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 
“parents mistakenly believe that love comes from collective experience instead of their direct input”
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A thousand times YES! And we are all as a society sowing what the parents reap, in the form of crime, government idiocy/dependence, and overall collapse in our Western Civilization. An entire book could be written out of that one single sentence right there.
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haha…reaping what the parents have sown…that’s what I get for typing fast.
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I suppose you have a point. : )
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I don’t understand… are you just trying to troll, or using hyperbole to try to discredit a community movement? Because none of what you are saying really applies to the situation – these aren’t band radicals. These are just people who were a part of band, and the majority of them want Snyder to keep his job for a bit longer.
Not to mention all the success of people who have done band under Snyder – you say he creates a hole where parents should’ve filled? That just seems like you have a problem with public schools. There’s proof that band provides experiences that prepare students better for the real world than any other class in schools. Leadership experience, working as a key individual in what is ultimately a group effort. If people don’t go into engineering or computer sciences, chances are they’ll never need calculus in their future life. But tell me – how many careers would you say it is NOT beneficial to have experience leading/working with others?
Sincerely,
– One of many of a group of people who learned much more about life from band than all other school experiences combined.
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Nice points, however we are talking about tax payer funded activity here and how feel good programs are used to help pay for the overall bad aspects of public education which tends to lean in the direction of the political left. I don’t want to pay for that. If public education were not so political, I’d have different feelings. But that’s not the case.
If someone wants to be in the band, that’s nice. But its entagled with a whole bunch of other things that I’d rather not support.
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I don’t think you understand what a marching band is. It’s not a “feel good” activity. It’s countless hours of practice and exercise. The end goal may be very satisfying, but that makes band as much a “feel good” activity as writing an essay for a class.
And it’s inane that you’re trying to bring politics into this. It’s very clear – taxpayers elect school board, school board makes decision some taxpayers disagree with, those taxpayers express discontent. But since you’re so hard-headed about making this a political thing, maybe this will sway your opinion – Snyder is hardcore Conservative, and during his time as band director, he has required to the band to go play at rallies in support of McCain/Palin, as well as used his paycheck for the support of the Republican party in West Chester.
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That’s good to know and is probably why he was really fired.
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That’s hardly related to why he was fired, and shows that you really have no idea what the situation is.
Pray tell – if you don’t have an inkling of an idea what is going on, why do you feel like you can spout off unrelated opinions?
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Who is the authority of determining what’s relevant or not? You?
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Anybody with an inkling of common sense. A man got forced to resign because a parent complained and another parent put forward a lot of evidence to bring him down. People came forward to defend their friend and mentor.
You’re the one who decided to throw in some backwards cannibal comparison to somehow turn this into a slam on parenting, and stretched things even further to turn the Lakota School district into some Liberal-minded demon with the purpose of ruining lives.
To put it in simpler terms, you’re making mountains out of molehills, and these molehills happen to be the price of tea in China.
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That is an excellent metaphor. But they are mountains. They only look like molehills if the vantage point is too far away to properly see them.
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Funny, because as far as Lakota Bands go, you’re the one whose vantage point is miles away.
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Everyone thinks their little corner of the world is special. Its one thing to look at some bumps on the horizon and assume that they are molehills because of their casual appearance. Its another to march around for hours on end with an instrument and a costume where even the slightest hill seems like a mountain. The important thing to know is what made the surface deviations in the first place and why–then the relative term of distance and time becomes irrelevant.
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You’re not making a clear point. Are you trying to say that things on the horizon, completely irrelevant to band, are very important to the situation, despite them being so far removed?
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To say you don’t understand is not a defense in an argument. I understand you very well. These are not items completely irrelevant to the band, they are connected to Lakota and used for its purposes. Vantage points of horizons are only relative to the size of the perceived problems. The band is not immune to connectivity just because you don’t want them to be entangled with the politics of the situation.
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Ok thank you.
Anyway, it’s once again my duty to inform you that the people you are bashing in this post are not “band radicals”. And the majority of people who do band at Lakotas do it because they want to be a part of an amazing program, not because their parents decide to sign them up for an additional class.
If I’m correct, you have poured a lot of yourself into your writing, and apparently, bullwhipping as well. All the fulfillment you get out of those activities is what people get out of doing band. People WANT to do band, and part of the reason the band program at Lakota is so great is that Snyder has been here, shaping it up for 30 years. He’s done an amazing thing, creating a powerful music program that has very very few rivals in the state. And that’s what people want to be a part of. Is it really radicalist to defend something you love? Were your parents bad parents because they let you pursue a hobby?
And you seem to imply that all the parents just send their kids off to Snyder – the band program has HUGE parent involvement. Band camps have massive staffs (or at least larger staffs before we lost the money to go to Wright State for it) of parents. A medical tent full of nurses. People in charge of activities, food. And the boosters program, the Lakota West Upbeat Club, is a massive parent-led monster. Many of the kids who go through band at Lakota West have had their parents there at some point – chaperoning, helping out, being a part of something their children want to do. And young adults come out of the experience more enriched than they were going in.
When it comes down to political agenda… sure, individuals might have some sort of agenda. But the school board of Lakota? They’re just trying to incompetently keep their district afloat. They’ve been gutting school buses (safest form of transportation) and “non-essential” programs and personnel because they thought a couple new schools deserved money that they didn’t have. That’s not a Liberal statement, and it’s not a Conservative statement – it’s a poor Capitalist decision. And for some reason, you’re turning the band supporters into a scapegoat for your tirade against taxation.
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Fair and well thought out comments. That is good to see.
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