S-A-R-Acrostic

This post is for Theme Thursday.  This week's theme is 'an acrostic poem' and Theme Thursday was started by & is hosted by Someone Clever!! 

Acrostics are those poem thingys that never rhyme unless you tried to hard in school.  It's like when you write your name or something vertically and then write stuff that starts with those letters and god, even the instructions sound lame!!  So I'm gonna try to do something with that.

Oh yeah, I'm Sara for the record.  And I think I'll write about ...dah dah dah!!!

S-soapboxes!!  I have a closet full of soapboxes and I love to get going on them....oh yes.  But do I have a soapbox that starts with 'S'?  Indeed I do!  I may have one or even two.  Ooops, Seuss wasn't the one I was thinking of.  Quite a departure from the safe and silly land of Seuss - SEXUALITY was the one I was thinking of.  Not so much the concept but hey, it had to start with 's' right?  More like gay rights & not just rights in terms of legal rights but just being treated like a human being.  I have my own stake in this but it's more about my friends.  No one deserves to live with the threat of bodily harm every time they step outside because of who they love or even just how they feel, dress, and identify.  I realize this shouldn't NEED to be said but alas, it DOES need to be said because way too many people are still idiots. 

A- 'a child's right to play'!  Sounds simple right (yes I know I cheated by starting this with the word 'a' to make it start with 'a').  Children should play right?  But academics are being pushed down every year to younger and younger children.  We used to go to kindergarten to play, learn to follow school routines, and to get introduced to numbers and letters and maybe read by the end of the year.  Now children are at a disadvantage in many areas if they can't read before kindergarten.  Many elementary schools have taken out recess to keep kids in the classroom longer and record numbers of young children are put on medications to manage behavior that is age-appropriate.  Young children (under age 8) NEED to move their bodies and manipulate toys and learning materials in order to learn.  That is just how their brains work.  It is akin to child abuse to make children sit in a desk for many hours grinding away on worksheets and then labeling them as disordered if they cannot somehow survive this way.  America desperately needs to overhaul its educational system in ways that are developmentally appropriate so that children can maximize their learning each school year rather than barely survive and retain even less of what is presented. 

R- race issues - yeah so I'm a bleeding heart.  I can't really explain it but I do trace my passions back to childhood.  I was very young, perhaps in 2nd grade when I read a children's biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.  (He was killed 45 years ago today ya know?)  The story told of how little Martin played with the kids near him every day until one day, his friend told him they couldn't be friends anymore because of his skin color.  As a child, this truly broke my heart to think someone could have this experience for something so arbitrary as color.  I've have a major interest in trying to understand race sociology ever since.  At this point, I'm stunned and beyond not knowing what to do in regard to the fact that 1 in 3 black men become incarcerated compared to less than 1% of white men.  The justice system is stacked against persons of color and even in schools, youth of color are treated more harshly for infractions that all children make as they learn and become socialized.  I'm reading The New Jim Crow in my spare time (yes I read sh*t like that all the time thankyouverymuch) and it's truly sickening.  If anyone knows The Answer - please lets make that happen. 

A- apostrophes!!  Yes, I think about a lot of crazy subjects all at once.  Like race relations and apostrophes.  It's not easy living inside my head which is why I drink.  I try to follow the rules of grammar unless I'm using poetic license which my English teachers always said I didn't get to use.  It grates my last nerve to see sales on Peach's and Banana's at the store.  Peaches don't own anything!  Ditto for the nanners.  Use the right version of words (unless you are me!), use your punctuation right.  At least try and if you are in over your head (like me & semicolons) try NOT to use that structure.  And read this and this.

/rant