You know that soccer mom who jogs by your house every morning? The other day she went right up to your son’s third grade teacher and stripped her naked of the due process rights she’s had for the last 57 years here in Kansas.
And that guy who was smiling and joking with me in the checkout line at the grocery last Saturday? He lit a firebomb, taped a tax credit for private school supporters on it, and flung it through the window of a first grade classroom in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
If you’re just blaming cowardly, anti-education legislators, you are wrong. Our Legislature was not beamed to earth from another planet. They were elected. Not by people in some other country who want to see American schools fail, but by jogging soccer moms, jovial husbands in the grocery store and upstanding members of our business community.
Every Kansan who votes for anti-education candidates, every Kansan who forgets to vote or who is too busy to vote, every Kansan who doesn’t bother to look at a candidate’s record, every one of those fine folks who rub shoulders with us every day is responsible for this open declaration of war on our children’s futures.
I look forward to the day when I can report that my neighbor around the corner just restored teachers’ basic rights to due process and funded public education at a more-than-adequate level.
For that to happen, there’s a lot of educating to be done outside of the schools - the educating of good old average Kansans about the damage they are doing to you, to me and to themselves in the voting booth.
