Tag: protests

Still too much

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching1 Comment

Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.

Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.

To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.

(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)

I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!

Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.

The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.

My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.

Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.

The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.

Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.

All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.

I kind of need tomorrow to go well.

(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.

On student protest

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, TeachingLeave a comment

We had a surprise snow day today— I woke up, thought “Man, it would be great to find out we had a two-hour delay,” and then we did, and less than an hour later it turned into an asynchronous cancellation. We had an ugly burst of sleet and lake effect snow at the worst possible time, apparently, and the rural roads were disastrous. This is somehow our seventh snow day of 2026, which is absolutely insane.

On Thursday a student walked up to me and asked me what the plan was for the walkout protest next week, since she had heard I was “in charge” of it. And holy fucking Jesus I have never shut an incorrect idea down so quickly. High school students across northern Indiana (and I assume most of the country, but this was definitely the week for them around here) had walkouts this week, and there are more planned for next week. Our district sent out a communication to the teachers explaining precisely what their expectations were for the staff were our students to decide to walk out of class. I have been talking with a lot of my students about the protests (at, to be clear, their instigation, not mine) and to be completely fair, the idea that I was “in charge” isn’t completely out of left field. I quietly distributed whistles into the staff mailboxes late last week, and it was hilarious how no one in the building, including my principal, hesitated for even a moment to decide that it was me behind them.

The problem is that I genuinely don’t love the idea of middle school students doing a walkout. Teachers have been told that they must remain in their classrooms if even a single student does not walk out, and we are to “continue instruction as normal,” and if everyone leaves, we are to contact the office for further instructions. I strongly suspect that there will not be enough supervision. This is a very different thing from high school walk-outs, where half of the students are at least on the verge of adulthood, have drivers’ licenses, etcetera. There are eleven-year-olds in my building. It is not the same thing. And while I’ve quietly encouraged a handful of students to take leadership roles if and/or when, the social environment in a middle school doesn’t work the same way a high school does either. Not to mention the fact that in my specific building, without providing a lot of detail, the physical layout of the building and the surrounding streets aren’t great for marching.

The notion of these kids spreading themselves out over a few blocks while they march around the building or whatever— or, worse, some of them deciding to do that while others congregate near the doors and chant or whatever— is … kinda terrifying, to be honest. All we need is one rogue asshole to decide to start a fight and all hell is going to break loose. Again, high school is different; there are going to be some of the same concerns, of course, but the kids are more able to self-police themselves.

Oh, and we already know ICE is in the area despite this being a red state, and all it takes is one fucking car full of Nazis to try to snatch one of the brown kids.

I happen to have an eye appointment scheduled toward the end of the day on one of the days that is being frequently discussed for a walkout. I could, technically, take the afternoon off, and then none of it would be my problem. But if I did that and something happened— or if I followed my district-issued instructions and stayed in my room for one kid or whatever— and something happened, I’d never be able to forgive myself. I find myself genuinely hoping they don’t have the guts to go through with it.

Fuck.

Today killed me

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

My day featured an absolutely abominable amount of Teenage Girl Drama and far too much politics than I’m comfortable with at work. I got asked by a student to help them plan an anti-ICE walkout and stuff kind of snowballed from there and it’s February third and I already feel like maybe it’s told January to hold its beer.

I’m either going to go read, go play Nioh 3, or, most likely of the three, go sit in a chair and stare into the middle distance for a while. Ugh.

Counting Crows tomorrow!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.

Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.

We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.

Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:

So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.

To be completely clear: On immigration

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments
photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

I have said this, or variations on this, before. But this is the type of message that bears repeating.

No human being is illegal.

I favor completely unrestricted immigration to the United States. I don’t care if you get here on a private jet or by walking across the border. I don’t care if you have “papers” or not. If you think a better life can be had by coming to America, I think you should be allowed to live here.

Immigrants are not taking anyone’s jobs. The way I know this is the kinds of jobs immigrants work are always hiring, and I don’t see anybody lining up to work them.

Immigrants are significantly less likely to be criminals than US citizens, and frankly I don’t give a fuck if we end up bringing a statistically insignificant handful of criminals along with all of the honest immigrants. We have plenty of home-grown assholes and criminals as is, and I’ll happily trade that Nazi trash creature Stephen Miller for a dozen Mexican murderers anyway. They can move into my fucking neighborhood. We’re still better off. This is the “poisoned M&M” question all over again. If the M&Ms represent human lives, I’ll eat the whole fucking bowl. I don’t give a shit.

ICE should be abolished immediately, and anyone who still works for that agency could be dropped into an active volcano with no actual loss to humanity.

Let anyone who wants to come here in, and give them a path to citizenship. If they break the law along the way treat them like anyone else who broke the law.

Immigration is an unconditional societal good. We are better off because of these people, and the people most opposed to immigration are reliably the worst among us.

I know who I stand with, and I will not apologize.

In which the kids are doing great

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

It warms my ancient, withered heart to see the news of all the campus protests popping up around the country lately, nowhere more than at my alma mater, Indiana University. I continue to stand by the position I held when this most recent disaster started back in October: I have absolutely no idea how to solve the problem of Israel/Palestine, but I am absolutely certain that Benjamin Netanyahu should be nowhere near it, and while I don’t know what we should do, carpet bombing Gaza and murdering 30,000 people, half of which are children, is absolutely and unequivocally not what should be done.

Are there people at, and around, these protests who are advocating other policies that I am going to disagree with? Yep. I’m sure there are. I’m also capable of enough nuance to recognize that one guy screaming “Death to Jews” or whatever does not cancel out hundreds of other people suggesting peacefully that maybe their university ought not to invest their tuition money in apartheid regimes. Being anti-Zionist does not equate to antisemitism, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some out there.

But, one way or another, this is an example of people using their power to bring attention to an issue that has a chance of achieving the goals that they want. The more pressure that can be brought upon US institutions in general, not just the government, to put pressure on the Israeli government to stop acting like fucking monsters, the better. And the great thing is that it’s clearly working– you didn’t hear squat about any kind of anti-Zionist movements a few years ago, and being openly pro-Palestinian was virtually unheard of. They’re moving their position into the mainstream with these protests, which is what needs to be done in order to effect any kind of systematic change. Good for them. I’m proud.

On #8cantwait, defunding the police, and reform

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics6 Comments

I went on a little bit of a tear this morning about incrementalism, police reform, and the “defund the police” … movement? Hashtag? thing, and it occurs to me that part of the problem is that I don’t know what to call it. One thing that has been true about me for a while is that I am nearly always in favor of taking small steps that get me closer to an overall goal. That doesn’t mean I don’t want the goal, or that if the chance arrives to achieve the goal I won’t jump at it– but if we have a chance to move closer I’m always going to take it even if it doesn’t solve all existing problems anyway. The notion that we can make progress toward solutions is one that I believe in pretty strongly.

To wit, health care: I think health care should be free or close to it at the point of delivery and that everyone should have health insurance, and I believe health insurance should be covered by taxes. I don’t necessarily care about how that is enacted– if you can put a plan in front of me that has a chance to pass and keeps for-profit health insurance companies in business while enacting that goal, or at least part of that goal, chances are I’ll support it. I think ultimately we need to move away from the notion of for-profit health insurance– that, in fact, it is a moral abomination– but it’s not going away tomorrow, and in the meantime anything we can do to keep people alive and fight off living in a world where medical bankruptcy is a thing is good. I am a realist, though, and I live in America, and I don’t think that private insurance companies are getting abolished tomorrow, so I’m not going to stomp my feet about Medicare for All and hold my breath.

Similarly, police reform. This is complicated to talk about, because when we talk about “defunding police,” the meaning of that term slides around kind of hideously depending on who you’re talking about. I am always entertained when I hear elected officials or, really, anyone talking about guns and saying things like no one is coming to take away your guns, because I am absolutely coming to take away your guns. Similarly, there appear to be a contingent of people who, when they say “defund the police,” they mean exactly that, and then there’s another contingent of people– who may or may not be trying to appropriate the phrase from the first contingent– who actually mean “cut their budgets, but keep them around.”

Those are not the same thing, and that’s kind of a problem.

And then there are organizations like #8cantwait, which has its own problems, namely surprisingly dodgy statistics and studies for something Sam Sinyangwe has put his name to, as he’s always seemed like a pretty straightforward guy. I would take that 72% number with a grain of salt. But I do think that enacting these types of policies would, in fact, reduce police violence, and even if the goal is (laudably!) to eliminate police violence, maybe we do things that aren’t going to get us all the way there in one stroke anyway because they’ll help? Some of those 8 items would even increase police budgets, or at least would without commensurate cuts elsewhere– training costs money, for example– and that’s an automatic nonstarter for (some of) the Defund folks, especially the Defund/Abolish wing. I’m willing to spend some extra taxpayer money if it keeps people alive.

And, of course, there is the fact that Eric Garner (and, I’m sure, others) was killed with a chokehold that has been banned in New York since 1993, so clearly the policy didn’t keep him alive. But laws don’t actually stop crime! We know this! It’s not controversial! What laws do is allow us to punish people when they commit those crimes, and you can’t go after a cop for using a banned chokehold if the chokehold isn’t banned.

It is utterly ludicrous, to me, to claim that you want police violence stopped and to simultaneously be against enacting a policy that police can’t use chokeholds. And I would like to see better data on how well these policies work— if police departments having such a policy doesn’t change anything, then by all means don’t bother– but I don’t see much of a down side in banning something like a choke hold while we try to collect better data. I mean, that should lead to fewer people being choked, right? It surely won’t lead to more choking.

I am sympathetic to the lower-case D defund people, and I’m absolutely willing to listen to the defund-and-abolish crew; I just downloaded Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing (because a paper copy cannot be found, which strikes me as a good thing) and I intend to read it soon, and me being me I’m sure I’ll find other books about it to read as well. But my initial feeling is that such a thing isn’t going to fly in America. I’d love to be wrong, but I live in a country where 40% of the populace still approves of the syphilitic Adderall addict in the White House. We are not abolishing the police anytime soon even if it’s a good idea.

So what sorts of things do I think we should do? Here, have a list in no particular order:

  • I really don’t see any reason not to encourage wholesale adoption of the #8cantwait agenda. It’s not going to solve all of our problems, but even if it doesn’t help as much as I hope I certainly don’t see it making things worse.
  • Police unions should be abolished. Police are not workers. This is a big part of the problem, because Republicans don’t want to criticize police and Democrats don’t want to criticize unions. They’re not the same as workers and they shouldn’t have the same protections. Police unions have to go.
  • Police should not even carry guns most of the time. I’m okay with keeping one in the car or something but the vast majority of police work does not require the cop to be armed.
  • It should be widely recognized that killing someone on the job is literally the worst thing a cop can do. No police officer who has killed someone, justified or otherwise, should still be on the streets. I don’t mind them having desk jobs, but once you kill somebody you should be done patrolling.
  • Police should be required to be licensed and degreed (four years!) to at least the same extent as teachers are. Police licensure should be temporary and revocable in the case of misconduct, and there should be at least state-by-state databases keeping track of them.
  • Police officers dismissed for cause or who have their license revoked in one state cannot move to another state and apply for a new one. Similarly, this information should be public– you can look up my teachers’ license; I should be able to see theirs as well.
  • Review boards with actual teeth, staffed by civilians.
  • “Kettling” and blocking access to public transit during protests should be banned. Protesters should always have the option to leave, particularly when “failure to disperse” is something cops arrest protesters for.
  • I want a nationwide, comprehensive, detailed, publicly accessible database on the use of force by police departments.
  • Deescalation training should be mandatory, frequent, and used. Again, I want the police held to at least the same standards that teachers are.
  • Use of tear gas, LRAD devices, rubber bullets and any sort of other military hardware by police officers is banned, and the sale of surplus military hardware to police departments is ended immediately. Tear gas is a fucking war crime if you use it on opposing armies; there is no reason for its use to be so routine against American citizens.
  • Any officer found to have turned off his or her bodycam or covered his or her badge number and/or name while on duty is fired immediately, end of discussion, no exceptions.
  • Tangentially related, perhaps, but private prisons should be abolished. We can talk about prison abolition in general sometime if y’all like but private prisons are an obscenity.
  • End qualified immunity.
  • It should be illegal for police to have sex with people in custody, because are you fucking kidding how are there not already policies against this???
  • Police should have to carry malpractice insurance the same way doctors do. Settlements are paid out of that insurance fund or out of pensions, not out of taxpayer pockets.
  • Police are not automatically dispatched when a call to EMS or fire departments is made.
  • Police are provided with free and ready access to counseling and mental health services.

That’s a start, I think; I’ll add into the list as the day goes on if I come up with more. None of these policies are going to stop police violence, of course, but again: you have to decrease police violence before you can stop it.

Yell at me in comments if you like, but be aware I am a bit short-tempered today.

4:06 PM, Monday, June 8: 1,954,236 confirmed cases and 110,845 Americans dead. The site I pull this data from had spiked to over 116k dead earlier today; it’s rolled back now, so I assume there was some sort of data entry error.