You want to talk about indoctrination? You want to talk about propaganda? I went to sixteen years of Catholic schooling back in the fifties and sixties when even god was afraid to dispute what Sister Angelina said in the classroom. I know about indoctrination.
When I was a senior in high school, I won a Voice of Democracy Award from the VFW for an essay I wrote. The award ceremony was held in a Protestant church. This freaked me out so badly, my parents had to send me next door to the rectory so Monsignor Vincent could assure me that going into a Protestant church was not an instant ticket to hell.
Now that’s what you call indoctrination.
What President Obama is doing is not indoctrination. He is trying to send a message to America’s youth that they need to stay in school in order to have a bright future. Not exactly the kind of message to cause the furor we’ve seen.
I think the problem is not the message but the messenger.
The other thing I remember about growing up as an Italian Catholic in the 50s was my parents’ feelings of otherness. There was our little neighborhood where everyone looked like us and spoke like us and ate like us and then there was the rest of America. We didn’t quite belong yet because our grandparents and parents spoke with funny accents. So we could wear all the Davy Crockett coonskin caps we wanted, and sigh over Spin and Marty on the Mousketeers, but we were always going to be just a little bit separate.
When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he was “other” because of his religion. People debated whether or not electing Kennedy wouldn’t, in fact, be the equivalent of inviting the pope to rule America. It seems a silly argument now but it was a very real one then. And it was one that made my parents nervous.
Not that they shared that nervousness voluntarily. This was before the era when parents were expected to communicate with their children. This was back in the day when parents communicated with each other and kids kept quiet unless they were asking for seconds at dinner. My parents would revert to Italian when they really didn’t want us to know what they were saying.
But being kids, we saw and heard more than they thought. And it became very clear to me that having Kennedy’s Catholicism out in the field of public debate made my parents very uncomfortable. They came from a generation that cautioned me to never declare any political affiliation because if I did, I might never get a government job if the wrong party was in power. They remembered signs from their childhood that said Italians weren’t welcomed to cross to the other side of Wayne Junction in Germantown. They lived their lives trying to assimilate.
Back in the 50s, being ethnic was something you tried to walk away from, not something you embraced, unless you were in your own neighborhood surrounded by your own kind.
Barack Obama is an other. Until this past January, the men who led America had one face and it was white. Barack Obama, despite his white mother, is decidedly black. His election has disenfranchised a whole group of people who had not much else going for them other than the fact that their race made them part of the ruling class. Barack Obama overturned their apple cart and they don’t know what to do.
America, as they have always known and defined it, has changed. It scares them. And so they hurl words like Nazi and socialism and Hitler at him, totally ignorant of the history behind those words and how stupid they sound in using them in this context. But two of the strongest emotions we feel as humans are hate and fear. So those who fear the other that is Barack Obama now hurl hate at him in the most absurd of circumstances.
He wanted to tell your kids to stay in school. Maybe, if they do, they’ll actually learn from history and not use it so pathetically and inappropriately. Maybe they’ll have a chance to grow up in an America where there are, finally, no “others” – just us.