Did anyone from the Office of Gun Violence Prevention come to your town? Yeah, me neither. Left-leaning media tropes about school boards. Have you ever had a megrim?
Did anyone from the Office of Gun Violence Prevention come to your town? Did they have any meetings with you or anyone you know?
Yeah. Me neither.
The intersection of guns and public health is an interest and one of the repeated themes I see when I read about the people doing that kind of work is how much they're interested in collaboration and respect for a variety of viewpoints.
As an example, check out screenshot #1 attached. This comes from CU's site linked below.
I recently got the first-ever edition of the quarterly newsletter out of CDPHE's Office of Gun Violence Prevention. I'd offer a link, but this came to my email. If you are interested in signing up, you'll find a link under the "sign up" heading at the office's site linked second below.
In the letter from the director of the office (see screenshot 2 attached), you have that same kind of collegial, collaborative language that CU offers.
I read these words. Then I reflect on what they're saying. I don't know a huge number of people and it's certainly possible that news and events have passed me by, but I don't know anyone that's ever been asked anything by either CU or the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. I don't know that I've seen a single event hosted by either in my neck of the woods.
So, then I ask myself whether it's just a case of my having missed things. To find out, I emailed the press contact for the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to see where he has gone in his year and a half of "...traveling the state and listening to community stakeholders." I also wanted to know who was invited to the conference he mentions lower in his letter (refer to screenshot 2 again if need be, it's the lower highlighted part).
The response I received to both questions is quoted below (with the links intact):
"Mr. Jonathan McMillan met with community members on the following dates:
Montezuma Communities That Cares Coalition - March 15th
Montezuma County Residents - March 16th
La Plata County Residents - March 17th
Pikes Peak/ Colorado Springs - April 10th
Weld County - April 13th
Roundtable attendance and registration were handled by Trailhead Institute so their organization is best situated to address your second question."
To give you a sense of how this fits within the context of the entirety of the State of Colorado, see screenshot 3 with the various locations mentioned shown as red dots within a blue circle. There is some ambiguity as to what specific location Mr. McMillan went to when all I received was the county name, so in those cases I just used the county seat. I did ask the press secretary a followup to see if Mr. McMillan went to several locations in each listed county. I did hear back but was told only that each day represented one meeting in one location. I will stick with my assumption that, when not listed otherwise, it was the county seat.
With regard to the conference Mr. McMillan mentions, the one with the 100 experts with diverse backgrounds where the energy was palpable, I again have yet to hear anything at all from the Trailhead Institute despite repeated calls. If I do hear, I'll follow up.
Trust is something that you build. You build it by your choices and you build it by how well what you say matches what you do.
I'm not alleging any bad behaviors or conspiracies by either CU or the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. What I am saying, however, is that if they want to be seen as groups that want to work with responsible gun owners, if they want to be seen as genuinely interested in protecting gun rights in addition to preventing violence, they have a ways to go.
That "ways" needs to pass through making sure that all voices are part of the conversation they want to have. It needs to pass through being transparent in terms of who is invited to the discussions they're having.
To not do so is to at least invite criticism that perhaps their rhetoric is soaring higher than their actual practice and to at worst engender the kind of mistrust that leads to further division and a lack of progress on the goal we should all be working for: less gun violence.
https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/emergency-medicine/major-programs/firearm-injury-prevention-initiative
https://cdphe.colorado.gov/office-of-gun-violence-prevention
It's because of those damned rabblerousing conservatives!
A left-leaning media trope I have seen a fair bit lately (see below for a couple examples of what I mean, a Colorado Sun video roundtable and then a CPR article) is lamentations about how the normally quiet school board races have become political, are now drawing more campaign cash (and some out of state influence), and, gosh darn it, they're not about the kids like they once were in the good old days.
It's funny to read and watch these things because they strike me as yet another example of something I've written about with the media before: how they "discover" something that was already there and then proudly display it to all of us.
I think there are some genuine changes, but you know, the idea that they weren't political before is as laughable as the idea that the races weren't drawing influence from big organizations, or that it was about the kids until it became a hotbed of culture warriors.
Think about it.
Was it not political when leftists wanted to teach things that some had philosophical disagreements with? Is it more or less so when leftists wanted to inject their values into the school?
Was it any more or less about big outside influences when teacher's unions roamed the school board landscape like dinosaurs? When you donated wads of cash and when candidates had to kiss the ring to get the union's nod?
Was it any more or less about students not being top concern when unions made it all about unions and not students?
There is nothing new under the sun and that applies to school boards and school conflicts as much as it does anything else. What we have now is simply that parents (thanks largely to shutdowns from COVID) got more involved and groups of parents who normally didn't pay much attention got a good look at schools and decided to speak up.
Of course, since it's conservatives doing so, since the questions are about things leftists hold dear, the left leaning media pays attention.
Why, it's newsworthy now.
Wasn't it newsworthy back when teachers unions did the same things? Wasn't it newsworthy when groups other than conservatives tried to sneak their agendas into the classroom?
A consequence of one-party media rule, not so much of those rabblerousing conservatives.
Related:
There is a flaw in this article (which I'll likely take up in a future post), but if you're curious to see some detail about how the money is moving, to whom and from where in terms of big money in school board elections, this article has some good charts.
**Let's not (reiterating from the post above) forget that big money and influence has historically often moved in school board elections from teachers' unions (local and national).
https://coloradosun.com/2023/10/23/colorado-school-board-elections-political-divides/
Migraine's archaic cousin: megrim
That time of the week again: the last post of the day and thus something for fun. Something interesting but not related to politics.
This is also a signoff til Sunday.
I have a friend who gets migraines and was looking through a treatise on them from the late 1800's. Apparently (and this was known to neither of us) back in the day there were two competing terms among doctors for migraines and one of them was "megrim".
I've written in the past about the circuitous and convoluted nature of how our words come to us, and megrim/migraine seems to be no less complicated.
I attached a screenshot from the link below which proports to give the etymology (I am always skeptical about sources other than, say, Oxford English or Merriam Webster, but this doesn't seem outlandish and echoes what I've seen in other sources so I'm decently confident in it).
Quite a trip to get down to us, no? Prior to looking it up, I would not have guessed that both migraine and megrim essentially have the same origin (though they appear to have been imported into English at different times).
Interestingly, too, the author of the treatise on migraines wrote about his disdain for the term migraine. Megrim was his preferred term--yet another example of how words and word usage change over time. What was the accepted spelling/pronunciation/word choice a generation ago is not always what it is now.**
At any rate, either migraine or megrim is acceptable though the latter is archaic. If you want to impress someone at a party, you now have a little bit of nickel knowledge to share.
Have a good weekend and back at it Sunday!
**Unless you're French where standardization of many things (food, language) was the rule. Academies don't control how language is used among everyday people, however, so I often wonder at the success of their efforts to control and "freeze" French.
https://www.rxlist.com/megrim/definition.htm