Project 2025 – The Bridge

A month ago, May 4, 2025, the Cowley County Democratic Party sponsored a town hall meeting. The legislators representing us in Topeka and Washington either ignored their invitations, or politely declined to attend. However, Senator Cindy Holscher from the State Senate, drove all the way from Kansas City to talk to attendees and answer questions. One major topic was the attempt to funnel taxpayer funds away from Kansas public schools into a voucher system.

Senator Holscher strongly supports our public schools. She pointed out that 90% of Kansas children attend public schools. Diverting funds toward private schools which have no oversight would harm the vast majority of our children, especially those in rural areas. There would be no follow up on the received voucher money. One of her constituents admitted they planned to use their voucher money to buy new furniture for their lake house.

A study indicated that vouchers would lead to a learning loss in Kansas with the economic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation.

Though Kansas has thus far managed to deny school vouchers, the question will return in the next session. It’s a continuing battle. Our state agenda mirrors that of the federal Project 2025, Holscher said.

Yesterday in DC, June 3, 2025, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon presented her proposed budget to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee. Kansas Senator Jerry Moran is on that committee. Part of the package was the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) which is an attempt to expand school vouchers nationwide. It is unconscionable for Congress to cut funding for public schools while providing a lucrative tax loophole for the ultra-rich. Reverse Robin Hood, again.

Years ago, when I was an elementary student, the US was involved in the Space Race and the Cold War. Support for public schools was boosted nationwide because we couldn’t afford to let America fall behind. We had to have the best education there was to offer.

Now, “falling behind” seems to be the goal, to withhold resources that would provide excellent education to all our children. The attacks on our schools parallel those on museums, public libraries, public broadcasting, and public radio. Any institution that exists to support learning and literacy has come under intense scrutiny and criticism.

The recently released film “Free For All: The Public Library” sheds light on the history of literacy, books, and learning. The 90-minute documentary is available on PBS. Highly recommended.

Public libraries, even today, are staunchly supportive of literacy. Whereas once libraries were exclusive, after the Revolutionary War, Ben Franklin supported opening libraries to commoners. “If people are to govern themselves, they need to be educated.” To me, that is democracy’s mission.

It took generations for literacy to be offered to everyone, however. Women were limited in what they could read, and they certainly weren’t welcome to write. In the slave-holding south, it was illegal to teach a slave to read. Before the Civil War, “Literacy literally was the line between citizen and slave.”

For a hundred years we made a lot of progress and then, groups such as the Heritage Foundation started whittling away at our public schools. Now many districts limp along. For the last fifty years, there has been an assault on our collective literacy until currently 21% of American adults are illiterate and 54% of us read below a 6^th grade level.

Why? It’s a calculated effort to return us to that time when literacy was the line between those with power and those without. Jess Piper’s column “View From Rural Missouri” explains it this way: “Their goal is to create workers who can be exploited, workers who won’t ask questions or join unions or demand better conditions.”

Project 2025 aims to make us stupid again.

But we see what is happening. We want our schools to excel. We want every child to learn the critical thinking skills that naturally follow reading and writing. “Everyone deserves an education to have a fighting chance against those who would take advantage of them.” (J. Piper 5/29/2025)

Vouchers would weaken our public schools and deprive our children of their future. Please let Jerry Moran know you support public schools and you want him to as well. While you’re at it, let our state legislators know too.

Here we are, one week post-election, one week post D-day (diagnosis day for our flailing democracy.) Most of you share the horror and grief I feel after the count, so I’m “preaching to the choir” so to speak. If you happen to be someone who felt smug and victorious after the tally, I don’t know what to say to you. When my nephew was left homeless after a hurricane ravaged his mountain town (Asheville) 400 miles inland, when cousins in southern California find their neighborhood threatened by raging wildfires, when my Cuban friend’s parents near Havana have been without electricity for weeks, I am dumbstruck to realize so many of my countrymen would vote for an aging insurrectionist, convicted felon, rapist, and conman when one of his first orders of business is to increase the drilling and use of fossil fuels.

Are you one who would object, “But wait, I didn’t vote for him!” Yet at the same time, you couldn’t bring yourself to vote for the one candidate who had the best chance to defeat the ugliness and destruction that’s bound to happen. Since my first visit abroad in 1977, I have worked to disprove the myth of the “ugly American.” Yet with this election, you have helped engrave it deeper in the history of the world.

Most of my friends, though, feel as I do. We’re compatriots, we’re family in a broad adoptive sense of the word, and I take comfort from our conversations and correspondence. We need each other to talk to, to share our mutual pain, our disbelief, and our fears. It means a lot to me that we have connected, not only during the weeks before November 5, but in the days since. Bolstering friendships has been one positive thing to come from this heartbreak.

A couple of thoughts about the outcome. I find a smidge of agreement on one of the MAGA points, though the target is polar opposite of theirs. We should beware one certain immigrant from South Africa who just bought a president with his billions.

For those who were all about—“Oh, the New World Order! We can’t have that. Biden has those plans in WRITING!”

Welcome to the New World Order. After the election, Elon Musk crowed on his X account, “Novus ordo seclorum” (Latin for New World Order.) And the written plan? Project 2025, which some have claimed was all lies. They aren’t even trying to deny the project now, and it has been in WRITING the whole time.

For the rest of us who are hurting and grieving over what we’ve lost—a country founded on democratic principles—I will say a few words about grief. We’ve probably all faced loss at some earlier point in our lives. As someone intimately familiar with that deepest of human emotions, I will remind you that you are not alone. Please remember that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to grieve. Allow yourself the privilege to mourn as you are called to, and then join the resistance. I caution you not to blame yourself for the election’s outcome, especially if you did everything you could to prevent the disaster. Try to avoid assigning blame to others, also. There is likely a myriad cluster of circumstances that brought this on us and we will all suffer the consequences together. Some groups will feel it first and worst. We need to support those of our friends who are at greatest risk.

From my own history of loss and recovery, I will offer this: it’s easier in small doses. One day at a time. One hour. Maybe even minute by minute. To that end, I plan to start a thread called, “Just for Today,” in which I’ll share ideas for facing the world and resisting the worst, finding resilience and ways to persevere. If you have ideas to share, let me know.

(See Post #1 Just for Today: I will find something beautiful provided by Nature.)