistols and assault rifles, flack jackets and SWAT gear. The great American Ninja  Warrior dressed to kill, and ready to die in a blaze of divine fire and hellish glory. You’ve transcended the quiet life of desperation, of faceless living staring at the smirks and picking up the barely audible whispers loud enough for you to hear, turning into giggles behind your back. Persecution at every turn. But your  AR-15,or AK-47, plus a sidearm or two—Congratulations! You’ve made it. You are now God, the ultimate authority of Life and Death. You have attained the American dream.

The divine impulse, the imperative to power, permeates the mind of the mass shooters consistently. Columbine shooter Eric Harris in is writings “I am the law; if you don’t like it you die” His partner Dylan Klebold wrote that he found true love and made him “infinite times greater than the wealthy and powerful…I want to die sooo bad…such a sad, desolate, lonely, unsalvageable life, The god of sadness.”

“I understand everything. I am the god of everything.” declared Sandy Hook mass killer, Adam Lanza. He had a history of mental and emotional problems documented from early on. Socially dysfunctional, developmental problems, the killer of 26 in an elementary school warned us. We just didn’t pay attention. Anxiety. Asperger’s. OCD. A walking Pearl Harbor the radar spotted but excused. Seung Hui Cho, who killed over 30 people on the campus of Virginia Tech, wrote: You had a 100 billion chances to avoid this day. But you forced me into a corner.” He said to MSNBC (from CNN) “You had everything. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs.” His mental illness was known; students feared him. A judge declared him mentally ill and an imminent danger--two years before the shooting. Nicholas Cruz, the infamous gunman responsible for the Marjorie Douglas Stoneham High School massacre, known as Parkland, chose St Valentine’s Day to kill 17 people because no one loved him and wanted to ruin the holiday for the entire school (AP).  Even adults like 64 year-old Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas sniper who killed almost 60 concert goers at Mandalay Bay, felt alone, that God didn’t love him. His brother said he was bored with life and capable of an act to commit mass murder for the price of fame and glory; he took control of a life spinning out of it. (CBS News)

Power to the Powerless. I am God.

Or, as someone else said 25 years later, “I am your retribution.”. I am God.

Serbia recently suffered two major gun attacks within two days. One in a school by a 13 year-old student, and another by a young man aged 20 who shot up two villages. Both incidents accounted for nearly 20 people killed and others wounded.

Despite having a high rate of gun ownership, apparently the weapons were leftover from the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Apparently the peace left  people awash with firearms. Yet,  these were the first mass shootings since 2013—10 years ago. The Balkan war was long over.

What makes America different than Serbia, than the rest of the world when it comes to guns? The answer lies in the culture, in our values, how we live and work and play. Our super aggressive culture, our extreme tough-guy, ego driven socio-economic values obsession with celebrity and wealth and popularity, with winners and losers and fend-for-yourself attitude could only lead inevitably to the forsaken collateral damage seeking not merely parity but victory and subjugation of the tormentors. No one wants to lose.

Thor had his hammer, Poseidon his trident, Zeus his thunder, God his omnipotence, Americans their guns. The ultimate judgment of a god—who shall live and who shall die. Nothing speaks to power more than deciding life or death. To steal Valentine’s day from the innocent. I am my retribution.

We do not have to take away all guns, there is a legitimate argument for recreation, such as skeet shooting and hunting,  but we must knock it from the pedestal. Let it fall like a defeated deity’s oversized statue. In the latest shooting, in Allen, Texas, a six-year old is orphaned, a family wiped out; two young siblings obliterated by an AR-15’s massive damage. Gun violence is now the number one killer of children. Grotesquely, we have Congressmen wearing lapel pins to make it the national gun. I am your god.

 On a pragmatic level, we must commit to the reparations of heart and soul, mind and health, from the time we identify at-risk individuals at any age and follow up with a multi-agency response across appropriate government and private services. Vigilance, purpose and dedication armed with continual monitoring, meaningful action, customized treatment focusing on bringing the individual back to the fold of humanity before pulling a trigger. The price is high, the cost of not doing is dead kids, murdered teachers, innocents from every age and category of life, in schools, malls, concerts—no place is safe. I am my retribution.

 Nothing will be enough until a collective America finds the fault in itself. We have a gun problem driven by our values problem. Pope John II, looking to America, said capitalism needs a human face. President George H. Bush asked for a kinder, gentler nation. If our contagious mass murders are rooted in emotional and mental health, Uncle Sam needs to look in the mirror and ask himself how much carnage results from his own out-of-control concepts of wealth, greed, power, callousness, politics, fanaticism, ego.

When guns no longer represent the killer’s self-anointed, god-like supremacy on a sacred mission to vanquish his demons, be it a personal grievance or a political belief, America will finally have the gunslayers’ scourge of  mass murder at school, at work, at play in its cross hairs.  

Toronto Uber Alles?

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For Canadian Jews, especially those in Toronto, O Canada’s “The True North strong and free” is less a line from the national anthem than a close cousin to Arbeit Macht Frei, the Nazi slogan on the entrance gates to the concentration camps. The Queen City has rapidly eclipsed other worthy candidates for the most antisemitic metropolis on the continent.

Ubiquitous signs saying “No Jews or dogs allowed” commonly appeared at beaches, parks, resorts and other recreation facilities”. (Levit, Toronto Star) regularly appeared dating back decades.
No group has been hurt more by Toronto’s pervasive Jewhatred than students and teachers. Temerty Faculty of Medicine U of T’s medical school is rife with anti-Semitism, apparently an old tradition emanating from its entrance quota for Jews. The university’s Student Union tried to block kosher food from being sold on campus because customers might be Israel supporters. Jewish, in other words. The Toronto District School Board has experienced a rash of ominous incidents in their buildings. Students disturbing class by offering a Nazi salute to a Jewish teacher. The list of bigoted acts can go on and on. In educational facilities or city streets, or any venue such vitriol can find ground to attack. In a city with a large Jewish population, Toronto’s antiSemitism seems more popular than Hockey Night in Canada.  

The municipal government has initiated A “Toronto for All” program to fight prejudice, including Jewhatred, despite the dispersion of focus such a title connotes when Jews have been the main target. There has been a somewhat milquetoast Working Group on Antisemitism at the University of Toronto for several years. TDSB claims it will enrich Holocaust learning to promote understanding and respect for Jewish classmates, teachers and others in the community.

Time will tell if these measures prove effective. If the culture doesn’t believe, refuses to change, attacks Jews for religious or political aims, all the enlightenment will not let willfully blind eyes see.

 Normally, TGBL awards stingers for bad behavior. We’ll use an alternative opprobrium for this one—and future issues. We’ll be watching Ontario’s capital for progress in the safety of Jewish and pro-democratic Israel individuals in the K-college level, as well as Toronto holding guilty parties accountable. For now, judgment at Toronto hass been passed::

Heute geben wir Toronto zwei Hakenkreuze. (Today we give Toronto two swastikas.)

Gun Violence Will Still Have Students in the Crosshairs in 2023

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 With 2023 two months old, news came down from Virginia of a horrific school shooting. A six-year-old brought his mom’s gun to school and shot his teacher, nearly killing her. Then Michigan State University: 3 dead, five injured. Seven K-12 school shootings resulting in injury or death through Feb 26. History has taught us that this will not be the last use of a gun in a school, nor the end of targeting teachers.

Violence will continue to plague our K-12, Higher Ed campuses throughout the year. According to the Washington Post, 338,000 students have been exposed to armed violence at school since 1999. Gun-level events are the most lethal but rarest manifestation of school insecurity. Every day, kids and staff are subjected to mental, emotional, and physical threats and attacks from multiple fronts.  

In-person. Online social media. Phones. The daily tribulations of anti-social, oppositional—even criminal--behavior, impede educational progress, and harm the school environment. One incident in one classroom or hallway can reverberate schoolwide. The disrespect, the threats, the shakedowns, the stabbings, the thefts, the assaults, the bullying all sit simmering on the back burner as the left and right fight it out over gun control. Progressives and liberals believe gun control will make schools safe, but then advocate and implement negative discipline policies indifferent to victims of daily serious misbehaviors. Sympathizing with the perpetrators who victimize individuals and even an entire school only encourage violent acts. Conservatives support harder discipline for safety infractions and other forms of school discipline violations, yet they fight tooth-and-nail gun reforms that potentially would mitigate the frequency and severity of active shooters on school campuses.

 We need to cleave off the gun control of the Left and the stronger discipline of the Right; add comprehensive interagency cooperation  among law enforcement, mental and other social services, with new  approaches for proactive monitoring and early intervention, we just might gain control of the scourge mass shootings and school assaults represent. The two present a dangerous synergy producing thousands of physical and mental casualties in schools. We have not addressed the problem effectively.   

There is some shared ground, but don’t expect terre firma walking it.The Left and Right both see a shooter’s mental, emotional status as significant. That’s where it ends. The conservatives close their eyes to the reality that most perps arm themselves with an inventory close to a small country. I guess they’re okay with unstable, volatile Rambos possessing such firepower. The Left believes strongly in mental services and gun control—a good start. They also want to defund law and get PDs, SROs out of schools, leaving them defenseless and attack-friendly, from intruders to cafeteria riots. Uvalde and Parkwood were law enforcement failure, but if the lesson learned is the Left’s police and security purge for guidance counselors and therapy sessions, or the Right’s arming teachers, remedial help in understanding the subject is needed.

One more thing. More important than legislation, more powerful than an impassioned speech, more transforming than alchemy, more difficult to change than a closed mind. But reducing school and campus  gun deaths and other violent acts won’t happen without it. An upcoming Green B Letter feature will tell you what’s missing from the gun debate, so vital to school safety.

Gov. DeSantis' Most Dangerous Gayme

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Bad enough DeSantis bullied teens into not wearing masks because he was afraid the optics would upset the anti-vaxxer, anti-mask, pro-Covid Trumplicans he’s trying to pull into his corner for a 2024 presidential run. Now he’s putting more than 100,000 Floridians under 18 years of age in jeopardy. That’s an estimate of the number of LGBTQ+ youths who live in Florida, attending school, playing sports, working part time, worrying about college, figuring out life in the Sunshine state.

The infamous and euphemistically named Parental Rights in Education Act  should have been called “Let’s Make Life Harder and Riskier for Our Young Gay People”. These kids—10% of any population fit into the LGBTQ umbrella, closeted or not—suffer higher rates in the following: suicidal thoughts and attempts, alcoholism and drug abuse, depression, victims of  bullying, mental and emotional issues. For many, tween and teen years mean a daily struggle to get through the day.

Across the country, many school districts attempt to reduce attacks on LGBTQ+ by promoting a positive environment. This includes developing trust between students and staff, maintain counseling and open communications, and programs promoting respect and tolerance.  Sexual minority students feel more positive about themselves and do better overall in a nonjudgmental, supportive school climate. Many Florida districts openly proclaim this goal in statements found in their  codes of conduct.

Florida’s Polk County Board pledges to “vigorously enforce its           prohibition against harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex (including sexual orientation, transgender status or gender identity). Osceola School District will not tolerate behavior by students or staff which ”insults, degrades, or stereotypes any race, gender, disability, physical condition, ethnic group, religion, sexual orientation”. Palm Beach County has extensive, vivid behavioral regulations regarding anti-gay actions, whether verbal or physical.

Stemming from a Supreme Court ruling, codes of conduct are in every school district. They’ve grown from pamphlet-sized delineations of simple infractions and consequences, to quasi legal booklets with dozens of pages informing the school community of rights, responsibilities, expectations, as well as infractions and consequences.

Broward County’s Discipline Code has an aggressive approach to  students’ wellbeing. A full page on human trafficking discusses sexual exploitation, explaining LGBTQ+ is especially vulnerable. According to the BCDC, Florida ranks third in sex trafficking among states, which attests to why some districts are concerned about high-risk populations.    Also, the Broward Code expressly forbids (pg. 18):

Harassing others because of age, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, marital status, race, religion, or sexual orientation.”

 Bullying a student for gender expression is no different than harassing someone for race or religion; everyone’s case will be treated equally. Since all students receive or can access the district guide online, Broward—and other Florida districts expressing similar policies—violate Don’t Say Gay (DSG) as soon as they distribute the behavioral rules.

Broward County’s code also states curriculum policy in the general area of family and personal health (p. xvii). K-3 includes lessons on feelings, positive self-image, staying healthy. Grades 4-5 discuss puberty, HIV, friendship, self-esteem; grades 6-8 covers abstinence, decision making, HIV. High Schools teach about abstinence, risk, exploitation, health.

 Teaching is about asking questions, providing answers, showing choices, pointing ways forward—helping kids understand. This applies across the K-12 curriculum. Although prohibition lessens to “age and developmentally appropriate”  after grade 3, primarily because “age and developmentally appropriate” interpretations have been wrested from educators and co-opted by politicians. Under  DSG, teachers and deans will either break the law or their professional responsibility. Kansas and Ohio are considering similar legislation as Florida’s. The chilling effect for teachers across the country will be more like an Ice Age, as every breath vaporizes with potential disciplinary or legal action regarding any utterance about LGBTQ+.

 Activist parents and crusaders see themselves as good soldiers in the culture wars. They could demand random visits to classrooms; tell their children to record or video a teacher; Ask a child what the teachers discussed in class; give instructions to write  down and report back anything on the subject. Inquiries like these go beyond the normal parental questioning, weaponizing kids, who like nothing more than getting a teacher in trouble.

Besides classroom instruction, other services support the educational environment, such as guidance counselors, school psychologists, social workers, and the disciplinary agents. They all have a kite-string thin tightrope to walk, especially deans.  While not a classroom per se, these support offices may be construed as a classroom and the communication with the students as instructive.

These vital interactions in discipline cases inherently contain serious discourse about gender identity or homosexuality. Based on this, counseling the victim and dealing with the perpetrator will automatically place the school officials in the crosshairs of DSG.  These incidents cannot be resolved without professional responsibilities and the new law being in abject conflict.

Students accused of conduct infractions are entitled to due process. An investigation ensues, followed by such measures as guidance, counseling, discussion, and restorative sessions, as well as more severe consequences. It is impossible to discuss an LGBTQ+  incident without talking about gay or gender expression. Any lawyer worth his shingle will have no problem proving a K-3 violation or the “age and developmentally appropriate” clause. It only takes one sentence in a forty-minute conference with a student to find violations of the law’s standards.

Florida’s new educational waters ring the buoys’ alarm bells, as  potential sacrifices—teacher and LGBTQ student both--dangle defenselessly, holding their breath in fear and uncertainty, like so many baby seals in the heated water.

 Maybe that’s the whole idea of Governor DeSantis’ most dangerous gayme.

 

THEY LEFT THEIR SEATS IN SAN FRANCISCO.

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Three SFSB members went a school too far, as the far Left progressive trio were recalled and ousted from the city by the bay’s school board. They died of self-inflicted wounds, impaled on the radical spike of far left activism.  

 The school-renaming movement built momentum as a reform to stop honoring Confederate figures. Given where we are in the 21st Century, it’s  a reasonable project whose time had come. The train derailed when the hit list went after time-honored Americans—usually dead white males— replacing them with progressive icons and symbols of its unofficial platform.

 Wiping out George Washington, revolutionary war legends, Abraham Lincoln, and others in favor of politically correct heroes appalled even the tres, tres liberals of San Francisco. Many recognized the immense damage to the national culture, and educational implications of equating Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis. In addition to our native population, we have a huge immigrant demographic with little knowledge of their new country’s past. Denigrating revered Americans and banishing their names to skewed pedantic politics weakens the national character by disavowing the best of our historical icons. Cancelling members of the American pantheon is oxymoronic to inclusion. We can cherish our noble past, discuss our mistakes and failures while exploring the zeitgeist in which it all unfolded, and move forward to a more perfect Union.

 Incidentally, I doubt very much the new names would meet the SF3’s own standards of saintly perfection, an unblemished life without error, unstigmatized by prejudice. The progressive Left has their own issues with bias and inclusion. However, their objective transcends mere nomenclature.

 Among the first acts of attaining power, revolutionaries will destroy the manifestations of the past because legitimizing the new regime is critical to solidifying power. Name replacement is about supplanting traditional American beliefs and shared homage to our democratic heritage with Far Left progressivism. The Right is doing the same when they control the school boards. We see it in the anti-democratic book censorship in schools and support of anti-anti-bullying programs. school boards disrespect our democracy by denying or repelling any social and cultural advancements made since 1960 or name change for partisan advantage . The victim of both extremes is our national identity, common cause, shared reverence for imperfect humans who rose to be great when needed the most. Our students and country suffer when revisionist politics turn heroes to outliers.                                                                                                                                                                    .

A case in point: the SF Board placed Dianne Feinstein Elementary School    in the crosshairs of the Name Police. The Left’s beef with the former mayor rewinds to a 1984 incident, wherein then Mayor Feinstein replaced a Confederate flag, torn down by activists. In addition to this incident, local media has reported her centrist views has drawn their ire for decades. Canceling Feinstein would be a major moral victory for progressives, despite her minority status as a  woman and—or because of it—an octogenarian Jew. Feinstein’s erasure smacks of the radical Democratic socialists’ own partisan aims and prejudices that infuriated the rest of San Francisco.

 While the trio lost their way in the name game, the school system and its communities of students, staff, parents,  was free falling. The mayor saw “a political agenda” supersede their management obligations. The members also strove to eliminate requirements for its elite high school—a flashpoint for hard progressive leftists that also carried anti-Asian connotations. Accusations over COVID19 miscues was the last straw.

 The city’s mayor, London Breed, summed it up when he said the school board was distracted by “political agendas. “ (Newsmax).  Mayor Breed got one thing wrong: the political agenda was not a distraction. It was the raison d etre.

Cutting Student's Hair Not in the Job Specs

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In Michigan, a teacher cut a seven-year-old girl’s hair. A student had snipped the girl’s locks days earlier,  leaving her head with a very uneven look. Taking the girl’s plight to heart, the teacher released her inner coiffeur and tried to compensate for the tonsorial damage.

However, she never spoke to her parents about restoring the imbalance. WHAT?! I’m not sure what her intentions were, be they maternal or underlying, but most teachers know not to violate a student’s person. The teacher might have asked the girl, but seven is not the age of consent for anything. You don’t cut hair, clip fingernails, paint toenails, pierce ears, or otherwise alter kids’ bodies. You can’t even put a hand on a student’s shoulder these days.

She and just about everybody in the district is being sued by her parents. Two other teachers knew of the incident but never reported it. They are now in hot water for not coming forward.  Let’s hope the school interviews the student who originally did the cutting and find out what’s going on there. This could require student disciplinary action, guidance counseling, or some intervention to ensure the well being of the student perp and the victim. Not to mention the adult.

I’m curious to find out how the school managed the original incident. There seems to be a scarcity of reporting on that, but such incidents could be indicative of issues deeper than a youngster’s prank, such as a hostile relationship or friendship gone sour. That’s why a thorough, multi-pronged approach is necessary in such cases. We have student-on-student and teacher-on-student aspects  here.  It’s not just about the what, but the why and the what now. And that has long term  implications for all involved and the larger school community.

 

 

 

Virginia Dept of Education Forgets the Unforgettable

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Some dates and days stand out in American history. They marshal the national spirit in a common bond, no matter how disparate our people. We celebrate July 4 for our independence; we mourn for lost soldiers on Memorial Day and pay tribute to all veterans on Nov 11. We know the Civil War ended in the Spring of 1865, as did Lincoln’s life by bullet.  Jan 6 now connotes when our Capitol was besieged by rioters and insurrection filled the air we breathed. Surprise attacks inflicting thousands of casualties come to the fore of our consciousness on Dec 7, 1941, a “day that will live in infamy.” 

Nothing stands in such stark relief to contemporary America as 9/11. Maybe because so many lived through it and so many died on it. Targets held no military significance, as did the Pearl Harbor surprise attack. Civilian planes turned into fuel-laden missiles with human shrapnel. It was terror yes, taking down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, nearly turning the Pentagon into a scrap heap, and a third plane pulverizing metal and bodies in a Pennsylvania field.

 It was transcendental. These were not armed soldiers in a field of battle or huddling in redoubts and forts. The several thousand dead were secretaries and stockbrokers, computer geeks and maintenance workers. They were everyday people going to work, earning a living, an aggregate of the diversity that perished on 9/11 because that is what America is everyday, before and since. The people who died and the buildings that were targeted precisely were blown up because they represented e pluribus unum—out of many, one; our buildings the economic and political might brought about by a democratic nation and a multicultural demographic. Bin Laden’s attack was, at its heart, mass murder against a political system he didn’t like, a culture that wasn’t his, a system needing to be defeated to impose his will for his goals and his ego. No one epitomized pathological bullying and mass murder more than the personification of Islamic jihad, a figure who now holds his own place in hell’s pantheon.

We have always faced our enemies squarely. We fought the Nazis not on a racial or religious bias but a political one. Although there was a racist component ot some of our war propaganda, we fought the Japanese because they bombed our territory and killed our people. In all the years since, we never flinched in who our foes were, and why we went to war. It was the Germans; it was the Japanese, and they were trying to kill us and our democracy. 

Twenty years after the worst attack on our homeland, twenty years commemorated year after year with the names of the dead read like a Georgian incantation at the Sacred Trough of Ground Zero, two rounds of silence at each plane’s time skewering the WTC buildings, and the reliving of private and public nightmares, personal anguish, charred lives of heroes still succumbing to their wounds; of men and women jumping 100 stories to escape the flames of death in one final defiant choice before falling.  

In one of the most disrespectful assaults on our country, our values, our defense, our freedoms, the Virginia Department of Education has striven to obfuscate the truth, pander to a political agenda, and betray its fundamental mission: to teach. In yet another attempt to suppress Americanism in America, the VDOE published a webinar for 9/11 professional development video for classroom lessons commemorating one of our most tragic days. Somehow, the disclaimer of “these views are solely that of the Dr.Decuir doesn’t quite it cut it.

The purported central objective of “Culturally Responsive and Inclusive 9/11 Commemoration” is to prevent and protect Muslim students from bullying, which Prof Decuir sees as the tragic result of the World Trade Center and other targets attacked that day. Decuir cites a troubling statistic—Muslim students are the second most bullied group in school. She doesn’t cite her source, nor does she name the first. I would imagine LGBTQ or Jewish students might head the dubious list, since statistics show gay youth ae subjected to harassment, ridicule taunts, physical and verbal abuse. Jewish students are now among the most threatened of all. I also tried an in an internet search to see what other kinds of bullying and harassment Prof. Decuir has written about, but I came up empty. Perhaps my poor Google skills failed to turn up a Decuir body of work on how to protect LGBTQ and Jewish students in our public schools from the actions Decuir says is aimed at Muslim kids.

No child should be harassed, threatened, bullied or otherwise feel unsafe during the school `day. Schools have strong discipline codes, which include violations pertaining to bias and discrimination under the umbrella of bullying.  Tweeners and adolescents have a strong mean streak compounded by numerous other teenage afflictions. Religion, ethnicity, physical appearance, jealousy—you name it, and kids will find ways to make you cry before you can get home and open the door. Schools do what they can with the resources they have and the authority given to guide youth in managing their conduct and social relationships in positive ways. Bullying has many definitions, explanations, approaches, to mitigating bullying. In a society valuing individual power, the job is significantly harder.

 What you don’t do is change history, suppress the truth, rewrite events, conjure fact into fiction.. If you are fighting bullying.  You must recognize the bully. Hijacking jets and turning them into missiles with human shrapnel targeting office buildings is the most malevolent, sadistic act of bullying—and war.

 

The video says “say what happened  and that’s the end of it”, according to reports. (The video was pulled from You Tube before TGBL could view it). Let’s teach what happened that day – a good lesson for our kids, those who teach them, and those who tell teachers how to teach. The Fire Department lost 344 members to Bin-Laden’s inferno; NYPD lost 71 officers that day, 74 law officers total. Many more suffered chronic or life ending afflictions. Many responders are still dying from their heroism to this day. 2,605 civilians who kissed their families goodbye, wished kids to have a good day at school, planned their work as they headed into the Trade Center, The Pentagon, or sat on Flight 93. All for the last time.

Yes,  the Virginia Department of Education, who promoted the video for 9/11 teacher training--let’s just say what happened happened. But that is far from “it.” Just talk to the victims” families, the responders relatives.  It is not “it” when residents and workers and students in the areas still suffer the physical and psychological effects of the day that changed America, and the world. To obfuscate  9/11 reality, to erase Islamic jihad’s Pearl Harbor in the guise of teacher development, to minimize America’s suffering and instruct how to suppress its pedagogy in the name of reducing bullying defiles the legacy of every victim, and violates every educational principle in a free society.

To borrow from Lawrence O’Donnell, Asra Nomani, president of Parents Defending Education, (quoted from the Daily Mail) has the last word:

“As an American Muslim parent and journalist who has investigated Islamic terrorism for the past 20 years, it’s offensive, immoral, unethical, manipulative and dangerous.”

 

 

 

Anti-Bullying Shot Down in Albuquerque

Three days into Albuquerque, New Mexico’s school year, a 13-yr-old boy is the first killed-in-school casualty.  Bennie Hargrove stood up to a bully and tried to get him to stop punching a smaller victim. The alleged perpetrator, Juan Saucedo, pumped multiple bullets into Hargrove and snuffed out his young life. The community has hailed Bennie a hero, a junior Good Samaritan who died trying to save a schoolmate in distress. As far as the incident goes, this appears to be the gist, and no more information has been released.

The terrible outcome blares out a warning that everyone involved in school safety, student behavior, and  anti-bullying for all to heed: The world is now a different place. Virtually all anti-bullying programs deride the passive onlookers or witnesses of a bullying scenario. Get involved, be proactive, intervene physically or verbally, provide information. Be the good citizen. The Hero. Be like Bennie.

 No one saw this coming, except for the reality-based educators experienced in student culture. Too many times deans and security APs heard the stories of threats, retribution, intimidation of witnesses and victims. It is a picture often pushed to the middle pages no one reads so the ugly, bloody schoolyards and cafeterias and hallways gain little attention compared to the marvelous work being done to make victim and perp meet on equal ground in the guidance office, a ticket out of math class.

How often students are told to be a good guy interventionist, be  an anti-bullying activist. Enlist in the  kindness brigade, do the right thing. The pipes, the pipes are calling, from school to school, and down the auditorium walls. Now the street angst of teenage life has claimed a victim because of naïve, courageous actions.  

Perhaps his intervention might have  been impelled by training, by altruism, by friendship, or a combination. We don’t know yet. Too much still lies in the deep background, the details of which must be gathered up and analyzed. What were the relationships, history; why did the shooter bring a gun to school. What set the wheels in motion that spun into a lunchtime murder at school lunch.

Too many anti-bullying approaches suffer the same fault as online financial business: it all sounds so convenient and miraculous, just  don’t ask about that security thing. It doesn’t serve the purpose at hand and may dampen the mood, so no negatives, please. Too many political activists (oh how we love activists) and professionals ignore the bare facts of adolescent reality because they just get in the way.

 We ask kids to be the soldiers in the anti-bullying army, give the recruits some boot camp for the kind and courageous,  then send them off to the front lines. And now we have a young teen gunned down by a boy the same age, alive yet all but dead. The authors, creators and pushers--school districts included--who construct  anti-bullying programs, school lessons, special presentations and its culture of therapeutic loquacity for violators and magnanimous fortitude for the brave  better go back to the drawing board and figure out how to protect kids who want to help. The shooter may be a bully and a  murderer, but the adults in the room have a lot to answer for.