All Labor Day weekend, while I should've been living in 1926 Los Angeles (as that's when and where the novel I'm trying to finish takes place), I couldn't quit returning to mental and gut responses to the flack about Obama's talk to students.
As a parent, an educator, and a believer in American principles, I've been sickened to read and hear of people using, for the sake of partisan politics, the President's attempt to encourage students to stay in school, set goals, believe in themselves and work hard.
My big daughter, a high school assistant principal, had to endure enraged phone calls from parents. A teacher at her school reported that his pastor asked parents to refuse to allow their children to view the video. My little daughter's school district declined to show the video until they had the chance to censor it "if appropriate."
Media commentators have referred to the speech as "indoctrination" and "mind control." Should we broaden the definitions of those terms to include the content of Mr. Obama's speech (the text of which is available at www.whitehouse.gov), hardly a television show, classroom lesson, news article, or advertisement, and certainly no pastor's sermon, or parent's guidance, could escape fitting those labels.
All weekend, I kept recalling these lines from "The Second Coming," a poetic masterpiece by W.B. Yeats:
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
I don't believe those parents who made enraged phone calls are "the worst." But perhaps those who encouraged them to do so are, no matter if they are pastors.
Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" between world wars, when frightened people were being recruited into terrible movements, while pastors for the most part stood by merely observing and declining to risk losing church members by speaking hard truths.
My current most fervent prayer is that our pastors begin to prove themselves braver than those.
