Welcome to my Petri dish

[the_steelmare]

Y'know, I wish I could harness all the fear I and my kind seem to generate and do something constructive with it.

A 71 year-old transwoman substitute teacher got a little support from some administrators and, predictably, some parents went nuts. ""I will not allow you to put my kids in a petri dish and hope it all comes out fine," said parent Mark

Comments

[hhbarmaid]

This is so sad and silly.

Can't we just get past this crap?

I guess not.

I heard someone on television (news I think) describe Capote as a "gay themed" film. Huh? It was the story of how one of the most influential books of the 20th century was written. The themes as I saw them were about how the artist can easily objectify his or her subject -- and the divide between the elite and the people -- and about 25 other things... none of which, including the questions around if Capote fell in love with his subject, are what I would see as gay themes.

How does that connect to this. Just that people seem so in love with labels and attaching them and using them as weapons or to create fear...

:-(

[the_steelmare]

It's all about projection and profiling. We all need to generalize as we can't make a thousand decisions about each person we meet. We fall back on stereotypes - some with truthiness, most not - so our little minds don't get overwhelmed. The trouble comes when we aren't aware of what we are doing and don't examine our ideas and motivations.

Poor Mr Schneep is right in some ways but he just doesn't see that his overreactions make the classroom a Petri dish. All the fears and hatreds get focussed on and worked out on the body of a substitute teacher. It's one little arena where people who feel they can't control anything else in their life take it out on somebody who they can gang up on.