Opinion/Brown: A national debate about how to keep our children safe. From what?
We seem to have a disagreement over what truly threatens us most, and threatens our kids. I’d like to weigh in, if I may. As you read this, somewhere on Cape Cod or in schools nearby, teachers are running active shooter drills with their kids. Since Columbine, over 338 thousand American children have experienced a school shooting. Why am I bringing this up? Because a whole political movement is being built around scaring the electorate about our children. Are our children really threatened and if so, by what exactly?
Every day, 12 American children die from gun violence … the leading cause of death for our kids these days. (Another 32 are wounded every day.) This is interesting because presidential aspirant Nikki Haley recently claimed that, “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.” FOX agrees. Well, let’s see now. COVID has killed over a million Americans.
I’ve spent 42 years as a classroom teacher, 34 years here on Cape Cod. Especially through community-service projects, I’ve worked with kids from schools across the Cape. What do they say threatens them?
Children today are in science classes across the country, learning about global warming and climate change. Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained over $1.8 trillion worth of climate-disaster damage … $22 billion-dollar disasters in 2020 alone. Last year, one-third of Pakistan was underwater. What will the world look like when our children are grown up? It scares them to think of it.
Our children watch as democratic institutions are subverted around the globe. They’re being threatened environmentally, politically and socially. It’s child abuse on a global scale. They’ve been through COVID. Death by suicide among our children is up … their second killer after gunfire. Let me ask you, if you were a kid old enough to catch the news, how hopeful would you be about your future?
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Thank God for teachers. Teachers are like the old merchants at a Persian Bazaar. Each has a different fascination to offer. “Look at this,” they call out. "Look at this!” Coaches coach. Others offer musicals, debating, and the arts. All of these are future-centered. All of them are offering our children knowledge and skills to build their futures.
You wouldn’t know that to listen to half our politicians. We got the QAnon conspiracies first, telling us that liberals are running an enormous child-trafficking operation in a maze of tunnels underground. We’re asked to imagine cages in the darkness holding wailing children. Democrats might even be feasting on their organs. Even Tom Hanks has been imagined, wiping young blood from his mouth.
Here on Cape Cod, I’ve received letters from readers, accusing teachers of “grooming” their students. Let’s be clear. “Grooming” in this context is ingratiating children with kindness and attention for the purpose of sexually assaulting them later. There are few accusations more shameful.
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It’s insidious because teachers do offer children their kindness and attention. We do that because they need those things to thrive. Teachers know some of their kids are threatened by hunger, homelessness, alcohol and drug-addicted parents, by divorce and continual argumentation … by poverty. (Over 1 in 10 American children face food insecurity.) Broken-heartedness inhibits learning and social growth.
But listen to some politicians and our children are threatened most by history lessons about slavery, by learning about racism and the especially dangerous idea that racial inequity is “systemic” — embedded in our cultural and economic systems. We’re also being told that the presence of even a minuscule number of gay or transgender individuals — or any attempts to make them feel at home with the rest of us — threatens us even more. These threats are subsumed under the term “woke”. Wokism is now being called a “virus”. We even have a state boasting that it’s where “Wokism goes to die.”
Read more:The rate of women dying in childbirth surged by 40%. These deaths are preventable.
And who stands accused of spreading this dangerous virus more deadly than COVID? Of “grooming” our children? Our teachers, that’s who. And it’s working. Already demoralized by the pandemic, teachers are joining pastors, police, nurses, and even doctors in retiring early and leaving their professions. In the coming decades, public schooling in America might collapse. That dear reader threatens our children.
Back to the active-shooter drills. I’ve done these. I — and every teacher doing them — is not only practicing for a nightmare. We’re imagining where we can best protect our kids — and how. And in shooting after shooting, the bodies of teachers have been found protectively shielding the bodies of children in their care. Why? Because it was school — and the parents weren’t there to do it. There is not a profession in the world (up there with nursing) more loving and open-hearted than teaching is. Please remember that.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: A national debate about how to keep our children safe
