Deace: How the hell did parents lose so much control in our schools?

"Just the good ol' boys, wouldn't change if they could." — "Dukes of Hazzard," Waylon Jennings

But that was then, in the fictional Hazzard County, when things made much more sense. Now we all apparently live in Hazard, Kentucky, where I introduced you on my show the other day to a drag strip show put on by students with the full endorsement and participation of the faculty.

The lesson is that if this can happen in Kentucky, then it can happen anywhere. And it is, right here in my home state of Iowa, which appears to be trending more and more red by the day politically, but culturally is still plagued by cancerous progressive growths in many of its school districts.

The Des Moines suburb of Waukee has been a battleground the last few weeks as Rainbow Jihad erotica has been discovered in school libraries. With parents and taxpayers preparing to vote in school board elections on Nov. 2, the debate about parent input and control of their children's education has taken on as much energy as I've ever seen.

The mom who read the smut out loud in front of the school board, as well as showed them graphic pictures from one of the books, deserves a thousand gold stars for her civic fortitude. So does another Waukee parent for informing me that the school district's mask-optional policy may be getting blown up by the mask cult.

It appears that some fully masked classrooms have been created, which required some elementary school students to now be moved into other classrooms with new teachers mid-year. So this isn't so much mask-optional any longer as it is mask segregation.

In both the mask and the erotica cases, we are confronted with the staggering reality of how in the hell did we ever reach this point in the first place? How did we as parents lose so much control over the fundamentals of the game? How did we become so easily conned that the educrat class believed it could so easily disrespect and/or manipulate our wishes?

About those wishes. Maybe we need to ask what they have really been all along. What have we truly wanted, if we are being fully honest with ourselves, from sending our kids off to school? Because for a lot of us, I think the answer is that we really don't know. We just send them because that's what people do. Because somebody has to do the teaching, and it definitely wasn't going to be you. Or we needed to plant them somewhere during the day while we worked off our increasing tax and inflation burden to drunk Uncle Sam.

If you don't see that's a plan ripe for a hostile takeover by nefarious forces, you probably deserve to be in a situation even worse than what is going on in Waukee.

Teachers and school administrators have gotten very used to talking to parents as if the former are parents' bosses, when the exact opposite is true. The schools are ours. Every adult in them works for us. They are accountable to answering every question we have and being totally transparent about all that goes on there. But only if we really care to make that clear.

Unfortunately, we have clearly not cared for so long now that what caring will have to look like these days, in order to recover lost ground, will be far more intense. The dark spiritual forces now operating within many of our children's schools want their new normal, and they want it bad.

They will call you domestic terrorists — or worse — for waking up from your nap and daring to care. Nevertheless, wake up we must.

We simply can't allow ourselves to be a slave to the demons of government indoctrination any longer. We aren't in chains. Stop acting like it. We are free, which makes what is happening to our children, while you stand by and do nothing for far too long, all the more pathetic. So this year, Nov. 2 may as well be July 4. It is Independence Day at the polls, nothing short of it.

It's "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" time. Time to pick — and win — a fight.