The day I picked a fight with a geriatric

My righteous anger found its voice

As unexpected as a bird hitting the windshield, the rage spike took me entirely by surprise. It caused my head to throb in time with my heart, whose rate shot up immediately. I felt dizzy.

The cause? Entering the restaurant where I’d just paid my bill was a septuagenarian in a Trump hat and a homemade t-shirt, white with huge black letters that read

DEFUND

TEACHERS

…NOT THE

POLICE

The host seated him in the booth back-to-back with the one where I sat, and I felt his stooped body shuffle onto the bench attached to mine. I was a statue on my bench, seething, not knowing what to do next. I considered leaving right then, but wasn’t sure my legs would hold me.

Since the incident I’ve had time to think about this man. I’ve considered the many articles I’ve read advocating taking a higher road, and the ways we could perhaps work with people to help them understand other viewpoints. But sometimes, dammit, there just isn’t a reasonable other viewpoint. Once I got really pissed off in a post-doctoral class about another student’s assertion that we should stop critiquing historical figures’ racism because “they’re just a product of their times.” So, what’s your logic here, that bigotry was acceptable because it was 1850? Fuck. That.

My chair outside my cabin at the American Prairie campground recently. Wholly unrelated to this post, unless you consider that someone likely had to learn to read and do math to build that cabin.

My sister recently sent me a rad post about running a nonprofit called Brutally honest answers to 15 pointless questions our sector keeps asking itself. I ate it up because 1) it helped me think better about nonprofit work and how I could be part of radicalizing this sector, at least in my area and 2) I love it when people say truth instead of trying to kowtow or pander or change people’s minds from within. That shit does not work. True rage spikes are rare for me, and I often struggle to express myself clearly, particularly when I’m filled with emotion. So it’s instructive for me to see people readily calling out crap and doing it with a righteous voice.

A clear theme in that article is that far-right nonprofits don’t mince words, they don’t spin their wheels taking too much care with the details. They hammer their points and make them count. Here’s a line that struck me:

This is one of the reasons why conservative movements and organizations have been so successful. They don’t waste time or energy on discussions that don’t ultimately serve their goals.

So, this dude and his shirt. He’s making a very clear point with it, even if it defies logic. Someone (him?) had a goal, made that awful shirt to serve the goal, and now he’s wearing it around town.

The sentiment itself is part of a backlash against teachers that’s been going on for, like, ever, but especially the last decade or so. Frankly I think it’s also part of a larger backlash against women, since teaching is largely a feminine occupation, and that is because women could be — and were — paid much less than men, prior to the advent of unions.¹ I wrote about that here.

Conservatives have been heaping abuse on public school systems, and increasingly using teachers as punching bags, for years. In Montana, where we’ve long enjoyed high quality public schools, the recent spate of conservative-leaning politicians and newcomers to our state have insisted on things we never thought we’d see, or need, such as religious vouchers, charter schools, laws restricting curriculum, and more.

Some will say conservatives want public schools to fail so they can replace them with private schools preaching and teaching what they want. Certainly some of that is behind the movements we see in legislatures across the nation. But I cannot paint it with such a broad brush as that: plenty of conservatives appreciate good public schools. These folks are just as aghast at the idea of computers teaching kids, or religion in classrooms, or the closure of local neighborhood schools as I am. Yet the rhetoric of their very-right-wing compatriots is literally weakening education.

Because what’s the upshot of all that rhetoric? People are leaving the teaching profession.² People aren’t even entering the teaching profession. Across the nation there is a dearth of educators, and schools will again start (and sometimes finish) the year with no trained teacher in whole classrooms of kids. At the Montana Digital Academy we see it when a school comes to us in August needing a teacher for 100 students…online.

Is that what Mr. Defund Teachers wants? Does he even understand the logical outcome of his shirt’s rhetoric? In that restaurant, when I finally found my feet, I doubt he learned anything, in this exchange that may have lasted as long as 30 seconds.

Me, sliding out of the booth and seeing him perusing the menu: Who taught you to read that menu?

Him: Excuse me?

Me: Did a teacher teach you to read that menu?

Him, considering my meaning: Some teachers are okay, but I’ll tell you what, most of them need to get their values straight…

Me: When was the last time you were in a public school?

Him: The parents have the right to…

Me, loud: Try going into a public school and watch the hard work these teachers do, then see if you still want to wear that shirt [jabbing a finger at him]. That is offensive! [marching out, him still grumbling]

Did I change a heart or a mind? Probably not. Did I say everything I really wanted to say? Definitely not. But I also did not kowtow or pander, and I at least began to tell that man what is wrong with his stupid shirt. And everyone else in the restaurant too.

My righteous anger found its voice. Educators do not need old men³ who live their lives like the online comment section of a newspaper, as cesspools of hostility and malice coming at them to critique what they know nothing of. Educators (and students, and public school systems in general) do need support, they need advocates, they need people who understand the near-impossible task of a classroom teacher, one that, despite its difficulty, yet compels the heart.

1. Which haven’t even entirely solved the problem.

2. Including me, in 2021

3. or anyone else