http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=102501"I also still remember a number of Spanish words, and could probably still count to 20 in Spanish if you gave me enough time and do-overs. I remember when I was about 5 talking to a friend of my mother's and telling her I watched Sesame Street (it was new then). She said she thought that show was awful. I was amazed, since I loved it so, and I asked her why. She said, "They're teaching kids to speak Spanish!" Later I asked my mother what she could possibly mean by it. What could be wrong with learning Spanish? Wasn't learning a good thing?
In fact, Sesame Street did not teach me to speak Spanish. I still can't. However, it did introduce me to a number of Latino (or, back then, Hispanic) characters, and it also taught me to recognize a fair number of useful Spanish words, so that now when I see Spanish, it isn't completely alien to me. I haven't become a Spanish-speaker, but I am, as it were, more Spanish-friendly. More tolerant of Spanish (and Spanish-speakers) if you will. At least more tolerant than I'd have been if I'd grown up listening to that friend of my mothers rant all day about what she must have seen as the Hispanic Menace."
* * *
I'm in the same age group -- I did watch Sesame Street, but something that had an even bigger effect on my childhood was receiving a subscription to National Geographic World. It was like a tiny bright window that opened up, between the Watergate era (I learned to read by looking at the Time and Newsweek covers from that time) -- and the Iranian hostage crisis and the rise of Reaganism. Then, as now, the press coverage that the United States was receiving beyond its borders, was rather critical. But National Geographic World showed a different view. It showed a nation with children in it, just like me, and a lot of people who were trying hard to make things better.
I don't know if this magazine contributed to my decision to go on to college, then grad school, and earn a geography degree. Looking back on all of this with a grown-up eye, I see that a lot of the ideas presented were oversimplified, naive, let's-all-hold-hands-and-get-along fluff. The "Kids Did It" section about a child in Chicago who started a petition to save a local park, or another kid in Florida who put up little fences to protect turtle nesting sites -- I mean, really -- the magazine wouldn't tell us if the park was flattened by a bulldozer after the local council caved in to a developer, or the turtles were all killed in an oil spill, would they? What happened in the past 3 decades is that we kept using more and more energy, and urban sprawl exploded, and global trade spread environmental damage across the entire planet. And other people told me that the National Geographic Society itself is a large bureaucratic organizaton that has ties to the CIA and industrial interests, and has been accused of sexism, racism, and exploitative research practices, and deliberately glossing over the ugly things that the west, and scientists, and Americans in particular have been accused of.
So now I'm a geographer, and I teach people a few years older than I was when I started reading National Geographic World. Many of them are very bright, and very idealistic. PA said in her original post, "whenever you teach a child to believe in an ideal, you are priming her for the same painful process of disillusionment, anger, and grief" -- and heaven help me, that's my job. It's what I'm paid to do. I tell them about the bad things that have happened and are still going on, some of which PA has outlined already, so I won't repeat. And just when I'm on the verge of telling them that there is so much inertia in the system --- and so many people who are mean and selfish, or who just don't care -- that there is absolutely no way we can get out of this without a lot of us, humans I mean, ending up impoverished or dead ... I see that calm sunny window in my mind. And to my surprise, I find myself talking about all the things could do, to change the situation and bring that kinder future a bit closer.
There are only so many years in a person's life when that window can be installed, Plaid Adder. Later there will be plenty of time for Howard Zinn and George Monbiot, and to ask how much of what you (and not just Americans, but people around the world) believe, was an illusion.
So give them that window. They might be angry later, the more they learn about the world -- but they'll forgive us.
You ask "whether it will ever be possible to connect these ideals with being American again". I don't have the quote with me right now, but almost 90 years ago someone surveying the shattered wreckage of WWI asked whether there would ever be a shared European culture, with Britons listening to German symphonies, Russians reading French literature, open borders and a shared flow of ideas across the entire continent.
And of course, the answer to both questions is "yes".
Sooner than we think, PJ will be old enough to run for public office. Perhaps, sometime in the 2030s, she will walk up to a certain wrinkly old man and say, "Hello, George Walker Bush. I'm the new President. My mommies talked about you a lot when I was growing up." Even if she doesn't -- even if she decides she'll stop once she gets to city council, or turns her back on politics altogether and instead goes into health care, farming, business administration, energy systems design -- or teaching geography classes -- thanks to her parents, at least she'll have an idea of what to look for when it comes to governance.
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