Our Amber Ortega has written of her experience with her children’s school administrations’ decisions to make President Obama’s speech to students optional for classrooms. In her article, she asks the question “Why would parents keep their children from seeing this speech?”
The answer is as simple as it is profound: fear.
More than ever in its tumultuous history, America is today a deeply divided country. President Obama’s inauguration crystallized both the hopes and fears of this nation in a way that is bringing to light a lot of suppressed tensions. Obama is seen by many as a radical, and in many ways, he is. It’s natural, therefore, that his messages of change evoke anxiety — few people like change, especially when it seems threatening to one’s preferred lifestyle.
Yet we know, or should know, that repression is never a proper response. Historically and traditionally, telling someone they can’t have something just makes them want it even more. So keeping a child from watching or listening to the President’s speech will likely have the effect of their asking why they can’t, leading to an eventual discussion that the parents might not want to have in the first place. It seems that many are confusing Obama’s political stances with the content of his speech, and are outright rejecting it based on nothing more than what they think they know about it.
How sad, then, that Obama’s message of persistence and hard work — which we should all adopt, student or not — will go unheard by some who might benefit the most from receiving it. I believe in the power of positive modeling; our children tend to do what they see us doing. So if we want our kids to learn to think for themselves, we shouldn’t be denying them the opportunity to do so. I may not have wanted to hear anything President Bush ever said, but that never stopped me from listening to him. The only way to go these days is forward, and we can’t do that if we’re blinded by our fears.
