No thanks on Thanksgiving?
If not Thursday, when?
The white lab coats at Blaska Policy Werkes, the indentured servants at the Stately Manor, and the unlettered field hands at the Experimental Work Farm (and Penal Colony) wish you a rewarding Thanksgiving. Have an extra serving of green bean/mushroom soup casserole on us! Topped with packaged onion rings, of course!
Squire Blaska is thankful for good health, a booming stock market, the Lovely Lisa, and No. #1 son Max. Also his Harley Softail Slim and the Moto Guzzi V-7 II. Oil changed, batteries tended.
The old curmudgeon thanks his Greatest Generation parents for teaching him hard work, saving for the future, helping your neighbor, and honest dealings. (Still remember finishing up the last of the field corn harvest on Christmas day just in time for the noon meal. Nothing tastes better than honest work.)
All reinforced by Mrs. Taylor at Oak Lawn country school and pounded into us by the nuns at Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. What some today would condemn as “privilege.”
So fragile!
Our Thanksgiving wish is for a Great Awakening in time for today’s kids, too many of whom are taught shame, guilt, and victimhood — especially in our public schools. “You’re not responsible, it’s somebody else’s fault” is not only dis-empowering, it is often fatal.
But we ARE oppressed!
They’re teaching this nonsense at schools of education, sociology, and grievance studies throughout the land. The greatly brainwashed are proselytizing this defeatism in Madison public schools. And Sun Prairie, Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, and Monona Grove, etc.
Which is why Heather Mac Donald gets booed off campus stages and Blaska harassed at Madison school board meetings.
“Few things upset American college students more than being told they aren’t oppressed,” Ms. Mac Donald writes in today’s Wall Street Journal.
A senior claimed that I came to Holy Cross [College] to “discredit, humiliate, and deny the existence of minority students.” In fact, I came to urge the entire student body to seize their boundless opportunities for learning with joy and gratitude. This maudlin self-pity … is actively cultivated by adults on campus.
⇒ By implication, Madison’s bien pensants blame a shoot-out — leaving 45 spent shell casings and narrowly missing a sleeping child — on “implicit bias.” (TODAY’S LAFF LINE: Isn’t it precious that Mayor Satya says these shootings will not be tolerated?!)
Dangerous ideas ahead!
As an antidote to another of Ms. Mac Donald’s pernicious talks, Bucknell University mobilized its interpersonal violence prevention coordinator; the director of its Women’s Resource Center; the interim associate provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion; a women’s and gender studies professor; and an economics professor. Their mission: discuss “rape culture, trauma and racism.”
Students and faculty were then invited to join in painting “self-care” rocks. This craft activity, in which participants write feel-good messages on stones, was originally designed for K-5 classrooms. …
The Bucknell Faculty and Staff of Color Working Group urged colleagues to support those whose “first-hand experiences with injustice” at Bucknell were “invalidated and perpetuated” by my arguments.
They’re DEMONSTRATING ‘white fragility’
Madison’s public school teachers are just as bollixed. They are more “woke” than A.O.C. on meth. Their labor union is deep into the fever swamp of “racial justice.” Madison Teachers Inc. is conducting seminars and book clubs on topics like “Black Lives Matter Week of Action Planning.” That beauty is scheduled for December. In January they will learn “Combatting Implicit Bias and Micro-aggressions” followed by “Understanding White Privilege and White Fragility.”
Not for MMSD to just teach reading instead of “socio-emotional learning,” in the words of two Madison professionals quoted in a previous installment of the Werkes.
Heather Mac Donald has the final word: “Certain ideas are now taboo in the academy — above all, the idea that behavior and culture better explain socio-economic disparities in the U.S. than bigotry.”
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
Notice how all of their efforts are not directed at explaining how their wacky gender/race theories actually work, but are instead, solely focused on changing how WE (everybody who is skeptical,) perceive what we are plainly seeing.
“You don’t understand, privilege/implicit bias/micro-aggression.”
“You’re not looking at it right. It must be viewed through the lens of equity,”
“Your privilege prevents you from seeing it.”
“You are not woke, and until such time as you become woke, you and your opinions are no longer welcome. You are irredeemable and a deplorable.”
I mean who are you going to believe, a Blue Ribbon committee of social justice experts or your lying eyes?
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I am alone
in the land of the aardvarks.
I am walking west
all the aardvarks are going east.
-McCarthy (Eugene J, not Tailgunner Joe)
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Battled for more than three decades. At some point in the future, you may come to appreciate, you’re fighting the winds of history. Struggle for principles is pointless. Above all, this is clear: Public Schools are beyond redemption or reform.
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Mayor Satya says shootings will not be tolerated in Madison. AOC says she will no longer tolerate the use of the phrase “free stuff.” Magical thinking–progressive style–at its best.
I too long for a “Great Awakening” in time to save our kids though I wonder a) where it’s coming from, and b) whether it’s too late. Kids arrive at the hallowed portals of our colleges and universities primed for the kind of systematic, state-sponsored indoctrination not seen since the heyday of the Hitler Youth, having been thoroughly groomed by their teachers in the subtleties of “social justice” (aka the fever dreams of white liberal guilt) in middle school and high school. They soon find themselves insulated from any ideas that might challenge the claptrap they’ve been spoon-fed for years and enticed into the warm embrace of victimhood. The next four years are spent learning how to regurgitate said claptrap in ways that guarantee them the approbation of their professors; eventually they are awarded with a useless degree in Advanced Grievance Studies and a bill for $50,000. They are indeed victims in one sense: they’ve been gang-raped by a cynical system that has become the enemy of the values that it once claimed to instill in young men and women. The “sifting and winnowing” that at one time was touted as the way to discover the truth is now employed to carefully remove anything or anyone who might expose the truth, especially the truth about the corrosive scam higher education has become.
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RE: WSJ, “victimhood”, BLM (apparently black lives don’t matter to blacks), ad nauesaum. Well… it can get worse.
Elizabeth Warren introduced bill to revoke Medals of Honor awarded for Wounded Knee Massacre.
Why, Oh Why do these folks expend energy and time on things long past instead of the future.
The future desperately needs our attention.
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