Our district has voted – the Board – to go back to a choice between in class an on-line program or classroom program. It sounds like it’s a mess. It is in my son’s school district where as a teacher he is treated like a yo-yo: in-out-in-out.

So I thought it hilarious when a reporter interviewed a Boogaloo Boy. He said he was there to protest government overreach. So she did the usual Commie fake news reporter thing and asked him what overreach he was concerned about.

Like most Trumpers, he came back with a very specific complaint: government interference in every aspect of our lives. So, the Commie rat persisted: What specific things bother you? Well, it turned out the government tells where you can build a house, whether you can drive a car, own a gun, and tells you what your kids will learn in school.

Being a card-carrying Commie rat myself, I thought it would be worthwhile to unpack these one by one:

He can build a house where zoning laws permit and as long as the house can pass inspection. Inspection is, in part, for general safety so no fires break out, etc. Just as you cannot store dynamite in your suburban or urban garage, you cannot have a house whose electrical system is fire prone which endangers your neighbors’ houses.

Zoning is so you, Googaloo or Boogaloo boy, cannot inherit your mother’s home in a suburban neighborhood, tear it down and put in your favorite franchised strip-joint. Homeowners are sensitive to drunken brawls next door with sex acts being performed in the parking lot.

Now to the retort from BB: no fire’s going to break out, dick wad. My old army buddy says he can wire my house for a case of beer and THAT’S MY RIGHT! And I can’t store dynamite in my mom’s apartment either, I suppose. GOV’T TYRANNY! As for the strip-joint deal, WHERE’S MY GIRLFRIEND GOING TO WORK, DICK WAD?

Then the driving a car. We license car ownership and permission to drive it, just as we do the same for gun ownership…… right? ‘Cause they both are lethal if used wrong. And that monster truck BB drives could take out a whole strip joint – I mean, strip mall. We take grandpa’s keys away from him at a certain point for a reason. Someone the other day mentioned driving in Brazil or the Democratic Republic of the Congo just to see what FREEDOM! means. I just heard yesterday on NPR (see, I told you I was a Communist) the history of seat belts. Without looking up records I can tell you the death toll on our highways and streets is the same as it was when I was seven years old because I remember listening to the radio then when they said the expected toll was 40,000 (and I thought they picked the people to die and they might pick my mom); it’s still 40,000 due to regulations like seat belts.

The retort from BB? My truck means FREEDOM! Besides, that’s where I carry my dynamite.

The gun ownership thing drives a large number of right wingers. I amuses me that they think they are the only ones who can shoot a gun. They probably fantasize themselves as old-timey Confederate soldiers, forgetting that that is the side that lost. And they lost because soldiers on the other side shot them. Then there’s the Freudian question: just what does that gun compensate for? More questions from a Communist, I know. I said the magic word: soldiers. Most of us grew up around guns – I was on my high school rifle team – but few of us saw anyone carrying M-!s or BARs, the military weapons of the day. My dad carried a BAR but despite being quite familiar with the Mafia he never carried one after the war. He did keep a baseball bat under his bed. No, Freudian is the word. These BBs see a gun like they see a car, a way to express their freedom and to get girls. No well-armed household in Poughkeepsie is going to hold out long against a rifle squad. There are ways to control guns without stomping on people’s ability (not right) to own guns and I wrote those up at the series of entries titled Gun Control, then Gun Control Step One, etc.

Now for the children and what they learn in school, thus bringing us back to our opening paragraph. Note, Mr. BB, that an ELECTED school board voted contrary to what I want. That is why, in this very Red part of the country (the East Valley of Maricopa County, AZ) I vote Democratic. Actually, I think this crosses over party lines quite a bit – I think it depends on if your stay-at-home kids are driving you crazy. Nevertheless, BB can vote for the school board members in his district. The state does have a Superintendent of Public Education or whatever it is called in BB’s state, and a board to go with the job and that board sets the state standards which are not binding on anyone I can see. No one except me goes to the state standards for their subject matter (mine was foreign language, another indicator of my Communist leanings – “foreign” – I mean, if English was good enough for Jesus, why worry about anything else?). And I went to them only to show my principal that I was following them in contrast to what he wanted me to do. OK now, BB, do you see the heavy hand of the Federal Gummint in that? Yes, you say? How about No Child Left Behind and Common (short for Communist) Core and Billy Gates and all that? I would agree, pointing out that most support for such Federal direction comes from the right. Obama had a disastrous education policy and his boy Arne Duncan screwed us over. (You know, I never thought of it, but maybe Obama WAS a tyrant and was carrying out his nefarious take-over via fifth grade classroom teachers – get it? Fifth grade, fifth column?) But all that comes only from top-down management, which works in this country only because the Feds offer money to cash-strapped school districts and their states. All you have to do, BB, is vote for people who want to fund schools via higher taxes distributed throughout the schools of the state. Low taxes allow wealthy districts to finance their schools through bonds while poor districts get zilch – —

But I fear here I have gone way over BB’s threshold. He couldn’t hold it together in high school biology – thus no mask – and he sure can’t get into the weeds on education. 3 Rs, RIGHT, BABY? I refer to my recent discussion with my Trumper neighbor where he admits it gets complicated when you really delve into it. No shit.