39° and Overcast
James C. Johnston Jr.
The world can be a pretty ugly place, and our children have got to be taught about it even if the truth of it is uncomfortable. In the year I was born, which was 1944, Germany had a “great populist leader”, a guy from the common run of men named Adolf Hitler. His life and political career was predicated on a philosophy of sheer hatred. Adolf Hitler was a very insecure medium built guy with a domineering much older father who was also his great-uncle, yeh-go figure that one out, which was not exactly his fault. Let’s say that this Hitler guy had a lot of emotional baggage.
By any objective standard, young Adolph was a fairly talented artist, who was discouraged from following a career by the academicians who denied him admission to the art academy. These “Elites” cut him off from a career in art that he was actually suited for. That fact added to his frustrations. It was also a fact that Adolph was academically lazy, and he was also very sure that everything bad that was happening to him in his life was somebody else’s fault, because his own deficiencies could not possibly account for all of his monumental misfortunes. At some point, Hitler selected the Jews to be the scapegoat that he needed to account for his failures and gross misfortunes in life.
The Hitler lad was from a very dysfunctional family to say the least, and he spent his youth and young manhood seeking his place in the scheme of things in war and the awful ruin that was the peace that followed. He came of age when most of Germany was a disaster, in the wake of World War I. Most of the soldiers who fought in the trenches were feeling about the same way. “We could not possibly have lost the war!” they thought, “We must have been betrayed by insiders who are enemies of the German people! It’s, ah yes, the Jews!”
The irrational hatred against “The Other” made the masses of Germans who followed Hitler feel a good deal better about themselves. After all, nobody wants to think of themselves as chronic losers do they? A lot of underachieving people tend to think that way I suppose. I think back to about eight years ago when marchers with tiki torches marched through Charlotte crying out. “The Jews will not replace us. The Jews will not replace us!” Now just what the Hell was that all about? Talk about a stupid chant without rationality!
We knew who these unhappy marchers were supporting, and we know that they are symptomatic of the new Anti-Semitism that seems to be invading American life and the rest of the world as well. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan dominated the legislatures of a number of our more rural states; Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia-where their great national monument Stone Mountain is located, Alabama, Indiana, Vermont, and Oregon. You see, not all the big Klan-Centric-States were in the Deep South. In fact, the Klan became so bold that they even marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C. in broad daylight!
Who did the All-American-Klan hate anyway? Let me answer you with a list of the people they especially despised: People of Color, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Foreigners. Does just any of these hated minorities sound uncomfortably familiar in this context? By the way, has anybody tried to burn down the local Catholic Church recently? This really makes you think about just what is going on.
“Haters” are dangerous, because they are irrational, and their self-image is tied up in their power to hate in secret and undiscovered. They are people who feel like they are being taken advantage of by a society that both is “elitist” and does not value them. So, who does that put on their hate list? The Educated, the Successful, the Jews-just because, People of Color-just because, and foreign-born people because they are all “Inferior” and trouble-makers and then some actually get to go to college in order to become elites and eventually look down on the “Haters” as a class of the undermenschen which is just the opposite of the “Haters” own twisted reality! And remember “Haters” burn down Synagogues, and eventually they will also burn books, and them they will burn people!
By the way, there is a very dangerous movement not to teach any history in school that will make students feel uncomfortable. Well let me tell you a great truth and that the study of history is frequently uncomfortable! I taught history for 34 years. Kids are intellectually tough. They can take the truth of our sometimes difficult story. So get over it. Not to teach today’s young people the history of the nation we love and of the world as it happened is a very dangerous choice. Slavery, the Holocaust, anti-democratic movements, and wars are also the reality that our children must be exposed to in the process of their education. How thick is the history book of the future going to be if all of the inconvenient content is removed that might possibly disturb Junior? Is that new history text book going to be half-an-inch thick counting the pictures and maps? And what will our children be studying?
How about the teaching of all the great literature that has some element of controversy including the classics we read like: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, A Tale of two Cities and all of Dickens’s works because of their social content. What about the works of: Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Steven Crane, Willa Cather, John Updike, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and more modern writers. What about Shakespeare’s stuff that latently inclined incestuously motivated Hamlet, that Freudian “Mother-Issues “dude. I guess that classic most likely should be off limits to young readers along with that play about Romeo and his girl-friend Juliet. I mean they were really involved!
Our kids need to know about the history of the K.K.K. and the history of anti-Semitism, racial prejudice, and the ugly side of what has historically been so that they can know when a dangerous and truly evil movement is afoot in the land and in the world. Hitler and his twisted regime, that cost the world many tens of millions of victims, was a very ugly reality we must always remember. We had better teach our kids what he did so that they will know better what to do in this complex business of living with each other in fairness and peace without Hate in their future lives. And while we are at it, we better bring back the subject of “Civics”. Good citizenship can be learned. Or at least, I hope so.
