[Header Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash]

Although hard to believe, it has been almost 20 years since I was sitting in a hotel with a friend after a bit too much day drinking in New Orleans during an education conference.

This was the spring before Katrina, and our conference was in the convention center that would become infamous during that disastrous hurricane.

We were watching Charlie Rose interview George Carlin from 1996. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Carlin explained why he was a non-voter.

While I have never been a partisan, and I have always felt a great deal of skepticism about politicians, I had dutifully voted since turning 18 in 1979.

Neither DuBois or Carlin, I must emphasize, were taking a “both sides” approach to politics in the US; however, they were confronting how in the context of their time that the policy implications of voting were not as clearly defined by who you voted for or what party came into power.

One of the first scholarly pieces I published, in fact, came out in the late 1990s; I made the case that for education policy, specifically in my home state of South Carolina, neither party offered any promise of the sort of education policy I supported.

So in the 2000s I became a non-voter also.

For me, the other aspect of this practice was (and remains) that in SC, we are an entrenched Red state; most elections have only a Republican on the ballot. Whether I vote or not in SC has no impact on the outcome.

This certainly made my stance a pale form of performance (or non-performance)—merely symbolic.

Just about a decade into that commitment, I did recognize that the era of Trump was different.

It was futile, but I voted for Hillary Clinton, and I begrudgingly voted for Joe Biden. Neither vote made any difference in SC, of course.

Yet, there simply is no way to justify voting for Trump or voting/not voting in ways that allow Trump to win.

By 2024, we can no longer claim that policy outcomes are essentially the same regardless of party in power.

Too many were naive, and we collectively allowed the US to render women not fully human with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The US has been awash in book bans, curriculum bans, assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, and a horrifying realization that Christian Nationalism is a possible future reality for a country founded on religious freedom as well as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In recent weeks, the nonsense arguments that people couldn’t vote for Biden has been unmasked as well.

With Biden out of the picture, the utter horror and emptiness of Trump/Vance have come more fully into focus (mostly for those who refused to see).

Trump hasn’t changed.

Only the context has.

Yet some continue to refuse to support Harris/Walz for so-called ethical positions about Palestine or some other essentially leftist or progressive ideal.

Before Harris chose Walz, I too championed a key policy concern of mine; I publicly rejected Shapiro for his horrible education policy (reminding me of the Obama/Duncan era of education reform disasters).

However, I was certain Shapiro would be chosen, and, yes, I would have still voted Harris.

How on earth could not voting Harris in any way help the issue I was committed to?

There is no universe in which Trump being elected benefits any position you believe is leftist or progressive.

The people in Palestine and Ukraine, women in the US, LGBTQ+ people in the US, Black Americans—none of these groups with whom many of us stand as allies will be helped if Trump is not elected.

The only option is Harris/Walz—regardless of the many credible criticisms we may have of their policies and even them as people.

Yet, as people, they seem at least worthy of my support in the context of mainstream politicians.

You must be incredibly naive to think there are politicians who are not at least ethically compromised. Those politicians who are wealthy are almost certainly doubly ethically compromised.

With Trump/Vance, we have candidates who without question cannot be supported because of deep personally failures and anti-democratic policy commitments.

Ultimately, however, we cannot allow this presidential election (or our democracy) to remain mired in the cult of personality.

Frankly it doesn’t matter if a candidate is likable; we should be voting for what policy insures the most human rights and human dignity to the most people.

In 2024, this isn’t even a close question.

Republicans are the party of bans, denying rights, and seeking ways to impose a singular way of living onto everyone, Christian nationalism.

Democrats have been an impotent party, a spineless party.

But Democrats are our only option if we have any hope for not only full humanity and rights throughout the US, but also imploring the US to extend its power to protect all people throughout the world as well.

It seemed a principled option just a couple decades ago to be a non-voter. Or even a protest voter.

It seems capricious, self-defeating, and frankly calloused to take that stance today.

I love George Carlin who profoundly shaped my life, but I must say today, there is nothing funny about politics and elections in the US.

Voting in 2024 is life-or-death for the most vulnerable among us, which now include more than half the US—the girls and women who call the US their home.

What am I voting for? Harris/Walz.

Because that is a vote not for those two people, but for all of us, all of humankind, all of human decency.

Note

For the grammar Nazis, let me clarify I recognize that “whom” is, at best, in Hospice and I have never trafficked in the “don’t end a sentence or question with a preposition” camp. I know, I know, many think the headline should be “For What (Not Whom) Are We Voting?” I humbly disagree.

[Header Photo by Glenov Brankovic on Unsplash]

brown men and women
in hard hats
neon yellow and orange shirts
and mud-caked work boots
build apartments
along the rail trail
where i ride my bicycle
for recreation and exercise

i know they are brown
and i have heard them
speaking spanish
but i cannot say they are mexican
or south american
i have seen them smile
and heard them laughing
i don’t know if they are citizens
i don’t know their politics
but i know they are brown

one day i pass them
during lunch
playing soccer
in those mud-caked work boots
on the new asphalt parking lot
as if playing soccer
is the most normal thing to do
in south carolina
in late july 2024
when the whole world
is going to hell
around us

—P.L. Thomas

I just finished my fortieth year as a teacher, spending the first 18 years as a high school English teacher in my hometown. As an English teacher, my favorite unit was teaching poetry grounded in the music catalogue of alternative rock group REM, based in Athens, GA, only a few hours from that high school.

Partly as a reference to REM’s song and partly as a bit of a play on words, “Welcome to the Occupation” was posted on my door—both as a reference to occupied territory and to “occupation” also meaning “job.”

And as you enter my class in this course, I think you may be initially disoriented because I practice my job of “teacher” and have expectations for your job as “student” in ways that you likely have not experienced before.

Your job as a student, I believe, is to learn, and my job as a teacher is to create the best opportunities for you to learn.

What that means is that you must do the work—not me—in order to learn at the highest level possible.

I have a doctorate, called a “terminal” degree; in other words, I am finished being a students. Thus, I do not want or need to do your assignments for you.

While I will provide a great deal of guidance, feedback, and opportunities to revise and resubmit your major assignments (often essays), I will be adamant that you do the work. I resist hand-holding and making your assignment decisions for you.

That environment, I understand, can be stressful; therefore, I do not grade your work, and you are not at risk of losing points or receiving a low grade simply for making your best effort and occasionally falling short of expectations.

If your work isn’t what is expected or required, you simply must try again—nothing lost except a bit of time.

In fact, since you are learning, I expect you to not quite yet know what to do or how.

If you could do all the work of the course perfectly on the first try, there would be no point for you being in the course, right?

I must also stress that my feedback is never in anger, with disappointment, or offered in any context except hoping I can help you be successful.

That I am demanding or have a high bar for submitting work that I will accept and respond to is a compliment, not a criticism. I truly trust you will succeed and often excel giving the support and expectations I provide.

You may or will struggle mostly not because of something lacking or “wrong” with you, but because this is a new kind of expectations, a new kind of occupation for you as students.

That different expectation is that you are doing the work and learning for you, and not me.

One thing we will work to avoid is you behaving like a student. In other words, when you have an essay to work on, I want you to think and act like a writer, not a student turning in a paper to the teacher for a grade.

I try, then, to make sure the writing assignments are the sort of writing real writers write (not research papers, for example, because that isn’t something writers do).

So what are the habits you have developed, actually learned, over years of formally schooling that I want you to resist and change?

First, I want you to set aside the deficit ideology you have been taught. Making mistakes, or errors, and the need to correct your work—these are deficit views of your job as a learner.

In other words, you will not be correcting your writing. I want you to do what writers do—revise and edit. And those revisions and edits are your decisions in the context of the assignment and the expectations of the type of writing you are drafting.

Next, I want you to take ownership of your learning and work. I often have students ask me what to do or how to do something that they can, and should, simply explore on their own.

For example, when students are working on a cited essay, they often ask how to cite a specific type of source (for example, a YouTube video or a Kindle book). Instead of asking me to do that work, a student can, and should, simply do an internet search for how to cite that source in the format required.

These shifts are broadly about shifting the center of power from the teacher/professor to the learner.

This is your learning, and your work. You will gain more and value the work more as you begin to have accountability for that work instead of shifting the responsibility to your teacher or professor.

I don’t see the occupations of teacher and student as games, or some sort of tug-of-war between competing forces.

Teaching and learning are collaborations that should be grounded in the experiences that create learning.

Doing work for a grade under the authority of a teacher is the experience most of you have had, but I think that is asking way too little of either the teacher or the students.

What we will do in here is messy, unpredictable, frustrating at times, but highly rewarding when we simply run out of time for this experience and must move on.

It is best not to fret, trust yourself and me, and then also trust that you will learn even though you have much more to learn.

And that is fine.

The day we stop learning is a kind of end to be fully human.

Humans fall a bit short, learn, and continue toward the next things that make us the new person we continue to become to be.

Welcome to the occupation.