No Palestinian family was invited to be on the stage at the DNC.
Before retiring I was an elementary school Art teacher.
When I first started teaching in 1984, neurodivergent students - they labeled them Special Needs students - were kept segregated.
My last fifteen years we fought for greater inclusion and some progress had been made.
As the buildings’ art teacher - over the years I taught in all of the district’s schools - I taught every “special needs kid”, either in an inclusive setting or individually.
So when I saw Gus Walz at the DNC last night, I totally recognized him and was moved by his tearful reaction to his dad.
Gus has gone viral this morning.
That’s good. Making neurodivergent kids visible helps to see that neurodivergence isn’t inherently an issue for the individual child and that all neurodivergence isn’t necessarily a disability.
Instead neurodivergence can be seen as a difference in learning and processing information, some of which become disabilities in an inaccessible and ableist society.
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Delegates in the United Center were also moved by the speech of parents of an American hostage. The couple asked that Hamas release their son, 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and the other hostages.
They praised President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for “working tirelessly” in pursuit of a cease-fire deal that would include the release of the remaining 100 or so hostages.
It is a shame that no Palestinian family, no parent of a dead child in Gaza, were invited to speak.
That’s even though there were 36 “uncommitted” swing state delegates representing over 700,000 voters at the DNC.
Last night, Uncommitted leaders announced that they had been denied any speaking time on the main stage.
AOC Tweeted that, “Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment. To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians.”
Ocasio-Cortez, one of the few speakers to mention Gaza at all, spoke only about a cease-fire and hostage release, not about ending the Biden administration’s illegal supply of arms to Israel.
Ocasio-Cortez’s speech and its embrace by the Democratic mainstream exposed rifts on the left — from the Democratic Socialists of America, the group that propelled the New York representative’s meteoric rise, to fellow Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
“It’s been unconscionable for me the last 10 months to witness my colleagues in this administration refusing to recognize the genocidal war that is taking place in Gaza,” Omar said on Wednesday.
The Minnesota representative, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, directly attacked the administration, but used Ocasio-Cortez’s turn of phrase in a thinly veiled admonishment: “To not understand that ‘working tirelessly’ for a ceasefire is really not a thing, and they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Omar and all members of The Squad including AOC, endorsed Biden before he dropped out - and Kamala Harris now - for president.