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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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