Probably won’t mean much to many, but today is a reminder of how fast time does, indeed, fly.

It was 25 years ago today, a quarter of a century, that I wrote the simple request to have staff training on the existence and the needs of GLBT students and parents in  the Oklahoma City Public School District with a lot of supporting information to show this was necessary and a suggested syllabus for such sessions and received the reply the next day, which meant no consideration was actually given to the request, because, although it would be an important thing and a necessary one as well, “Local norms will not allow it”.

The local norms at the time were determined by the Southern Baptist Church, extremely conservative politicians, and people’s propensity to accept falsehoods over facts, often in the name of Jesus.

In spite of its own admission that such professional development was important, the district was content to let the GLBT kids deal with things on their own and just get through the discrimination-based system to keep politicians and religious leaders happy, when the school district’ s responsibility was to education and welfare of the students. All of them.

The process took 12 years with administrators going through a revolving door of new people replacing the old, having to start over with each new superintendent, and there were many, and elected school board members with the bigoted reluctance to do what was best for the students now and in the future in favor of keeping the old guard, the church leaders and politicians, the ones who generally resented desegregation, happy. They were going to be allowed to mistreat this one group of students because laws had taken away their other bully victims.

It has now been 13 years since the policies of the Oklahoma City Public Schools added “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity”, and the predicted end of society is yet to come about, and life has moved on now for those twelve years pretty much unscathed.

The predicted conga line of nuisance lawsuits motivated by the lawsuit frenzy of those who saw a cash cow and looked for things to file suits about did not happen. Students are protected, but they aren’t being stupid about it.

Schools did not become overrun with gangs of militant homosexuals attempting to tear down school traditions while demanding some form of supremacy.

Neither the students nor their parents yelled at school board meetings to establish their control over the curriculum as people seem to find acceptable now on other issues.

No one has shoved anything into anyone’s face or rubbed their noses in it.

Schools continue as usual but with the added feature that GLBT kids knew they were protected and those who would not have done so otherwise reduced their bullying because they knew that too.

12 years to get, 13 years in existence, and 25 years in the meantime.

Considering the protections were added in December 2009 and that year applied just to the second semester of the 2009/2010 academic year, the GLBT students who entered the first grade in the fall of 2010, and will be graduating this June from the Oklahoma City Schools, will be the first class to have gone through their complete school experience from grade one through twelve with “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity” protection the whole time not only in that city, but the state.

They are unknown history makers.

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.AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM

BRINGING FLOWERS TO A GUN FIGHT

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One of the questions as a result of the covid epidemic and the various mandates whether you agreed with them or not, was in light pf how workplace productivity changed and the experience people had with working remotely that turned out to be just as complicated as stopping the DVD player from blinking 12:00 once you finally did it, would the workplace and approaches to it change in light of what was learned especially about worker attitudes as many refuse to return to work unless old practices that were based exploitation as  grunts performed the work whose benefits are enjoyed only by the people at the top, not the workers who produce the profits.

 I was talking to a friend who has a new job.

He used to work at a downtown hotel, a boutique hotel, which had to close during the peak days of Covid and only recently began the reopening process. Many of its employees had found it necessary to move on to other jobs during the hotel’s closure, so that when the hotel began to reopen it did so on a limited capacity basis with other precautions added to the bar and dining room sections.

Obviously, the re-opening process had to begin with a skeleton crew to handle the limited capacity with many employees doubling up on duties until the hoped for applicants for jobs began to show up for interviews and get hired. Since there were few guests and few patrons in the restaurant and bar and assuming the situation was only temporary until everything was completely open, the bartender who has a view of the front desk was required to do the reception desk duty when activity at the bar was slow, and this often raised the question whether that person was a bartender covering the reception desk when needed or the reception desk person stepping in to the position of bartender when needed.

The employees were willing to double up with kitchen staff also doubling as waiters because it was their way of helping the hotel they felt good working at and hoped would recover.

Instead of learning what lessons they could have during the pandemic when it came to employees, the owners decided that they could save money by slowly increasing capacity while continuing to have employees serve multiple positions, something, it was assumed, they would adjust to over time so it would be a gradual, almost unnoticeable, creeping increase of duties that employees could ease into blindly as opposed an instant company practice change that would be too sudden and too obvious not to elicit a reaction.

Customers were inconvenienced by this practice, and some got angry at the staff for not being where they were expected to be for the purpose they were supposed to be there. The bartender faced the anger of people who had to wait for him to finish serving the ordered drinks at the bar before getting to the reception desk to sign them in, and then people at the bar got mad at the bartender because , instead of being at the bar and their beck and call, was, instead,  at the registration desks dealing with those coming and going or just needing a little concierge assistance.

Ownership thought it had found a way to get people to do multiple jobs so the company could increase profits as it was clear the replacement hirings were taking much longer than expected as interviews were not being held and the management kept things going under the new system.

They assumed the employees who returned would be grateful for the work and would not mind a little increase of duties with no increase in pay, but their assumption being wrong employees walked.

The hotel ownership had learned nothing and assumed they could mistreat employees perhaps more than in the past and it would just be allowed and accepted.

They were wrong.

Regardless that teachers have had to get a degree in their subject area, attend continuing education classes, and meet all state requirements for their certification, in spite them being experienced and knowledgeable professionals, they can only teach students in accordance with school district policies designed by people heavy on theory but lacking in any real classroom experience. The end result is that by ignoring teacher input, school districts too often institute policies that prevent a proper education as what is taught is often subject to the personal, religious, and political beliefs of those in charge with actual education playing a secondary role to their need to promote them.

I know a math teacher who had been named the state teacher of the year because of her extraordinary way of getting kids, even reluctant ones, to do well in math despite any dislike of math or difficulty with it that they had experienced in the past. Part of her job as Teacher of the Year was to hold workshops for other math teachers around the state to explain her method as an offered approached as opposed a requirement. After serving a year in that position, the school board and administration of her district came up with a new way to approach math because some “expert” recommended it, and she was no longer allowed to apply her method to instruction but had to use the new, unproven method. Her performance was not what it had been as she had to learn the new method and applying  it in the classroom as she did so, and between the double requirement of learning while teaching, she did not do as well with this method initially and was written up for unsatisfactory performance in her evaluation.

They stopped her from doing what they had agreed she had been successful at, having crowned her state teacher of the year, but now the board and administration just expected equal success with their chosen method and punished her for not meeting expectations.

She left the district and is doing very well in the district that is letting her use her proven successful methods.

Although most people associate teachers with all things related to school, the reality is that schools are run by elected people who choose leadership based on how close an applicant comes to agreeing with their personal, political, and religious beliefs, and while accepting praise for any success, their self-fulfilling failures are placed on the teachers whose position is often “comply or perish”.

Because a nearby school district did a disastrous job dealing with students for whom English is a second language, the federal government put the district under its control until such time as it had rectified its deficiencies.

As per usual, addressing the board and administration failures meant putting pressure on teachers to have this happen with the teachers being the ones harmed by the district leaderships failures.

Teachers, regardless of experience and effectiveness are required to take courses to get certified in teaching students for whom English is their second language and to do so at their own expense, with failure to do so resulting in a forced, involuntary transfer to a different school with the option of just leaving.

It is not so much the requirement, but that it was arrived at without any input from teachers who could very well have helped develop a better approach.

Between this, covid conditions in general, and some ill thought out approaches by people in charge who being as new as they were to this whole covid thing and knew everyone in teaching was too, still held teachers to impressive but realistically unattainable goals the district teachers for whom there were to many unrealistic expectations and requirements, just one too many things  put on teachers to repair the damage of others, left due to retirement or being tired of the treatment as hired help.

This put the district in a bind for the next school year.

They need new teachers, so they have instituted sign-on bonuses as bait.

For a few thousand dollars extra, you can sign up with the district that may or may not rectify its errors by better policies and practices that come from the classroom and not some isolated collection of non-classroom people in their own special building without any assurances that the district leaders will treat them as more than a person filling a slot to keep the number of teachers from being reduced further, and, most likely, will use them until their purpose is met and they can be discarded, or after having saved the district, treated like the help subjected to policies and practices a large number of which are counter-productive.

In spite of a recent labor dispute based on the threat of these involuntary transfers, a policy arrived at with no teacher input, the district is attempting to get fresh faced new teachers to enter the Disney Land of education when in reality they are entering a dilapidated, crumbling, and non-functioning on many levels amusement park and being required to make it Disney.

As if potential teachers are unaware of the district’s previous bad behavior toward teachers and a few thousand taxable dollars are going to bring people in without any assurances that the past abuses of teachers when it came to hours, wages, and conditions of employment will end and the district become more honestly collaborative.

As it is, teacher recruitment is going slowly.

It may not be a universal thing, but it seems these two entities, the hotel and the school district, have totally misread what working people learned during the pandemic.

The bosses need the workers, and the workers will not be quiet in accepting poor conditions and treatment because that has been the status quo.

Management needs to relearn the proper lesson.

Workers are neither desperate nor stupid.

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I will not recount the number of times Tucker Carlson spoke in favor of Putin whether by choice or unrevealed force, but it appears now that things went the way they were going in spite of Tucker’s choice to ignore that, rather than make the simple admission that he had been in error, he employed two dodges that would allow him to say he had been contrite while in reality he was not.

He did this first by pointing out that the unrelated failures of others were greater than his own minor peccadillos, something, something Kamala Harris somehow, and he used the Imperial We instead of the more definite I.

He admitted that he had been wrong during those weeks leading up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, especially as no one could have seen it coming if you ignore those people who did and said so, saying,  

“This situation appears to become more chaotic by the day, possibly even spinning out of control and that, we must be honest, is shocking to us. We’ve been taken by surprise by the whole thing. We’re not the only ones who were, but we’re willing to admit it. The only thing more embarrassing than being wrong in your estimates is pretending that you weren’t.”

Seems a noble deed unless he spreads any responsibility on everyone, the “we”, so his sin is the sin of all.

His answer to that question was,

“Why didn’t we see this coming, this total loss of control? Well, because we assumed that if things were dire, serious people would be involved in fixing them, but we looked up and we saw Kamala Harris involved, and that reassured us.”

Regardless any support he gave on his show to Putin and downplaying what was actually happening, it was all such a big surprise because Biden sent the vice-president to meet with European allies about the impending conflict, so they, the undefined “they” who could be just him, didn’t take Russia’s military build-up on Ukraine’s border seriously.  

“If the future of Europe and the world hung in the balance, as now so obviously it does, of course, the Biden administration would not have sent Kamala Harris to fix it. That is absolutely not Kamala Harris’s job. That was our assumption. But, as noted, we were wrong.”

He probably would have preferred someone more skilled, perhaps a Jarod Kushner, when it came to diplomacy.

But we, not I alone, were wrong for the things I alone, not we, had said, but it was only because of Kamala Harris somehow, but not my getting ratings by riling people up.

There is bravery.

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If you want to be governor of a state, it is a good idea to not only know your state but also want to keep doing the things the state is doing successfully.

That is why it is a little confusing that gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl praises edcucation in his state,

‘Massachusetts has consistently been at the top in the nation for K-12 education and we boast some of the best public and private colleges and universities in the world,”  

but then, in spite of this assessment on the state of education here, he says he wants to improve education by doing the very same things that the bottom 10 states in education standing do by banning non-existent critical race theory, referring to comprehensive sex education curriculum as pornographic, calling for “parental consent” on matters of transgender children, not necessarily their own children but other parents’ kids, and handing over control of education not to the trained and experienced experts, like teachers, but to parents whose main basis for evaluating education and curriculum is  personal, religious, and political beliefs with there being as many such beliefs as there are students in a school, but not best practices and proven methodologies with the understanding that schools teach every kid giving advantage to none.

Why stay at Number One when you can join the states with the worst standings on academic performance, safety, academic investment, class size, and attendance?

Diehl believes that former teachers, the experienced experts in education, should not sit on school committees because they may echo the sentiments of teachers unions whose members are teachers.

Diehl calls Rights, Respect, Responsibility, a sex education curriculum that seeks to address both the functional knowledge related to sexuality and the specific skills necessary to adopt healthy behaviors and reflects the tenets of social learning theory, social cognitive theory and the social ecological model of prevention, inappropriate for children.

And he supports the very unsafe policy of “parental consent” which would require schools to disclose to parents that a student has indicated they may be Transgender or have begun transitioning at school.

The model for his approach on education is Glenn Youngkin who became governor of Virginia because of his stance on CRT, parental control not only of curriculum but the speech of teachers, and the Transgender student menace because, as Diehl has said,

 “There’s parents’ groups out there that don’t feel like they’re being represented well, on either school boards or by state or local officials when it comes to their right to have to make their own healthcare decisions for them or their kids,”

Which, I guess, means that if your candidate for office doesn’t win, do whatever you can to screw up the system that the winner is now in.

Virginia has been in the top five states when it came to education, but that could change as, rather than continuing to do what has been successful, Youngkin will now be putting efforts into tilting at the windmills of CRT, sex education as pornography, and parents reporting teachers for saying something in class they do not agree with just as Diehl wants to do here.

This is not a failing Red State. It is a functioning Blue one with an education system Diehl himself praises.

Why would he want to sacrifice that on the altar of mindless unity with states that are not Massachusetts?

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Among my pet peeves, e.g. mothers who push strollers with kids in them out into traffic to stop it so they can cross the street, letting people into the main traffic flow from side streets and parking lots without regard to how that affects the people already on the road behind them, doing the same with people wanting to make left turns when the light finally turns green and the person at the front lets a line of cars turn so the poor Schlepper in the last car won’t make the light, waving someone on out of turn at a four way stop so the normal flow of traffic is disrupted, and calling a Gay event “Family Friendly” so that attendees have to work hard at appearing straight in an open air or public closet so as not to offend the non-Gays which is an offense to the Gays, I count the convenient cover charge as one of the worst things that pulls my chain and burns my corn

There are bars that never charge customers to enter unless it is for a generally rare evening where there is a charity event with all the money going to the charity. These are often annual events and not things that spring up spontaneously. The result at such bars is that the clientele is the most mixed as people from the most desperate crackhead to a judge on the state supreme court mingle as they never would have the opportunity to do in their daily lives. And people are taken for who they present themselves and, by and large, every level of society gets along.

Although many bars are free entry during the week when business is slow, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights a lot of money is pulled in as bars are crowded on weekend nights, and people come into the big city to spend money and enjoy themselves.

Some bars usually open only on weekends and always have a cover charge. Usually these are large bars with all the lighting, sound system, and accoutrements that make the place special that appear to the party crowd. You plan to go to these places as destination bars. Depending on the bar, the cover charge might be low so as to get some extra money and not drive people away, or so high as to guarantee a higher and more selective class of patron. These cover charges divide the community into the haves and have nots.

In the past when safety was a major concern, Gay and Lesbian bars would gather in one section of town, usually a derelict part of town that self-respecting people would never go to at night. There was a degree of safety in numbers. Eventually, as cities gentrified, these areas became prime real estate and the Gay bars had to move and this resulted in a community bar diaspora.

Bar hopping went from walking from one bar to another, to something that requires a car.

Because of the existence of the Gayborhood, if you were unable, or unwilling, to pay a cover charge, you could walk to a coverless bar not too far away.

A person had options.

Over time, as places became more educated and open minded, the need for the refuge that Gay and Lesbian bars afforded to a persecuted segment of society and the need for this community circling of the wagons became less necessary. Today the number of Gay bars has been greatly reduced and many are basically similar to neighborhood bars where people of like minds can meet, and which also afford some safety, security, and privacy for those still in situations where being openly Gay can have negative consequences.

I live within walking distance of many downtown bars but occasionally, I will get in the car and drive to a Gay bar to be among kindred spirits where I can be as Gay and talk as Gay as I want without explaining a reference or a joke to straight people who are not as into Gay-Speak as the community is.

Where I live, there is a gay bar desert.

There is a major stretch of an interstate that has Gay bars on both ends 120 miles apart with an option to go 30  miles out of your way to get to one bar that might be considered close to the highway if your world is all relative, or you stop at the one bar just off the highway that is ¼ of the distance between the state line and the end of the highway where it runs into the ocean, that 120 mile stretch.

At both ends, as one is a major city and the other a gay resort area, there is a concentration of bars all of which are on some point of the cover charge continuum. They both have bars that allow for options when it comes to ambience, cover charges, price of drinks, or clientele so bar hoping is a convenient option as is whether or not you will pay the price of two drinks to get into an establishment to buy actual drinks or opt to go somewhere that along with being able to just enter and buy more drinks you can mingle in a very eclectic crowd.

If any of the bars in those locations that do not normally have a cover charge has a fundraiser and has one for a particular evening, patrons who choose not to pay the charge, or can’t, can walk to other similar places. Just as important, even with a surprise cover charge no one has to just go home.

I have been to bars that never charge an admission fee, and who, on a fundraiser night rake in a lot of donations because people like to voluntarily give to a cause, not pay an excise tax to support it.

I live on a tight budget, not always faithfully. On a night on the town, I will decide ahead of time the number of drinks I will pay for with the eternal hope others will include me in a round on them.  Because of a past experience this practice helps avoid any police interaction on the way home. My usual limit is three drinks and I will bring enough money to cover those drinks, the tip, perhaps enough to buy someone else a drink, and gas money, so if I go to a bar whose cover charge is equal to or greater than the price of a drink, I am not paying to get inside in order to spend a lot more money that I don’t have on me. My evening out gets limited by someone else or, to have the evening I had looked forward to, I have to hit an ATM with the added charges having my evening cost more than planned for or I could be limited to being able to just buy one drink with a tip.

On nights in places, like mine,  with only one Gay bar in town, when an otherwise free entry bar charges admission with nothing more to show for the fee than that you got in as there is no entertainment of any kind, nothing tangibly different than any other night, just basically the same people you see every weekend except you had to pay to see them this time, the three viable options are to drive over 25 miles in one direct, over 30 in another, about 90 miles in a third, or add to the fun of driving long distances and looking for parking that does not cost an arm, a leg and your first born, and go the 60 miles into downtown Boston or to a T station on the outskirts to get the commuter rail knowing your night will be early as you have to pay attention to when the last train leaves the city.

When the only Gay bar in  town adds a cover charge, regardless the importance of the object of the fundraiser, it locks people out first because of the honest objection to having to pay to go into a place where you spend money regularly resulting in not going, perhaps not having enough money to pay to enter and still buy a number of drinks, maybe having the cover charge half of what you were planning to spend, it could be you do not support the particular cause for any variety of reasons, or there is nothing special about what is inside that could really explain why you are paying to get in, or you can enjoy your evening in another establishment for more of the evening than the cost of the admission fee might allow.  

You might go to the bar for Community and, for older people, it might be to hang out with people you grew up with to reminisce and laugh with longtime chosen family, but drinking not being your thing, you drink water while socializing, but have to pay the cost of multiple bottles of water just to get in to drink water.

In a one Gay bar town the choice becomes paying the charge, going to another bar, or going home. unless you are willing to take the round trip drive and chance a DUI on the way home, you are forced to modify your plans which often means either going to a heteronormative bar and have the night you had not planned for, or simply going home.

The negative purpose of cover charges is to control the make up of the clientele. Anyone can enter if they pay, but not everyone can pay the charge. The positive is that gets money to a worthy cause.

Where there are options, a cover charge might limit access to the one bar that has it in a location that has many bars, however, in a location with only one bar the cover charge prevents entry into all of them.

The existence of options does not lock someone out of a community experience, but where there are no options people get locked out.

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