John Harwood hit the nail on the head today by invoking the "S-word" to explain the hysterical opposition to President Obama’s planned address to American school children. It’s stupid for a lot of reasons, but mostly for its futility and hypocrisy. After all, by censoring their children’s access to information, aren’t these parents conducting a form of indoctrination?
Above all else, they are cultivating disrespect for the Office of the Presidency; a mainstay of the so-called traditional values system that they claim so passionately to protect. If the shoe were on the other foot, and if four years ago, parents opposed the visage and voice of Bush 43 coming into their child’s classrooms, the Right would have quickly accused those parents of treachery, or worse.
Time was, the education and cultural enrichment of America’s children was almost entirely apolitical. I grew up in Southern New England and among the kid’s TV shows I used to enjoy watching was "Big Brother Bob Emery" which was broadcast on WBZ in Boston. As benign as any program an innocent five-year-old would be allowed to watch, Bob Emery was in some ways, a forerunner of Mr. Rogers. I have distinct memories of that program, and apparently others of my age do too.
I remember him in the '50's, having us salute the flag with a glass of milk. We would drink the milk as he played, "Hail to the Chief", and he showed a portrait of President Eisenhower. Sometimes he would gather the kids around and talk or sing... He would play a ukulele or banjo. I believe he read the comics at times.
At the age of five, most children at that time didn’t know Democrat from Republican, Conservative from Liberal. One hopes that is still true. Children in the 1950s were mostly spared witness to the vilification of public figures. Parents didn’t discuss certain matters in the presence of impressionable children.
In September, 1964, President Johnson visited my hometown to speak at the anniversary of a local university. I was in junior high school at the time recall that we were allowed the morning off to observe his motorcade as it passed through city streets. What I can’t recall, was the protest of any parents against this decision. Johnson was immensely popular at the time and on the way to a crushing landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. When school convened later that day, the excitement was palpable as almost the entire student body of my school had gotten to see the President of the United States.
In 2009 it is unfathomable that parents would want to shield their children from Barack Obama whose own compelling life story is an inspiration in itself. The signal that they are sending to their children is of a deeply cynical nature. Before they are able to form an opinion of their own, one way or another, these children are being inculcated with beliefs and prejudices that may stay with them for a lifetime. Children ARE that impressionable. One hopes that, in most cases, they are only conveying a message of passive intolerance. But what these parents should be asking themselves is if they are helping create the next generation of Timothy McVeighs or James Earl Rays.