Bakery Owner, Facing Death Threats Over Anti-Ice Cookies, Refuses to Back Down
I've taught the Constitution to eighth graders and Civics to high school students for almost 40 years. The requirements for passing these courses in order to graduate from either eighth grade or high school are not enough. For one thing, the standards used to measure what students must achieve in order to graduate are frankly, a joke. So is the classroom order and management in the vast majority of schools in this country, to the point where the few students who are engaged and interested enough to learn are passed through because passing requirements have to be dumbed down so that the majority of students don't fail.
Argue against that, and I will bring out the test data and scores, and organize a tour of schools to prove otherwise.
But the biggest test of the effectiveness of this kind of coursework is what happens in our society when every value we understand as Americans, every Constitutional right and principle, every limit on the power of the federal government against the rights of the people is challenged by ignorant, stupid, violent people just because they don't agree with the idea that is being expressed.
Death threats to a bakery owner for expressing something that is a matter of conscience, protected by the first amendment is a real life test that demonstrates the failure of our educational system, at least as far as having taught anything of value to the hateful ignoramuses who make the threats. It also shows that mental health care in this country is failing to treat the high level of insecurity that such behavior represents.
The response of this bakery owner is the right one. Don't back down. Move ahead. Cowards make those kind of threats, cowards and stupid people. The response of the community was massive repudiation of ignorance. Good for them.
Political Weakness and Insecurity Fears Free Speech and a Free Conscience
Politicians who can't stand protest against their ideology and the decisions they make are weak and insecure. Basically, their response not only betrays this fear and insecurity, but it also demonstrates their own incompetence and ignorance, and their own cowardice and weakness.
The first time we really saw this in American history was during the Presidency of John Adams. Adams was one of America's founding fathers. He had served in multiple capacities on behalf of the United States, including being part of the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia that drafted the current document along with the Bill of Rights, and worked to secure its ratification.
But when critics challenged his decisions, especially regarding his handling of the United States and its relationship with France, he went over the edge. And, in fact, Adams going down in history as one of the least effective, most inept Presidents is due to his instigation of support for a set of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Basically this made it a crime to write or say things critical of the President or of Congress, and it gave the President the power to deport foreigners he didn't like, and were critical of his position on immigration and citizenship.
Then, if that wasn't bad enough, Adams went on a court-packing frenzy. As a lame duck, he tried to fill every judicial seat with Federalists who would rule against challenges to the acts. Known as the "Midnight Judges Act," it was repealed by Jefferson before the appointees could take office and eventually led to the court's establishing Judiciary Review.
Even founding fathers were subject to partisan temptation. In this case, it damaged, and practically destroyed, Adam's reputation, and the good work he did. It also ended any chance he would ever have at being re-elected President, and it destroyed the Federalist Party, which lost the next five elections in increasingly large landslides and would disappear completely during the Monroe Administration.
The suppression of the first amendment that Trump so blatantly advocates and tries to implement should be driving the GOP to extinction. Though it does appear to be doing some real damage to Republican chances at holding a Congressional majority, it isn't having the widespread effect that the Alien and Sedition Acts did 225 years ago. Is it because more Americans today are so completely ignorant of the Constitution, and lack the critical thinking skills to associate Trump's attempt to subvert the free press with a violation of this most sacred Constitutional protection?
Yes.
So What Do We Do About It?
Leaving public education in the hands of the states, in the balance of power, has been a huge mistake. It has led to a huge gap in the student outcomes experienced from state to state. In states where education is regarded as an essential for the preservation of democracy, and valued as a means of raising the standard of living, the test scores, graduation rates and overall quality of the schools are all high. And generally, the voters in those states tend to favor the Democrats. In states where education is seen as a glorified babysitting service, budgets are cut whenever there's a tax reduction, and they'd rather spend millions on football stadiums with artificial turf where they can watch their kids bash each other's brains out than on learning math, or how to read, or, God forbid, how to correctly interpret the Constitution in a way that the differences in skin color, or ethnicity, or religious beliefs, gender, or political perspective don't matter when it comes to individual rights.
There is a reason why a President who uses the dumb-ass interpretation of politics to scam for votes wants to dismantle the Department of Education. And that is exactly why one of the first things any future Democratic majority needs to do is to double its budget, and make public education a power under the federal government. Students in places like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas or West Virginia should not be denied the opportunity to get the same kind of quality education that those in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Illinois, Maryland or California get.
Once that's complete, then the number of courses students receive throughout their grade school and high school years in American History, government, the Constitution and other Civics-related subjects should be implemented every single year, starting with Kindergarten. Common Core and the revamping of schools to increase instruction in technology, science and mathematics hasn't worked. The math and science scores are getting worse nationally, not better, and the time has crowded out the ability to teach important subjects like American history and government.
Look at the course requirements for university bound, professional students in high schools in European countries like Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and now even most of the Eastern European countries. Their school day doesn't end at 2:15, it goes to 4:30 or 5:00 and it includes double the amount of social studies that American schools do. Most European countries won't even give any coursework credit to their students who participate in a foreign exchange program in the US, because they have no respect for the quality of American education and they know the students get far less than they would in their European school.
This is not the place for an apologetic on behalf of our hard working, underpaid school teachers. Any teacher in American public education who is doing their job, and knows what education is supposed to look like will say that the quality of education in most of our public schools is substandard and I know this, because I'm engaged in those kinds of discussions almost every day. I taught in a public, inner city high school in Houston, in a program aimed at recovering drop-outs who wanted to come back, and I saw teachers make do with few resources, sometimes spending their own money, in a state where teacher salaries already rank in the bottom 10% nationally, to try and provide students with opportunities. Many of them lined up at the private schools, when a job opened up, to take less pay and fewer benefits, but where the quality of education was higher.
And we see this poor quality social studies education manifest itself in the media, where reporters and commentators are either completely ignorant about the Constitution, or are told by management not to bring it up when the President or one of his cronies says something that they know is anti-Constitutional, anti-Democratic and anti-American. I wonder how we'd feel if we're facing charges in court, and our lawyer is a millennial who doesn't know the Constitution.
This is why over 70 million Americans cast a ballot for the incompetent, inept, demented and insane man now living in the White House, and why another 30 million who would have potentially voted the other way just stayed home.
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