Herz for . . .

The following comment was made on Facebook by Alex Shapiro. I have no idea who he is, but I couldn't help responding, so I share with you:

My favorite part about the Coronavirus school closures is the extreme panic from communities and parents. “Where will kids eat?” “How will I provide child care?” “How will my kids socialize and see other people?” “How will I maintain a normal life and work routine?”

So go ahead and remember this.

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I suppose it's one of the scariest things for a writer, a blank screen and an empty head. I seem to have all sorts of ideas when I am in other places, but when I sit down in front of a computer, I let it take me to all sorts of places that I may not have originally intended, today it was back over my campaign page (simple, but I still like it, and the supporting blog).

What I'm left with is that I am a damned good writer. And I'm feeling guilty that I'm writing at all when I “should” be organizing myself to teach the forty or so children with whose lives I am at the moment entrusted.

I'm teaching middle school English, and a good chunk of my classes are “at risk” students. It's hard to get where these kids come from. I always had two parents who were always available to me. I don't know violence. I don't know neglect. I don't know what it's like to not have a place that feels like home.

I suppose if you don't have a home, or feel like you don't, you create one, and if all that is around you is dysfunction, there's a good chance that the foundations of that home will have some flaws.

Now when you stack on that a system built for a different time, on a different background, assuming a different base experience, it's unlikely you're going to be in a spot to create the best results.

Now, the problem here is that we try to cure dysfunction, but don't actually define functional. With these kids, “what should be” is often a function of “what shouldn't,” as opposed to some ideal we can define, measure, and work toward.

And when I look bigger, I think it's America's founding fathers' understanding of this that gave us the framework that made us great. We recognize that everyone has the right to define his own great and work toward that. Further, we got that for each person to have the space to do this for himself, we must limit the abilities of others to shape our vision, and this is the genius of governments of limited powers.

So let's take on this March against Gun violence. It's leftist claptrap.

Now I won't deny that taking away America's guns would result in fewer school shootings. It would, and anyone who argues otherwise has some really hard arguments to make.

So why am I calling bullshit. It's because the focus is on guns. When was the last time you heard of a home-schooler shooting up his classroom, or a Montessori kid, or a democratic school child

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