It’s getting ugly again

Don’t take my word for it.

The Moderate Voice (and if there were ever a time for them this is it) runs down a laundry list of reactions to President Obama’s address to schoolchildren.

The polarization is just plain silly, and downright dangerous. Quoting the post:

The present frenzy suggests that the seeds are now being sowed for a mega-polarized America that could be almost ungovernable in the 21st century if this trend continues unabated.

If Republicans and conservatives make the very legitimacy of Obama his patriotism — even the safety of allowing little kids listen to him tell them to stay in school and think about helping their community — the issue, and link his name to Hitler and/or Nazism, precisely how do they think Democrats and the left will respond next time a GOPer is in power? How will the next Republican President be treated in terms of legitimacy and doing what he/she feels is in the best interest of the country? The bar on discourse is being lowered and lower and right now it’s touching the soil.

The only problem I have with the above is the blame for conservatives and Republicans for “lowering the bar.”

The seeds were planted with eight years of complaining about “President Select” and “stolen Florida” and Lord knows how many other attacks on the process. The Left never treated Bush-the-younger with any degree of legitimacy, borne out in the way they portrayed him.

How many Bush=Hitler references can you find?

Do you think the Left – in any manner – gets a pass?

We’ve been going down this road for a long time, and we might actually get to see the flip side of John Edwards’ “Two Americas” vision. Only this time we’ll get two radically polarized factions that can look at the same set of objective facts and see two wildly different realities. They will, of course, be mutually exclusive – yet both completely consistent with the worldview and premises of the factions.

Now — my response to the people who are pulling their kids out of school today?

Why don’t you teach your kids how to think for themselves? There’s a far greater chance that your youngster will be introduced to spurious views, partisan ideology or religious rhetoric coming from the mouths of teachers and administrators. Don’t get spun up by the idea that the President will somehow hold more sway than the people who know your kid on a first-name basis.

Inoculate them with the ability and desire to think for themselves, and to ask questions about the implications of ideas. For instance, if the idea is that “no one should do without X,” then teach your kids to ask how much X-for-all would cost, and who would pay for all that X, and what kind of world we’d live in with free-X.

Quit whining — put on your big boy pants — and take responsibility for your kids.