Their American spirit is AWOL
by Tom Sullivan
Something about Sunday mornings brings out the preacher in me. I wrote about this yesterday, but this morning I'm still fuming about misguided efforts by right-wing ideologues to abandon our system of public schools for whatever crazy reasons, or because freedom. Listen:
One hundred and sixty thousand rugged individuals didn't suddenly decide to grab a gun off the mantle, don uniforms, build landing craft, and separately invade Normandy on June 6, 1944 because if big gummint did it, it would be un-American, add to the debt, and we don't like France anyway.
There are things we do as a people, together, that make us US.
Educating our nation's children together is one of those things. Support for universal public education in this country predates ratification of the United States Constitution. It's built into the state constitutions and enabling legislation that brought new states into the Union all the way up to and including Hawaii, the 50th state.
I don't know what country chest-thumping, would-be patriots who want to abolish public education think they want to live in, but it's not the United States of America.
My father in-law law fought on the front lines in Europe during WWII. One of the things he said distinguished the American GI from the enemy is that when their tanks and trucks and jeeps broke down, the Germans would abandon their equipment on the field of battle and walk away. But the American boys had grown up tinkering with their cars, trucks and tractors. It was a point of pride for them, he told me, that when their gear broke down, they could fix it and get it running again with whatever they had at hand. Shoelaces. Rubber bands. "Duck" tape. And get back into the fight.
That's the spirit that won the war. You don't hear that spirit from public school abolitionists. Freedom, my ass.