In a shocking story, Peter Hegarty reports for the East Bay Times that the Lafayette, California school system just threatened to have a 12-year-old boy arrested because he missed 90 minutes of Zoom class.
Mark Mastrov, the boy’s father, says he received a letter from the school:
’Out of the blue, we got this letter. It said my son had missed classes, and at the bottom it referenced a state law which said truants can go to jail for missing 90 minutes of class,’ Mastrov said in an interview. ‘I called the school and said, Hey, I want to clear this up.’
Sorry. Not in the cards.
In fact, the card game is rigged against Mr. Mastrov and all the other taxpayers and kids in the state.
Mastrov contends that his son didn't miss his classes but simply logged on after his teacher had already taken attendance.
‘Who passed this law in their infinite wisdom?’ he wonders. ‘Who in their right mind could do that?’
Well, since this isn’t merely about the insanity of threatening a boy with arrest for not getting on camera from his own home, and it’s not merely about COVID19 changing the “learning environment”, perhaps there’s a deeper level to explore.
That seems appropriate, especially because this idea of “arresting for truancy” was something that Senator Kamala Harris openly touted as wonderful when she was Attorney General of California.
Indeed, as even the leftist Huffington Post reports, Kamala’s wonderful statute saw parents arrested if their kids missed too much of the abysmal California school propaganda:
The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse.
Harris even laughed about it in public gatherings.
In January of 2019, Nathan Robinson wrote an insightful piece for The Guardian not only citing the occurrence, but linking to video footage of Harris laughing about threatening parents with arrest if their kids didn’t slavishly attend the government schools the way she commanded.
Harris cheerfully recounts the story of sending an attorney from her office to intimidate a homeless single mother whose children were missing school. She smiles as she recalls how she instructed her subordinates to ‘look really mean’ so that the mother would take the threat of jail seriously. In separate footage, Harris mocks those on the left who say things like ‘build schools, not jails’ and ‘put more money into education, not prisons’, suggesting they are naive sloganeers who do not understand crime prevention.
This is not to single-out Harris, but to focus on the offensive mindset she embraces and promotes.
It is the mindset that sees not only children as cogs in a giant state machine, but their parents – in fact, all people – as subservient to the demands of the all-powerful, all-seeing state.
And now, as that state continues to take money from people to fund its school and police systems, as localities do the same, we see that the video-teaching method has placed that all-seeing eye directly inside people’s homes.
Heck, the state already invades homes through property taxes and income taxes, through zoning and other so-called “regulations”, even when people are simply trying to live in peace and not bothering anyone, so this is an expected step.
And the march of tyranny will continue unless people stand up to stop it.
Perhaps this will be more impetus to convince folks to do so, wherever they are.
That’s a lesson we can all remember, taken from this crazy story in Lafayette, California.