Like headhunters about to cook a captured enemy supporters of longtime Lakota West High School Band Director Greg Snyder showed up at a school board meeting demanding an explanation for his suspension. Their effort was tribal at best and displayed an uneasy byproduct of the ultra levy supporters of Lakota—creations of that same school board designed to pass higher taxes so to increase a revenue stream directly into the mouths of their teacher’s union. The natives turned against the school board when disciplinary necessity was demanded upon one of their own. Greg Snyder was suspended on April 16 and agreed to resign following an investigation that revealed he received unethical compensation for personal gain, and the band fans at Lakota wanted the issue ignored with the same kind of activism that is common among pro public education radicals—a collective display as though their unified input could change the reality of deceit for which Snyder was in trouble to begin with.
http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/lakota-community-reacts-to-band-directors-suspensi/nfkhN/
Those same tribal malcontents even took a page out of my book and started their own blog—announcing their actions ahead of time. Again, their belief indicates that they wish to alter reality with mass protest and activist support of their beloved teacher. Parents of this kind represent everything that is wrong with the public education system and in their own way government in general. In the Snyder case they are behaving like Washington lobbyists working K-Street for their small section of the political pie. At Lakota there are radicals for the band program, radicals for the art programs, radicals for the football program, radicals for virtually every extracurricular program the tax funded school offers—and they all expect special treatment—especially when impropriety is discovered. Have a look at their site for yourself—it is quite revealing.
http://supportlakotabands.com/
What these radicals of public education never indicate is what is really behind their motive. In the case of these band supporters—as it is with most government school radicalism, they are driven by guilt and the peril to them is very real. Since they have squandered themselves in most cases and surrendered their children’s future to people like Greg Snyder hoping that musical futures are on the horizon for their offspring—the threat of that investment losing value for them becomes all too real when trouble is discovered. Instead of doing the work of teaching their children themselves, they pawn that task off to a Lakota teacher then expect magical results. For them when their children are invited to the Macy’s Parade as a representative of Lakota’s famed band by the highly respected Greg Snyder—their dreams of being good parents are fulfilled and they gush with pride because of the experience. For them such experiences are the culmination of years of sacrifice—of social climbing so that they could earn enough money to buy a home in an area like the Lakota school district and send their children to teachers like Snyder.
The reality of impropriety within that system is simply too great for them to understand, so they ignore the evidence to preserve their illusion. What they perceive to be good parenting is literally all rolled up into building up this grand illusion against reality—and when it comes crashing down, they are dumbfounded like the aforementioned headhunters gazing up at an airplane flying overhead and thinking that it is some kind of god. Their mentality is that of a primitive. They are creations of that same school board encouraged to activism so long as it serves the collective institutional aim of revenue enhancement. When that activism turns on the headhunters of Lakota all the school board members can do is nod in appeasement and smile with sympathy. The levy passed, and the radicalism of those same supporters had already done its job for the good of Lakota.
Too late the band supporters learned that their activism was not wanted or appreciated unless it directly served the needs of the collective whole. The system of Lakota does not care about them, their children, or Greg Snyder. It only cares for Snyder so long as he can take Lakota to the Macy’s Parade and other high-profile venues. Once his usefulness is complete, the collective system of Lakota will discard him and his supporters the way a wonderful meal might be appreciated upon eating it, but once the digestion has taken place it leaves the body uneventfully, and unceremoniously to be flushed away from our eyes and noses.
What often is lost in these cases are the children. The kids usually join these band groups to make their parents happy, to see them proudly watching from the stands during a football game. Kids just want the love of their parents—but often the parents mistakenly believe that love comes from collective experience instead of their direct input. Such mistakes feed the false importance of people like Greg Snyder who are used by the Lakota school board to generate public relations support for their revenue streams of taxation. The children are used by the parents to make their lives seem meaningful—to make all their decisions as adults justified. The school uses the children for the same purpose—but from the other end to achieve community consensus. Once those school days are complete the children enter their post education years empty husks perpetually looking for a way to fill a void in their lives that they can never quite identify. Their lives away from their parents are never quite satisfactory, and without people like Greg Snyder, they are often lost—and depressed because they never learned self-reliance. They were used as teenagers, and as young adults are empty and often directionless.
Headhunters particularly in the South Pacific cultures believed that by consuming the body of an enemy, that the spirit of that enemy would become incorporated in the body of the cannibal. To a large extent, even Native American cultures believed such things—which is why they had elaborate dances to pay tribute to the spirit of the animals they consumed for their sustenance. Like those primitive cultures which progressives have so much reverence for, the band supporters of Lakota believe that the spiritual leaders of the band have power to enrich their children with magical prosperities if only they attend their class. The school board was happy to popularize that myth so that the public would support school levies and give them money to throw at the cannibals of their teacher’s union. But in the end, the lives of the children are simply consumed by all the headhunters involved in public education, especially the ones who protested with cult like reverence the Lakota school board over the Greg Snyder case. The headhunters believe that the fates of their children are attached to a Lakota deity who can magically whisk their children away to New York to perform on Thanksgiving Day, and give them a future that they as parents cannot provide on their own. But in the end, they discover too late that all that Lakota could do for them was taking their money and use their children as sacrifices to the gods of speculative success.
Rich Hoffman
The Overmanwarrior 