No Child Left Behind

Some people in this country have lost their feeble minds.  One speech is not an indoctrination and if someone besides the parent or siblings can influence a child as much as these people fear, then the parents haven't done a very good job at raising them. The contrived brouhaha over the president giving a speech to school kids is so insane, not to mention disrespectful, that I can't believe it's happening in America.  Some backwards country on the other side of the globe, but not in America.

I am 53 and out of the eleven presidents in my lifetime, six have been Republicans who served for a total of 33 of those years and I remember all of them except Eisenhower.  My interest in politics started Halloween night 1964 when I overheard two parents vehemently discussing the difference between Goldwater and Johnson.  In 1968 we students held a school wide mock election at Vandenberg Junior High.  We had the same choices the adults had and even though I voted for Pat Paulsen (his campaign slogan was "I've upped my standards. Now, up yours."), Nixon won.  It was the first of many political disappointments for me. I survived.

The school is still located across the road from the front gate of Vandenberg AFB.  Back in the sixties and seventies it was a high security base, now you can walk on anytime you like.  I attended base schools until we moved to California and then I attended schools that were technically public but three fourths of the students were military brats.  As you can imagine, all of the schools were pretty conservative.  Never would one of them ever have considered blocking a president's speech to the students.  That was then.

Forty years have passed and the nation that eagerly looked forward to the future has become one believing in a history that doesn't exist.  Four years ago if you criticized the president you were branded a traitor by the right wing and now it is the patriotic thing to do at every opportunity, no matter how ridiculous.  For the previous eight years students were taught that they should listen respectfully to their president, now a few lunatics have determined that no children should listen to the president.  Why is that?

I am not a fan of President Obama, he's lived down to my expectations, but he is still the President.  As we were taught in the military, if you can't respect the man you can still respect the office.  School districts deciding that students don't need to hear what the President wishes to express to them because a few people object is not in the best interests of the students.  They go to school to learn and the only way they can do that is to be exposed to different points of view (who would have thought?).  After the speech they should be able to ask, and have their questions answered, by their teachers and their parents.  That is how you raise good citizens.  Now if the end goal is to produce mindless drones instead, then we are well on our way to being a nation of uninformed, unquestioning dummies.  And we will all be left behind.

BBB