Why I am optimistic

I believe that there is a governmental campaign afoot to completely change the relationship between the State and the Family, starting with home educators.

But I believe that they will fail.

I know that there is a great deal of doom and gloom around, and of course I am having my days of despair too, but here is what gives me hope:

When we can explain what is happening in terms which relate our plight to the lives of more conventional families, they are starting to wake up and get it. Slowly, but they really are (spot the brilliantly articulate non-HEer in that second link).

We have a power which Mr Macho Bully Boy Balls did not anticipate in his wildest dreams. That power is female. It is the power of the mama tiger seeing a threat to her cubs (Hear me ROOOOAAAAARRRRR) combined with the power more often seen in women than men, IME, to network and share ideas and actually get on with 45 things at once. How many ideas have you seen in the last month of ways to fight the proposed legislation? And maybe half of them are damp squibs, but there are just so many of us on the blogs and the boards and the lists and at the local HE meetings who are fired up with ideas and fury and goddammit with right against might.

It's not samizdat now it is teh internetz. We are connected. We are a many headed hydra. We are going to be a thorn in the side of the State. And if they do pass their evil legislation, we will, legally and politely, find ways of making it just too horrible for anyone to be prepared to do the HomeEducationStaziInspector job.

And, in a year's time, Ed Balls will be out of a job, and Graham Badman will still have to be Graham Badman every morning when he wakes up.