Opinion

Poor Elijah’s Almanack: The home front

By June 1940, Britain stood all but alone against Hitler’s armed forces. The attack on Pearl Harbor hadn’t yet drawn the United States into the war, and President Roosevelt was working to persuade the American people and their representatives in Congress that it was in our interest to grant British Prime Minister Churchill’s plea to “give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt recognized the necessity of supporting Britain and preparing for war. She warned, though, there was little point in fighting to defend democracy abroad in the world if we didn’t renew and preserve democracy at home in the United States.

Applying Mrs. Roosevelt’s words as war rages in Ukraine, we need more urgently than ever to “make democracy work at home and prove it is worth preserving.” We’ve become a land governed by arrogance, expediency, corruption, incompetence, insurrection and sedition.

An alarming percentage of voting-age Americans believe in a political conspiracy of humanoid lizards and Democratic pedophiles who traffic in children and secretly rule the world. The recent interrogation of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by Republican members of the Judiciary Committee appeared to exploit Americans’ mystifying susceptibility to this bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory.

Republican politicians are also deliberately disseminating equally unsupported rumors that public schools are teaching critical race theory, an allegedly biased analysis of racial inequality typically introduced at the university level.

In fairness, teachers — liberals and conservatives — sometimes present their opinions as historical facts.

I’m not talking about bigots or zealots on the left or the right. I’m certainly not talking about fanatics who threaten school board members and their children or show up at school with plastic handcuffs to arrest the principal. These excesses are symptomatic of the intolerance and violence undermining our democracy.

I’m talking about well-intentioned Americans who hope to be reasonable.

Not every difference of opinion or disagreement about facts is the product of bias or bigotry. Liberal activists, for example, tend to argue that the Civil War was fought to end slavery. They contend that anyone who claims the principal issue was states’ rights is just trying to sanitize history and paper over American racism.

The problem is that the Civil War’s agony climaxed a long train of assorted disputes between states and the federal government over power. It began in 1798 with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, written by Madison and Jefferson to oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts. It included New England’s threats to secede in 1803 and 1813 because of opposition to the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812. And South Carolina, whose secession in 1860 precipitated the attack on Fort Sumter that launched the Civil War, initially threatened to secede in 1832 over the imposition of federal tariffs.

Conservative partisans, in contrast, often minimize slavery’s causal role. They cite a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to publisher Horace Greeley where he identified preserving the Union as his presidential duty and priority. They’re less likely to highlight Mr. Lincoln’s reference in the same letter to “my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.” They also frequently charge that it’s unpatriotic to sully our national reputation or the reputations of prominent founders by emphasizing slavery’s horrors or those founders’ participation in its iniquity.

I’ve sometimes inadvertently overemphasized one point of view or the other, but accurate history is more instructive and useful than simplistic, cosmetic, air-brushed history. It isn’t unpatriotic to acknowledge George Washington owned slaves. It’s the truth. It’s silly and misleading to leave either slavery or states’ rights out of the story.

Even more fundamental than deciding what to teach in a public school is the question of who gets to make the decision. Teachers should be consulted because we’re supposed to know the relevant material and how to present it. Parents deserve to be heard because they’re the rightful sovereigns in their children’s lives. But public schools don’t belong to teachers despite our presumed expertise, and they don’t belong to parents even though the children in them do.

Since their founding in colonial Massachusetts, American public schools have belonged to their communities. The Puritans believed their commonwealth’s well-being depended on raising up generations who could read the Bible. Education was therefore a public responsibility, undertaken for the public good, that should be supported by taxes and governed by the public.

While public education no longer exists to deliver biblical truths, we’ve entrusted our public schools with a public mission we deem valid and valuable. We support public schools so children can learn to be literate, informed citizens, capable of a constructive role in governing our republic. This means equipping them with a body of knowledge and skill that we as a society consider worthwhile.

Schools exist to serve this societal purpose, not to suit my parental agenda. We elect and appoint school boards to faithfully carry out that mandate. If I disagree with that board’s policies, practices or curriculum decisions, I can state my case and present my opinion at a public meeting, like any other citizen. I can run to replace a school board member with whom I disagree, like any other citizen. I can sue in court. I can even withdraw my child from my local school.

What I can’t do is usurp the power to set school policy. I can’t claim the peremptory right to run my child’s public school in the name of my parental liberty.

What I shouldn’t do is reflexively shut my ears to opposing points of view.

As long as we live within spitting, walking, driving or flying distance of each other, as long as we breathe the same air and drink the same water, our liberty will be measured and governed by other people intent on their liberty.

It’s folly to expect otherwise and madness to resort to violence because of a book or a bathroom.

Sadly, here on the home front, folly and madness are every day more the American way.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

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