Wed, May 28, 2003

While on a recent vacation, I had occasion to read the editorial page of a local newspaper in a region that's fairly unanimous in its right-leaning tendencies. It would be unfair to cast all conservatives as brainless pro-Bush war hawks who echo the party's position on any issue without any thought of their own, so I won't. (Not that right-wingers experience any hesitation before labeling anyone else a whiny liberal treasonist baby-killer hippie.) However, on this particular editorial page, the letters to the editor were written by the "from my cold dead hands"/nuke the French/Bush is God types. (I checked online and the paper's letters to the editor had been like that for weeks. Which says as much about the editors as it does the readers.)

One topic in particular that was on the letters page I was reading (and three before it in the preceding two weeks) was a recent article by conservative columnist Michelle Malkin entitled (ever so subtly) "Brainwashing Preschool Peaceniks." Malkin had got hold of a book that is on a list of books used in training pre-school caregivers, and this particular book is entitled That's Not Fair! A Teacher's Guide to Activism with Young Children. Basically, the point of the book is to encourage pre-school teachers to foster critical thinking skills. It's about curbing the reflex that most of us have, when talking with the very young, to over-simplify things – and avoiding the instinctive response "Because that's how it is" when asked "Why?" Malkin, because creating a stir improves readership, focused on a particular example in the book that was more liberal than necessary, but in the context of the book as a whole was simply another example of providing alternative viewpoints. Malkin drew some very faint connections and managed to give the impression in her column that every custodian of pre-schoolers was forced to read this book and abide by its credos to the letter. Therefore, Malkin concluded, all of our young children were being taught all sorts of crazy liberal things like "war is bad." If children are being fed that message at such a young age, how can we expect them to grow up and elect someone like George W. Bush, our country's greatest president and the liberator of countless innocent Iraqis, she asked – in not so many words.

Malkin's column obviously had the desired effect, as the readers who wrote in expressed fears that such anti-war tendencies in today's tots will lead inexorably to an unprotected America of tomorrow where no terrorist or warlike action from another country will be sufficient to provoke a military response. One reader expressed disgust that toddlers were being force-fed "the same liberal, blame-America ideas that are prevalent in so many colleges and universities." Malkin (the kind of columnist who regularly uses the term "Clinton-loving" as a slur) knew her audience. They have no interest in checking on her flimsy logic and unresearched claims. They just know she speaks the Conservative Truth and if she says teachers are slapping guns out of the hands of our righteous toddlers before they can enlist in the war on terror, it must be so. Or maybe, these readers did see the underlying message of That's Not Fair and it scared them even more.

I'm not sure what bothers the Bush faithful more, the concept of critical thinking or the thought that a three-year-old could see the world in clearer focus than they do. Not everyone blindly accepts what they're told as unquestioningly as the conservative pro-war flock swallows the Bush administration's propaganda and fearmongering. (Not that the Bushies are the first to rest on those time-honored political mainstays, but they're certainly the most unashamed and unchallenged in recent memory.) It would seem that a child, or a grown person for that matter, could understand that war is a terrible and destructive thing and a last resort in conflict resolution without endangering a generation by refusing to resort to force. (Even the Bush administration – with a remarkably straight face – referred to force as their "last resort" in the Iraq situation.) The overwhelming assumption among the hawks is that opposing this war is equivalent to opposing all war and wanting to drive all our tanks into the ocean and leave our country vulnerable to enslavement by Iraqis or North Koreans or Canadians. I don't know where such narrow-sighted thinking comes from, but it may have to do with a lifetime of psychologically reconciling the actions and statements of decades of party leaders who say one thing, mean another, and do yet a third. I can see where it might be necessary to put blinders on to avoid getting caught up by the inherent conflicts of reasoning.

I have a hard time imagining what kind of book these people would rather see used to train pre-school instructors. You Stole My Marker, Now Eat My Lead! A Guide to Violent Conflict Resolution in Toddlers? With a foreword by Columbine massacre leaders Kleibold and Harris? Is the message they really want their three-year-olds to hear "War is what we do to someone who has what we want, or doesn't want to do what we say"? It seems to me that it makes more sense to try to steer young minds away from such horrors for as long as we can in a nation so filled with violence.

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