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Joined: Thu February 02, 2017 10:39 am Posts: 5616 Location: Most likely at the office...
washing machine wrote:
Higgs wrote:
With the recent school shooting in Texas do any of you RM parents worry about your kids when you drop them off at school that they won't make it home?
Yes, and I will always remember this Uvalde one as the one that broke me. The one that feels the most real.
We had just dropped off our son at his grandparents for two nights and headed to San Antonio for my wife's birthday getaway when the news broke. These were her first two nights away from him since he was born in 2019. We didn't say anything to each other about it (the shooting) for the first day and then on the way to breakfast yesterday we just broke down and bawled to each other on the sidewalk. We let it all out. We were so ready to see him today when we got back home.
He attends a private daycare that goes all the way to elementary and secondary school. Not that it makes a difference. We vowed this week to build our lives around keeping him in this school. Again, not that it matters. Feels so helpless.
I get that, totally. Hugging your kid is one of the truly greatest things in the world.
I'm genuinely sad and sorry for all you American parents. This is a worry that no one should have.
Joined: Tue September 24, 2013 5:56 pm Posts: 47141 Location: In the oatmeal aisle wearing a Shellac shirt
washing machine wrote:
Higgs wrote:
With the recent school shooting in Texas do any of you RM parents worry about your kids when you drop them off at school that they won't make it home?
Yes, and I will always remember this Uvalde one as the one that broke me. […] He attends a private daycare that goes all the way to elementary and secondary school. Not that it makes a difference. We vowed this week to build our lives around keeping him in this school.
I’m right here with you. The key difference is that all the good private schools around here — again, sort of a false hope, but it’s something — are all Christian based so that’s a no go.
The MT Superintendent has been actively dismantling the public school system since Trump’s term, including big cuts to mental health resources for students; and 2A reigns supreme here. So it’s only a matter of time, is my view…
There are just a couple other states I’d consider raising my child (VT and ME), but they have their own issues.
So anyway, we are very seriously discussing prioritizing a real estate purchase in another country within the next few years. Have a short list of places that meet a certain criteria.
Im ready to turn my back on this country in favor of raising my child somewhere I believe will be more conducive to a happy and healthy upbringing. It’s a weird feeling.
Joined: Tue September 24, 2013 5:56 pm Posts: 47141 Location: In the oatmeal aisle wearing a Shellac shirt
What you call neurotic, I call responsibility.
This place we live isn’t growing right. Like many places, the pandemic-driven economic changes have created A) a sense of transience and B) a sense that committed residents are increasingly isolated from one another.
I see things shaking out the ways many others have identified: short-term trend of lefties moving to the coasts, but then being driven back to rural areas as climate change has greater impacts on the coastal hubs.
Both ideologies are going to continue to dig in. If there’s no middle ground to be found after Uvalde, it likely won’t be found for a long time.
I’m thinking roughly 30 years before there’s something approaching a political consensus in the US arojnd the very issues that are driving its current decay. I don’t have the stomach for it: not just the shootings, but the income disparity and poverty, the supply chain challenges and formula shortages, the cancellations and book bannings, the virtue signaling and tribalism.
Mostly I want to be the most positive influence I can be for my kid, and that’s becoming more daunting each day as the news cycle just sucks the life out of me.
So yeah, I want to have a tiny farm, a couple goats, some chickens, off-grid energy and well water. I want my kid to have the option to sustain herself when the world eventually looks like Children of Men.
Joined: Wed January 02, 2013 6:02 am Posts: 9712 Location: Tristes Tropiques
I still hate Trag but I don't think Trag is being unreasonable.
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VinylGuy wrote:
its really tiresome to see these ¨good guys¨ talking about any political stuff in tv while also being kinda funny and hip and cool....its just...please enough of this shit.
Joined: Wed January 02, 2013 6:02 am Posts: 9712 Location: Tristes Tropiques
Kids actually love child labor
_________________
VinylGuy wrote:
its really tiresome to see these ¨good guys¨ talking about any political stuff in tv while also being kinda funny and hip and cool....its just...please enough of this shit.
Joined: Wed January 02, 2013 6:02 am Posts: 9712 Location: Tristes Tropiques
I almost posted this earlier, but being a (fingers crossed) expecting parent has certainly changed the intensity at which things like school shootings register for me. Uvalde felt a lot more immediate than Parkland did, and though school shootings specifically are rare, the general levels of gun violence in America are significantly higher than in many other parts of the world. So I don't think it's crazy for Trag to think--and I'm thinking this too--that the US is maybe not the best or most responsible place to raise a child, if you have other options.
In our case, I have Canadian citizenship. Given their university hiring practices (where an equally qualified Canadian citizen gets preference over any international applicants) plus the current state of the academic job market, I was always planning to take a shot at Canadian jobs. But my wife and I are increasingly feeling that a Canadian university gig would be at the top of our list. More reasonable gun legislation and decreased threats of both mass shootings and urban gun violence play a role in that. So do the stronger protections for abortion and the broader social welfare nets (like universal healthcare). And more broadly, I kind of think that the US is like...quite literally in terminal decline (in ways that I think are unlikely to be reversed, since they're intrinsic to its central position in this cycle of capital accumulation) and I think there's a 50/50 shot we're headed for a prolonged Years of Lead period. Canada is not exempt from the effects of this, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that Canada will most likely not enter the death spiral with quite as much speed. Quality of life would be, in a lot of ways, objectively higher. And then you factor in the effects of climate change, the way CRT panic and the new red scare affects our careers as educators--there's a lot of reasons.
We'd take a hit long-term in terms of purchasing power of the Canadian dollar for things like traveling abroad, but that's the only downside I can see--I have family up there, my immediate family all have citizenship as well, and the fact that her parents could NOT move down the street is just another win for me.
_________________
VinylGuy wrote:
its really tiresome to see these ¨good guys¨ talking about any political stuff in tv while also being kinda funny and hip and cool....its just...please enough of this shit.
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