.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

 I understood what he meant and shared his sentiment, just not the way he articulated it.

 At the age of twenty, Frederick Bailey, having his master’s surname, arrived in New Bedford after his route to self-emancipation, soon to be joined by his wife, changed his name after being inspired by a poet, and Frederick Douglass entered the world and began his life as a spokesman for Black people before, during, and after the Civil War.

He may have moved after a few years to other places, but Frederick Douglass became a free man and bloomed in New Bedford.

While other cities, even Dublin, Ireland, have statues of him and buildings named in his honor implying a deep connection with Douglass after he had become himself before moving to those places, short or long term, and many places named things after him as the token Black person later to be replaced by Martin Luther King whose name was just as practical and useful in the white mind as a panacea and a crumb to offset segregation and other racial abuses,

I worked for a New York Minute at the Frederick Douglass High School in Oklahoma City, the main high school built during segregation when the Blacks were red-lined to the Eastside of the city. The name was there, but by the time I arrived there this millennium, with little effort to even educate the students fully on his full import, his being an angry old Black man who spoke for Black people was the extent of knowledge of or connection to Douglass. His name was a crumb thrown to convince the Black residents that segregation was good and proof of that was the name of the school being that of a famous Black person.

Sadly in my time, while in his autobiography he condemns the practice of letting the enslaved have days like Christmas to celebrate without going to the field with part of the celebrations being athletic events, dancing, and, of course, more drinking than usual and this was okay within the plantation owners as it was a pressure valve release. Douglass lamented that while enjoying and encouraging the games and partying that were connected to man’s more primitive pursuits, educating the slaves was forbidden in order to keep these people in that primitive state. There was no problem training a slave to perform athletically so that in competitions they would make money for the master while it was illegal to educate them for self-improvement.

 At this school, while the principal doctored the books to give the impression students were learning because the district appreciated the false stats that appeared to validate their leadership so there was no oversight, he could not do the same in the field of athletics as there was a state organization. As was Douglass’s complaint, athletes received A-one training in the field of athletics to win championships, but most of the players, had there been oversight in the school district, should not have played in many games as their true grades would have them on the “Ineligible” list until they brought their grades up, but their grades were already artificially high because of the principal’s machinations.

This gave the impression to the public and colleges that these kids were academically successful when a later court case filed by some poorly educated students had that principal lose his job and professional certification for educational malfeasance.

The school named after a man who condemned this practice was producing minimally educated athletes.

The Great White hope with a deep seated doubt that Black people can learn when challenged, ran the school like a plantation with no work, using the students as the source of false statistics that made him and the school look successful while the students were going out into the world educated only for failure.

While this city and others had their tributes real or just gauze, there had been nothing in New Bedford other than a picture occasionally hung somewhere, a plague a tourist might happen upon, or his presence in the city being mentioned in passing, but nothing in the city that would celebrate his being here and re-birthing here.

To rectify this, the New Bedford Historical Society, doing everything that was needed, including community involvement, recently dedicated Abolition Park in the section of the city where the original Quakers who began the Abolition Movement had lived, the neighborhood Douglass first arrived at and resided in, and in which a bronze statue of a twenty year-old Douglass, his age at arriving in the city,  was unveiled.

I brought a small figurine of Frederick Douglass that has been with me from my experience at Douglass High School and gave it to the president of the Historical Society because doing so closed a Douglass Circle I have written about in the past. I knew I would be asked about my having it and from whence it came, so, in order to avoid using words like “bought”, “purchased” and “owned”, decided to glibly say when asked that we met at the Oklahoma History Museum just before I left that state.

The other words would have  been totally  inappropriate in relation to the Great Abolitionist.

The ribbon cutting and statue unveiling was why the mayor ended up in front of the huge crowd of racially mixed people, the obvious majority being Black people getting their history back. I wore my rainbow shirt from my Pride Parade days in OKC to represent those Gay people of color I knew, and those I didn’t. Like other white people present, as a Gay man or a straight one, I was a guest at someone else’s party and needed to stay in my lane and be wary of any unconscious words or actions that might come out because of unconscious privilege.

I may need to remind some that this is the mayor who, knowing the building I lived in was being sold six months before the tenants received their thirty day notice, the first and only indication the building had been sold around them, so that the low income and section-8 tenants had to move elsewhere for the building to be remodeled into luxury high-end apartment as part of the gentrification that is replacing actual citizens with empty apartments waiting for the influx of more moneyed people moving to the city when the commuter rail starts running.

Actual existing people were less important to the city than the potential, but not guaranteed, ones yet to come..

The gentrification was quiet until that point but media investigation as a result of the response from tenants to make this crime public and that the city had no central office to help those being displaced due to gentrification forcing them to organize a meeting of various assistant agencies in the building’s parking lot themselves brought it out of the shadows.

The mayor gave the media a wisp of a comment during all of that more impractical than humane, refused to recognize a tenant from that building during the question and answer period at the press conference where the mayor revealed the city’s rather late plan to address what had been going on after considerable damage had already been done to the citizens who rent and have low incomes.

His is an elitist mindset, and low income people need to just go away if the city they kept alive even during its worse days was to become a glass-palaced, top rated city and the mayor can add another feather into his cap. So this elitist stood before the crowd and made it known that, regardless what claims others maintained concerning Douglass, New Bedford was where Frederick Bailey, the enslaved, became Frederick Douglass, the, well, Frederick Douglass, as he should have as the mayor.

A well known historical event in the city’s history, a city with a high population of comfortably situated Blacks who owned businesses and homes, or held jobs equal to those of the White citizens as this was a Quaker town back in the Pre-Civil War era, is Rodney French ringing the Liberty Hall bell to warn citizens that some slave bounty hunters had arrived from the South so that people could protect themselves from being kidnapped and spending the rest of what should have been their free lives in slavery.

Massachusetts had passed a law in 1843 granting equality to all residents of the city, so such an act was legal.

Some self-emancipated people went right to the docks gaining employment on whale ships and could spend months and years out at sea until their escape was no longer relevant, or could jump ship in any port that looked more promising than what waited at home. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, the number of Black men going whaling spiked and remained high until after the Civil War.

Owning people and bounty hunters are negatives when it comes to New Bedford.

When a white supremacist group came to town and did their usual demanding that citizens take their city back, they were totally ignorant that that would mean the handful of still existing Quakers would have to go up against the majority population that was anything but Anglo-Saxon throughout its history. If people took back the city, the Whites would not fare well.

After explaining his problem with the other places having statues et al, the mayor made his declaration that the park and the statue show the world that,

“New Bedford owns Frederick Douglas.”

Yep we went out there and brought him back to being owned again.

He could have said Douglass is one of us, that he belongs here, or that he is now home. He chose, instead, to go full bounty hunter and re-own him.

The crowd might have remained silent but it rippled like a breeze had passed over water.

The word choice was not missed.

An isolated, poor word choice, perhaps, but the Freudian Slip added to other mayoral actions and attitudes as a further indication of his upper class attitude and actions and his true attitude toward the great majority of the citizens of the city he leads.

If it had been up to this mayor, if a poor, unemployed, self-emancipated person arrived in town, like refugees and immigrants do now, it would have been better in his mind if Douglass had just moved on and left any possible residence available for someone who might move into town from Beacon Hill.

I taught at Douglass High School and fought the principal hoping to educate my students. An attempt was made to drive me away by those who wanted the safe and self-serving status quo and were exposed for this by harmed students. 

Regardless of whoever I might truly be, I was unhoused by a city leader who prefers money and fame over people, and here, in front of me, came the mayor letting me know that there was one more connection with Douglass that I had not seen before.

Frederick Douglass too, perhaps for his color or initial status, is not fully accepted and only a Freudian slip made that known.

My building, the one we all got thrown out of, is only three blocks from the new park and statue. Had he moved to that area and had my building existed in his day, the mayor would have just seen Douglass as someone who needed to be moved back to his “place” because there was money to be made with him gone.

And why would this be acceptable?

What rights did he have since the mayor went and got the city its property back.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

When in 1978 Gilbert Baker made the First Pride flag for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day celebration, it was a grassroots action to symbolize hope and liberation with the colors of the rainbow displayed as horizontal stripes. Red stood for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, pink for sexuality, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit

These were attributes of ALL the people the flag represents regardless of race, color, creed, sexual orientation or gender identity. Just as the Stonewall Rebellion began as a spontaneous community outburst, one inside the bar and subsequently coalescing into one on the street, and not, while the current generation fights over which single person started it needing an individual to identify with because, apparently the concept of community is too difficult to comprehend, an individual. Like those who morph the Bible, that fictitious person’s orientation and gender identity came into play changing periodically so that over the fifty years since the Rebellion roles have been changed, some invented, and, after a period of time, someone announces that someone else threw either the fictitious shot glass or the fictitious brick and got it all going.

The obsession to claim a link to the person who started it all became divisive and each hero was rolled over the last to become the new.

We ALL did something then as ONE. It is being divided now.

Just as the meaning of Stonewall would be more complete with the proper understanding when it came to DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION, so too the stripes would be seen as inclusive as they represent the diversity of the Community if there was not this fight to be King of the Hill on flat land. 

As a grassroots movement of volunteers with little money, mass producing the flags became a financial burden not only because the flags were hand sown, the commercially printed ones coming much later, and as the pink and turquoise were so expensive, costly. Thus they were subsequently dropped and we have the six stripes of the Pride flag that symbolizes all of us and our community.

No color was removed to white wash the flag as there was nothing about the flag that placed any one race, color, creed, orientation or gender identity over another.

It became the flag that Gay activists fought under, winning any rights the Gay Community has won, a symbol of unity and oneness, and, obviously, a symbol of forward progress which those who do not learn real History seem to not grasp.

Just as with Stonewall, being part of a unified community seems to be a little too  much to grasp, and, although there is no problem with all the various flags of people within the community to symbolize themselves as sub-categories, division has come in as a new flag has appeared on the scene to represent all of us.

In June 2017, the city of Philadelphia, not the grassroots Community, had a revised version of the flag designed by the marketing firm Tierney that added black and brown stripes to the top of the standard six-color flag to draw attention to issues of people of color within the Gay community because, apparently, it needs to be pointed out what we had assumed all along, these people had the same “virtues” as the rest of us.

Apparently, as with so much else, this flag came from a design company that imposed its design on the community and not from within the community. Once again, if we expect to be respected and recognized, we can be so as long as we do it the way we are told to. Someone made money for the design, production, and sale, and it was accepted like a grateful crumb from the masters table and was honored and cemented in place by being the basis of the Progressive Flag.

We accepted the pat on the head but seemed not prepared for the shove out the door like a good lap dog.

We were once again dazzled by a shiny object and just accepted it from the masters.

They treat us poorly, to put it mildly, but then, seeing there is money to be made, tell us what symbolizes us and bestow through their largess the symbols they choose and if the chosen symbol, a Pride flag on a beer can or clothing in stores, is challenged they will not defend their right as a private company to sell what they want and how, or show their real commitment to the Community, they cave, remove the rainbows, and all is back where it had been when the relio-fascists had been keeping us down.

But, hey, there was a rainbow on the Pride Whoopee-Cushion so they love us.

Ignoring history, and obviously unaware of what the Pride Flag stands for, in June 2018, a new design, the Progressive Pride Flag was released adding the Black and Brown stripes and the three stripes of the Transgender flag slicing to the right in a chevron through the original flag as a sign of inclusion and progress within the community because the flag representing us all did not do that, and there had been no previous progress.

Only White Gay people got their rights according to the new history and there was never any interracial activity.

In the over 40 years I have fought for the Community at one point losing my job, winning it back in a district and appellate court trial because of my advocacy for students which was successful in getting sexual orientation and gender identity into school district policy in the Bible Belt which got equality for all students of every strip on any flag it was inclusive progress.

The chevron along the hoist features black, brown, light blue, pink, and white stripes to bring those marginalized  communities to the forefront, and the official description states,

“the arrow points to the right to show forward movement, while being along the left edge shows that progress still needs to be made.”

It’s the wedging across the Pride flag like the horses did at Gay rallies and that bothers me as it implies the inclusion needs to be forced on the old, the ones who were totally aware of inclusion when they were physically attacked at Gay Rights rallies, or Baptists invaded a Pride Parade hitting marchers with Bibles.

Sadly, even this attempt to be more redundantly inclusive was further modified so that the brown and black stripes and the Trans flag were reduced in size creating  a triangular field of yellow with a purple circle in the middle to represent Intersexed people as the most prominent, while, unless as a person of color you are Black or Brown, you have to assume you are in the stripes of the old flag because of your virtues, but you certainly didn’t make it onto the new flag. for your race. 

Where are the Two-Spirit people, the Asian and Pacific Islanders? Are they, in the name of progress getting further marginalized by having to settle with being lumped into another group’s color stripe?

During this present June, when I have gone into bars, I have seen all the various sub-categories represented by their flags which had me look many up. However, there were no Pride Flags with the stripes which left the Elders in the Community out, the ones who created  the atmosphere that allows for all the flags to proudly exist.

So a symbol of unity is being carved up by the various groups within the community so the flag is now more about division than unity. 

Representing sexual orientation there are 14 flags, 5 for sexual attraction, 9 for gender identity, and, now that we let society call us “Queer” again, a Queer flag because those who had to live with that word as a weapon and do not want to be called that now, are no more or just have to accept we are to be called that by those for whose future we fought to removed it, or, we have to settle for the seat in the corner Baby was never to get?

I had a Queer flag. It was the Rainbow one.

So, a unified event, Stonewall, has subsequently become competition for credit among those viewing history from a modern lens and do not bother to read beyond a friend’s text or something written on the internet by someone claiming they know something when they actually do not.

The present shot glass/brick debate.

A unified flag based on virtue not race or any other specific characteristics of a group is being divided in that same divisive action as the Progress Flag, I assume called that because “Progress” doesn’t trigger people the way the word Gay does,or, heaven forbid, using the word “Pride”.

The Philadelphia flag was found non-inclusive by one group who forced a redesign of the flag producing the Progressive Flag. Other groups are just as deserving of representation and there is that whole field in the chevron ripe for filling, so this could continue.

It all started, rightly or wrongly with the blanket term at the time, preferred over the clinical and humanity reducing term “Homosexual”, Gay. Now we have an ever increasing alphabet with disagreements over the correct order and hell to pay if someone omits a letter by mistake or violates the ever morphing correct order which is too often assumed these days to be a personal attack or an indication of the willful holding back of the Community. Most straight people and many Gays joke about this ever increasing hard to remember designation of the Community. 

I have a good friend who was proud the other day to add guacamole to his BLT to create an LGBT Sandwich.

The Flag is catching up.

I am sad to admit it but, if the Progress Flag and whatever shows up next June is any indication, judging from the modern post-Stonewall revisions of history, the ever increasing alphabet, more concern for knowing everyone’s preferred pronouns which have no logic to them, in many cases, beyond personal taste rather than addressing issues, and redoing of the flag like it was just a meaningless piece of drapery in a futile effort to be inclusive while deciding who does and who does not make the flag cut when the original flag avoided all that by representing SHARED attributes and virtues, it appears that, while in the past our goal was to get equality with the tide raising all boats, the goal of the Community now is to divide from within so we can be conquered from without.

The fight is to erase Community.

I weep for the people in the past upon whom this is spit. I have the advantage they do not of being alive and able to wipe it off.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The parent was irate.

Rather than allow my Special Education students to depend on the giant, clumsy, plastic, spring-loaded, just above toy calculators that the department used because I knew there would be times they needed to do multiplication and there was no form of calculator around, or the batteries on the one they had died, I had the class memorize the times tables as best they could. I had learned mine up to the Tens by the third grade, and, even with the learning disabilities each kid had, none had the intelligence ceiling below a third grader so could learn as I had.

Not all kids could learn all the tables, but all, save one, learned considerably more than they had when they knew none of them. The complaint of the irate parent was that I was forcing the Times Tables on his son, and as he had had what he considered a successful life without them, his kid should not have to learn them either. It was demanded that I allow his son to use the toy calculators instead

And so it remained with his kid sitting in the classroom using his Fisher-Price styled calculator, which, for comparison of size, consider that between the universal remotes of decades past to those now, and his use of the calculator single him out. Overtime, he learned his Times Tables, all of them, because of peer pressure.

When heading into a week’s break I advised the students to use the time to occasionally look at and study the Tables but was informed they would be too busy to do any school work, I handed each kid three copies so they could tape one inside the refrigerator door as opposed on the door as no one stares at the door until they decide to open it, while most people open it and then stare inside the fridge, one on top of the toilet tank, and the last opposite the toilet at eye level on the opposite wall because they were guaranteed to be in the bathroom once or twice each day, and depending on the reason for their being there could study while either standing or sitting without the danger of misplacing the Ties Table papers.

A parent complained that I not only made a connection between the Times Tables and the bathroom, but in doing so I had used the word “toilet”. Her demand was that she be allowed to put them where she chose, something she could have done without my knowledge by just doing it, or her child should not be required to even attempt the learn them as if that threat would somehow harm me and not her child. An “issue” had to be made.

That student did learn the Time Tables but a little slower than most others who actually told stories of how visiting relatives laughed about the Table in the bathroom with some having been quizzed on them by the person after the flush and return to the visiting.

Since I began teaching, it was obvious that it would be good to have a picture or a model or replica if not the actual item when explaining things to the class whose learning would be enhanced by showing what eventually became known as “Realia”.

I had the usual facsimiles of historic documents, things like a bullet from Gettysburg to explain how a soldier in “Red Badge of Courage” could have his arm practically blown off by the size of it, something that impressed a student that had been involved in a drive-by and was glad they did not use old bullets, models ships which, along with a life-sized replica Lewis Templeton harpoon, were useful in making Moby Dick more understandable for my landlocked, Heartland students, and other historical and not so historical things that I could grab when needed and if needed to show the students.

There were also things more for decoration and ambiance that were based on things literary.

Among the things, Excuse me, Realia in my room was a poster of the Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey hanging in my room as one of those things that, although I may never use in class, was there for the students to discover. Gashleycrumb Tinies is a cautionary tale where children meet bad ends because they did not think before acting and the consequences were negative. Boris could not be eaten by bears unless he went where they were and Pru would not have been crushed in the brawl if she had not decided to enter the bar room.

A parent, however, who had never been in my class even on Parent/Teacher nights and who, therefore, had never seen the poster, saying nothing to me went straight to the powers that be, demanding my pro-abortion propaganda be removed from my room. After school the day of the complaint, the principal went to me classroom, not to remove but to inspect the poster, but couldn’t find anything in the room dealing with abortion, however, and upon seeing the poster did recall reading the Tinies when she was young, not knowing that as the offending poster.

As usually happens, and which did on another occasion, the move to remove the pro-abortion poster was joined by the parent’s friends and her pastor and his congregation. To end the problem, the principal agreed with me that by dividing the poster and hanging one side on one wall the other on another, and the complete, erroneously represented poster had been removed. After allowing the parent and her allies to walk through the room for their approval,they all gave it because the offending poster was non longer in the room, the offending poster none had seen before, during, and after,they demanded it be removed, and to them not seeing a large poster promoting abortion, it had been.

As we were working on more inclusive protective language in the school district’s student policies, some objected because we wanted Gay kids included as we headed to the new millenium. There were the usual baseless objections, but the committee working on this whole revision of the Student/Parent Handbook had everything on draft ready for school board vote, but were assured that we could proceed with the spirit of the changes as it was just a matter of accepting them, and the reasons for the additional inclusion had been made clear in statistics, studies, and reports. For this reason I felt comfortable putting up the list of famous Gay, Lesbian,

Bisexual, and Transgender people throughout history in my high school classroom I had hung for Gay History Month at the previous middle school at which I taught school with no comment and no further references to it, leaving it to be found by the students without any direction from me.

A parent, and eventually a Baptist pastors demanded this display of Homosexuality be removed.

In their demands they wanted all books in my classroom that might have Gay themes, any pictures, be removed with the big target being the huge chain in Rainbow colors I hung across my room. Although no books were removed even as they had all been gone through as the book shelf behind my desk with my personal reading and and other personal items like a coffee cup, had been rifled through and left to look like a post police raid scene from a movie.

The raid took place at night when I was home, and I had to be contacted by the vandals, the principal, the assistant principal, and the dean of education, because they wanted to know where I was hiding the big chain. I refused any cooperation especially as the big chain that was suspended across the room was a mall, Pride colored tennis bracelet I had bought in Dallas and which I had removed and placed on my desk one day, never to put it on again, as it kept getting caught on things and was annoying for that. It was the size big though to fit snugly on my wrist and obviously not all that big if they couldn’t find it. It sat on my desk the remainder of that year.

They could not find the poster showing people having sex that the parent had claimed the poster was illustrating and wanted me to come to school late at night, to show them where I had hidden it, another impossibility as the existence of the poster ws the invention of the parent.

I had listed the names of famous people and he imagined people having sex. Yet, his delusion and, perhaps, lewd mind was respected and addressed rather than his being told to go away.

His solution was to have his daughter transferred to another high school which would turn her away because the staff did not want to deal with any theatrics this parent might choose to display making it necessary to enroll her in a costly private school where, as it was to turn out, he continued to attempt micromanaging that school to promote his own personal, political, and religious beliefs.

Rainbows and anything Gay were not allowed in my classroom which I pointed out caused a huge problem as I was a Gay teacher on contract and would have to be in that room.

Yet another reasonable parental complaint.

Because I would be grading essays at home at night, and so as not to deal with ever fading pencils or sentences smudged to make them illegible from a sweaty arm during the writing, and because following a simple direction to use blue or black ink as opposed pencil or any other preferred color could decide if a job application was read, and because a lot of red on an assignment does not look good and is hard to correct, I required all assignments be in blue or black ink reserving pencils for math class.

This brought about a parental complaint, again to the office and not to me, that my having requirements in my classroom, some of which some kids might not like, such as the blue/black ink requirement with which her son did not approve would be setting up a power struggle in my classroom with her son that would interfere with his education, so, therefore I should allow him to use whatever his chosen writing utrensil was regardless of color.

I tried to explain there was no power struggle as I was the teacher and set the rules in my class to get the maximum student achievement, and the best way to avoid such an anticipated power struggle was to inform her kid he needed to have blue and black pens for class.

His next assignment was passed in in pencil.The following day I handed his ungraded paper pack and informed him he could pass it in the following day in blue or black ink. The mother was at school shortly after dismissal to complain about my unreasonable requirement, demanding I be made to accept her son’s work no matter what medium it was written in. I explained I had gotten to his paper late in my essay correcting and my eyes were too tired to read his essay and being in ink would make sure this would not happen again. I refused to go along with her suggestion that when he wrote in pencil I correct his essay first, because that requirement would set up a power struggle between the three of us.

He was habitually borrowing pens from other students.

I was teaching a History class when we came to World War II. It would seem to be extremely difficult to teach about the war if you omitted Hitler and the Nazis, but because in explaining what led up to the war I had to explain what Hitler and the Nazis supported and promoted, a parent, again saying nothing to me, went to the administrators and lodged the complaint that I was trying to get her child to abandon Christ and follow Hitler.

Needless to say the unit on World War II was a little weak as, while the issue was being discussed, just telling students we won a war against the bad guys without context made it necessary to go back over the material when it was decided the best solution was to have that student placed in another history class where the parent was to later complain about the teacher mentioning the KKK.

I was in trouble because I mentioned Walt Whitman was Gay and was informed that was a fact no student needed to know, while on the contrary they all do, especially those for whom he could be a meaningful figure and source of self-esteem.

In my Classroom, at least, Walt was Gay.

Because I was openly Gay, the attempt was made to require me to show the principal any book I brought on campus for personal reading as some child might come upon my book and commit the most heinous of crimes, begin reading it. The content was to be cleared as “not Homosexual.” I never complied with this ridiculous rule and this lack of abiding with a directive was brought up occasionally as the reason I was not a good teacher anymore.

I have had to deal with demonstrably uninformed parents, pastors and their congregations, and politicians who tasted a monster they could use to promote that whole Christian Nation thing which would seem to be in competition with God’s claim of having a Kingdom of His own and emphasizing that, “My kingdom is not of this world”, because, rather than do the work and possibly learn their perception was wrong, they lump things into extremely broad categories of their own making and simply condemn not on the content of a book or idea, but on its having been lumped in with other unrelated books in their contrived category.

An attempt was made to prevent me from mentioning that Walt Whitman was Gay because of the trope that Gay means sex-act, and claiming that by mentioning he was Gay I was bringing up sex and that was not in my curriculum. I stopped teaching Robert Browning and his lovely wife, Elizabeth Barrett, because they were always writing those pornographic love poems. I assumed that, had I brought them up, the students might head to the nearest porn palace to find out all the ways he loved her.

Percy Shelley and Mary were not such a problem as he wrote romantic poetry and she wrote books about reanimation and monsters so the sex could not have been all that good or even of any interest to students who stereotyped things a lot.

We are required to teach Romeo and Juliet who as children in adolescence fall in love, and eventually kill themselves because the parents did not want them to date, something that could have been prevented if they had paid attention to the man at the beginning of the play who made it quite clear their love was “star crossed”. We have two tweens killing themselves, and a few others along the way, to deal with their decision and its consequences.

But mention Walt Whitman was Gay and the parents are traumatized.

I taught down the hall from a History teacher who had recently accepted Jesus and went into proselytizing about Jesus like a smoke quitter who becomes as annoying about everyone’s need to quit as a vegan when you order a cheeseburger.

In his history class he found ways to introduce the Bible into any event and went full bore when covering a war or battle and he could read an account of some Biblical event in an attempt to draw parallels. I was expected to avoid an important part of a writer’s persona and possibly their motivation for writing the great works, but Walt’s love was unacceptable while the kids got the thrill of all God’s Old Testament smiting, complete with foreskin removal and collection and the inevitable post battle rampage in God’s name. Amen

On parent teachers’ nights for 38 years at four each year, the parents who came in were those who really only came in to have their parental approach to education validated as they were the ones whose kids were doing well and achieved academically. The parents who should have but never showed up were those whose children reflected their bad attitude toward education. The no shows, although usually claiming a schedule conflict and an inability to reschedule a private conference, where the ones quickest to drop everything and get to the school or, more often, central administration to lodge a complaint whose resolution was to have their child not learn something because, as they did not know it themselves and either did not see the value of their child learning more for a better life, a thing most parents want, or to prevent their child learning more so parental deficiencies, real or internally perceived, would not be seen.

As a Kid, if I asked either of my parents for help with something with which they were not familiar, they would not pretend universal knowledge but would acknowledge this was something they didn’t know about and would suggest someone who might. Their reaction was not to demand the subject matter not be taught because they did not know it, but that we learn it in spite of their not having done that. There were many post World War II things we were learning in school that were not around in their day.

Jaws, the novel and movie, came out while I was teaching College Prep American Literature at the same time I was covering Moby Dick in class, and some students saw some parallels with Moby Dick and Jaws that gave them the impression that Jaws was just an updated version of the classic and asked if they could do a group report on this. A few students subsequently handed in a written report showing their findings. The principal thought it a good assignment as it was a) connected to literature, b) had the kids voluntarily reading a novel, c) employed thinking skills, d) required coordinating disparate research for inclusion in one report, and e) was student initiated.

A higher up in the religious order that ran the school demanded I be fired for allowing such an assignment as he had spent a whole night underlining all the curse words in the book to which the students were exposed by it.

The principal shot him down by asking for a plot summation which the priest could not offer as he had not read the book, but had merely skimmed it, looking for curse words. The question, therefore, became, which should be properly dealt with and punished, the teacher whose students had read two novels and produced a well written, well thought out comparison on two books, one they read voluntarily as it was outside the curriculum, or an old man sitting alone in his room at night going through a book, not reading it, but going through it and only to underline the dirty words he found.

When parents complain individually or in a public forum, there are certain questions they must be able to answer before even pretend attention will be give.

If it is a book,

1) Did you read it?,

2) Can you summarize the plot?,

3) Can you cite the specific passages with which you find fault and explain why?,

and

4) Would you accept a parent’s objections to books that you have no problem with.

Although it would be rather mean, if I were to be the interviewer and asked the fourth question, I would request an example of a book the parent believed should never be banned and fill out the complaint form myself to have it banned as the parent waited patiently for me to finish. My reasons would be as broad and irrelevant as the ones on the parental complaint as I would merely be copying them and reapplying them to other books as is the accepted practice.

If it is a classroom presentation, rather than a general, blanket complaint, I would ask,

1) What specific information do you object to and why?

and

2) Can you supply the correct information for our review to help the teacher improve for our review?

If any parent accepts that their child when telling a story about school does so completely factual and precisely without artifice, they forget their own childhood. If a student says that a teacher said something, the adult thing to do is make sure the teacher did and not go to school administrators to file an official complaint based on a story about a piece of information stated during class by a person with one or more degrees in their subject matter and follow up refresher classes in a six hour day with constantly changing circumstance and multiple personal and circumstance based interactions with other kids and their stories, and a thousand other distractions that could influence the details details of a post school day story.

Nothing against parents, I had two good ones. The problem is that too often the least common denominator, often because of their lack of education attempts to control the education of everyone and find those who will support them, not because of the validity of the complaint, but how it can be used to control the education of those who appreciate the value of a good one.

The assumption upon which each book, each bit of factual information is challenged should not have that challenge presented without required rationale for the request and this must be more than a political statement or slogan.

If it is because it is “woke’, that term must be defined by the complainant and how what is objected to supports the concept of woke must be presented.

You do not believe your kids merely because they said so.

Adults should not be denying information to students for that reason.

They are the adults.

Perhaps the best response to book banning and controlling education based on the because-I-said-so approach should be,

“No. Make me.”

.

.

.

.

.

.