I’m watching the teachers story with interest and concern.

My concern is threefold: First, and foremost, for any children who may be involved; second for my liberal peers who – if this story proves out – have shot themselves in the foot again; and finally for my peers on this blog – Joe and Trent.

The first two are self-explanatory.

The last requires some explanation. And it will provide a nice springboard to my next blog post on risk as well.

I’ve got to walk a somewhat fine line here. I’ve followed this with some interest, and some concern. As I’ve said a bunch, my belief is that the left in this society needs to rediscover its relationship with patriotism.

And as a parent, the idea of my sons being singled out and abused because of a teacher’s political discomfort with me sends my temper soaring.

So, to the extent that teachers are harassing military children because their parents are following their legally constituted orders, I think they’re abusing the children.

But…

…is this a problem?

Asking whether it’s a problem isn’t the same as suggesting that it’s OK. It is not even denying the reality of several instances. But when something gets elevated to the status of a ‘problem’, it implies that it is systemic and pervasive as opposed to infrequent. Lots of bad things happen to people which may or may not be problems.

I’m working on the next post in ‘Risk’ in which I talk about risks to children. We tend to misperceive risks, which itself causes all kinds of problems.

In this case, there are a few possibilities:

It never happened.
It happened a few times.
It’s widespread.

In order to figure out our response, it helps to have some base of fact that we can use to figure out what we’re dealing with.

We don’t yet have them.

First, the better, which has me laying some “fact checking” on myself. It looks like my earlier report of problems in Texas was a emotion driven misinterpretation on my part of an e-mail sent to me. The gentleman involved said he would not be surprised that there were several incidences in Texas, not that he knew of several incidences in Texas. I apologize for that. Growing up as a military dependent, I let my anger over this color my objectivity.

OK, so it’s not happening in Texas.

Now for the “worse” part: further checking of the report from Kansas revealed that the Gulf War in question was 1991, not 2003. I thought this was an improvement, at first. Then I went to our track back “linkie love” and found this from Emily’s blog:

“…Teachers are entitled to their opinions the same as everybody else, but they should be expressly forbidden for making their students suffer by them, especially when those students happen to be between the ages of 7 and 9 years old.

My fourth grade teacher, a judgmental sixties throwback, was very cruel to me once he found out that my father was an officer in the Air Force and had served in Cambodia. He taunted and picked on me, even humiliated me on more than one occasion in the front of the entire class. I feel for these children so badly, almost to tears. Here their parents have made a tremendous sacrifice for their country, followed their orders as they promised, and are putting their very lives on the line and these… people make their kids feel like worm-rot? I’m with Joe: MAKE THEM PAY.”

So this sort of thing hasn’t just happened before, it has happened repeatedly over the decades, and it was done by individuals associating themselves with the anti-war movement. It just hasn’t had the Web to advertise these abuses (and >AMEN< to Emily's last line above).

OK, so it’s not happening in Kansas, either.

Unfortunately for these child abusing low lives nationwide, I was not the only one fact checking for this abusive behavior. For one, I now have an e-mail reply from a really pissed off mother from New York about a teacher cursing her son in class for enlisting. The wider media has started to run with the Maine story as well. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh have all picked up this story as has Fox News, CNN, ABC News, World Net Daily, and the Washington Times.

There are two things I have not seen in this story yet from the mainstream media, and they very much worse, as far as the abuse of military dependents is concerned. The first is from of all places a BBS for the science fiction publisher Baen (registration is required for posting there):

“The bad news is that it is a dozen confirmed cases, more cases are being checked, and it is widespread with complaints being documented in Portland, Bangor, and Augusta. Also, kids being kids, it has been confirmed as well that this has now gone to the playground and such, with the other kids taking the cue from the teachers and taunting the kids of the troops.”

The fact that we have three separate places where teachers did the same thing at the same time suggests a coordinated campaign. Whether this was simply a group of people sharing the same feelings spinning each other up to vent on kids at the same time, or active and coordinated malice, is something that needs to be investigated and not swept under the rug.

No political movement is so noble and just that it doesn’t attract its share of nuts. On that basis, an acquaintance from my “list of usual suspects” mailing list suggested looking at the Maine Chapter of “Educators for Social Responsibility.” The “ESR” is a spin-off from the 1980’s anti-nuclear group “Physicists for Social Responsibility.” The largest and most active chapter of the ESR was in Maine. My acquaintance, who is a very leftist college professor, viewed the support of the Maine chapter of the ESR for the anti-nuclear movement, and other leftist causes, “in the same way Republicans would view the support of a chapter of the KKK.”

I don’t know for a fact if this organization is involved or if it is just a “cultural marker” for the politics of Maine academia. I do think it is a good starting point for people investigating these incidences in Maine to run down.

Uh, a good place for people investigating this to start would be to try and identify and call out the specific cases. Second-hand tales are enough to raise concern, but like the Internet tales about JATO-powered Chevys, more scrutiny is required. Or not. We don’t know. We need to.

When you Google search “Maine Teachers” most of the first 20 stories are about Maine teachers abusing military children.

Trent…because we have been running the story and other blogs have followed our lead.

The primary world image of Maine teachers is that they are child abusers. This is something Maine residents know and have been debating over on places like the “As Maine Goes” BBS (registration required). Maine State Rep. Michael Vaughan, R-Durham, has set up his own clearing house e-mail address at repmavaughan@hotmail.com for parents of children victimized by this or others knowledgeable of this matter to contact. He has also called for the dismissal of the teachers involved.

Trent, can we have a trial before we have the hanging? Can we calmly gather some facts and make considered decisions?

The problem here is that neither the Maine education establishment, nor their supporters in the Maine Democratic Party, have realized the potential for violence and negative stereotyping here. They are too busy covering up, papering over, and spinning. If they do not see to it that the teachers involved are suspended at the very least for these actions, they are ratifying, condoning and endorsing them.

How about proving that these things really happened? How about citing facts? Trent, you make a series of unsubstantiated accusations and then call for action based on the hysteria these accusations create. You can do better. You need to, because you’re not just talking to five friends in a bar here. The Wall Street Journal is amplifying your accusations, and what’s not happening yet is a simple recitation of facts and numbers that would tells us that one Maine teacher has been abusive to five students because their parents are in the military, five Maine teachers have been abusive to ten soldier’s children, or a thousand Maine teachers have been abusive to ten thousand military children. We don’t know, and we can’t know because you make accusations based on facts you won’t publicly support. And then you – as we say in Los Angeles – jump the shark.

The most important point of public justice is to preempt people taking private justice. This was the real and ignored lesson of Waco and the run up to the Murrah building bombing.

In this context, Trent, that’s a damn dangerous thing to say. I’m reminded of the staunch Chamber of Commerce types in the South in the 50’s who explained that none of those regrettable church bombings would have happened if it wasn’t for those pesky Northern agitators.

The BATF’s screw ups and abuse of power that caused the Branch Davidian stand off were ignored by the Clinton Administration, the mainstream media, and the then Democratically controlled Congress. Newt Gingrich and the NRA used the public discontent with that outcome in mailings and talk radio to build a really poisonous public climate that resulted in the 1994 Republican take over of the Congress.

This is a brilliant and honest analysis – but do you really want to acknowledge this? That the root of the modern Republican electoral majority is “a really poisonous public climate“? Atrios will be thrilled.

Gingrich and his crowd ran like scalded dogs from that hate talk when the Murrah building bombing happened. They did this in large part because of the picture of the fireman carrying a dead child from the wreckage of the Murrah Building’s day care center. That image overpowered anything the Republicans and the NRA could say. This turn of events let Clinton stereotype Republicans as “mean and evil haters of women and children” for the 1996 election.

Perhaps the problem wasn’t the photographic image, but the hate talk itself? Perhaps it was the toxic, partisan atmosphere itself?

What is different this time around is that the Maine establish cannot spin this for public sympathy like the Clinton Administration did. They are not protecting children from David Koresh’s child abuse. They are protecting child abusing teachers from the public. That makes all the difference in the world.

The Maine education establishment is ignoring this at its peril. The names of the teachers who did this *will* become public domain. If they are not punished by the school system, and the school system actively frustrates attempts by the public’s political representatives to do so, they may be punished by vigilantes via physical violence.

Please note carefully that I am not advocating or condoning violence. It’s just that I’ve seen this before.

Before we accuse the Maine administrators of ‘protecting child abusing teachers’, let’s prove that the abuse is happening, that it isn’t an aberration, but a pattern. If it is, let’s root it out.

But until we provide some hard evidence, we’re the ones out on a limb here.