In Classrooms of the Country Which Some in the Mideast Call the Great Beast….

syria 1

“In 2016 we allowed 15,479 Syrian refugees into the U.S., in 2017 we reduced that to 3,024, and this year we’ve only permitted 11 to enter. We care a lot about those folks, don’t we? Or should I ask whether or not we’re worried that a parent of one of those kids we’ve blown away will come our way?” — Richard Martin Oxman drawing from the magnificent work of Jeffrey St. Clair, an independent journalist without teaching credentials

People of color better get a grip on the difference between someone teaching their children History who has official teaching credentials and someone who has a commitment to “truth”… or something approximating truth. For their own survival.

Everyone else ought to get on board with that too.

The recent headlines focusing on the bombing of Syria (and the content of the articles they lead to) mislead, to put it very mildly. Robert Fisk sets the record somewhat straight today, but there’s a dire need for follow-up on a monumental order, for — as usual — “truth” which dribbles through the cracks of our mainstream news outlets gets lost in the shuffle of life. And there is such a thing as truth to be reckoned with. In the sense that one cannot be a party to the killing of children and other innocents anywhere and expect to not have blowback, to not have to witness the death of our Collective Soul.

Even if you and your children live in a gated community in a exceptional country.

My Uncle Ox (Richard Martin Oxman, who writes for Countercurrents regularly, an alternative media outlet which is very clear about the above) teaches History to home schooled youngsters, and he recently noted something very interesting germane to any discussion of bombing in Syria.

He pointed out that an Air Force pilot who had bombed Syria between September 23, 2014 and some point in January, 2015 told him that the U.S. compiled an average of SEVEN airstrikes a day in that realm. Do the math. Then ask yourself if you think such madness ended in January. And ask yourself why — prior to the much-heralded bombing of yesterday — no “hits” on chemical storage or processing plants took place during the last three years or so. And so on, and so on, and so on. Lots of unanswered questions, yes?

I’m a kid of color. And the adults in my life have a responsibility to accurately gauge the impact of such bombing of the brothers and sisters abroad my age overseas. For there’s really no difference between destroying their futures and destroying the future for my brothers and sisters on these shores.

But the main point of this piece is that I wouldn’t know any of this if I were attending a public school or a private school towing the line, where instructors who are credentialed rule the roost, being obedient to those who dictate the parameters they must bow to to keep their jobs. Meaning, you’d be hard put to find a teacher in any Charter School or any public school who would know about any of this, let alone be willing to risk the consequences of telling the “truth”… or the truth… or anything approximating what’s really happening on the ground in Syria.

Neither Robert Fisk, nor Norman Soloman (who wrote another interesting piece on the bombing in Syria today), nor my Uncle Ox have the credentials necessary to teach History or Geopolitics or any discipline in most educational quarters in the U.S., but… parents in communities all across the “exceptional” U.S. ought to begin organizing to see that they’re allowed to enter the classroom, to make sure — at the very least — that their ideas are permitted to be talked about in the classrooms of the country which some in the Mideast call the Great Beast.

The Flannery O’Connor Academy is comprised of home schooled teens, for the most part, studying with members of the Oxman Collective*. They write anonymously and exclusively for Countercurrents (CC). They can be reached at [email protected]. The author wants readers to know that there are approximately 5 million Syrian refugees to date according to Jeffrey St. Clair.

*All members write exclusively for CC.

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