Column for Oct. 20, 2011

I wanted to take a quick diversion right at the beginning this week to share a chuckle I had from the front page of last week’s “The Selma News”. There was a headline that said, “Just in time for Halloween: Selma has a bat problem”. I chuckled when I saw that because I have known that Selma had bats since I moved here. No, I am not talking about some of the residents or even Town Council members, but I have heard bats at night in this town for almost a decade now. Sometimes when I am outside late at night walking my old, trusty dog, Barack Odaga, also known as Slime Dog (his given name), I will hear the screech of bats overhead or nearby. I just took it for granted that this town had bats in it. Now I read that someone is just now making it known to the Town Council that there is a bat problem in town. I chuckled and sarcastically said to myself, “Noooooooooooooo, ya’ think?” Anyway, now back to the regularly scheduled rant, already in progress.

A friend of mine who lives in Wake County and decided to home school his son said to me and a television audience that if Wake County Schools are not smart enough to take a compass or protractor, lay it on a map, draw a circle around a school’s location, and have the children that live within the circle’s radius attend that school, then he didn’t want them educating his child. That seems like a common sense thing to me. It made sense when I went to school that I would go to the closest, neighborhood school available.

Unfortunately, voters in Wake County seem to have lost their common sense in their election this past week. They fell prey to the progressive mantra about diversity. The very people who fought for the right to simply go to a neighborhood school during the civil rights era of the 1960’s were the very ones who argued that the act of letting neighborhood children go to a neighborhood school in this present day is racist and hateful. They were organized and unrelenting in their attacks and disinformation. Of course the left leaning media outlets lapped it up like my aforementioned dog slurps the leftover milk from my morning bowl of cornflakes. As a result, some courageous school board members have been voted out of office.

Men and women who stood for the common sense concept of letting children go to schools in their own neighborhoods rather than needlessly transporting them across the county for the sake of racial and economic diversity will be replaced by potentially snivelling control freaks who don’t think that parents should have a say in the education of their children. One dear friend of mine was rather upset by this election result and, well, I can’t print here what she had to say about it.

I am thankful that we do not have such issues here in Johnston County. If we did and we were going to truly follow the spirit of racial and economic diversity, we would probably have to bus in White children as well as students from wealthier neighborhoods from the other side of the county. White children at Selma Elementary, by nature of the town demographics, are the vast minority. Also, children not receiving government assistance in the form of free and reduced lunch prices are also a tiny minority. In order to balance this out, should children from perhaps the Cleveland community be put on school buses and sent clear across the county to help populate Selma Elementary? For that matter, should students with Hispanic surnames who live in Selma be bused to Polenta Elementary School? Of course not.

Here is one thing I will say about the lefties in this country. When they think that they have a cause, they rally behind it, however misguided it may be. One only needs to look at the “Occupy New York” and other similar “Occupy” rallies held across the country. They have no real coherent message other than to demonize those who hold wealth in order to force some of it to be appropriated for use by others. Redistribution of wealth makes as little sense to me as redistribution of students for the sake of diversity. Both have politically correctness and socialist indoctrination as part of their core.

How is that “hope and change” thing working out for you? I would say not so well. Yes, there can be change, but let us not continue the slide into socialism and government control. Keep that in mind this next election season, even when we have municipal elections next month.