A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

Board of Ed

It's gotta be kind of embarrassing. Say you are this small upstate community and folks have sung your virtues as this liberal paradise, as one of the most enlightened towns in America. You boast a world renown vegetarian restaurant, a natural foods coop, an ivy league university, and have practically beat out Detroit as the social work capital of the US. You have volunteers swarming around like an ant colony at a picnic, trying to help out here, making a difference there.

Then the shit hits the proverbial fan. (Ez likes to use earthy language, if you haven't noticed, because it helps him to stay connected with the masses, lets him temporarily forget that he has 5 doctorates.) A well known African American community leader and activist, frustrated that the city has equivocated endlessly over renaming the main thoroughfare after Dr. King, uses the 'R' word in a guest editorial. Soon after, if that embarrassment wasn't enough, the Human Rights Commission, backed up by NY State. describes the behavior of your Board of Ed in responding to a parent's complaint as racist. Apparently, members of the board failed to respond to the mother's email detailing how her child was threatened and harassed at school. The problem doesn't go away. The mother goes on to organize a rally, Board members crash it; the mother writes a guest editorial claiming that not only are Board members racist but hypocritical as well.
Circle the wagons, bang the tocsin.

We got 'racism' in Ithaca City, which starts with R, which doesn't rhyme with T , which stands for trouble, folks. We have trouble right here in Ithaca City. Whatcha gonna do about it, Ithaca?
Let's stay calm. Let's beat our chests, write letters to the Editor, form subcommittees which then split off into small study groups which then report back to the whole subcommittee which then writes a report which then gets excerpted in the daily rag which then gets recycled and forgotten.

In the old days we'd have scapegoats. Tar and feather parades. Break out the pillows.

Witch hunts. Build a good old fashioned integrated punishment system on the Commons --pillory, stocks, gibbet, you know, the works. Maybe the same guy who does those wooden playground structures could design one for us.

Forget Webster's, you can go right to Answers.com for a definition of scapegoat.

1. One that is made to bear the blame of others.
2. Bible. A live goat over whose head Aaron confessed all the sins of the children of Israel on the Day of Atonement. The goat, symbolically bearing their sins, was then sent into the wilderness.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Or is that a sheep?
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 5:41 AM