Schools and Trump

Where did he get that thing?

I was in high school when Reagan got shot. I don't remember any students being upset about it. I just remember them being pleased or at least amused. It's a little strange. He was elected president, supposedly by a landslide (voter turnout was so low that Richard Nixon got more votes in 1960 when he lost that Reagan got when he won). There must have been SOME Republicans in that school, but nobody cared that he was nearly murdered.

I spoke later that day to a much more mature member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a college boy, and he was rather shaken by it.

I couldn't stand Reagan, but I didn't see any big advantage to him being shot. Carter was barely to the left of Reagan. Bush, Sr, was vice president and he wouldn't have been much better.

There was an alternative grade school in town which had held a mock election. Barry Commoner of the Citizen's Party won, Jimmy Carter was a close second. Ronald Reagan might have gotten one or two votes. The Libertarian and Communist candidates each got one vote.

I was tutoring a kid at the school at the time. I'm pretty sure I knew which kids voted Communist and Libertarian. The kid whose mother was in the Communist Party went on to be a leader in the African-American Student Union in college and served on the city's Human Rights Commission. But I couldn't imagine any kid in that school voting for Reagan.

And now you have Trump. He won, yet, in schools, it's the kids who support him who are being isolated.

Here, the principals are posting messages urging kids to be tolerant of others even if they are Trump supporters.

A middle school boy in Alabama was paddled for writing Trump's name on the chalk board. You'd think it would be uncontroversial in Alabama, but the school banned the president's name from being uttered because it would be disruptive. You could only mention who the President of the United States is in history class, although I'm not sure how that would come up while they're studying the War of Northern Aggression.

A confused reader commenting on the article claimed that liberal teachers were paddling pro-Trump children. All those pro-corporal punishment Alabama progressives.

Imagine. Your candidate has almost zero chance of winning. Even he assumes he'll lose. You're plainly the underdog. His opponent has raised far more money. Everyone anticipates your bitter disappointment. Then your guy wins a truly stunning victory no one thought possible, and YOU'RE the bad guy.

I don't want to give people the wrong idea. I hate Trump. I was afraid of Clinton because her only real campaign promise was to start World War Three, but Trump is moving in that direction anyway.

I don't know how far to the right Trump really is from the DNC. The only thing they're willing to attack him for is being a Russian spy. I think it's because they don't honestly object to anything else he's doing.

Every president turns out to be far worse than anyone dared imagine. I thought Trump would be an exception just because everyone thought he'd be another Hitler. Anything short of actual Nazism would be a relief. But he's getting worse and worse and impeaching him won't do any good. Look at his vice president. We're just going to have to sweat it out.