Sanctimony Pony

Listen, I think one of the things that’s real strange, and you see it for when I see it with my kids, is that they have entire networks of communications and entire networks of sort of joining up with each other and talking that I think allude folks like me and older. I mean, I’m not on Tumblr every darn day. I’m not. I don’t have Instagram. I don’t get on any of these networks my kids are on. There’s all this movement and information that’s passing and that is sort of slipping past what we would call the mainstream radar.

My kids, my students, they understand that there’s these kind of two worlds. That there’s the official world, or the official world that they’ll go work and the official world where they’ll talk to adults. And in that official world, folks don’t talk about race. Folks don’t talk about rape. Folks don’t, you know, acknowledge how much young people are doing or what they’re doing. Folks don’t talk about how many gay folks are out there. Folks don’t talk about how Iowa’s got all these Mexican Americans living there. And then there’s the world that they live, on the ground, where they’re seeing all this stuff right up front. And I think a lot of what’s going on is that you’re getting communities that are becoming bilingual and speaking real speak (and real speak is the stuff that, you know, we can acknowledge is happening) and speaking the official speak. And in the official speak, we don’t acknowledge any of this stuff.