Day: March 18, 2018

Corporal Punishment

A Sunday of lots of rain so the garden is out of the question without a slicker…..but what crops I have planted can use the water….

I’m gonna step back in time……

When I was in high school I was a bit of a trouble maker….I was a member of a group called the Red Tidal Discussion Group…..we protested that our history book was printed in 1942 and not updated….we lead a sit-in in protest of no black history classes and I lived in Mississippi in the 1960’s….enough about my earlier years…needless to say that punishment in those days was a good paddling…or what they call ‘corporal punishment’ these days….I visited “coach” several times for he was our disciplinarian……5 whacks per offense we had to remove our wallets and anything else we had in our pockets so the full impact could be appreciated (sarcasm)…..by my junior year I had lost count of the trips to “Coach”……

I bring this up because of something I read about the students that recently walked out of class to protest the deaths of 17 students in the most recent school shooting…..

I seems that some things die hard in the South….Arkansas will deal out corporal punishment to those students that walked out of class….

Three students were punished for walking out of their Arkansas school Wednesday during the national protest against gun violence, and their punishment is now in the spotlight. Per ArkansasMatters.com, the Greenbrier Public Schools superintendent says the students never gave a heads-up so their school could prep for their demonstration, adding they were disciplined not for exercising their First Amendment rights, but for leaving class. Their choice of punishment, per the super: suspension or getting a parent-OK’d paddling. He wouldn’t say which punishment was selected, but the mom of one student did. On Wednesday, Jerusalem Greer tweeted that the kids “chose corporal punishment,” adding: “This generation is not playing around.” Her revelation soon went viral, with reactions ranging from calls to contact the ACLU to a horrified “Holy hell. Corporal punishment is still a thing in schools?!”

And that’s proven surprising to many, as, yes, many states do still allow it, though the exact number differs (it’s usually said to be 19). The Daily Beast reviewed Greenbrier’s school policy and found it stated physical punishment couldn’t be “excessive, or administered with malice”; an attempt to talk to the school’s assistant principal about the policy was met with a hang-up. Greer’s son, Wylie, told the Daily Beast his two “swats” didn’t hurt or cause any injury. He says he has “the utmost respect for all the adults involved,” as they were “merely doing their job,” though “the idea that violence should be used against someone who was protesting violence as a means to discipline them is appalling,” he noted. (Alabama paddled 19,000 kids in one school year.)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/teens-face-corporal-punishment-in-rural-arkansas-for-participating-in-student-walkout

Too bad we cannot use corporal punishment on politicians…kinda like a public flogging….I know where I would bring…..you?

The South hangs on to their institutions from the past…statues and corporal punishment and a simmering racism…..

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Bury Me Not

I begin my Sunday watching it rain like cats and dogs….(yeah I know I just stepped in a poodle)……makes for a lazy day…….my granddaughter may stop by and give me the ‘skinny’ on what’s what….

Garden update….my radishes, mixed lettuces and grapes are doing great…..lots of rain and sunshine…..citrus trees in full bloom…..peach and plum trees in bloom also…..has the makings of a good year…..

Bury me not on the lone prairie…..as the song goes……

It appears that Americans are taking the song to heart…..

Visit someone’s home nowadays and you may notice their dead loved one—on a shelf, on the floor, or wherever. “They are in my house,” says Ellen Herman, an LA ad saleswoman, of her deceased parents. “Actually, in my bedroom! In boxes, under a bunch of other shit.” That’s because more Americans are being cremated, a shift that reflects changes in our economic and emotional lives and possibly the environment, Popular Mechanics reports. Back in 1980 only 5% of Americans were cremated; now it’s 50%, partly because the Great Recession drove people away from expensive burials. The crematorium at Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, NJ, for example, is burning 25 bodies daily to keep up with demand and pauses only on Sunday. “We just need a day off,” says the cemetery’s president.

In Rosehill’s crematorium, each body is burned in a brick-lined chamber that’s heated to 1,200 degrees; a second chamber then burns off the gas and particulates before it all goes into the atmosphere. Problems do arise in the cremation business, like loved ones slipping in personal items that explode, such as cell phones or even a coconut, the Bolton News reports. Cremation’s popularity has also aroused concerns about emissions and sparked interest in a water-based post-mortem process. Mourners are encountering new emotions, from relief at avoiding a funeral to pain or comfort in taking the ashes home. Many leave the urns on cemetery grounds, but others love having them. “There is no pressure or guilt of having to visit them in a cemetery,” says a woman who took her parents’ remains home. “And they will stay with me until the end of my time.”

I will be cremated…..no need for family members feeling obligated to visit a grave site and then eventually stop altogether and you become a memory only to the grounds keepers that have to mow around your head stone….not for me.

The family can get together and have a send-off for me……a wake if you like….memories presented and a good time for all and I ask no more after that….I already have my obit written on IST held in drafts…all someone has to do is hit “post” and it is over…painless and quick…..