Losing A Supporter of Public Education

Zombie, probably the best photoessayist of our time, has had a rough time figuring out what to do with all those "State of Emergency" pictures he had from last month's CTA rallies. He's always been a fan of public education, but something in these pictures drove him away:

But as I walked around the rally in San Francisco, and later scanned the pictures taken by Ringo at the L.A. rally, I found myself thinking uncharitable thoughts about the protesting teachers: I hope your funding gets cut even more! Your demands are futile because the state is bankrupt anyway and there’s no more money to give; but even if the economy were to eventually recover, I would still want to see funding for public education slashed to a minimum.

Horrors! I was taken aback by my own thoughts. How could I be so cruel? What evil right-wing influence was making me think this way?

And then I looked around me and realized: It isn’t the right-wingers who are making me think these awful thoughts: It’s the teachers themselves at this very rally who have forced me into it!

If you don't have the time or the inclination to go read the whole thing, I'll cut to the chase for you:

And then it hit me why I had such an adverse reaction to the whole thing:

The very act of them asking for money is what made me not want to give them money, because it revealed their political bias.

And here’s why:

• As you can see in the many photos illustrating this essay, their demands for more money were accompanied by many ancillary leftist slogans like “Tax the Rich!” and “Workers’ Power!” and “Cutting Education Is Class War” and so on. So this wasn’t just about requesting more funding for education: The content of the rally itself revealed that increasing school funding is just a component of a larger leftist agenda — school funding is being used as a lever to penalize the rich, increase power for unions, and so forth.

• The demand that unwilling taxpayers fund more government services is in and of itself a cornerstone of liberal ideology.

• The very act of having a street protest demanding handouts is essentially a leftist tactic, so the simple existence of teachers at the rally means that they embrace leftist ideology.

• As at other union rallies documented in earlier essays, socialist and communist groups mingled freely on May 13 with the teachers’ unions, their messages blending into a unified ethos.

• And the clincher: At both rallies, teachers brought entire classes of their students (this was held on a Friday, a school day, remember) to join in this overtly leftist behavior.

It’s this last point that really turned me sour on the whole thing. Dudes, are you seriously bringing your students from public schools to a leftism-soaked political rally? You’re supposed to be their teachers, not their indoctrinators.

Good job, idiots.