Education, Schmeducation

This is a follow-up to my entry, A Boy Named Sue, updated because of the results I reported yesterday in Statehouse Shootdown.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of education, and educate people about the benefits of going barefooted.

What I objected to in “A Boy Named Sue” was the idea of education in lieu of lawsuits. I also object to education in lieu of activism.

There are those who fear that such activism sets back the cause of increasing barefoot rights. (And let me add that increasing barefoot rights is really about increasing all rights and fighting governmental restrictions on all of our freedoms.)

But let me back up and talk about education.

We all educate whenever we appear barefoot in public, particularly in public businesses like grocery stores. We educate when we write letters to newspapers. We educate when we go for barefoot hikes and others can see that bare feet can do all sorts of things that the observers just cannot imagine unless they can see it with their own eyes.

Education is great. I do it all the time.

But it is also one small facet.

What gripes me is folks who are afraid of activism. Folks who want to retreat solely into “education”. Folks who think that all we need is education. Now, if there are people who don’t actually do activism, that’s okay by me. Different folks have different talents. What bugs me are folks who don’t want anybody to do activism because sometimes it just doesn’t work.

As I pointed out before, we just don’t have the numbers for education to be effective, and I really doubt that we will ever have the numbers. At least without adding activism to that.

And that is one reason I am an activist. (That and being a nasty son-of-a-bitch.)

Pure education doesn’t have a chance against the forces out there, and my Statehouse efforts really illustrate it.

I didn’t start this fight. I didn’t go looking for trouble. Let me remind people that I was just walking through the Statehouse, as I had done so many times before, when I was stopped by a State Trooper. He was sure I was violating something. It was only after he contacted CSRAB that he found out my bare feet were okay, and he let me go.

As a result, this whole Statehouse barefoot rule started, because some politician was offended that I might use his Statehouse barefooted.

So I made a great effort to educate the CSRAB. I attended a multitude of meetings and talked to the board members. I know many of you out there also wrote letters, educating CSRAB board members and JCARR committee members.

We all could have just done nothing. Yeah, in the end, that would have meant no negative newspaper stories. It would have meant that people across the nation would not have seen a story about the Ohio Statehouse banning bare feet. But it would have been a . . .

Ratchet.

Just like the libraries that, after seeing me in them barefoot, decided that they needed to make a barefoot rule:

Ratchet.

We saw how the JCARR legislative committee jumped right on board with the CSRAB. Almost always when this gets to those in power, they jump on board with being authoritarian.

Ratchet.

So, my choices were to just do nothing and let yet another official shoe rule go into place, or at least make the attempt to stop it.

In the former case: ratchet. In the latter, at least some chance.

I’m the sort who tries to stop it. And I don’t think that, overall, we are any worse when I make the effort.

I can see that fighting back might have a negative effect, in that some business might see the newspaper story and use it as an excuse to exclude. But I can also see how it can let other people out there know what their government is doing, and let them realize that even the tiniest of freedoms may be at risk. And that business would have been likely to exclude a barefooter anyways. All of the great educational news stories about barefoot runners and barefoot hikes mean diddly-squat, though, when it comes to going barefoot in a business.

I am sensitive to the issue that any publicity may not necessarily be positive (heck, just the fact that it often appears in the news category “odd news” suggests that). But I bet that there are plenty of people who see the story and wonder just why government, any government, is wasting its time on such a thing.

What is a shame is that we don’t have a sugar daddy who can pour money into this. With real money we could have hired a lobbyist who could really educate the politicians. With a real money we could get real lawyers, and real experts to testify.

But in the meantime, I, and others, do what we can. I think that the effort is important to do what we can to stop the . . .

Ratchet.