CBSD: Love thy neighbor as thyself and do not accuse them of horrendous intent

Did you miss the school board meeting last Tuesday? Perhaps that’s your good luck. If you’d been there, you would have heard a whole lot of electioneering, smearing of candidates, easily disproven allegations, failures of logic, and a community so far out of balance it has lost focus on what's important: educating its kids.

Instead, what we saw followed a familiar pattern: Someone angrily makes accusations, implying criminality, malicious intent, and general despicableness, in tones of mockery and contempt. Someone else angrily responds, objecting to the substance and the implications of that attack. Conflict ensues.

This wasn’t the most illuminating part of the meeting.

The illuminating part came when one school board member contended that our divisions are not partisan and do not fall along political lines, but instead stem from lingering anger of the handling of Covid and what that person alleges without evidence of any kind as the “sexualization” of children.

No. We disagree. Those issues are the pretext. The real problem is fear and loathing of neighbors who don’t see it that way. National agitators have used the disruption caused by Covid and the false claim of “sexualization” to create furor. But they are phantoms.

Covid threatened and angered everyone. Nobody liked how it was handled and everyone was hurt by it, but it’s no longer an imminent threat and most of us want to move on.

There is no movement for “sexualization” of kids in schools via library books, curriculum, pronouns, names, symbols of safety and inclusion, or any other means.

But national disrupters fan flames of Covid anger and tell lies about research-based education practices to turn neighbor against neighbor. They don’t want the anger to ease or the fear to lessen. They want to turn anger to contempt and contempt to conflict.

The result is that we aren’t even talking about improving schools anymore. If you go back and listen to the public comment, you will see that very little of it pertained to policy, to kids, to teachers or support staff, to the real issues that impact our schools. Mostly it was attacks on one another, neighbor against neighbor.

The goal of those who would divide us is the creation of moral disgust. Another school board member expressed this plainly and out loud when they said:

we have a problem with community members burning it down. They’re using our children as political currency. They have not a shred of morality.

That’s a shocking thing to say about your own constituents, about the parents of children in your care, about your community. And if that is how you see your neighbors, you are no longer trying to govern or to lead. You’re trying to win power over fabricated enemies.

We have compassion for the fear that inspires this level of repugnance of one’s own neighbors. But to view those who support:

• symbols of inclusion in classrooms because they help marginalized kids feel safe, supported, and ready to learn

• a return to policy that fosters a diverse collection of age-relevant books for every child to see themselves in

• equal participation in sports

• students’ right to use their requested name and pronouns

• a return to policy that allows for the discussion and study of age-appropriate political, social, and cultural issues as they arise outside of curriculum

as morally foul and to believe that there is a movement in Central Bucks to hurt children creates real harm out of fear of false dangers.

Here’s the hard truth: when you fight an imaginary foe, you do not win. But you sure get people racing to the polls to defeat the enemy—of which there are none, just people living in deep conflict with each other. 

The problem is those partisan strategists who use the cynically enflamed fear of masks/school closures/corruption to set us against one another so they can enact their own agenda on the ruins of what was our community.

The compulsion to depict opponents as low and immoral is dangerous. It harms all of us. It destroys fruitful debate. It closes minds, poisons hearts, sows the seeds of anger, deters anyone from speaking up to voice their concerns. 

The incendiary who flaunted the conflict and chaos he stirred up nationwide with lies about Critical Race Theory, Chris Rufo, said it explicitly: the goal is universal school distrust. When he has accomplished that, he and his co-conspirators believe they can destroy our public schools.

This is well documented here, here, here, here and here. 

So you might ask what we can do to advance our kids’ education in the face of such slander and misinformation. The urgent question is how a community can come back from the fabrication of moral disgust that is based on nothing but agitators’ desire to profit off our loss.

Here’s how: we can focus on education and make our schools great for each and every child in each and every family. This will never entail attacks on individuals. Excellent schools for ALL our children command respect. Even the cynical cannot argue with success. Our great schools will quell attack from the agents of chaos. 

Good people of differing opinions live in Central Bucks. We believe that they will reject the vindictive characterization of others, and above all reject the policies that are taking us backward.

We call for a return to good policy with principled deliberation, research-based decision making, and a commitment to the best interest of all our students. We call for strong leadership that sets an example by refuting the demonization of those with whom we disagree, maintaining order, quelling chaos, and settling in to the hard work of governing our schools. We call for rational debate on policies that will revive our schools and enhance our children’s ability to learn and grow to their highest potential.

That’s how we get along with one another. It’s how we resolve our differing views and live together. 

We will never be one big happy family and we don’t need to be. That’s not the point. While cynics have suggested that the alternative to personal attacks and community strife is us all standing hand in hand, flowers in our hair, singing “Kumbaya,” we envision something far better and more doable. Something real, achievable, and democratic.

Where we want to go is a place of mutual if tense respect for one another’s right to live and raise our children according to our lights in accordance with principles of democracy. We call for a community of diverse views, values, practice—variety of every kind, and all of us proud of our mutually created spectacular neighborhood schools (that do have a wide array of books in their libraries, for our varied students to choose to read or not).

Great schools for ALL the kids: that’s the doable, tolerable way to love our neighbors as ourselves.