It has been a minute. Summer came upon me and time spent with the family became a priority. I also worked on a few woodworking projects. And we took a glorious, two-week road trip. Writing took a backseat.
Don't expect any consistency from this little letter going forward. Sometimes I might write one, though. It could be a week between letters or it could be months.
Organizing
The GOP strategy of motivating voters by sending out operatives to disrupt shit at the local level has arrived in my city. “Public challenges School Board on rights during open meeting.” It’s all around Critical Race Theory (there was a high school class with that same name last school year, but no such class is on the schedule this school year).
The key bit:
"This is not your meeting, this is our meeting," said Todd Pearson, of Spring Valley, Minnesota, a town 30 miles south of Rochester. Pearson, who has been mobilizing people from around southern Minnesota to attend Owatonna School Board meetings and present opposition to Critical Race Theory and equity being taught in the classroom, demanded that school staff and members of the press be forced to leave the meeting [rather than community members because the fire capacity of the room had been met].
This dude is not part of our community. He lives 70 miles from here. He’s mobilizing people from outside of our community to come in and throw fits at our school board meetings. He’s making demands for meeting accomodations that are not legal or reasonable. The local newspaper, which hardly ever takes a stand on anything, wrote an entire article about how his statements do not actually align with the requirements, rules, and laws around these open government meetings.
Maybe this is the other side of the community organizing coin? Maybe this just another type of nonviolent protest? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel quite right. (I'm not commenting on the issue at hand [Critical Race Theory]. That's … complicated.)
The practical impact of this pressure, these yelling fits at school board meetings, is that there is no chance our school board will bring in a mask mandate for the schools. Even though a city just down the road from us started high school a week earlier and immediately experienced 35 Covid-19 cases and 300 quarantined students. Even though our Covid cases are rising fast and our positivity rate is at 12%. Obviously infections are going to run high in our schools, but the school leaders are too scared to rile people up. Even if our district has just as bad of an experience, I will be surprised if masks are mandated.
I hope we make it through. I hope the innocent are not hurt.
One More Year
I keep thinking I turn 43 today, but I definitely turn 44. We are all saying that the pandemic has lost us our sense of time; lost us a year. I guess my brain has decide my 43rd year went unlived?
