K.J. Cartmell's Blog

On Friday, January 5th, my wife and I were at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles to see The Eagles, with Steely Dan as the opening act. It was the first of a four-night set of shows to kick off the last leg of the Eagles “Long Goodbye” tour. Lisa and I have been Eagles fans our whole life. I’ve become a big Steely Dan fan in recent years, and I fondly remember playing “Peg” in my middle school jazz band. This combination is not coming to the Bay Area, so we took the time to drive south and catch this “last of this lifetime” opportunity.

Our seats weren’t cheap, but we were still in the upper deck and on the far side of the arena from the stage. (Thank goodness for big screens!) Steely Dan opened with “Josie.” Being the opening act, there was no time for deep tracks. This was a favorites-only 60 minute set. Donald Fagen surrounds himself with top musicians, sings for a bit and then steps back to let his band shine. His three background singers sang “Dirty Work.” Jon Herrington handled the guitar solos on “Kid Charlemagne,” while Jim Pugh closed “Hey Nineteen” with an impressive trombone solo. The star of the set, though, was drummer Keith Carlock, who rocked through the dramatic instrumental breaks of “Aja” and then took another solo at the end of “Reelin’ in the Years” to close the set.

After a quick thirty minutes to switch out the stage, we were summoned back to our seats by a music and video montage. Then - there they were, the Eagles, with their distinctive harmonies, singing “Seven Bridges Road.” In their final form, the Eagles consist of Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit, plus country star Vince Gill and Deacon Frey, the son of founder and leader Glenn Frey. Deacon Frey fit in well with the others and held his own singing “Take it Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” Vince Gill not only hit all the high notes of “Take it to the Limit” but took an impressively rocking guitar solo at one point. Timothy B. Schmit was the most comfortable of the band when it came to audience banter. He took the lead only once, for “I Can’t Tell You Why.” The loudest, most rocking moments of the night belonged to Joe Walsh. He sang four songs: “In the City,” “Life’s Been Good,” “Life of Illusion,” and “Rocky Mountain Way.”

Don Henley is unquestionably the leader of the band now. He could have stood in front with an acoustic guitar in hand and sang all night, and I would have been fine with it. It was great to see him behind the kit for some of the numbers, including “Hotel California.” I was thrilled to see him perform the big hit from his solo career, “Boys of Summer.” Henley pointed out that they could have done a single show at SoFi Stadium, what he called, “the spaceship next door,” but they preferred the acoustics at the Forum, where the Eagles have been performing for fifty years. “We’ll just work a little harder so that you have a better entertainment experience,” he said.

The special guest of the night was long-time collaborator J.D. Souther. He came on early and sang a few lines of the hit songs he helped write, “Best of my Love,” and “New Kid in Town.” He returned for the finale: “Heartache Tonight.” It made for some heartfelt, sentimental moments, playing in their adopted hometown in front of so many longtime fans.

Do you remember, as a kid, saying things like this: “When I’m grown up, I’m going to stay up late all the time! I’m going to eat whatever I want, whenever I want to eat it! And I’m going to watch Rated R movies, and no one will tell me no!”

Well, I’ve been a grown up for a while now, and I’ve found that staying up late is overrated. It’s true that I can eat what I like and my mom won’t get mad at me - but my doctor might! I do, however, enjoy movies, and if I want to see one that’s Rated R, no one tells me no.

There are certain movies from the late 70’s and early 80’s that I wanted to see as a child but I didn’t get to because they were Rated R, and no one was interested in taking me to see them. Some of these films - Alien, Bladerunner and The Terminator all come to mind - as soon as I was old enough, I drove myself over to Asparagus video, rented the VHS tape and watched them.

Many more, some well respected, some deservedly forgotten, I simply never got around to watching as an adult. Now that my own kids are out of the house, I decided I would track these films down and watch them. Some pop up on Netflix or Max, while for others I buy the used DVD from my local Half Price Books store.

I’ve seen action films like Dirty Harry, Scarface and The Road Warrior; horror films like Jaws, Carrie and An American Werewolf in London; comedies like Caddyshack, Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Some of these movies are still great, all these years later, while others feel dated. The blatant sexism, racism or homophobia of these older movies is jarring from the perspective of the 21st Century.

I saw a couple of Bo Derek movies: “10” and Tarzan, the Ape Man. I still find her beautiful, but she doesn’t impress me as much now as she did when I was younger. There’s not much substance to go with all that beauty. Like Dudley Moore in “10”, I quickly tired of her.

I watched the Brooke Shields movie The Blue Lagoon a few times on network TV back in the day. Seeing it uncut on DVD was an experience that my younger self would have very much enjoyed.

Last night, I watched Conan the Barbarian, from 1982, starring Arnold Swartzenegger. It was dreadful, but Swartzenegger is charming, and even his bad movies are endearing.

What’s next? A horror film like Cat People, Altered States, or the original Halloween? The teen romance Valley Girl, featuring a young Nicolas Cage? Or maybe a drama like Terms of Endearment, starring Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine? They’re all on my list. My younger self can’t wait to see them.

The Midterms are upon us. Some of us have already voted. In California, vote-by-mail is now the default option. My wife and I have both voted, turned in our ballots and received confirmation that they are now in the custody of election officials.

Conventional wisdom states that the Democrats will suffer a defeat this year, that they will lose the House and perhaps the Senate as well. If that happens, the United States will have a divided government for the next two years, and very little legislation will get passed.

We should not consider this to be a foregone conclusion, however. To borrow an expression from sports, you don’t play the game on paper. There’s only one poll that matters, and that’s the one that we start counting on November 8th.

Political pundits have been “playing the game on paper” for over a year now. One of the stats they look at is the “likely voter.” This is a person (like me) who voted in the last three election cycles – 2016, 2018 and 2020. “Likely voter” polls are trending towards Republicans right now.

The obvious problem with this statistic is that there have been millions of voters added to the rolls since 2016. My younger daughter, the Parkland kids, none of them would yet be considered “likely voters” because they were too young to vote in 2016.

Women are registering to vote in large numbers across the country, and I doubt they will be voting for the party that took away their reproductive rights. Republicans have gotten very good at gerrymandering away black voters, but they can’t get away from women or young people.

Another point which I have not heard any pundit raise: there are people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 who will not vote in 2022 because they have died of COVID-19. As I pointed out in an earlier blog, the pandemic hit Republican areas of the country hard. Some of those who rejected vaccines and masks paid with their lives. A 5%-10% drop in Republican voters may not matter in deep red states and districts, but it could matter in “purple” ones.

Typically, about 40% of eligible voters turn out for the midterms. In 2018, however, turnout was around 50%. This was the Blue Wave that put Nancy Pelosi back as Speaker of the House. Turnout in presidential elections is typically around 60%. If turnout is 50% or higher in 2022, the Democrats could score the upset.

What will happen if the Republicans take control of the House? Let’s take them at their word. They are threatening investigations into Biden’s COVID-19 policies, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the president’s surviving son, Hunter. They will shut down the January 6th Commission and stop the House investigations into former president Trumps’ finances. They want to stall implementation of, if now outright gut, the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature piece of legislation. Their starting point will be to stop the IRS from beefing up enforcement. The last thing they want is for the IRS to go after wealthy tax dodgers like Donald Trump.

The most radical members of the GOP, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are already threatening to impeach Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. Not because those men have abused the power of their office, but simply in retaliation for the Democrats impeaching Donald Trump.

If the Republicans come to power, there will be no effort to rein in health care costs. The little progress we are making to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will stop. The rights of women will continue to be stripped away. And don’t expect an assault weapons ban any time soon. The most we will get is thoughts and prayers the next time there’s a school shooting.

Don’t turn the country over to the insurrectionists and the servants of the billionaires. Show up and vote on Tuesday November 8. Vote because it’s your right and your privilege. Vote like your country, and your planet, depends on it.

There is a persistent myth in our society that Republican administrations are better for the economy than Democratic ones. The myth originates back in the Reagan years. The economy struggled during the Carter administration. Gas prices spiked, and inflation was high. Under Reagan, things went better.

This fond reminiscing about Reagan overlooks the fact that under George H.W. Bush, the economy struggled, and under his son, George W. Bush, it nearly fell off a cliff. The economy was far stronger under Clinton. After recovering from the Great Recession, the Obama administration oversaw a strong and growing economy, too.

I have heard many people make the argument in the last few months – things were better under Trump. Inflation is at 8.3%, and the stock market is down significantly. The truth is, the economy would be doing just as bad or worse if Trump were still president.

Trump inherited Obama’s strong economy, and the things that Trump and the Republicans did during his time in office hurt the economy more than it helped. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act benefited only the billionaires. It drove up the deficit, which in times of relative prosperity we should have been paying down, and left us with little in reserve for the next crisis that was around the corner – the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump’s other main initiative was his trade war with China, an expression of his racism rather than sound conservative economic policy. The American consumer paid the brunt of the tariffs, and China’s retaliatory measures punished American farmers.

But that was then, and this is now. The stock market is down, and prices are up. The GOP will tame inflation just like they did back in the 80’s, right?

Take a look at England right now. Their Conservative government, the Tories, are similar to the Republican party in terms of their economic policies. They are free market capitalists that want low taxes and low regulations, just the sort of legislation Republicans will offer if they take control of Washington after the midterms.

The problem is, the Tories have been in charge for years, and things in England are getting worse and worse. Inflation is 10.1%. Working class people are having to choose between paying their heating bills and buying food. The Tories have no answer for inflation, and neither will the GOP if they come to power.

This round of inflation is mainly caused by supply chain disruptions, due to the lingering pandemic and the war in Ukraine. China has a zero- tolerance policy for COVID 19. They have been shutting factories and whole cities to stop outbreaks. Because, despite the trade war, much of our goods are made in China, this causes random disruptions and price spikes.

Russia had been a major oil producer. NATO countries are now boycotting Russian oil and gas, taking that supply off the market. Since demand has not decreased in any significant way, prices spike for everyone.

Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of grain. Again, NATO sanctions plus Russia’s naval blockade of Ukrainian ports, have caused a steep drop in the worldwide supply of grain. Demand has not decreased, so we are paying more for our bread and cereal.

Inflation is a problem right now for every government on the planet, whether their government is right, left or center. It doesn’t matter if the Democrats hold on to Washington or not. We will be living with inflation either way, just like England and the rest of the world.

The Tories recently instituted a big tax cut, which caused inflation over there to get even worse. They immediately reversed course, fired their Prime Minister and started over. I don’t see the Republicans doing that. I see them lowering taxes, but if inflation worsens, they will only blame Biden, immigrants and trans people. They won’t take any responsibility themselves.

Meanwhile, California, with its high tax, high regulatory policies, is poised to overtake Germany as the fourth strongest economy in the world. In 2012, when Governor Brown first hiked taxes on the wealthy, we were sixth. Democratic policies really can and do lead to strong economies.

I remember watching Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. I found many of his arguments compelling, but I wondered if some of it wasn’t alarmist hyperbole. The thought that the Greenland ice sheet would melt, and the resulting surge of water could cause massive flooding on the coasts, seemed too incredible to believe.

It’s twenty years later, and the Greenland ice sheets are melting. The time for doubt has long since passed. Fires and drought in the West, tornadoes in the Midwest, and ever fiercer hurricanes in the South – there is no part of the United States that is unaffected by climate change. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls climate change the defining challenge of our time.

The term “climate change” is too mild. It doesn’t properly describe the moment we’re facing. Climate crisis better conveys the urgency, the danger of the situation that is before us.

What are we to do? The energy systems of the entire planet are built on burning fossil fuels. We need to move with urgency to adopt new methods of generating the power we need to run our lives. We need more solar panels and wind turbines, though these alone will not be enough. We need more power from other sources.

The oil majors are placing billion-dollar bets on hydrogen. Companies like Chevron foresee incorporating hydrogen into their existing infrastructure of refineries and service stations. Depending on how you make it, hydrogen can be a godsend, or it can be worse than burning natural gas. If we can minimize the downsides, the upside is enormous. Hydrogen can potentially fuel cargo ships, airplanes and long-haul semis, vehicles ill-suited for electric motors.

Nuclear is making a comeback. In Georgia, they are bringing online a new nuclear power plant, with another one scheduled to open in a year. Once those power plants are online, Georgia Power should be able to shut down more coal burning plants. Bill Gates and others are experimenting with new designs for smaller, less dangerous nuclear plants that are simpler and easier to build. They are building some of these plants in Wyoming, at the sites of shuttered coal plants, utilizing the existing infrastructure to plug into the national grid. Research into how to reuse spent nuclear fuel is on-going, and the dream of limitless fusion energy creeps ever closer to reality.

There’s more to do. We’ve got to help China, India and countries in Africa and elsewhere transition away from coal plants to other forms of energy generation. Somehow, we must convince Brazil to stop burning their trees, clearcutting their land and invest instead on regrowing the Amazon rainforest. Geothermal energy, energy generated from ocean waves, and techniques to pull carbon out of the atmosphere - all of this and more must happen, and happen soon.

In Europe, the Russian natural gas embargo, a response to European sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine, is driving up energy costs dramatically. This is spurring further investments in green energy technologies.

In the United States, the Republican Party is slowly coming around to the threat of the climate crisis. They have put forward some policies that will help, but there is still too much reliance on oil and gas for energy production in their proposals. Their penchant to cut taxes and gut regulations will undermine efforts to curb carbon pollution. They cannot defund the EPA if they expect to cut emissions.

I am not insensitive to the plight of working people in Appalachia, the Permian basin and other energy producing areas. We need to make sure these folks can stay in their homes and feed their families as we make the transition from one energy system to another. My sympathies are with the coal miners and the derrick operators, but not with their billionaire bosses. We cannot hold up progress simply because senators like Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell have their wealth tied in coal.

Solving the Climate Crisis will take politicians from both sides of the aisle working together. There is simply no more time for the showboating of Trumpish clowns. We must take bold action to address the climate crisis. All of our lives depend upon it.

When I was growing up, I didn’t know many people who were Democrats. The Democratic Party standard bearers at that time were Jimmy Carter and Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown. Both men were very unpopular in my neighborhood. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was a winner. He beat Mondale 525-10! He hijacked the hijackers! So, when it came time for me to register to vote, I very naturally registered as a Republican.

I considered myself a Moderate Republican. Since there isn’t such a thing any longer, let me explain what this meant. I was fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The latter is easy enough to understand - it meant I was pro-choice. Though I hadn’t gotten all the way to gay marriage by that point, I was opposed to legislation that made life harder for gays and lesbians. That's what we meant by "small" government: Keep government out of areas that it didn’t belong, like the bedroom or the doctor’s office.

“Fiscal conservative” is a term that has changed over time. It now means a sort of anti-government, anti-tax libertarianism that I would have opposed then as strenuously as I do now. Even at 18, I understood that taxes were necessary. Taxes paid for the Interstate Highway system. They pay the salaries of teachers, police and firefighters. Running the most powerful military in the world takes a lot of money. That money doesn’t come from bake sales and charity car washes. It comes from taxes.

As a “fiscal conservative” in 1987, I wanted my politicians to be prudent with the people’s money. Invest in programs that work and cut the programs that are ineffective. Hyper-partisanship was counterproductive. If there was a good idea out there on how to make a government program more effective and less wasteful, it shouldn’t matter if a Democrat or a Republican proposed it. I did not believe the GOP had a monopoly on good ideas.

I understood that our government depended on citizens and politicians alike acting patriotically, in the interests of the country as a whole. To a Moderate Republican, vaccine mandates to end a pandemic would be unnecessary, because everyone would get the vaccine as soon as it was available. They would believe what the scientists and health experts were telling them. They would get their shots out of love for their family, out of concern for their neighbors, and out of that great American desire to get back to work!

By 1992, I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable in the Republican Party. George Herbert Walker Bush, a classic Moderate Republican, was in hot water with the fiscal conservatives for allowing the Democrats in Congress to raise taxes. He was running afoul of the Religious Right as well, especially after he nominated moderate David Souter to the Supreme Court. In ‘92, the Religious Right flexed their muscle, trying to pull the party further to the right. They were becoming ever more focused on restricting women’s right to abortion.

The Republicans, divided and angry with their president, opened the door for a charming moderate Democrat from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. I didn’t vote for Clinton in ‘92, but I gave him a chance once he was in office. I liked that he tried to integrate homosexuals into the military, even if the conservatives in his own party shot the initiative down and forced the ridiculous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy instead. He soon put his wife in charge of forming a plan for universal health coverage.

At the time, I didn’t have health insurance. My wife and baby daughter had it, but adding me to the plan was too expensive. Here was the First Lady personally advocating for me to have health coverage. Republican resistance to the idea was disheartening. So, in ‘94, right before the Republican wave that made Newt Gingrich the Speaker of the House, I switched my party designation to Democrat. I’ve been one ever since.

I still consider myself to be a moderate. Still socially liberal, especially when it comes to the rights of women and the LGBTQ communities. I still hold to the traditional Christian values of caring for the sick, the poor, the unfortunate in our society. I’m far more comfortable voting for moderates like Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton than I am for firebrands like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

I honestly don’t think I changed my views that much at all. The Republican Party continues to move farther and farther to the right, towards fascism and totalitarianism. The Democrats make up both the left and the center of the political spectrum. In a way, the Republican party left me, and I found myself among other moderates in the Democratic Party.

The Pandemic is not technically over. Health officials worry, if enough people don’t get the new bilavent shot, that there will be another surge this winter. But vaccines are available, and people are dying in much lower numbers than in 2020. Stores, churches and sporting events are all open, and schools are back in session. So, with two years’ perspective, let’s look back on the 2020 pandemic to review how California responded vs what other states did, and what the outcomes of those decisions were.

The first cases of COVID-19 appeared in California in January of 2020. By March, cases were rising dramatically. On March 16th, the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area took a drastic step and ordered a complete shutdown. Businesses and schools closed for what was supposed to be three weeks. The State of California as a whole followed suit a week later.

The move was decried in some circles as a giant government overreach, but remember, California has the largest population of any state in the Union. There are more people in the Los Angeles Basin than live in Michigan and Alabama combined. If Wyoming was a city in California, it would be the fifth largest behind Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco. A contagious virus that spread through the air had the potential to devastate our densely packed cities.

That was exactly what happened to New York. They were a mere four days behind California in implementing their shutdown, and it was already too late. Their hospitals were quickly overrun, with patients on ventilators in the hallways of hospitals and portable morgues in the parking lot. People still died in California, but we never faced a wave like the one in New York.

My local school district took a week off to figure out how to do distance learning, and then they jumped in with both feet. They provided Chromebooks to every student in the district. To the families that did not have internet access, schools offered portable hotspots. It was rough at first, but it got better as they went along. When the new school year started in August of 2020, and we were still in lockdown, the distance learning program was far more robust. When vaccines were finally made available in the spring of 2021, teachers were one of the first groups to get shots. Right after that, they went back into the classroom to teach in person. Bottom line: we did not lose a single child or teacher to coronavirus during the pandemic.

My wife and I supported small businesses during the pandemic as best that we could, and we wore masks in respect of those essential workers who could not work from home. My wife got her vaccine with the other teachers, and when I was eligible, I got mine too. It was the right thing to do for us and for our community as a whole.

Meanwhile, President Trump was downplaying the severity of the pandemic, contradicting his own advisors and generally making a mess of things. Republican leadership across the country followed his lead. They resisted shutdowns, mask-wearing and vaccines, to the detriment of their constituents. The proof is in the numbers. In July, Scientific American reported a huge gap in mortality between Democratic leaning counties and Republican leaning counties. COVID-19 affected the entire country, but Democratic counties, following CDC guidelines, had fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Republican counties who flaunted those guidelines suffered tremendously.

Small businesses were hit hard by the shutdowns, and some children fell far behind their peers during distance learning. That has caused lingering anger and frustrations at the leaders who brought about the shutdown. Good leadership is about making difficult choices in times of crises. Our governor, health officials and school superintendents acted to save as many people as possible.

Teachers have been under attack from the right wing of our country for several years now. Those attacks have only intensified since the start of the pandemic.

To understand who is attacking teachers and why, we need to explore the three main factions that make up today’s Republican party: the money people (Conspiracy Theory “B” still hard at work!), Evangelical Christians, and White Supremacists. These groups often have overlapping membership, and they use the same methods, but their motivations vary.

The billionaire shareholder class sees education funding as another source of profits. They want to establish for-profit charter schools and run them the same way they run retail stores - hire cheap labor, spend as little as possible on materials, and call any unspent money “profits.” To accomplish this, they are determined to deregulate education, removing as many guardrails as they can in the name of “innovation.”

Standing in their way are two of the most powerful special interest groups in the country, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association - the teachers unions. AFT and NEA rival the National Rifle Association in their political clout, and in their ability to mobilize large numbers of people for phone-banking, demonstrations, etc. The teachers unions fight back against deregulation, maintaining union protection for their workers but also keeping money for students out of corporate pockets.

While the super-wealthy have suffocated private sector employees with wage suppression and ever-dwindling benefits, the teachers unions and other public sector unions have maintained decent wages and good benefits programs, including pensions, which have all but vanished from the private sector. Efforts to bust these unions (see my blog on the Janus Decision as an example https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...) have failed. In fact, the public sector unions are a shining example to those trying to unionize Amazon, Walmart and other employee groups. The wealthy respond by bashing teachers via right wing media, calling them communists.

Evangelicals want charter schools, too, but for a different reason. This group wants to send their children to publicly funded religious schools. They want to do away with the Constitution’s division between church and state and establish their brand of Christianity as our nation’s religion. Teachers unions fight back against this by teaching everybody’s kids and protecting the secular focus of our public schools.

Teachers stand for science, for critical thinking, and during the pandemic, they have been big advocates for vaccines. They offend Evangelicals by teaching evolution and by creating safe spaces within schools for LGBTQ students. Evangelicals leverage right-wing media to lambast teachers for their support of school closures during the height of the pandemic. They accuse teachers of recruiting children to become homosexuals or transexuals, clinging to their outmoded beliefs that this is a choice rather than something inherent.

White Supremacists blend in with Evangelicals in an attempt at legitimacy and acceptance. Their main goal is to create white enclaves to stop people of different backgrounds from mingling. They don’t want “their tax dollars going to those kids.” One way to do this is to move their kids out of their local public school and into a semi-private charter school. If they create a school with a mandatory requirement for parents to donate either money or time, they naturally exclude low income families, creating de-facto segregation at their schools. Teachers unions fight against these types of charter schools which strips both attendance dollars and donation money from neighborhood public schools.

In recent months, the Right have focused their efforts in a new way: banning books. White Supremacists focus on books that treat the African-American experience with honor and respect. Evangelicals attack any book that normalizes the LGBTQ experience. A school district in Pennsylvania recently banned the Girls Who Code books, because you wouldn’t want girls to have career aspirations!

Just like in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade, this is an attempt by an active minority in this country to dictate to the majority. The battleground is not only the House and the Senate. School boards all over the country are in play, and anti-teacher extremists are signing up to run. Some of these campaigns are even funded by billionaire money.

You can’t take this election off. Pay attention to who is running for school board. Read through the candidate statements and look for rhetoric that is extreme and polarizing. Vote for someone else.

And, stick up for your local teachers. They are out there every day teaching, mentoring and guiding every student in their class. Diversity-Equity-Inclusion is not a catchphrase for teachers. It’s a way of life.

Teachers have been under attack from the right wing of our country for several years now. Those attacks have only intensified since the start of the pandemic.

To understand who is attacking teachers and why, we need to explore the three main factions that make up today’s Republican party: the money people (Conspiracy Theory “B” still hard at work!), Evangelical Christians, and White Supremacists. These groups often have overlapping membership, and they use the same methods, but their motivations vary.

The billionaire shareholder class sees education funding as another source of profits. They want to establish for-profit charter schools and run them the same way they run retail stores - hire cheap labor, spend as little as possible on materials, and call any unspent money “profits.” To accomplish this, they are determined to deregulate education, removing as many guardrails as they can in the name of “innovation.”

Standing in their way are two of the most powerful special interest groups in the country, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association - the teachers unions. AFT and NEA rival the National Rifle Association in their political clout, and in their ability to mobilize large numbers of people for phone-banking, demonstrations, etc. The teachers unions fight back against deregulation, maintaining union protection for their workers but also keeping money for students out of corporate pockets.

While the super-wealthy have suffocated private sector employees with wage suppression and ever-dwindling benefits, the teachers unions and other public sector unions have maintained decent wages and good benefits programs, including pensions, which have all but vanished from the private sector. Efforts to bust these unions (see my blog on the Janus Decision as an example https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...) have failed. In fact, the public sector unions are a shining example to those trying to unionize Amazon, Walmart and other employee groups. The wealthy respond by bashing teachers via right wing media, calling them communists.

Evangelicals want charter schools, too, but for a different reason. This group wants to send their children to publicly funded religious schools. They want to do away with the Constitution’s division between church and state and establish their brand of Christianity as our nation’s religion. Teachers unions fight back against this by teaching everybody’s kids and protecting the secular focus of our public schools.

Teachers stand for science, for critical thinking, and during the pandemic, they have been big advocates for vaccines. They offend Evangelicals by teaching evolution and by creating safe spaces within schools for LGBTQ students. Evangelicals leverage right-wing media to lambast teachers for their support of school closures during the height of the pandemic. They accuse teachers of recruiting children to become homosexuals or transexuals, clinging to their outmoded beliefs that this is a choice rather than something inherent.

White Supremacists blend in with Evangelicals in an attempt at legitimacy and acceptance. Their main goal is to create white enclaves to stop people of different backgrounds from mingling. They don’t want “their tax dollars going to those kids.” One way to do this is to move their kids out of their local public school and into a semi-private charter school. If they create a school with a mandatory requirement for parents to donate either money or time, they naturally exclude low income families, creating de-facto segregation at their schools. Teachers unions fight against these types of charter schools which strips both attendance dollars and donation money from neighborhood public schools.

In recent months, the Right have focused their efforts in a new way: banning books. White Supremacists focus on books that treat the African-American experience with honor and respect. Evangelicals attack any book that normalizes the LGBTQ experience. A school district in Pennsylvania recently banned the Girls Who Code books, because you wouldn’t want girls to have career aspirations!

Just like in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade, this is an attempt by an active minority in this country to dictate to the majority. The battleground is not only the House and the Senate. School boards all over the country are in play, and anti-teacher extremists are signing up to run. Some of these campaigns are even funded by billionaire money.

You can’t take this election off. Pay attention to who is running for school board. Read through the candidate statements and look for rhetoric that is extreme and polarizing. Vote for someone else.

And, stick up for your local teachers. They are out there every day teaching, mentoring and guiding every student in their class. Diversity-Equity-Inclusion is not a catchphrase for teachers. It’s a way of life.

There is too much gun violence in the United States, far more than in other wealthy countries. The obvious difference between us and countries like Canada or Germany is our lax gun laws, and the sheer amount of guns that have flooded our society.

That said, I understand Americans' fascination with guns. I had toy guns as a child. I went with my dad and with the Boy Scouts to the shooting range to practice my marksmanship. Jerry Cartmell, who served his community for decades as a cop, once took me to the police shooting range, where I fired a .38 revolver and a .45 automatic at human silhouette targets.

To this day, I enjoy video games like Mass Effect and Doom, which involve acquiring and utilizing ever more powerful weapons in order to defeat the bad guys. I do not, however, own a gun in real life, nor have I fired a real gun in decades.

I live in a quiet suburb, but gun violence is not an abstract concept to me. A friend of mine, police sergeant Mark Dunakin, was killed in the line of duty in Oakland several years ago. My wife teaches school at our local elementary school. After all the school shootings, I worry about her the same way I used to worry about Mark.

Do I want to ban all guns? No, but background checks and red flag laws are not enough. We need to get weapons of war off the streets. Let’s start with semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15.

The AR-15 is a very popular weapon. You can use it effectively with very little training. There are over 20 million of these rifles in the United States, and manufacturers sell upwards of 8 million each year.

It is also an incredibly vicious weapon. With some high powered rifles, the bullets rip right through the victim. Bullets from an AR-15, on the other hand, tumble through the air. When they hit someone, the bullet snowballs, tearing up the victim’s insides. You get hit with one of these things, even in the arm or the leg, you are likely to bleed out.

Remember, police in Uvalde Texas had to use DNA swabs to identify the victims of the shooting there, because the shooter's assault weapon caused such devastation the children were unidentifiable. A weapon of this lethality should not be in the hands of citizens. It is a weapon of war.

But, what about the Second Amendment? Let’s take a look at the Bill of Rights, Article II, from 1791: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

There’s two phrases at work here. Gun rights advocates tend to focus on the second phrase, while gun control advocates like me focus on the first. In 1791, the United States depended on citizen militias for defense. They were our armed forces, and, because we were such a fledgling country at that point, we needed them to bring their own guns. Those farmers and townspeople needed to be armed and ready in case of an invasion from Britain or another European power.

The “well regulated militia” of 1791 has not existed for over one hundred years. In its place, we have the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Coast Guard, as well as our local police forces and sheriff offices. Join any of those organizations today, and you will not be required to bring your own weapon. If they need you to have one, they will give it to you, and when you are done with it, they will take it back.

If this well regulated militia is no longer necessary for the survival of the free State, then it is reasonable that the right to keep and bear arms can and should be infringed.

I realize that plenty of people disagree with me, and if you are one of them, I won’t hold it against you. More significantly, six people who disagree with me sit on the Supreme Court.

These justices are originalists. They look back on our history and traditions and seek to find the original intent of the authors of our Constitution and our earliest laws. These justices like to look back on the year 1791, when the difference between a military weapon and a hunting rifle was negligible. If I were a lawyer about to argue for an assault weapons ban before these justices, I would hire a historian, and I would point that individual at the great, great grandfather of the AR-15, the Gatling gun.

The Gatling gun, one of the earliest machine guns, was not a hand-held weapon. It was mounted either to a wagon or a ship, and it took four men to operate it. In 1886, it was capable of firing 400 rounds per minute.

If I were preparing a history lesson for the Supreme Court, I would want to know what was the original intent of this weapon, based on company marketing materials and the letters and diaries of its inventor, Richard Gatling. I would look for federal, local or even military regulations restricting the use of Gatling guns in crowded, urban areas. Were there any restrictions keeping citizens from owning this weapon of war? Or, was it simply understood that this weapon was the domain of our armed forces?

I would look, in short, through our traditions and history to find distinctions between citizens' guns, protected by the Second Amendment, and weapons of war. I would apply what I found to create reasonable regulations on other weapons, like the AR-15.