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January 12, 2003

CONFESSIONS OF A FLAG-WAVER

Horsefeathers is honored to present a guest blog by the distinguished author, Diane Ravitch*

Many teachers and professional organizations have debated the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism.

One of my academic colleagues recently argued in a published column that the question, "What lessons should we teach?" is the wrong question because it implies that teachers should transmit a single viewpoint about the attacks. Those who are attempting to answer the question, he claimed, break into two predictable camps: "the flag-wavers and the self-haters." Both camps allegedly share a deeply undemocratic assumption: that kids should agree with what they are taught and with those who teach them. Instead, my colleague argues, students should be presented with the views of both the "flag-wavers and the self-haters" and be allowed to make up their own minds, to come to their own conclusions about September 11th.

Someone needs to say a word for teaching America's core values and for waving the flag when appropriate. Here is my explanation.

Children are not born with an innate belief in the values of a free society. They are not born believing in the importance of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the other freedoms and rights that we hold dear. They are not born believing in the right to form and organize groups independent of the government.

If they were, the world would be a freer, more democratic place than it is. But our daughters and sons do not enter the world knowing these things. They are profoundly vulnerable to what adults teach them, for good or for ill. If anything, we have ample evidence that churches, schools, the law, and the other institutions of society can be used to teach intolerance and hatred for those whose speech, religion, dress, and ideas differ from our own.

It makes no sense for parents, for society, or for schools to take a hands-off attitude towards children and assume that they will figure it all out for themselves. Some might conclude that it is OK to discriminate against people who are different; some deduce that it is OK to silence dissident voices; some might decide that it is OK to tie Matthew Shepard to a fencepost and leave him to die.

No, I think we must defend and teach the values that we believe in, not because they are ours, but because they are the values that make a free, democratic, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious society possible. Without the civil liberties and political rights that undergird democratic society, we could see those rights and liberties whittled away by forces of passion, intolerance, religious hatred, and ignorance.

Where does the flag fit into this discussion? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the flag is a symbol of our rights and freedoms. It is a symbol of the sacrifices that others have made over the years so that we might live in freedom, free to argue with each other, free to sneer at our elected officials, free to practice our religion or no religion at all.

Now comes the confession. One of my earliest family photographs shows me and a couple of my siblings in Houston, Texas, holding and waving small American flags. It was taken when I was 6 in 1944.

Why were we waving the flag? My uncle Herman was in the South Pacific, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fighting the Japanese. He saw combat in some very bloody battles; many of his friends were killed, some while detained in Japanese POW camps. We were waving it for him and other American soldiers and sailors.

Why were we waving the flag? My family is Jewish. My mother arrived in America in 1917, my father's family earlier. In 1944, my mother's remaining family in Bessarabia was being processed into incinerators, as was my father's remaining family in Poland. None survived the war. We were waving the flag for them. We were waving the flag, too, for the American G.I.'s who were fighting and dying in Europe to stop the madman who had unleashed the war. We knew that they were fighting and dying for us.

Since 1960, I have lived in New York City where, over the years, I have not seen too many flags except for the annual veterans' parades, which were sparsely attended.

All that changed on September 11, 2001.

On that infamous date, I rushed to the harbor and arrived in time to see the second plane strike the second tower. It was right in front of me. I stood there watching people burn to death, watching massive flames and smoke pouring out of the two buildings, watching the sky above me fill up with confetti, the detritus from people's desks. People whose only "crime" was to come to work in the morning.

My neighborhood in Brooklyn that day was covered by a thick layer of ash that blew across the harbor. By noon, the ash blanketed the cars on the street, the dust so thick in the air that it was like night-time-on a day that began with a brilliant blue sky. A neighbor who lived across the street from me died at the top of one of the towers; she was a vice-president of Morgan Stanley. Everyone knew someone who died, and everyone knew people who had barely survived.

Overnight the flags began to appear in my neighborhood. This is a neighborhood that typically votes 90% Democratic. People who never owned a flag suddenly had one hanging over their front door, attached to their car antenna, pinned to their chest.

Most of the flags remained in place all year. They all came back again as the one-year anniversary of the attacks approached.

Why are people wearing and displaying and "waving" the flag? They are saying, in the shortest short-hand that they know, that we treasure our nation's ideals. We are part of a national community that has struggled to achieve its rights and freedoms, and we are determined to support and defend that national community and those rights and freedoms.

Part of the ongoing struggle involves teaching our children what those rights and freedoms are, how precious they are, how easily they have been lost in the past, and how important it is to understand and defend them.

I will continue to wave the flag, because I continue to love the ideals that our country represents. If others disagree, so be it. It's a free country.

*Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Ravitch is the editor of many publications, including the annual Brookings Papers on Education Policy. She edited The Schools We Deserve, Debating the Future of American Education, and The American Reader.

She has many books to her credit including Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms; National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide; What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (with Hoover distinguished visiting fellow and Koret Task Force member Chester Finn Jr.); The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973; and The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980. Her publications have been translated into many languages. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Brookings Review.

Ravitch, a historian of education, has lectured on democracy and civic education throughout the world.

Posted at 09:32 PM by

Comments

Thank you.

Posted by: thoth on January 13, 2003 11:47 AM

Thank You for the post on the flag and what it means. Herewith, what I managed to essay, a challenger for the Shell-Economist prize.

Long Live the United States of America,

Best Wishes,

Alex Kroll Jr

HOW MUCH FREEDOM ARE WE WILLING TO TRADE FOR SECURITY?

You felt you could reach up into the sky and your fingers would come down blue. A perfect, beautiful, sensible day. This made the first, malignant, cross-browed, smoking tattoo on the face of the World Trade Center utterly incomprehensible. Out of the clear blue.

Minutes later, the second jetliner, rattling near to pieces at such a low altitude, smashed into the other World Trade Tower at close to 500mph. Closely followed by the attack on the Pentagon and an aborted attack on the White House things became as chillingly clear as that perfect sky. The leader of liberty-loving mankind, the most sophisticated and creative economic and military power on the planet, had been felled by a fanatic judo chop.

The months and years leading up to this watershed atrocity had seen the security of the United States and her citizens frittered away by, among other things, senators fixated by the weighty issue of cell-phone use in cars. A press transfixed by the Chandra Levy-Gary Condit mystery. A wedge of minority lobbies decrying racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike (later proved to be empirically justifiable) and succeeding in rendering it illegal. A powerful alternative-lifestyle faction, led by the US President, commanding the military (notwithstanding the possibility of unit-inimical relationships forming within the combat team) to experiment in socio-sexual re-engineering. A homicidal militant Islamic faction, learning, through a succession of deadly, largely unpunished terrorist experiments, that the US government cared more to squelch its own citizens more than them.

A pity America’s citizens didn't reach this understanding as fast as America-hating militant Islam. This is especially poignant considering what we’ve let slip and what we must now go against: farcical inspections at airport security checkpoints, new adventures in the name of security by America's judicial-enforcement arms and even the specter of a US military now training for operations on American soil, habeus corpus be damned.

Notwithstanding the capture in 1995 of a laptop computer by the Philippine federal investigative bureau that contained the outline of the so-called "Boyinka" plan to mount attacks on American skyscrapers and national monuments attacks or the fact that significant evidence exists for an al-Qaeda connection to Messrs McVeigh and Nichols, the investigative and enforcement might of the federal government is focused instead on lawful citizens and not, say, the millions spilling across the border. For some reason, the government is afraid of its own people.

What rights do you have, when a medical emergency acts as a social lever?

Take, for example, a well-known retrovirus whose principal vectors are unprotected homosexual sex and IV drug use that has been packaged as an affliction as innocent as measles -- but without the concomitant and logical quarantine. This is simply a modern-day political crime.

How sepulchral that “Free Speech” thing now smells. Now, free speech is limited to words which won’t discomfit the listener. This, of course, results in a new kind of offense, called "Hate Crime,” enacted and ennobled to protect the entitlements of "alternative" sexual lifestyles and the revenge agendas of other interest groups. Sex, of course, is presented at all hours on the TV, helping to further ensure that sexually-transmitted diseases became the norm rather than the exception, all while adding uncounted millions of unwanted pregnancies into a social milieu already manifestly unable to understand, deal with or school its children -- many of whom become pregnant out of wedlock, logically enough.

Unsurprisingly, children, and childish behavior and garb have become sex objects. Children are taken from homes (cf. Elian Gonzales) on the slightest pretext by so-called child protective service departments more intent on securing additional outlays than on the actual well-being of children or families, further commoditizing and diminishing the value of these young lives. Roe versus Wade enshrined as law (sidestepping the Congress in a pernicious Supreme Bench-legislative metastasis of the laudable Brown versus Board of Education decision) the "choice" of people to decide that the mystery of conception is now a side-effect of the momentary satisfaction of sexual congress. The world's most expensive school system produces legions of moral-intellectual cripples more skilled in condom employment than in actually, pardon the expression, conjugating a verb correctly.

But wait! There’s more! Increasingly militant "HR" departments (“Human Resources” being an intrinsically foul term, as though human beings were some sort of natural resource to be mined, exploited, canalized or simply spent) raise whip hands over wage-earners, further stifling their ability to express themselves or even to assemble and discuss possible grievances for fear of the inevitable informer among them ending their employment.

A wholly hypocritical feminist movement offers a US president a "pass" even after allegations of rape and sworn testimony reveals his assignation with an intern. Amendments 1, 2, 4, 5 & 8 to the US Constitution are routinely abrogated. Law-enforcement confiscates property for the slightest alleged infractions. The extortionate IRS fulfills Marx's cherished dream of progressive taxation and feeds an ever-ballooning government and bureaucracy, not least of which includes a federal enforcement body of the Department of Treasury called the BATF (cf. Ruby Ridge; Waco). Not content with the US Government's impressive campaign of destruction against personal sovereignty, supranational, non-governmental, non-elected consortia seek to erode not just the rights of the individual, but the remaining shreds of national sovereignty. With tragicomic ineptitude, our own INS helps to redress a perceived economic imbalance by failing to enforce even the clearest of immigration laws.

Then comes the World Court, the EU, a wholly-undemocratic UN masquerading as a world parliament and countless other acronymized entities whose purpose aims at the further diminution of American liberties and productivity whilst attempting to punitively tax Americans until we, too, are economically humbled in the world's eyes. A strange show of thanks to the Yanks who, for six decades now, have sheltered the rest of the free world and allowed it to flourish under its frightfully expensive (gauged by percentage of GDP) military umbrella. Now, freeloading (and, shockingly enough, still anti-Semitic) Europe and Asia make bold to lecture us about how to approach national-religious issues in the Middle East, Africa or Asia at a time when the latest crop of mass-murderers all but offer their countries up for earth-salting. How interesting that the UN should find America’s belief in her national sovereignty few remaining freedoms so worrisome.

Hypnotized by the ill-used legacies of such magnificent persons as M. L. King Jr, Abraham Lincoln, M. K. Gandhi and even L. N. Tolstoi, the freest, most vital people and the greatest hope of republican democracy on the face of the earth are falling victim to the ageless Divide et Impera.

We have mistaken the truth of "All men are created equal" with "All men must be equal." Safely sanitizing and making equal any codes of conduct nefarious or decent, repugnant or praiseworthy, this international, enforced illiberalism is what Andrei Sinyavsky calls a "New Conformism." This new, enforced consensus is, with the advent of new surveillance and control apparatuses, even more dangerous, than its conjectured Orwellian or actual Leninist-Trotskyist-Stalinist-Hitlerite-Maoist-Khmer precursors.

In all cases, the overweening imperative of the overarching Superstate, abetted by a largely Quisling press, overwhelms in the name of "greater security," the rights of the individual. The naked pursuit of power sets aside all other possible interests as sweepingly as Bakunin, Plekahnov or Lenin could have wished for. In the words of Albert Camus, "The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling society by force alone." Substitute “bureaucrat” for “intelligent man” and you get the idea. It is Dostoevskii's Bread for Freedom trade -- and to judge from US waistlines, the carbs are what we're going for.

So, how much freedom are we willing to trade for security?

Better still, how much of our trifling few remaining freedoms are we willing to bargain away to the State for a security it can in no wise guarantee?

Shall we offer up our retinal prints? Our gene maps? Our scalps as wallets for implanted identity chips?

Even better still, who's "We?"

Look upwards. Into the sky.

Aloft in that faultless blue sky, 44 early-rising, hard-working, enterprising, hopeful, talented, beautiful, innocent passengers awakened on 11 September 2001 to the starkly etched, black-and-white reality that no authority on earth -- or in the air -- was going to save them. They as one and each as an individual used the final elapsing minutes of their lives to consult with their fellow passengers, to consider the unfolding news from the ground, and to comprehend that no one but them alone, and together, could influence their fates. Those that could bade farewell to their loved ones. Then the heroes of Flight #93 rolled. Each, in his or her way, awakened, as every hero must, to the irreducible "I" that comes before "We."

We, the People.

"We" have nothing left to trade. It is now time each of us recognized his (or her) responsibility in acquiring back some of our so-called freedoms. Our rights.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats undoubtedly expressed it aright with clamped-on visionary goggles, just as did Conrad, Dostoevsky and even, latterly, Tom Clancy.

A jealous world wishes nothing so much as to see the American experiment fail.

We cannot allow that to happen.

Posted by: Alex on January 14, 2003 03:17 PM

Alex, if you haven't got a blog, you certainly should get one!

Diane Ravitch, thank you!

Posted by: Kathy K on January 15, 2003 08:45 PM

Yasher Koach! ["May you grow in strength!"] You write succinctly and cogently and with some passion: and I agree with everything you say. But although "time is running out" [GW Bush], I believe that as soon as we attack Iraq the flatulence of the left will receed, as usual. The left is strongest when it's at its most simple-minded. History's more difficult and complex issues have never been its strength, and it will once again retire in shocked silence when something actually happens, whether it understands it or not. After Sontag's ill-thought out return to her ubiquitous and politically "correct" rhetoric after 9/11, you may remember, we heard nothing at all from the leftist babble for some time. It is always stunned by actions from any side. It revels in and expects rhetoric only. That's why it's almost always on the wrong side of history. It didn't have too much time for its righteously "progressive" anti-war stances before Afghanistan. This period is giving it more time to embellish its squawks. But after the war against Iraq begins [which it will, quite soon], there will once again be some flappings and then -- another long silence. After the war is won and the incredibly difficult problems of occupation/re-education begin, it will be able to pick up some steam again. But probably not too many will be listening.

Posted by: Pat on January 24, 2003 02:36 PM

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.

Posted by: Robbin Max on December 11, 2003 12:43 AM

Churches are hospitals for sinners, rather than hotels for saints.

Posted by: Bauer Seth on December 21, 2003 02:31 AM