Not so civics minded.

In the fall, I am slated to guide two or three teens through high school civics.  This is the second time through; the last time was two years ago, 2016-2017.  

That was a difficult year to teach U. S. Government.  I felt that I had lost something, because in any previous year I would have greatly enjoyed it.

 I like politics, I like constitutional law, I like liberty and the American experiment, I enjoy thinking about the various tensions that we have to keep in balance in this country and how best to draw the careful lines that must sometimes be drawn even between good and reasonable claims made by opposing groups.  That our ideals, expressed in our laws, have the potential to create room for justice and liberty and security for everyone, at least as well as any government can.  I like talking with people of good will with different opinions about things.  I like practicing good will when I form them.

Especially, when it comes to introducing children to the world, I like encouraging them to think about opposing views.  I like to introduce the notion of different ideas of “fair” — this idea that most people believe, or manage to convince themselves, that their own position is the “fairest;” people believe in fairness, they often have a different idea of what is fair.   There are not that many true Bad Guys in mainstream American politics, I would have said a few years ago.  Most of us are trying to promote what we believe to be good.  And an important part of understanding political discourse is to brush away the strawmen and listen to the real arguments made by the thoughtful people on each side of an issue, not a caricature, not the extremes.

  Also to listen to people’s stories (not restricted to the most thoughtful people, but only to honest people) about how they are affected by policies.  Not necessarily because these stories and their human faces and voices will change our theories about what is right and good; but because they remind us that policies have consequences.  Maybe with more care we can design them to mitigate the troubles they cause people.  Maybe with more attention we can reach more finely tuned compromises.  Maybe if nothing can be helped, at least the winners can bear in their hearts a little of the weight that falls in a more tangible way on the losers, and remember it for next time.

But I can’t muster it right now.

+ + +

What I feel I have lost, I can’t decide if it was a false thing, like scales falling from my eyes, or if it was some of my own hope and charity.   I used to be confident that truly malicious motives were rare, and that the great majority of people convinced themselves that they were seeking a thing which we all can agree is good:  safety, or fairness, or freedom, or justice, or protection of the vulnerable, or enjoyment of the good things in life.  Maybe too much of one here and not enough of another there, but seeking something good.  

And now, everywhere I look, I see spreading fibers of sociopathy, twisted and tangled through everything that seeks the good, roots and stems and branches of the poison tree, something that cannot be pruned or grafted to yield good fruit and must simply be torn up and thrown into the flames. 

  + + +

I always fancied myself as playing a sort of character when I helped kids through history or civics:  Professor Socrates Neutrale, perhaps.

I feel now like a new character:  Armband Krabappel.    Perhaps Armband Krabappel can be a good civics teacher, but I am not super confident that she will have inner peace while doing it.

+ + +

I know I have to get my motivational act together. Cynicism, possibly rational, possibly not, stands in the way of my usual motivation.  I need a new one or I cannot move forward.  

Partisan activism is not the answer, I believe, because that is what created the current situation.  Also, I am not only teaching my own children; one or two other families will be entrusting their high schoolers to me; I owe them an approach that isn’t narrowly focused on my own values and politics.  We do, of course, share many values that I can take for granted, but part of my responsibility is to run a more “classroom-like” experience, where they can practice encounters with values none of us share.  They need to know that otherwise good people can hold views that are noxious and that noxious views, enacted, harm people.  And that correct views, enacted hamhandedly, also can hurt people.

 I think I am going to have to take an extremely pragmatic approach, and keep before my mind some entirely utilitarian reasons why these young people should want to to put effort into understanding the mechanics and structure and consequences of government.  Mostly because it will help me keep putting one foot in front of the other from the beginning to the end.

Comments

[Penelope]

Beautifully expressed. Thank you. This is not the America I grew up in, loved, believed in, hoped for.

What an era in whch to grow up :-( this has been so trying for my teens (16 and 18). Particularly for the elder, my daughter, who is fragile in many ways, and who is becoming so bitter and cynical about life and people and our society. So it is extra challenging, as you say, to teach them well and responsibly, in this current miasma of political and cultural destructiveness.

[mandamum]

Your description here: "I used to be confident that truly malicious motives were rare, and that the great majority of people convinced themselves that they were seeking a thing which we all can agree is good: safety, or fairness, or freedom, or justice, or protection of the vulnerable, or enjoyment of the good things in life. Maybe too much of one here and not enough of another there, but seeking something good." still rings true to me. I think the way we talk with those who pursue these things in ways we think are wrong has changed, such that each group is other-ing the ones they disagree with to the point they stop looking human, but I don't think the pursuit of genuinely good things has changed. I don't think people function in a way that they can think, "wow, this is a BAD, and I will pursue it!"

I am also doing high school US govt and politics this next year, and I'm actually very interested in what we'll have to discuss. I guess I don't see this year as much different from 4 years ago, or 8, 12 or 20.... I have always felt civic life to be a bit of a struggle and often a vale of tears - easy to see the fallenness of man there, I guess. "Hell is other people" and all that. I'm sorry you are facing a loss of joy in the subject. Last year might have been an even worse year to teach it, leading up to the vote and then having to both recover from it AND help lead others through a debrief on what happened.

Perhaps a historical revisiting of other times people felt, "This is not the country I knew" might bring about a measure of breathing room, as when the presidential election was "stolen" for Rutherford B. Hayes or for John Q Adams (who was behind Jackson in both popular and electoral votes, but was chosen out of top 3 by House, and then appointed the Speaker of the House as his Secretary of State).

In the western state I moved to last year, we're always watching for the state govt to make it even more expensive to live here, or even less legal to live in the way we've chosen (ie serious consideration whether large family and/or homeschooling = automatic assumption of child abuse, for inst.) Our governor's race offers the very real possibility that our limited health care options may become even more drastically curtailed by the introduction of a one-payer, big-brother-style healthcare system. Local politics, at least, are of dramatic and terrifying personal import, even as they also seem to be predestined and beyond my influence.

(not-so-quick aside: living through the local discussions about large homeschooling families being ipso facto dysfunctional made real to me the kind of lifetime stress burden that living as a black woman in our society creates, which is pointed to as maybe part of the reason preterm birth affects black women disproportionately even when everything else is corrected for. My little burden is nothing in comparison, and yet I could feel the baseline stress all the time: when we were home and kids got upset by the suggestion we do our chores, or get ready for bed; when kids out back got frustrated with their siblings and began to yell, before I could arrive and suggest different forms of communication; whenever I left some kids home with the big ones, and wondered if some totally unexpected rare event might cause a problem while I was gone; and EVERY TIME I had to go out in public with more than a few kids while the conversation was fresh and ongoing. "Are they looking at me? Is some busybody going to report me because my daughter is wearing her favorite shirt that seems like it should be in the rag bin instead? Why didn't I notice before we left and make her change it?? Please don't let my toddler start shrieking in the earsplitting way that is his go-to response to most frustrations - everyone just smile and be quiet, but not TOO quiet, and don't be noticed, while I look all peaceful and nurturing and also efficiently take care of this errand...." I can only imagine the level of baseline stress from trying to raise confident, safe, ALIVE children as a black woman, but my small experience made my imaginings much more vivid and visceral.)