Look, I am not condoning threatening anybody, so let’s get that out of the way first. Don’t threaten people, don’t egg their houses, and don’t behave in anything less than a law-abiding manner.

That being said, if you go out of your way to fuck somebody over, it’s really kind of beyond the pale to act all affronted when they get riled by it.Via liprap:

Jefferson Parish School Board member Pat Tovrea – one of five board members who voted against extending the teachers union contract past June 30 — is speaking out about how he was treated by teachers after the June 6 meeting.

“I had the actual teachers who taught my child (a year ago) approach me in the most vicious manner,” said Tovrea, whose 7-year-old son is mildly to moderately autistic. “These ladies accosted me and said, ‘We taught your son. Remember that’ in a threatening manner.”

As he tried to back out of his parking spot at Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School in Kenner, teachers repeatedly shouted “shame on you,” Tovrea said. They then blocked him in by standing behind his car with three children, he said.

“They clearly possessed rage, rage like you would see in an institution,” he said. “It was a vicious and hostile tone of people who are considered teachers.”

Yes. They said mean things to you, and stood behind your car. This horror is beyond imagining. All you wanted to do was try to negate their contract! Why couldn’t they just leave you in peace? After all, we should have learned by now that the real way to hurt people is behind closed doors, across a mahogany desk, surrounded by fellow suit-wearing members of one’s club. Not by speaking. To someone’s face. With your mouth.

Look, this is why the civility bullshit and the constant lamenting of partisanship and the lauding of bloodless objectivity above all else is so pernicious. The only thing civility in politics serves is incumbent power. It’s always going to be rude to stand up for yourself in the face of bullying. It’s always going to be an affront to those who want to keep you in your place when you try to break out of it. Incivility is the POINT. DIsruption of the status quo is the POINT. Otherwise you don’t get anywhere, because what incentive is there to give you what you want?

Moreover, this fight should be bloody and it should be hard. You should have to look at the people your politics affect. You should have to tell them, face to face with their anger, why you’re doing what you’re doing. You OWE them that. Otherwise we’re all just constructs, just pieces moving around on the board, and I know it’s fun to play that on the Sunday shows but that’s television, come on. We have a right to put our own faces to the things that affect us, to say, this is not an abstraction.

These are real things, teacher contracts. They affect the actual teachers who taught your son. They affect your friends and your neighbors and your kids and your relatives, and expecting everything to be all polite so it’s easier for you to wreck it is asking them to make their lives into something for you, into something that isn’t real, something that doesn’t matter. You have every right to do whatever douchey thing you’re about to do, to talk in general terms about this group or that group, about what they do and don’t deserve. And they have every right to stand up and say, you mean me. The person who taught your son. You mean me.

It disrupts the conversation, doing that. It inconveniences the person who wants to make a point that is either monstrous or thoughtless or glib. It shames him, or it should. It prevents him from getting out of the parking lot at the end of the meeting. It’s rage, and it’s vicious and hostile.

Good.

A.