Thread by @MsBoismier_ELA

A 🧵 to end all 🧵s

⚠️CW: Profanity, references to violence, suicidal ideation⚠️ Please proceed with your mental health in mind.

It’s common knowledge that people are capable of some frankly breathtaking levels of cruelty. I’ve known that for a while now, but I’ve never known exactly what that meant until recently.

This is the personal cost of a culture war that weaponizes ignorance, that willfully (or worse) mistakes it for righteousness. As a quasi-90s kid, I’m compelled to ask, “WWJD?”

In an answer practically tailor-made for TL;DR, the absolute simplest way to say it is this: LOVE. No asterisks, no ellipses, no conjunctions. No qualifications or hesitations, just love pure and simple and all the more profound because of it.

For the out-of-context crowd, this is the tweet to screenshot. I, the Norman teacher, am aware of your comments. I’ve heard your self-produced podcasts and seen your Facebook posts dripping in cherry-picked Bible verses. And last night, your venom-laced rhetoric finally landed.

As I arrived home to boxes and boxes of my life’s work, my classroom’s contents (the books, the posters, the Takis bags, the notes and graduation announcements and Taco Bell coloring-book pages) haunting the darkness of an otherwise empty apartment, you finally drew blood.

Debate my ideas, fine. Those are fair game.

But you grown men who spend your days spitting into $60 microphones ordered online the moment a Black man had the audacity to aim for the presidency have no right to engage in cruel and completely unnecessary speculation on my gender, my sexuality, my clothes, my hair, my voice.

I’ve been described as a “vile leftist” who someone hoped would become the victim of a violent crime. My picture in an article prompted someone to say their lunch was officially canceled for the day. Someone else added that this whole thing could be solved by a ball of lead.

I’ve been called a “thing,” an “it,” a “creature” even the Clintons wouldn’t touch, and a c*** from California.

I have seen parents with upside-down American flags as their profile pictures promise vengeance for what some public leaders are still loudly saying I supposedly did to their children. But these same netizens seem to forget that I am somebody’s child too.

And last night, I had to call that somebody to come sit with me while I cried because I didn’t know what I might do if left alone with the words intended to bury me alive.

I am not another political point for you to collect. I am a person who seems to have a closer relationship with my God than any of those “fellow believers” currently calling for my professional crucifixion on Facebook. And what was my crime? Encouraging your child to read.

We can read so much of ourselves in the world if we only know where to look. But the even more valuable endeavor, I think, is to realize that we can read so much of ourselves in each other too.

In her poem “Speech to the Young,” Gwendolyn Brooks writes, “ ‘Even if you are not ready for day/it cannot always be night.’/You will be right./For that is the hard home-run.” I am a high-school English teacher. I once saw a student lick the underside of a desk on a $5 dare.

You don’t scare me because you don’t speak for me ... and you never will.

There is nothing dehumanizing you can say that I haven’t already said to myself. My darkest nights are already behind me, so I will continue to hold my head up in the broad light of day and meet the sun’s gaze unflinching.

While you attempt to contort the connotations of “woke” to fit the limitations of your narrow worldview, the rest of us are already awake, and we are rising. And we are raising our voices because we know that it takes every member of the chorus to make the harmony.

I have been truly humbled by the deluge of familiar faces and complete strangers asking how they can help financially. Our nation’s public school teachers have paid too high a price–both literally and figuratively–for far too long.

We owe it to the students sitting in classrooms across the country right now to properly fund these spaces and fully embrace their stories.

Midterms are approaching. It is beyond shameful that even one educator would have to spend even $1 of their own money to do a job that pays dividends for all of us. VOTE ACCORDINGLY.

In the meantime, if you are a teacher, drop your list in the replies. If you’re looking to help, you can also head over to @GivingClassroom, @DonorsChoose, and/or @Support_a_teach.

And if you spot a 🐅, let them hear you roar: donorschoose.org/donors/search.….

#oklaed #elaok #BannedBooksWeek #QRCodeResistance #BooksUniteUs #ClearTheList