3372
3373

I feel really sad for my country today. The US used to be a place that welcomed people in trouble or in need. Now, we are a global embarrassment and example of intolerance. What will it take for people to rise up and make this stop?

3374

Hold up, football is on.

3375

Rise up? Like how? Like the 2020 election or like impeachment (which cannot happen) or like armed insurrection (which won’t happen)?

3376

Rise up and send a letter to your representative.

3377

Can we at least build guillotines in our front yards as a sign of the times?

3378

So the pretty much do nothing approach. :)

3379

I mean take to the streets en masse, like in Hong Kong or Puerto Rico.

3380

I can only think of once in my life time when Americans have done anything like that, and that was the protests around the Vietnam War. That occurred, in my opinion, because so many people knew someone who was involved. It took years for popular opinion to change among those who favored the original move into Vietnam.

I don’t see Americans hitting the streets over the mistreatment of foreigners trying to enter the country, no matter how unjust. It is just not personal enough for that many people to risk something over.

And even after everything that happened with Vietnam and Watergate we elected Reagan just 6 years later.

3381

How about we all refuse to pay taxes, since Trump is lining his pockets with it? I know why people aren’t out in the streets, but the level of corruption and ill intent across the administration is sickening. Everything he touches molds.

3382

Rise up and do nothing.

3383

I wasn’t around for Vietnam, but it does say 100k people marched on the WH for Vietnam, 50k marched to the Pentagon.

The WA DC Women March drew 200k, an there were marches in other cities totaling around 3 to 5 million.

Black Lives Matter marches have reached in the 10’s of thousands and occurred multiple times.

Americans are able and willing to do so, today; they already demonstrated this, but these are personal, close at heart for sure.

3384

A 1st-grade classroom where there are 30 five-year-old students for one teacher would be a nightmare for everyone. A high school math class with 30 kids would simply be considered “kinda crowded”.

There’s also the facilities to consider – was the school built for class sizes of 30? Our local schools were typically built back in the 80s and were sized for about 20 desks per classroom… and trying to squeeze 25 or 30 desks in that same space is pretty terrible.

Those ratios are weird and a good example of the reporting not answering the question in the spirit it was asked. Clicking through to that site, you find that the very first “school” listed is a county juvenile court where the ratio is 1:1.

Beyond that, the teachers that are included in the calculation are not all classroom teachers – you have language specialists, part-time health teachers and sometimes even administrators included in that number, which gives you a lower ratio than the actually important number, which is number of students per classroom. For California’s secondary schools, that number is 23… which is actually pretty bad, ranking 40th out of 50 states (per Dept of Education).

3385

It’s not obvious that smaller class sizes are an efficient way to spend school district money:

Certainly they’re what teachers’ unions want, and there’s no organized opposition to them, so they are very politically attractive as budget targets.

It’s useful to put education budgets in perspective. The budget for San Diego Unified School District is roughly the same size as the general fund budget for the entire rest of the city of San Diego: all public services combined, including public safety, environmental monitoring, administration, city parks, transportation and road repair, sewage collection and processing, garbage collection, libraries, city courts and jails, water management, etc etc.

3386

Yea, that would be good advice. Like the IRS will ignore you if you have a good excuse for not paying. :)

3387

It wasn’t just a march though. Colleges were shut down, there were bombings, there was civil disobedience and arrests. People did go to jail over there beliefs. People kept at it in large numbers, I am not sure you can say that about the other causes you mentioned. Probably the next closest thing was the civil rights marches.

3388

Neither the Women’s March nor Black Lives Matter were or are restricted to a single day’s march either.

3389

I know, but they had a big push and then have pretty much died down to small neighborhood affairs, or annual marches. At least they don’t make the news anymore so if there are larger events going on I haven’t heard about them.

3390

Black Lives Matter has been going on for years, and there have been several activities, including additional marches, that have made the news.

I am not trying to take away from the Vietnam era protesting and efforts, but i think you are severely selling short the efforts and willingness that have been shown today, already. You’re making it sound like there has been “nothing done like that” again when literally there have been several, and that’s just the last two. We haven’t even addressed Occupy Wall Street yet.

There is no lack of willingness for people to act. Whether they are motivated enough is another thing.

3391

I am not trying to denigrate any of the other causes but none have had the continuing presence and broad support of the Vietnam era protests. Those protests covered years, literally almost a decade of constant protesting. Occupy lasted what, a few months by a few that really went no where because nobody knew what the hell it was they wanted.

I would love to see the BLM movement stay in the news without it having to be a reaction to somebody getting shot. But personally I don’t see it, but as I said it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening somewhere. Perhaps one reason the Vietnam protests lasted so long and with such emotion was that every night people saw a body count on the nightly news. It was also something that crossed social and racial boundaries, effecting everyone.

Yea, that is the main thing. Whether you are willing to risk something you have to change things.