I've talked a lot about Buffalo this week. It's not my normal thing, but it was something that I felt mattered. That's why I've beaten that particular drum so much.
But the truth is that what's happening in Buffalo is just a part of the story. There's so much that happened that I'm not sure how we can salvage the current situation.
Let's remember Loudon County, Virginia, where a male student wearing a skirt entered the girls' bathroom and sexually assaulted another student. Because the school system was apparently considering a transgender bathroom policy, the school covered up the crime.
Sounds kind of familiar, now that I think about it.
But not all of the problems are with sexual assault. There's still plenty of regular assault, too, that's being covered up, as reported at our sister site RedState earlier this week. In Katy, Texas, the school district opted to completely ignore video of an attack on a 15-year-old girl by a football player, arguing that it lacked sufficient "context."
Then we have high-profile incidents such as the murder of Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. It wasn't even the first high-profile attack at a high school track meet, either. Sprinter Kaelen Tucker was brutally attacked while running a relay race at the Virginia State High School League Indoor State Championships when another athlete used the baton as a weapon. Her alleged attacker, Alaila Everett, has been trying to pretend this wasn't intentional and that she's really the victim, but she'll have to convince a court of that.
All around us, there's more and more evidence of violence and other forms of predatory behavior in our public schools, and what are the teachers doing?
Well, some are predators themselves. This happens a lot more than many would like to believe.
Yet that's not all of the teachers. Not by a long shot, to be sure.
That said, plenty of teachers pushed to keep schools closed for as long as they could during the COVID pandemic, even though there was no danger to them or the students. Now, they're trying to gaslight the public into believing they were the champions of opening the schools as early as possible. Those same people are still at the helm and pretending that they're the only ones who can be trusted.
However, what are the teachers doing in our schools? They're trying to find ways to introduce Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) into the classrooms. They're trying to force parents to accept their kids being indoctrinated into the LGBTWTFBBQ agenda while failing to provide even the basics of education.
The system is, in my opinion, hopelessly broken.
Somewhere along the way, we let the foxes into the henhouse. Predators of all kinds, from sexual deviants and abusive jackwagons to those who see an opportunity to warp young minds to believe their own twisted ideologies. We didn't do a good enough job of securing who got to be a teacher and now we're overrun.
School choice might well help. Parents having the choice of pulling their kids from terrible schools and putting them elsewhere would potentially mitigate the evils that we're seeing disguised as education, but too many parents are too blissfully unaware of what kind of a snake we've allowed to form in our places of learning.
That means burning it all to the ground and building a system anew.
We need a system where teachers aren't sitting there filling kids' heads with the idea that they should be free to express themselves however they want, unless they say something conservative or libertarian. We need discipline in the classroom starting at an early age, and it needs to be applied fairly, but effectively. Kids need to know that there are repercussions for their actions, and those can include arrest.
Maybe then track meets wouldn't seem nearly as dangerous.
We need administrators who recognize they can't control everything, aren't afraid to notify the authorities when something goes wrong, and work with them when something comes up.
Police officers shouldn't have to go on their friends' podcasts to talk about something because they can't get traction anywhere else.
The whole system is broken.
If someone knows how to fix it, I'm all ears. Until then, the only thing I see that would work is gasoline and some matches (metaphorically, of course, lest someone decide I'm calling for violence when I'm not).