Dahlia --
Need to talk before next class. There’s a class audit coming up.
-- Anton
Oh, dear! This sounds too much like an IRS audit. I’m getting nervous already. I call Anton.
“No need to get nervous,” he assures me, sounding like a nurse at a dentist’s office. “We can talk now, or you can come in ten minutes early for your next class.”
“We should talk now,” I say decisively.
“OK,” he grins, “the borough licenses our school, and they want to be sure all our ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s crossed. Specifically, they want to be sure certain topics are covered in certain ways. I cover 99% of what they ask for with routine paper work, but once in a while ...”
“Didn’t we just have a school board election? A controversial one?”
Anton winces, “That we did, and it is ‘Judge Dredd’ ... sorry, Ms. Antonelli, who will be attending. But don’t worry, all our ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s crossed.”
The audit is routine ... like a root canal is routine. Sigh!
Ms. Antonelli comes into class announcing, “Please don’t change a thing for me,” and plops her personal recorder down on the table. The recorder announces, “This class will be monitored for quality control and training purposes. The personal information will be anonymized,” and it repeats that message every fifteen minutes. With that kind of entrance, I have to introduce her immediately, and everyone gives her a curt and annoyed welcome.
I try to take her advice and conduct the class as I normally do. I begin with, “For this lesson, we will talk about how much creations should be involved in early child raising. Mankind was using tools to help raise children even in Stone Age times -- toys have been found in prehistoric sites. As we have gotten more civilized, the variety of tools used in child raising has grown more elaborate just as all other tool use has.
“And discussions among women about which tools to use have probably dated back to the beginning of language use. So, having discussions about how to use creations is part of a long, long tradition.”
“I should say so. I remember my mother and aunt having discussions about how often to give a pacifier,” says Janet.
“They date back to at least medieval times,” Jaden announces as Mr. Trivia, then backs off a bit by adding, “... so I would guess that conversation dates back a bit, too.”
Ms. Antonelli chirps in, “Technology is nice, but the human touch is necessary for wholesome child development. So once an hour, a baby should be picked up and carried around by a human for ten minutes.”
I continue, “The arsenal of baby products has been growing exponentially for decades. And, not surprisingly, there are now products to help pick products. This is where creations first began to fit in -- they acted as assistant product pickers.
“Few people complained about that use of creations. But when the intelligent rockers started showing up, the murmurs about appropriateness got a lot louder.”
Antonelli again, “Babies can pick up vibes from a mother’s activities, so if you want your baby to be literary, you should read good literature while he or she is in your womb.”
I continue, “There have been some recent high-profile, if marginal, adaptations of creations to child care. You may recall the case of Annie Z, the anencephaly case -- a baby born without the top of her brain -- who had a cyber installed. Her parents were rich, kind of nerdy, and hyper-pro-life. She is two years old now, alive, and can walk and talk.”
“And there’s still a lot of question about how human she is,” says Jaden.
“And I’ve seen the latest video. She is really strange, especially how she talks,” adds Jaina.
Antonelli, “Too much sex during pregnancy will make the child promiscuous as a teenager.”
Adrian gets back on topic, “She talks like a cyber because she is one ... except for her body.” He adds matter-of-factly, “I’m not sure why people would expect anything else.”
“Because she has a soul,” Miranda jumps in.
Adrian has a gleam in his eye like he is ready to jump on that with both feet, but instead thinks better of it and says nothing.
I continue, “As we can see, we may be light years from the Stone Age, but there’s still a lot to talk about on what kinds of tools we should use in baby raising.”
The first part of the class feels like someone’s in-bred Arkansas aunt has crashed a bridge party. Whenever Ms. Antonelli opens her mouth, something completely irrelevant comes out, and when it is advice she justifies it with urban legend. Her recipes for solving the world’s problems sound like a delightful pastiche of California Fruitcake garnished with East Coast Flakery.
Well ... it would have been delightful if it had been a comedy routine on some vid channel. But she is here in person and as a person of authority -- I think she stepped on more toes than we have in the class room. In our work Ben, Janet, Adrian, Ruby, and I have encountered this kind of thing before. We hold our tongues. It is Jaina who breaks.
She raises her hand and asks, “You’re an elected official, right?”
“Yes,” she responds.
“Just who elected you?”
Ms. Antonelli is just a bit taken aback, “The people of the 12th Brooklyn precinct.”
“The nomads? You are in here on the nomad vote?” Jaina snorts.
Antonelli darkens at that, “The ‘nomads’ as you call them are just as much citizens as everyone else. I appeal to them as much as I did all the other fine citizens of the 12th precinct. Now that I have the mandate, there are going to be some changes.”
“Oh my,” I think, “This doesn’t sound like the ‘i’s and ‘t’s are going to stay dotted and crossed much longer.”
Ms. Antonelli turns off the recorder, packs her stuff, and gets ready to leave. Before she does she announces, “Since you all seem so interested, I’ll give you my preliminary assessment of this class: While the class seems to have met the previous standards, it will not pass the upcoming standards. The Board of Education is drafting new standards built around the theme of ‘A human education for human babies’. This class is not spending enough time on human bonding and building human karma into our children. This faddish concept that a human child can become a better human if much of its development is handled by cybers is nonsense. If a child is going to grow up human, it must be raised by humans.
“I will see to it that this is emphasized in future curricula.”
She looks around ... daring ...
“Luddite!” shouts Jaina.
There is triumph in Ms. Antonelli’s eyes, “That attitude, my dear, will cost you. There’s a new wave coming to Brooklyn, and if you keep that attitude it will wash you away!”
Finally it’s over. The rest of the class feels like attending a wake for a teetotaling preacher. It’s been a rough day. I’m glad it’s done. I hope next week we can get back to class business without interruptions.
First
Dahlia --
I won’t be making class
-- Annette
then
Dahlia --
I will be making class after all
-- Annette
The “why” for this flip-flop is all over the news: Annette’s colony has been raided by the state authorities and they are taking away all the children! There are pictures of dozens of police cars with flashing lights, commandeered school buses being filled with kids, and helicopters flying overhead. What tears your heart out is watching dozens of school age children being lead like the innocents they are into the school buses to be taken who knows where! They are mostly behind blankets to protect their identities, but the blankets are widely enough spaced that the parade of kids is quite visible.
There are distraught women in anachronistic dresses standing outside homes and a school, and grim-faced colony men in jeans and reed hats forming a linked-arm circle around the entrance to the incongruously large and elaborate temple building -- I saw it in person when I visited, but in this view it looks like part of a movie set. Facing them are equally grim-faced state troopers with uniforms, dark glasses, and Smokey the Bear hats. There is an occasional, furtive long-shot of snipers backing up the troopers. The troopers and the colony men are negotiating over something. And of course, dozens of media people swirling are around collecting sound bites of people saying the obvious.
It is a stranger than fiction sight, and Annette is here watching it with the rest of us! She is holding back tears. I can’t tell if they are of fear, concern, rage, or all of the above.
When the pictures start to repeat what we’ve already seen, she starts explaining, “We’ve had our differences with the state Child Protective Services people for a long time. We view them as Nanny Statists, and they feel we recklessly endanger our children. There have been other issues as well.”
“I’m betting there’s money involved in those other issues,” snorts Jaina.
She looks sharply at her; we all do. She retreats a bit and Annette answers, “Yes. We have a lot of plural marriages, and the CPS has never figured out how to deal with that. Neither has the state welfare system. We apply for things, and some of our detractors say we are exploiting loopholes ... or outright lying. We say they are lying back to keep us from what’s rightfully ours.”
“Ouch,” I say.
“The townies nearby are the worst. We work hard on our self-sufficiency, and they say we cost them jobs because we won’t buy stuff from them. They also say we are hypocrites, and we aren’t as self-sufficient as we say we are because we steal stuff.
“It’s not true! ... Well, not very true. We have a lot of teenagers, and we do train them to solve their own problems. But we also teach them to respect the law!” But her face says Annette is recalling some times when the kids had stepped over the line, even in the colony’s eyes.
“What’s going on now?” asks Ben.
“Someone phoned in to a child abuse hotline that she was forced to marry when she was thirteen and now her two year old child is being abused. CPS says that all the children in the colony are at risk, so they all have to be moved out.”
“What! All this based on one phone call?” I say.
Annette nods. “And they haven’t found the caller. They are keeping the name anonymous, but the word is out that they are still looking, and they haven’t found her.
“They won’t find her, either! We don’t marry thirteen-year-olds! We marry fifteen-year-olds with judicial consent.” She looks around sharply.
“... Different strokes,” says Ruby. Annette looks relieved at that.
“What happens now?” I ask.
“I ... I ... I don’t know. That’s why I came to class. I talked with the people there, and we agreed that my being there wasn’t going to make any difference. It would just add to confusion and congestion. And ... it might help to have someone meet people in New York, so I should stay. For me, for now, it’s business as usual.”
She looks grim, and we all share her deep, deep worry. What can she do? What can we do?
“You have our full support in this, Annette. I’m saying that for all of us,” I say. I don’t have to look around for approval.
By the next week, this had turned from SNAFU to FUBAR for the CPS, as some of my military friends would put it. The tipster turned out to be a fraudster, and while the moral grounds for the raid remained strong in some eyes, the legal grounds turned to quicksand.
We in New York were all busy contacting people. Back at the colony, the state was discovering that the logistics of finding new foster homes for four hundred children at the same time was proving daunting. The colony lawyers were gathering evidence for a counter-suit of child abuse being conducted by the CPS for their negligent handling of the children.
And there was precedent -- this was not the first time a state’s protective services had raided a polygamist colony, and in the more recent cases -- which were over fifty years ago -- the state had had to turn tail and run from what turned into a big blunder. Things were looking up.
Annette was looking more comfortable when she came to the next class, but she was still looking grim, “No matter how this turns out, we will remember.”
She then got very gracious and thanked everyone sincerely for their help. Things were certainly looking a lot less scary than they were last week.
For the next few weeks, it does seem as if Ms. Antonelli is on the leading edge of some wave. There are announcements of shakeups at the board of education, and those are followed by announcements of changes in our curriculum guidelines. Anton is not pleased, and neither am I, but what can we do?
And there are teeth in those pronouncements: We are hearing about classes at other schools getting decertified. Anton, God bless him, seems to be keeping Child Champs ahead of the storm, but that means lots of inconvenience for us teachers. The guidelines of what we have to cover are getting a whole lot more picayunish.
And it is not just Brooklyn. Last year, there had been a scandal when the town manager of a new resort town in North Dakota had tried to improve his town’s image by booting out nomads. The project was insane from day one: How in the world could anyone develop an upscale resort in North Dakota? What were nomads doing in North Dakota? The situation got real ugly and high-profile when the Nomad supporters dug up that the mayor was both a convicted sociopath and had been raised exclusively by cyber parents.
Of course, the background facts behind those lurid headlines were a lot more mundane -- the sociopath conviction was for a sexting incident when the mayor was in middle school, and the “nomads” were nomad wannabes, high schoolers from a nearby community that existed to maintain a national park. But that hadn’t stopped a wave of outrage from sweeping through nomad communities all over the US. The outrage had started as protesting and then turned political, and Ms. Antonelli was part of that wave.
In fact, the real tragedy of that incident wasn’t the nomads, but the fate of Charles McDougal, the town manager. Twenty years ago, McDougal had been a child prodigy. He had made headlines briefly as the first child raised by two cyber parents and for winning a science fair when he was eight years old. But fate had not been kind -- maybe there is karma. First the sexting business, then last year, he had taken the position of town manager of this resort that was just as ill-starred as his career was.
Legend has it that the Wounded Knee Resort was started on a bet made by Harold Koch, a Koch family heir. He boasted he could develop a first-tier resort community anywhere in the US. His drinking buddy of the time put up a US map and handed him a dart. Koch was aiming for Mount Rushmore, and he was a decent dartsman, but his buddy jerked the map after he let fly. They both had a good laugh at that, and that should have been the end of it, but that buddy held him to his bet.
Until last year, Wounded Knee had been called Fort Beaufort, and it had been an obscure money hole. But Koch was determined, and McDougal was brought in to shake things up. He started with some profile-raising. He changed the name to Wounded Knee, even though that historic site is across the state line in South Dakota and close to Nebraska not North Dakota. He stepped on other toes in his profile-raising and finally tromped on a big one with this bums rushing nomads incident. He resigned, with criminal charges threatened, but by then the protest wave had developed a life of its own. The Nomad Spring had begun.
Jaina hadn’t been far off the mark in calling Antonelli a Luddite, but that didn’t help the situation any, and Child Champs suffered for it -- we were now on Ms. Antonelli’s radar, and she was a sign of the times.