MountainMornings

This week, we ate lunch inside a coffee shop! The Frothy Monkey is a Nashville staple, so I went big and ordered a rosemary latte to go with my avo toast. We were surrounded by 20-somethings on laptops, all socially distanced under a soaring ceiling. All mask-less. We felt like we were living on the edge – this was only the second time we tried eating within a restaurant, not just taking-out or dining en plein air, in 20 months.

It’s been 10 days since we received the Moderna booster. Although I was a bit achy, Bob felt fine, except for the thrashing the Democrats took on Tuesday. Our two beloved states, New Jersey and Virginia. NJ, the place where we fell in love, and VA the place where we built our first home and I started this blog looking out at the Blue Ridge. I couldn’t watch the returns, but we called Cousin Anita in Richmond to get the inside scoop.

It would seem McAuliffe misspoke, or maybe he just told the truth, and that’s what tanked him. He basically said that parents don’t write the curriculum, schools do…. which is true. Have you ever written a semester course on biosynthesis? But the spin from his opponent was all about parental control.

“During an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning, Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe claimed that his statement at a recent debate against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin that parents shouldn’t be involved in their children’s school curriculum received applause and support. When host Chuck Todd steered the discussion to parents objecting to inappropriate and politicized assigned books and materials, McAuliffe defended his comment at the debate, in which he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

https://www.yahoo.com/now/mcauliffe-claims-everybody-clapped-argued-172127281.html

He doubled down.

When I first attended a school board meeting in NJ, I made the mistake of raising my hand. Little did I know that when you raise your hand, you get the job. I had something to say about their health classes, and it wasn’t good. If you know me, you know I didn’t mind them teaching my kids about birth control; the problem was what they weren’t teaching. They’d had no instruction on substance abuse and addiction. And I remember the look of bewilderment on the school board members’ faces, you know they had paid for some “Say No to Drugs” suitcase right, filled with materials…. and I said that may be true but my kids haven’t heard one iota…

until the board president said,”Oh, so you mean you want parents to be partners with us?”

I get where Terry McAuliffe was coming from, I really do. You don’t want parents to dictate a course on the Christian Bible in a public school, or to demand that their kids NOT wear a mask in the middle of a global pandemic. You don’t want parents threatening school board members. Thirty years ago, if a parent objected to a health class section dealing with birth control, they could opt their kids out. That little paper was among the hundreds of “first day of school papers,’ like the one giving the school permission to take their children on field trips.

But what the Republicans did in this last election is unconscionable. They want to ban a book by Toni Morrison. They took a college-level class about Critical Race Theory (CRT), and whipped up racist sentiment. They’d like to keep the Confederate Myth alive. The GOP would not want schools to write their own history curriculum – the party of ‘states rights’ promised parents that they were in control, that learning about slavery isn’t age-appropriate. Although every middle school curriculum includes a Holocaust segment

CRT is a non-existent, non-starter, Trojan horse of a curriculum that doesn’t even exist in elementary schools. Surprise, they made it up. The party that lies together under their orange leader, may just take back some power.

It’s time for that Blue Wave to get smart and start fighting. Voting rights and our entire planet are on the line; enough about so-called social issues and sports and bathrooms. This is an old playbook, distract and defend. We need a hero or a shero right about now, before our slide into authoritarianism is complete.

These wild and crazy days deserve discipline and courage! Bob and I are planning to go to our first movie next week in almost two years! Probably a matinee, but still. And in better breaking news, the Grands will get their first Covid vaccine this weekend. Are they too young to see the new Bond “No Time to Die” film in surround sound and technicolor?