Good morning, y’all. A break in the weather allowed me to blow some wet leaves into a pile that I hope I’ll be able to add to the compost bin. We need a week of dry weather to let the leaves get dry, but it doesn’t appear that dry weather is in our stars for a while. Better here than Texas, though. I feel sorry for them folks. First of all, they live in Texas, and second they’ve had just horrific weather the last couple of years. Droughts to floods and back again. I believe after a couple of years of that I’d move on. Texans are a hardheaded lot, though.
Speaking of hard heads, or maybe it’s hard hearts, did you catch Brenda Wood’s “Last Word” last night on Channel 11? I know, she keeps saying it’s her last word, but it never is. She just keeps on coming back breaking down some news item so that the great unwashed, her viewing public, can gain the deep insight into the topic that only Brenda Wood can divine.
Tonight’s show stopper was the video of the big white guy throwing the black girl around like a rag doll while he was placing her under arrest for disrupting the class. Here’s a link to the video, if you haven’t seen it a hundred times already on TV. It is fairly obvious that the girl was outclassed, and really wasn’t putting up a defense to the jacked-up policeman. The fact that the policeman was so out of control that he attacked the girl physically should be the “last word” on the matter. The average person sees an adult assaulting a child, it couldn’t be any clearer, and the fact that the girl’s neck wasn’t broken when the policeman body slammed her to the floor is a miracle.
There are so many questions that could be asked just about what we see in the video that we don’t need Brenda to drag a red herring across the screen to try to cloud our vision. Question one,would this have happened to a white child? Question two, if the policeman had been black would it have happened? We know it wouldn’t have happened if the child had been white and the policeman black. Question three, have we become so crippled as a society that a teacher needs to call in the storm troopers when a student finds his class less than engaging? Whatever the infraction is, there has to be a policy in place to handle the discipline that doesn’t involve assaulting a child.
“BUT!!!!!!!” , says Brenda Wood, while she starts off on her rant about how we are living in the last of times when it comes to school discipline. Brenda started her rant by showing the video and saying that while the officer’s actions were over the top, it wasn’t as obvious as it looked. I beg to differ, it was an adult assaulting a child, we don’t have to dig any deeper than the video. “BUT!!!!!!!” , says Brenda Wood, “discipline is out of control in schools these days.” “It’s understandable that teachers call in the police to help maintain order in class.” Brenda seems to think that the other children will not be able to learn without the police snapping the necks of the unruly children.
I need to scream BS in my loudest voice. First off, Brenda’s children went to a very expensive private school. I assure you Brenda never heard any tales about a policeman body slamming a student at her children’s school. If she had, she would have done a 90 minute special on it, and the topic of the special would have been police brutality, not urchins out of control. So where does this disconnect come from? Shouldn’t the kids going to public school be as safe from police brutality as Brenda’s kids were at private school? Is the problem that Brenda has lost compassion for the less fortunate in our society? Is Brenda angling for a job on the Faux network where the victim is regularly blamed for the crime?
Like the policeman in the video, who has been fired by the way, Brenda needs to examine her heart and try to figure out why her elite status in society has caused her to lose touch with the majority of folks. Brenda also needs this to be her “last word”, no kidding. At the rate she’s going she’ll be proposing a final solution for disruptive students next. After all, “it’s a war out there, and the teachers are losing”.