This is Planet Earth

“Look now, look all around
There’s no sign of life
Voices, another sound
Can you hear me now?
This is planet earth, you’re looking at planet earth.” — Simon Lebon

The combination of stories can be overwhelming. Sometimes there seems to be an endless chain of stories that it can be hard to find one point to focus on. So, let’s focus on education. One of the acts from the state legislature that did make it through. I alluded to it last time, but it deserves a whole lot of attention.

The legislature has outlawed the teaching of critical race theory in the classroom. This seems like more of a scene from 1984 than anything from reality. Yet, here we are. It is easy to overemphasize the importance of these things, so we should focus on what it actually does.

I certainly can’t envision the police busting in if a teacher mentions racism in the classroom. Yet, we have already seen the effects of denying racism in our social studies classes. Do a quick survey of people about a number of historical events and you’ll see the problem straight off.

If you add up percentages you would find that a majority of Americans think the civil war was caused by anything other than slavery. You hear the usual haunts. States rights. The war of northern aggression. It’s all a load of crap and yet somehow a majority of Americans believe it. I wonder how that works.

Other events have somehow slipped our memory. 100 years ago, Tulsa was the spot of one of the biggest massacres in U.S. history. How many of us heard about in school? Heck, even those of us that were history scholars may not have heard about it in any of our college classes. When history isn’t taught we run the risk of it never happening. It is erased from the memory.

That’s the real tragedy to banning critical race theory. It is a belief that systemic racism is no longer a thing. If we teach that it is no longer a thing then that somehow becomes the reality for a majority of Americans. If that becomes the reality then we can act as if it doesn’t exist and go on operating under it’s protection.

That’s how we bring all of these things back to the other issues. Voter suppression? Anti-transsexual legislation? Voter suppression? It’s all related. When you can convince the masses that racism and bigotry doesn’t exist anymore then you can continue an agenda that plays upon those exact prejudices.

We don’t need stormtroopers to come into the classroom to round us up. Such a move would attract too much attention. Like an evil vaccine it doesn’t take 100 percent to inoculate the public from the truth. It only takes enough for the majority to believe it. From there we’re done.