When my sister, Judy Jennings, announced to our family that she was planning to run for Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) District 10 (www.votejudyjennings.com), we all supported her. However, I wondered how she could be so different from me, at least in the "putting up with people" category. I mean, she can sit and talk to people and listen to them politely, whereas I tend to inconveniently point out to people when they're stupid. I thought her skill will be useful when debating people who, say, don't believe in the Heliocentric model of the solar system.
Watching her campaign, it's been difficult for me to see people attacking my sister. One blogger described her as a "ferociously smiley expert," which I thought was a compliment until I read the entire blog post and realized the author used the word "expert" in the pejorative sense. Did you know there was a pejorative sense to the word "expert?" I didn't until this election. My sister's Republican opponent also referred to Democrats as "America Bashing." My first thought was: many of the soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are Democrats, how dare she call them "America Bashing!" (and now that Republicans voted down a pay increase for the troops, many more of them are Democrats....) Then I thought, why is my sister, running for an unpaid seat for the most boring job in the world, with the single lofty goal of improving the education of children, being labeled "America Bashing?" Clearly, the Republicans have no issues on which to campaign, so they have to resort to name calling and ad hominem attacks, but as her brother, it still hurts.
Did I mention this was the most boring job in the world? Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly, stab-yourself-in-the-leg-with-a-pen-to-get-them-to-call-an-ambulance-so-you-can-escape-this-meeting-
boring. If she wins this seat, she will spend days in meetings discussing the logistics of textbook acquisition, and politely sitting through hours of public comments from people who think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to listen to Jesus preach the Sermon on the Sanctity of Tax Cuts for the Rich. Now, for some reason, she actually likes this kind of educational public policy work, and she'll do a great job at it. But it's an absolute shame that some of the most important jobs in this country, the local government jobs that keep our streets safe and clean, and keep our kids in school learning to be good citizens, can be taken over by a highly motivated extremist minority who resort to name calling and deception to maintain their hold on power.
When she started her campaign, she shared with me that the most difficult part for her was calling up people and asking them for money. Since her SBOE district is more than twice the size of a Congressional district, she can't talk to every voter personally, and the need for money to get the word out is critical. This is especially true since her Republican opponent spent $200,000 of her own money just to win her primary election! Having spent that much on the primary, God only knows how much she'll spend to win the general election on November 2nd. I know how difficult it is for my sister to ask people for money; I only wish that her reticence to ask for money was a value shared by more of our relatives, if you catch my drift. Since it's so hard for her to ask, I wrote this blog post to ask you all to send whatever you can afford to help her get her message of non-partisan education here: http://www.actblue.com/...
Everyone who can send in $5, $10, or whatever they can afford will help put this country back on track to get partisan politics out of the classroom. Thank you for all your support!
