Editor’s note: Updated with information from the Oregon Health Authority regarding current and proposed rules regarding COVID-19 in schools. See the addition at the bottom of this editorial.
We get it. It’s been a long couple of years. We’re all getting pretty tired of wearing masks while lifting weights at the gym or wondering when our favorite event gets to take place inside again. We understand that, in a society designed to let the people operate their own functional government, protest and petitioning the government for redress of grievance is an important tool—and one we wholly support. Where we draw the line in that support, however, is when protests are used for things that don’t actually require redress—for things that haven’t happened, aren’t happening now and aren’t expected to happen at some point in the near future. It denigrates the process.
Case in point: the “shoes on the steps” demonstration that happened Dec. 1 on the steps of the Bend-La Pine Schools administration building.
“Each pair of shoes representing a child being pulled from the school system if vaccine mandates are enforced,” states a description of the protest on the Facebook page of the Moms for Liberty – Deschutes County Chapter.
And yet, Bend-La Pine Schools has not rolled out a vaccine mandate for students in the district and does not have plans to do so. We asked, just to be sure. Decisions like that are typically the purview of the state, the board’s chair told us.
Portland Public Schools, located in a city that has seen far more COVID caution and overall compliance than Central Oregon has, did briefly consider a student vaccine mandate, but already declared it will not enforce one.
The recent protest at the BLPS building could be labeled as simply annoying or embarrassing if it didn’t have other issues attached to it. Staging a demonstration in protest of something that has not happened and doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon preys on people’s ignorance and riles them up for no good reason.
It’s one thing to stand in objection—as is Americans’ constitutional right—to things that pose a very real threat of being enforced. It’s another to make stuff up. Doing so diminishes the impact of protests that aim to tackle real problems.
So what would be the purpose of such a thing?
Seeing this type of protest crop up in Bend demonstrates something important: That nationally led movements and national talking points continue to insert themselves into local issues—even when the local community doesn’t have an issue at all. Moms for Liberty is a national group with various chapters around the U.S., incorporated just this last year by two moms in Florida. It’s a group that can be counted among the loud minority that showed up at school board meetings across the country in protest of Critical Race Theory and comprehensive sex education, along with mask and other COVID mandates.
“These well-connected partisans are opportunistically manufacturing outrage and selling it to parents under the guise of empowerment,” describes Media Matters, the nonprofit that monitors and corrects conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
So where is all of this going?
Beyond upsetting those who saw last week’s shoes protest as an affront to Jewish people, (the original “shoes protest” along the Danube River in Budapest sought to memorialize the people killed by the fascist Hungarian militia during WWII), the end game of all of this needless protest appears to be a front-load to a larger effort.
“Globalists, utopians, socialists, totalitarians and the UN are using public schools to undermine freedom and Christianity,” a slideshow at a Moms for Liberty event in October decried, according to Media Matters. That statement slots nicely with the efforts to undermine and water down public education and to build up the school-choice and charter-school movement, which has been identified as a modern-day move to segregate schools and subsequently, we feel, negatively affect lower-income students.
“It would be unrealistic not to acknowledge that far too many of our public schools are troubled with low performance (due to a variety of factors) that understandably prompt many parents and guardians to seek alternatives,” wrote Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, in a May article in Forbes. “…The truth is that voucher and tax credit programs structure choices to promote de facto segregation, contravene constitutional considerations, and threaten to dismantle hard-fought and socially beneficial historical progress. They represent a serious setback for universal free public education and the equality and equity goals it promotes.”
While it would be easy to disregard these meaningless protests in our community as simply annoying or beneath discussion, it’s important to remember that, if not for a broader knowledge of what is happening inside and outside our schools, this misinformation can gain traction and seriously upset people. This unrest can lead to a very real decline in our ability to provide vital services to those in our community who don’t possess a national platform.
CLARIFICATION, 12/15/21:
After hearing from readers concerned that current rule-changes underway at the Oregon Health Authority purportedly included vaccine requirements for students, we reached out to OHA for clarification.
Below is the response from Rudy Owens, communication specialist at OHA:
“OHA’s current temporary rules and proposed permanent rules, specifically OAR 333-019-0010 and 333-019-1005 do not establish vaccination requirements for children or students that attend children’s facilities or schools and do not establish an exclusion date for non-compliance – because there is no vaccination requirement.
“OAR 333-019-0010 implements a state law that requires school administrators to exclude staff or students who have been exposed to one of the communicable diseases identified by the Oregon Health Authority, which includes COVID-19, if that staff person or student is susceptible to the disease, for a period of time, unless the local public health officer believes that exclusion is not necessary. A staff person or student who is not vaccinated is considered to be susceptible to COVID-19.
“OAR 333-019-1005 requires child care providers and youth programs to have communicable disease management plans and does not have any vaccination requirements.”
This article appears in Dec 8-15, 2021.
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This editorial nailed it.
The writer thought it all the way through to the dire implications. I didn’t, and got stuck in my initial reaction to this “protest”: The monstrousness of conflating the Nazi terror that killed 20,000,000 people in Europe with American public health measures?
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” (Voltaire)
All of us who WANT kids vaccinated and masked should take shoes up to the school. See who has more shoes.
Moms for Liberty are part of the larger, national effort to overturn democracy. Read Barton Gellman’s piece in The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases…
“Mom’s for Liberty”, what a misnomer.
Great article, thank you.
You all can’t be serious? I bet all of your children are vaxxed. Shame on you. One shoes are a symbol of loss and have been LONG before the Holocaust. This is not journalism. This is a personal opinion editorial directly aimed at causing hatred for anyone with a different viewpoint than your own. This is what is wrong with America. There is no longer the “right” to any opinion other than the one being pushed by our politicians. We can no longer have honest thoughtful discussions because one side just attacks, denigrates, and verbally abuses the other instead of having conversation.
Well thought-out and presented editorial. Kudos to The Sources editorial staff: heres a showcase example of excellent local journalism.
This Moms group (originating in FL, surprise) is yet another example of wacko far-right manipulation of the clueless who characteristically demonstrate their social concern by glomming onto a single wedge issue and beating that drum at the expense of being able to apprehend anything else (like the complex interlocking tapestry of our actual multicultural, would-be-democratic, society like the concept of caring for all others, the good of the whole, which requires dropping ones habitual stance of selfish me-me-me-mine.)
Keep leading those horses to water. Maybe someday theyll lose their taste for the icky-sweet koolaid that has been their preference?
Great article. Hopefully all those shoes were donated to a truly good cause instead of being wasted on a needless show of misinformation.
Just disgraceful that some of our community members can be so ignorant & allow misinformation to prosper.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the editorial. Faux outrage is being used across America and, as the Voltaire comment above so beautifully states, we the people will lose our democracy if the minority is victorious in destroying democracy using fake news to promote “personal freedoms.”
These ARE local parents, friends and family conducting a peaceful protest…. these are real people who live right here in Bend, who are not eating out of the hands of main stream media, big businesses, and the government.
Fact Check — PPS’s voted to POSTPONE voting on a vaxx mandate, not “declare they will not enforce one.”
Though I appreciate the thoroughness of the reporting and fact-checking, I’m not sure that this non-protest of something that isn’t even happening really deserves such coverage. That’s what these people want. They pretend to hate the media, but they want media coverage. Maybe we should starve them of it.
Also, someone in the comments is trying to claim that leaving shoes out has *always* been a form of protest. Uhhh, sure. Where is your source, your data, your historical accuracy? Can someone at The Source Weekly offer a source, data, history to counter that claim?
tiffysquid: Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but here’s some info on the Shoes Protest on the Danube from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center: https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general…
Wrong category of article.
This is an editorial – or an opinion provided media publication.
And in this case the author seems to have fallen short research-wise.
For example –
PARIS — There was a pair of shoes from Pope Francis and sneakers from the United Nations secretary general, Ban-Ki Moon. Most were from ordinary citizens, like Gloria Montenegro, a 65-year-old Parisian, who left two pairs.
All together, 11,000 pairs of shoes were on display in the Place de la République on Sunday morning in a silent demonstration – in place of canceled marches and other events – of support for action against climate change.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projec…
The Shoe, as a means of protest, has a long history and one well outside American culture.
“Shoe-throwing has become a celebrated art form ever since an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US President George W. Bush, eternally sealing Bush’s last presidential moments with the iconic image of the shoe. Popular acts of communication and protests enter new forms of relationships with audiences and global spectators beyond the political context and the shoe-throwing incident is no exception. It has been consummately appropriated into popular culture and entertainment in the multimedia platforms of the internet, transforming political images and political protests into voyeuristic entertainment for the masses.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1…
And in the U.S. the laying of empty shoes to graphically illustrate concerning social issues, in this case the number of children killed by gun violence, visually brings home the message being sent.
“Activists placed thousands of pairs of shoes on the lawn outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to memorialize children killed by gun violence.
“The demonstration was planned by international advocacy group Avaaz to represent the number of children killed by guns since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, CBS News reports.”
https://time.com/5198721/capitol-gun-death…
And “Operation Shoe Drop” took place nationwide and peacefully.
https://www.thedailynewsonline.com/top_sto…
And Michael Jordan said it best – “It’s not about the shoes, it’s what you do in them.”— Michael Jordan.