Texas School Statistics

As an introduction to a series I'm doing for What Happens in Texas about Texas schools, I started by researching a few facts and figures. In many cases, the data I discovered created more questions in my mind than answers, but I've decided that's a good thing. Research works that way; you're never sure where it's going to take you. I'm just going to put these here without a lot of explanation, and go swimming in the details later. I do want to call out the monkey wrench I threw in the last graph, which compares Texas per student spending to the US and to the averages of other developed countries, because I think this looks really interesting.

Trump Tantrum

An acquaintance posted something on Facebook today that kind of made me throw up in my mouth. “People don’t understand the rage that Trump supporters feel.”

So, let’s talk about rage. I grew up with Watergate and Vietnam on the news every evening. I grew up in the world of the draft and Kent State, a world where women weren’t allowed to run marathons or have their own credit cards. During high school, I watched Reagan destroy our economy, laugh at the AIDS epidemic, and violate federal and international law with impunity. I watched my beloved home state turn into a third world country of pollution, poor education, and unregulated corporate greed. I walked the streets of San Francisco in the 80s where men like living skeletons marked the days until their inevitable deaths.  I’ve watched my friends get beat up and thrown to the ground for the crime of speaking or sitting. I’ve marched with women who have lost their children to the violence of racism, and had cops point rifles at my head for it. I’ve been denied jobs, promotions, and opportunities because I’m female. So yes, I do know about rage. But anger isn’t always destructive, in spite of what the self-appointed gurus tell us. My rage is for the disenfranchised, for the creatures of the earth denied the chance to live in joy, peace, and prosperity because of human greed. My anger drives me to activism, to liberalism, to compassion.

If this was your anger, you’d get involved. You’d vote for someone who cares, who has a plan to right some of these wrongs. But your anger is not this. Your anger is the same rage that drives a jilted man to murder his wife or girlfriend. Your anger is the same rage that causes a toddler to smash the toy he’s been told to share. Your anger is the rage of privilege denied.

Yes, I get it. You were supposed to get a great ride in this life. It was supposed to be awesome. You were supposed to rule the world. Or, at least, live some kind of James Bond fantasy of women, adventure, and wealth. But from your stand-up desk in the financial district, you can see the beginning of the end of the patriarchy. People abandoning the church. Women college graduates outnumbering men. Blacks marching in every city demanding justice. The legalization of gay marriage. The legalization of marijuana. Grandmothers chaining themselves to pipelines. But, even if human civilization would continue to endure patriarchy’s toxic legacy, nature herself will not. She is in a burning rage, and business as usual will not appease her. You can blame this on my generation, just as I could equally well blame it on my parents’ generation. We would both be right, and it wouldn’t matter. Civilization is just beginning, or just ending, or maybe both, and you’re scared as shit.

So, you’re going to vote for Trump. Because you want to go out in a blaze of glory maybe? I guarantee that didn’t work so well for the Third Reich, and it won’t work well for you either. You’re just a very small pawn in the game, after all, no matter how your gonads ache for greatness. You could devote what’s left of your insignificant life to solving problems and bettering the world, or you could just grab what you can with your fat white hands and scream for more.