Texas Educators Care Enough to Vote

Register and research so you’ll be ready to VOTE!                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

September 27, 2018

There are 12 days left to register to vote and 25 days until the start of early voting. Keep working to register students, staff, parents, and community members. With early voting right around the corner, let staff and community members know about upcoming candidate forums so they can meet candidates and become informed voters. If you don’t have any planned, reach out to your nearest League of Women Voters and Texas Retired Teachers Association to help pull one together. Informed voters make good citizens.

To do:

1.     Register:

a.     Make sure your voter registration is active and has your current address.

b.     If you’re not registered, apply to register to vote here.

c.      Invite voter registrars (League of Women Voters or Texas Retired Teachers) to register students and staff at campus and district events.

d.     Use this link to let the Texas Civil Rights Project know if you are registering students to vote.  It will give you credit for registering voters next time they update their map!

2.     Research-

a.     Teach the Vote has asked all candidates to fill out their questionnaire with education-related questions. Check what your candidates have to say.

b.     The League of Women Voters of Texas has a Voter’s Guide with candidate responses to their questionnaire.  

c.      Go meet candidates in your area. Attend candidate forums and ask questions about things that are important to you!

3.     Get ready to VOTE!

Social Media Posts to share:

You can’t vote if you are not registered!  Register today!  #txed #vote

Students are counting on you to be their voice at the polls.  Register to vote! #txed #vote

Let’s move Texas out of last place in voter turnout. Register, research, and vote! #txed #vote

                                   

Stand up for public education and 5.4 million TX students. Register before Oct. 9.  #txed #vot

Laura Yeager

Texas Educators Vote

Nazis separated me from my parents as a child. The trauma lasts a lifetime

Do read this must-read, terribly sad tale of separation from parents involving siblings during Nazi Germany.  We should ALL have difficulties sleeping at night right now given the significance of his policy of family separation for refugees seeking asylum from desperate situations.

Our president is a Nazi. His White House team, too.  

Of course, such statements don't faze him at all. He would take it as a compliment. 

We desperately need regime change.

While November 6, 2018  is Texas' Uniform Election Date (mark this on your calendars), this website on important election dates provides a complete list of dates and details.  

Go vote.  And vote like children's and parents' lives at the border depend on it—although this barbaric, grotesque White House policy of separating children from parents could end today if Trump wished it so.

Here's what you can do:   

• Call the White House between 9AM and 4PM EST daily at either of these two numbers:  (202) 456-1414 or (202) 456-1111 and demand that Washington free the children that are currently imprisoned along the US-Mexico border and they must get reunited immediately with their parents from whom they are getting brutally and inhumanely separated with every passing day.  
• You can also leave a comment online at: www.whitehouse.gov/contact

And may we all without fear or apology disavow this despotic and sadistic regime of terror. Free the children!  

Angela Valenzuela

#FreeTheChildren

#FamiliesBelongTogether #FamiliesTornApart

Nazis separated me from my parents as a child. The trauma lasts a lifetime

Yoka Verdoner  I know from experience that the Trump-sanctioned brutality at the US border with Mexico will scar its child victims for life  Mon 18 Jun 2018 02.00 EDT

The events occurring now on our border with Mexico, where children are being removed from the arms of their mothers and fathers and sent to foster families or “shelters”, make me weep and gnash my teeth with sadness and rage. I know what they are going through. When we were children, my two siblings and I were also taken from our parents. And the problems we’ve experienced since then portend the terrible things that many of these children are bound to suffer.

My family was Jewish, living in 1942 in the Netherlands when the country was occupied by the Nazis. We children were sent into hiding, with foster families who risked arrest and death by taking us in. They protected us, they loved us, and we were extremely lucky to have survived the war and been well cared for.

Yet the lasting damage inflicted by that separation reverberates to this day, decades hence.

Have you heard the screams and seen the panic of a three-year-old when it has lost sight of its mother in a supermarket? That scream subsides when mother reappears around the end of the aisle.

This is my brother writing in recent years. He tries to deal with his lasting pain through memoir. It’s been 76 years, yet he revisits the separation obsessively. He still writes about it in the present tense:

In the first home I scream for six weeks. Then I am moved to another family, and I stop screaming. I give up. Nothing around me is known to me. All those around me are strangers. I have no past. I have no future. I have no identity. I am nowhere. I am frozen in fear. It is the only emotion I possess now. As a three-year-old child, I believe that I must have made some terrible mistake to have caused my known world to disappear. I spend the rest of my life trying desperately not to make another mistake.

My brother’s second foster family cared deeply about him and has kept in touch with him all these years. Even so, he is almost 80 years old now and is still trying to understand what made him the anxious and dysfunctional person he turned into as a child and has remained for the rest of his life: a man with charm and intelligence, yet who could never keep a job because of his inability to complete tasks. After all, if he persisted he might make a mistake again, and that would bring his world to another end.

My younger sister was separated from our parents at five. She had no understanding of what was going on and why she suddenly had to live with a strange set of adults. She suffered thereafter from lifelong, profound depression.

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I was older: seven. I was more able than my siblings to understand what was happening and why. I spent most of the war with Dick and Ella Rijnders. Dick was mayor of a small, rural village, and he and Ella lived in a beautiful house next to a wide waterway. Ella had a warm smile and Dick referred to me as his “oldest daughter”. I was able to go to school normally, make friends, and became part of village life. I was extraordinarily lucky, but I was not with my own parents, sister, and brother. And, eventually, I also had to leave the Rijnders, my loving second “family”. I was returning to my own family, but this meant another separation.

 How can America sleep at night when families are being torn apart?

Jessica Valenti

Read more

In later life, I was never able to really settle down. I lived in different countries and was successful in work, but never able to form lasting relationships with partners. I never married. I almost forgot to mention my own anxiety and depression, and my many years in psychotherapy.

My grief and anger about today’s southern border come not just from my personal life. As a retired psychotherapist who has worked extensively with victims of childhood trauma, I know all too well what awaits many of the thousands of children, taken by our government at the border, who are now in “processing centers” and foster homes – no matter how decent and caring those places might be. We can expect thousands of lives to be damaged, for many years or for ever, by “zero tolerance”. We can expect old men and women, decades from now, still suffering, still remembering, still writing in the present tense.

What is happening in our own backyard today is as evil and criminal as what happened to me and my siblings as children in Nazi Europe. It needs to be stopped immediately.

• Yoka Verdoner is a child survivor of the Holocaust. A retired teacher and psychotherapist now living in California, she edited Signs of Life: The Letters of Hilde Verdoner-Sluizer from Nazi Transit Camp Westerbork, 1942-1944