Information is power.
Recently my daughter, a junior in high school, had to write a report citing a published book for her Advanced World History class. Her report was on the Nazi propaganda machine, particularly how it was aimed at children. She researched her most likely sources of good information and selected four books to procure from the library.
Now, I have spoken with my daughter about politics, but I try more to open her mind than to dictate to her how to think. I was mildly dismayed when she began to say things that seemingly agreed with the memes that liberals put forth to further their goals. Young people are frequently overwhelmed with the unfairness of the world, and their natural urge to correct such “wrongs” usually comes to rest upon what they view as a power capable of ensuring fairness… the government. Youth are idealistic, and they do not see the consequences of giving the government a broad mandate to create bureaucracies to ensure fairness and to remove the risks from the world. They do not understand that liberty comes with risks. Often, they will gladly trade liberty for “fairness,” because in their innocence they do not realize the price of liberty and how difficult it is to regain once lost. The price of blood paid for our Constitution and Bill of Rights means as much to them as the price of the new cell phone they crave. They haven’t had to earn that price and to pay it… why would it make sense to them?
My daughter had been caught up a bit in the wave of enthusiasm, and the social pressure, that gathered around Barack Obama and which carried so many to Congress on his coattails. She wouldn’t admit this to her mother, but she did admit to me that had she been of legal age in November, she probably would have voted for Obama.
I love her anyway.
Her report was due on fairly short notice, so she scanned for information that she could cite for her report. One book, a book on the Hitler Youth, began to fascinate her. She wound up reading it an another book from cover to cover. A few days later, my beautiful young daughter, whose idealism I had excused as the realm of a young mind that would be seasoned by time, sat down and stunned me with her insight.
“Dad,” she began almost tentatively, “when I read that book about the Hitler Youth, I began to have some thoughts that are disturbing.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a disturbing subject.”
“Yeah, but what concerns me is that I see some similarities in how the young people in Germany were attracted to Hitler,” she said. “They way that they treated others who even questioned anything that Hitler did… well, the kids at school are the same way about Barack Obama. As I read the book, I saw similarities in our society today. I don’t like feeling that way about my own society, but it’s hard to deny the similarities.”
We had a great conversation about the phenomenon of personality cults and the results they have most often borne over time.
She is still coming to grips with her realization that such a personality cult may not be a good thing for our nation. When those scales fell from her eyes, it freed her to question things that are being treated as undisputed truth. Being a student of history, she starts to wonder if the United States Government owning a controlling share of General Motors is a good idea. She started to question what the ramifications were of destroying the private health insurance industry will be. She realized that once it is destroyed, it will be almost impossible to go back, and that people will become dependent on their government. She realized that the government will have access to all of her personal health information. The government will know if she has a certain procedure, or a diagnosis. They will have access to any counseling records that may exist.
Even she, at 16, sees that once the government begins to take over just a part of it, the rest will most likely collapse into that one solution. She is beginning to realize that she is witnessing the destruction of a private industry in favor of a public one, and how seductive it seems. She realizes that there is not a single voice who can prevent it, that there is no balance in Congress. She realizes that the country is, “high, like stoned on Obama, but there is really nothing to balance us, to keep us from going too far. It’s like a drug.”
When the glossy pop-culture icon was shattered and the potential ugliness of a cult of personality was revealed underneath, all the wonderful fairness of the “New and Improved New Deal” suddenly came into question. My 16 year old daughter suddenly perceived the oppression that she is witnessing in her own society, driven by those who are smitten by the image of a man and the ideology that his popularity empowers, even when the message doesn’t hold water under scrutiny unimpressed with the image. She suddenly realized that this phenomenon was not new, nor was it a strictly American one. She realized that this had happened before elsewhere, and the results were not entirely positive. She suddenly felt like the situation we are in is vaguely dangerous.
None of us know how we would have behaved in Hitler’s Germany. If we had been raised in that world and had been offered such a solution to our problems, what would each of us have done? How many of us would question the cult of personality? I am seeing my daughter ask herself those questions, and I am sleeping much better because of it. I know that at least one of my children has a precious gift.
Posted on June 15th, 2009 by Andy Wahl
Filed under: Uncategorized
Loading ...
First of all, congratulations on having such an astute daughter!
Growing up in the 1980s there were a few films that the local youth club used to show us regularly, ones that really changed our lives. Our favorite one was The Wave;
In 1967, at the Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, World History teacher Ron Jones was asked about the Holocaust by a student. “Could it happen here?”. According to the press release accompanying the latest retelling of the events that followed, “Jones came up with an unusual answer. He decided to have a two week experiment in dictatorship. His idea was to explain fascism to his class through a game, nothing more. He never intended what resulted, where his class would be turned into a Fascist environment. Where students gave up their freedom for the prospect of being superior to their neighbors.
More at http://www.thewave.tk/
The film can be bought on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wave-by-Alexander-Grasshoff/dp/B001688AVG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=digital-video&qid=1245164383&sr=8-2
I appreciate your having such conversations with your kids and support of their views, even if they disagree with your own. Perhaps you should mention about the cult-like following of GWB during his first term that amounted to “If you are not with us, you are against us”. this squaled any resonable dialog about which war our country and our resources should be involved in.
NY-David
My bad, instead of “squaled”, I meant “squelched”.
NYD
“…the cult-like following of GWB during his first term that amounted to “If you are not with us, you are against us”. this squaled any resonable dialog…”
And to update that, just substitute BHO…