Yesterday probably would have gone by as a normal day. But I started clicking on shared posts in my newsfeed. And that got me thinking. Ruminating. I wrote this then, and I wasn’t going to post it. I changed my mind.
2011
I’ll start off with where I was then: Okinawa, Japan. There’s a 13 hour time difference there. My now ex-husband and I had just finished a shouting match, and I was lying down in the bedroom. He stayed up watching television. He called to me to come out. I was still mad and didn’t want to, but he called again. I got up. I think it was after the first plane hit, and maybe before the second one hit. Or it might have been around 11:00 p.m. (10:00 a.m. New York time) and both planes had already hit…
I remember feeling calm and not really surprised. After all, the United States has done a lot of fucked up things around the world. It made sense to me that someone would finally call us on our bullshit. And, of course, it was terrible, because thousands of civilians died for fuck-ups by folks who were supposed to be ensuring our freedom. Or something like that.
2021
Fast forward to now. We’re finally out of the war that was created by the incident. A twenty-year waste of lives and resources.
And all along the way the United States has laid the infrastructure for us to build space for our own domestic terrorists to rise up. I think of Trump, who released 5,000 members of the Taliban in 2018. So there’s that. But also him spouting his racist, sexist, “alternative facts,” fascist hate through his Twitter feed and beyond.
I think of Florida’s Governor, who is fine banning schools from creating mask mandates, ignoring that fact that humans have been using filters for a variety of uses for at least 4,000 years, using water filtration as one example of an application. (I’ll do what I would tell my students to never do and cite Wikipedia. But there are some citations there that support the history of filters.) He’s fine putting the lives of children, school employees, and the communities these folks live in on the line for the sake of his own political career.
Then I think of four Pinellas County School Board members (Cane, Cook, Dudley, and Long), as well as the Superintendent (Grego), who are enabling the Governor’s negligent and reckless order. Each of these people are public servants to the education systems, yet will not stand for even the simplest application of science to guide their policy. Instead, they choose to use the argument of “there are two sides to the story.” They choose to hide behind misinformation to try to appease the anti-mask people who yell at them. The choose to remain silent in the face of folks who spread misinformation, and they choose to ignore the science that is very clear that masks can help to slow or even stop the spread of Covid.
By making these choices, they are enabling fascists. Or at least enabling people that employ fascist tactics.
At the last School Board meeting in Pinellas, pro-science protestors demanding a mask mandate faced extreme intimidation tactics from anti-mask protesters. They were spat upon. They were touched. They were yelled at, with the anti-mask person standing inches from the other person’s face.
Every time any School Board Member stays silent on these behaviors, they side with those using the tactics.
As a former Pinellas County Schools teacher, I’m not really surprised these folks have been staying silent about bullying behavior. They act as bullies themselves, whether directly or indirectly, when they intimidate and retaliate against their own employees for speaking out. Even if they don’t do this directly, they create space for the intimidation and retaliation. I faced this the first week I worked in Pinellas County (I started Fall 2019), at the end of the first day the students were on campus. I sent an e-mail to the School Board about my class sizes. I taught Chemistry, and I had over 30 students on nearly all of my rosters. One had 38. My room was rated by the Fire Marshall for 21 students. I knew my Principal couldn’t do anything about this, so I sent an e-mail asking the School Board to look into the issue so it could be remedied in the future. Guess who showed up in my room at the end of that first day of classes? My Principal. She was actually pretty cool about it, but she had gotten heat from the Area Superintendent. And so, she brought a bit of the heat to me and to our Department. The powers that be above my Principal cooked up a performative “fix” to the problem (that didn’t actually fix anything), and life went on.
Now ask me if I said a damn thing the entire rest of the year I was there? The message was clear: bring up valid safety concerns and stir up a shit-storm. Since I was on probationary status that first year (normal for folks new to the district), I laid completely low. I didn’t feel safe bringing anything up.
And that is a mild example. I just had intimidation tactics used on me. No write-up or actual discipline.
As an education organizer and activist, so many teachers have come to me telling me their own stories of intimidation and even retaliation by varying levels of district administration (which is illegal by the way). Unfortunately, not many stand against it, because it’s just too damn hard mentally and the culture is just too damn toxic.
So why don’t you see too many school employees going and speaking their truth in front of the School Board? They know it’s highly likely they will get a “talking to” the next day by their Principal. Or worse.
I’m not so surprised that the Superintendent and certain School Board members (Cane, Cook, Dudley, Long) are siding with a bully (i.e. the Governor) and bullies (i.e. aggressive anti-mask folks). They’ve already laid the ground work by acting as bullies towards their own employees.
Back to the point
Getting back to September 11. I’m using examples I’m familiar with, but I think they point to broader trends and problems. No one is going to openly admit they support domestic terrorism. But domestic terrorism has always lived in the United States, in the form of slavery, white supremacy, the patriarchy, and racism. And since September 11, 2011, we’ve been laying that groundwork for some folks to feel ok with terrorizing other folks for something as small as wearing a mask over their face to protect themselves and their neighbors from an illness that could kill them.
And that’s the best example of domestic terrorism I can think of in the U.S. right now: how Covid is being handled in too many places. We are terrorized by losing our housing as eviction moratoriums end. We are terrorized by a lack of basic protections in the form of mask mandates. We are terrorized by lack of unemployment benefits. We are terrorized by anti-mask folks who yell at us for wearing masks on outings with our families. We are terrorized by having inadequate health insurance during this pandemic (if we’re lucky enough to have it at all).
Elected officials at every level could stand up to bullies and do the right thing right now. We could quickly stop the tens of thousands of people who are getting sick and dying from Covid each day. But these “leaders” will need to start standing up to bullies, whether that’s anti-mask folks or corporations.
So what do we do?
We must unite and cause “good trouble,” as Senator John Lewis would have said. We need to join together against these intimidation tactics. We can be afraid, but let’s organize and work together to build a wave that will wash away the terribleness of facism that infiltrates into our society more and more.
Let’s fight hate with love, misinformation with facts and truth.
Let’s create a country and a world based on community, not on war.