Livejournal Entry the Thirty-First: A Carefully Worded Response
I received a forwarded email from a family member recently. You know the kind, multiple nested preambles like "OMG this is so true!!!!!" etc., where, if you're lucky, the font isn't purple 22-point comic sans.
Anyway, I often get clusters of these forwards with the occasional raging Anti-Obama message thrown in (e.g. the Anti-Obama T-shirts: my favorite, of course, being the one with Obama and Hitler side by side, and the caption "Hitler Made Great Speeches, Too!" Classy.)
I generally ignore these, but every once in a while I decide that I need to present a counterpoint to something I find ridiculous or dangerously thoughtless or both, so I dust off the writing part of my brain and set to it, trying to merely rest a foot on my soapbox as opposed to jumping wholeheartedly onto it.
The particular message in question this time was about a planned (for some value of planned) boycott of schools this Tuesday (9/8) in response to President Obama's address on the importance of education, which is going to be made during the school day so that students can watch it in schools across the country. Here's the message:
WHETHER PUBLIC, PRIVATE OR PAROCHIAL - I PROMISE YOU MY KIDS WON'T BE IN SCHOOL NEXT TUESDAY IF THEY SHOW THIS - THE CHOICE IS YOURS !!
From NBC's Mark Murray
This coming Tuesday, President Obama is set to deliver a speech on education and its importance to students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA.
The speech also will be broadcast on the White House's Web site, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan has encouraged principals across the country to have their students tune in.
Yet somehow, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, Jim Greer, believes Obama's speech as a platform "to spread" his "socialist ideology."
Says Greer: "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power."
More: "While I support educating our children to respect both the office of the American President and the value of community service, I do not support using our children as tools to spread liberal propaganda. The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President's agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President's initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates."
Has the state of our political discourse devolved to the point where a president's speech about the importance of education gets called a socialist power grab?
*** UPDATE *** We just spoke with Florida Republican Party spokeswoman Katie Gordon, who said that Greer's concern is the recommended lesson plan from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. One example for pre-K to 6th graders: "As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following: What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do? What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?"
Gordon tells First Read that the Florida GOP believes that students should be taught to respect the office of the presidency. Its beef, she said, is that parents should be able to decide whether their children should be allowed to participate in this kind of discussion.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/09/02/2050250.aspx
--
My response, which I sent to my entire family, is here:
>> WHETHER PUBLIC, PRIVATE OR PAROCHIAL - I PROMISE YOU MY KIDS WON'T BE IN SCHOOL NEXT TUESDAY
>> IF THEY SHOW THIS - THE CHOICE IS YOURS !!
Let me get this straight:
To avoid the *possibility* that Obama will brainwash your children with socialist propaganda during a 20 minute presentation, the solution is to pull your child out of school and *definitely* set them back for a whole day?
Wow, what a great idea! Send kids the message that it's okay to skip an entire day of school if there's one thing going on that day that they might find objectionable. I hope these concerned parents at least spend part of the day with their children sharing their own parental wisdom about the importance of staying in school, since they'll have missed Obama's speech on the subject (as well as that day's lessons in English, Math, Social Studies, etc). These parents will certainly have an opportunity to discuss the concept of "Double Standard" with their children - might as well get them started early!
If this kind of thinking represents the best solution to the insidious specter of socialist propaganda supposedly being beamed into our heads continuously by the Obama administration, then the US's ability to compete education-wise with the rest of the world is going down the toilet even faster than previously thought. These concerned parents should consider talking to a teacher (not necessarily their child's teacher, just a teacher in general) and getting their opinion on this boycott idea. Unless they think - by extension of the fact that schools are allowing this presidential address to even happen - that all teachers must therefore be bleeding-heart liberal Obama-lovers; in which case, forget I suggested it.
I have an alternative proposal for all the concerned Chicken-Little's out there: How about you send your kids to school as usual, and you watch Obama's address (I know, I know, it's hard, but be a trooper, huh? This isn't about you: Do it for them.), and after school you can sit down with your kid or kids and talk with them about it. That way, you can quickly undo whatever socialist brainwashing that mean old Barack put into their precious little heads. After all, you're their parents, the ones they ultimately look up to. The values you instill on them should be able to trump whatever comes out of the mouth of our evil Socialist Trojan Horse of a president. Your kids can't be so mindless that 20 minutes of Obama will irreversibly and indelibly set their concept of civics for the rest of their lives, can they?
Then again, if a forwarded email with a marginally grammatical all-caps preamble is all it takes to get you to boycott your child's education, then maybe the apple didn't fall too far from the tree, in which case you're fucked. Sorry.
But hey, I'm not a parent, so what the hell would *I* know?
Hani Sallum
stiltwalker@hotmail.com
http://web.mit.edu/hmsallum/www/portfolio/portfolio.html
http://www.thestiltwalker.com/
PS. This isn't a forward. I, Hani Sallum, spent the better part of a weekend morning writing and rewriting this myself. These are my own thoughts; I stand by them, and I encourage you to forward this to parents who might be considering keeping their child out of school on Tuesday, 9/8/2009. (family member), I encourage you to forward this to (person who forwarded OP); it would be presumptuous for me to forward it to him.
Clarification: My response was to the original poster of the email, not my family member.
Anyway, I often get clusters of these forwards with the occasional raging Anti-Obama message thrown in (e.g. the Anti-Obama T-shirts: my favorite, of course, being the one with Obama and Hitler side by side, and the caption "Hitler Made Great Speeches, Too!" Classy.)
I generally ignore these, but every once in a while I decide that I need to present a counterpoint to something I find ridiculous or dangerously thoughtless or both, so I dust off the writing part of my brain and set to it, trying to merely rest a foot on my soapbox as opposed to jumping wholeheartedly onto it.
The particular message in question this time was about a planned (for some value of planned) boycott of schools this Tuesday (9/8) in response to President Obama's address on the importance of education, which is going to be made during the school day so that students can watch it in schools across the country. Here's the message:
WHETHER PUBLIC, PRIVATE OR PAROCHIAL - I PROMISE YOU MY KIDS WON'T BE IN SCHOOL NEXT TUESDAY IF THEY SHOW THIS - THE CHOICE IS YOURS !!
From NBC's Mark Murray
This coming Tuesday, President Obama is set to deliver a speech on education and its importance to students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA.
The speech also will be broadcast on the White House's Web site, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan has encouraged principals across the country to have their students tune in.
Yet somehow, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, Jim Greer, believes Obama's speech as a platform "to spread" his "socialist ideology."
Says Greer: "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power."
More: "While I support educating our children to respect both the office of the American President and the value of community service, I do not support using our children as tools to spread liberal propaganda. The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President's agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President's initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates."
Has the state of our political discourse devolved to the point where a president's speech about the importance of education gets called a socialist power grab?
*** UPDATE *** We just spoke with Florida Republican Party spokeswoman Katie Gordon, who said that Greer's concern is the recommended lesson plan from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. One example for pre-K to 6th graders: "As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following: What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do? What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?"
Gordon tells First Read that the Florida GOP believes that students should be taught to respect the office of the presidency. Its beef, she said, is that parents should be able to decide whether their children should be allowed to participate in this kind of discussion.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/09/02/2050250.aspx
--
My response, which I sent to my entire family, is here:
>> WHETHER PUBLIC, PRIVATE OR PAROCHIAL - I PROMISE YOU MY KIDS WON'T BE IN SCHOOL NEXT TUESDAY
>> IF THEY SHOW THIS - THE CHOICE IS YOURS !!
Let me get this straight:
To avoid the *possibility* that Obama will brainwash your children with socialist propaganda during a 20 minute presentation, the solution is to pull your child out of school and *definitely* set them back for a whole day?
Wow, what a great idea! Send kids the message that it's okay to skip an entire day of school if there's one thing going on that day that they might find objectionable. I hope these concerned parents at least spend part of the day with their children sharing their own parental wisdom about the importance of staying in school, since they'll have missed Obama's speech on the subject (as well as that day's lessons in English, Math, Social Studies, etc). These parents will certainly have an opportunity to discuss the concept of "Double Standard" with their children - might as well get them started early!
If this kind of thinking represents the best solution to the insidious specter of socialist propaganda supposedly being beamed into our heads continuously by the Obama administration, then the US's ability to compete education-wise with the rest of the world is going down the toilet even faster than previously thought. These concerned parents should consider talking to a teacher (not necessarily their child's teacher, just a teacher in general) and getting their opinion on this boycott idea. Unless they think - by extension of the fact that schools are allowing this presidential address to even happen - that all teachers must therefore be bleeding-heart liberal Obama-lovers; in which case, forget I suggested it.
I have an alternative proposal for all the concerned Chicken-Little's out there: How about you send your kids to school as usual, and you watch Obama's address (I know, I know, it's hard, but be a trooper, huh? This isn't about you: Do it for them.), and after school you can sit down with your kid or kids and talk with them about it. That way, you can quickly undo whatever socialist brainwashing that mean old Barack put into their precious little heads. After all, you're their parents, the ones they ultimately look up to. The values you instill on them should be able to trump whatever comes out of the mouth of our evil Socialist Trojan Horse of a president. Your kids can't be so mindless that 20 minutes of Obama will irreversibly and indelibly set their concept of civics for the rest of their lives, can they?
Then again, if a forwarded email with a marginally grammatical all-caps preamble is all it takes to get you to boycott your child's education, then maybe the apple didn't fall too far from the tree, in which case you're fucked. Sorry.
But hey, I'm not a parent, so what the hell would *I* know?
Hani Sallum
stiltwalker@hotmail.com
http://web.mit.edu/hmsallum/www/portfolio/portfolio.html
http://www.thestiltwalker.com/
PS. This isn't a forward. I, Hani Sallum, spent the better part of a weekend morning writing and rewriting this myself. These are my own thoughts; I stand by them, and I encourage you to forward this to parents who might be considering keeping their child out of school on Tuesday, 9/8/2009. (family member), I encourage you to forward this to (person who forwarded OP); it would be presumptuous for me to forward it to him.
Clarification: My response was to the original poster of the email, not my family member.