The Season for Dreaming

I’m grateful for the Madison protests

I am grateful because I live in an exciting and terrifying time, where I turn on the news and I see reports on protests in Egypt, in Libya, in Yemen, and yes, an hour and a half west of me in Madison, WI. In all of these reports people are coming out in great numbers to stand up against what they believe to be injustice, but the difference is I live in America, where people can protest to protect a right that people in other countries don’t even have to begin with, and where they can do so peacefully.

I’M SO SORRY I HATE TO KEEP GETTING ALL POLITICAL UP IN THIS TUMBLR

But I just gotta say:

All the people going IF THE TEACHERS REALLY CARED ABOUT MY CHILD’S EDUCATION THEY WOULD SHOW UP TO WORK TODAY are driving me nuts.

Oh, that one day (or even three in Madison) your child’s school was canceled is really impacting their education to an unforgiveable degree. You know, this one day specifically, and not any other day they’ve ever missed school for weather or anything else that didn’t happen to have politics attached.

Regardless of how you feel about the bill, I find it hard to believe you can’t understand that it’s important and setting a precedent. It’s not unreasonable that teachers would value their future/well-being and the national implications of the passage of the bill over a day or two of your child’s education considering, whether you think that they’re justified or not, they do believe that this decision does ultimately impact your child’s education in what they consider to be a negative way.

The teachers are not holding the education of Wisconsin’s children ransom. Calm down. Some people will argue, well, they’re hurting other non-union workers who have to miss work to deal with their kids not having school — then fine, argue that, but when you start claiming that the protests are robbing children of their education you’ve lost me because I cannot see your point as anything but highly exaggerated and finding excuses to attack the protesters (you know, those protestors… who are the teachers… who teach the children whose education you care about.)

WI schools closing on account of lack of teachers

Milwaukee Public Schools (which consists of 223 schools) just announced it’s closing for the day because of the volume of teachers calling in (to go protest), and Madison (which consists of 47 schools) is closing for the third day in a row. From what I gather from the news, at least 15 other school districts are canceling today also.

I was sort of surprised (probably naively) to check up on the news and see that MPS is closed (my cousin teaches in an MPS school, actually, she just tweeted her shock) and I decided to look into just how big this is getting. Obviously… yikes. I’m not going to talk about the whole situation here — Google around for information from people much more informed and articulate than me — but it’s just sort of crazy to be watching this going down.

darkchocolateandlemons-deactiva asked: I tweeted John Green asking him to make his video about the protests. You should retweet it. (mighty_mudha on twitter)

Will do.