I was 3 years old when President Richard Nixon made his infamous claim, “I am not a crook.” I watched from the vantage point of a modest black-and-white television set with rabbit ears.
It wasn’t Nixon so much that interested me that evening, of course. I was probably playing with Weeble Wobbles on the floor. It was my parents yelling at the screen: “You are SO a crook!”
I’ve thought about that memory, my first political one, a lot in the last few days.
By about 9 p.m. on this past election night, I was anxious. And my kids saw that. Social media was full of accounts of people turning off their tubes and shifting to less stressful tasks.
They were doing it ostensibly for the kids, but in truth, watching Donald Trump win was for many adults like watching a horrific accident unfold in slow motion. It was hard to watch.
But some things in our political life … a lot of things, I’d argue … kids should be watching. Or rather, they should be watching us watch. They should be seeing us react to news.
I didn’t have children during 9-11, but it must’ve been excruciatingly difficult. I surely would have been mindful of how often the burning towers filled space in my living room.
But our world is a pretty tough place, and that’s true for all of us, kids included. Some kids are clinging onto deflating rafts off of Turkish beaches. Other kids are hanging themselves in their bedroom closets because they’ve been bullied to death for their learning disabilities.
How can we prepare our children for the world they live in unless we engage them in it?
In her book “The Spiritual Child,” Dr. Lisa Miller challenges the notion that parents should let their children find themselves spiritually without any kind of foundation. She argues that if you choose not to nurture your child’s spiritual life early on, so as not to “lock them in” to one faith tradition, you’re doing them a profound disservice.
It’s like saying your child may learn French someday, but in the meantime, you’re not going to teach them any language. Spirituality, like academics and athletics, is a practice.
The same logic can be applied to civics. When in the 1980s, thousands of hospital beds for mentally ill patients were eliminated, I bore witness to a huge surge in homeless people on the streets around my family’s Dupont Circle church. We packed meals in the church’s kitchen and did “grate patrols” to deliver sacked food. You can imagine the conversations we had in the car rides home.
None of this stuff was pleasant or easy to talk about. But it mattered that we did it.
The problem today is that we have elected someone who I believe transcends all previous presidents in terms of his cruelty and seeming lack of commitment to American values. Obviously many Americans disagree with this position. I have friends who disagree with me on this, and I’m struggling with how to reconcile that.
And because this president-elect verbalizes so much vitriol, we’re going to have to be careful. I am not suggesting that little ears should hear everything.
Maybe Trump will temper himself in the White House. I hope so. We don’t really know what’s ahead with this leader because he has never led before.
We do know this: Since the election, the KKK has announced plans for a celebratory rally in North Carolina, according to the Raleigh-based News and Observer. Minnesota police are investigating a case of high school graffiti, in which someone wrote “Whites Only/White America/Trump” on a bathroom wall, according to CBS News.
News is happening, and we need to pay attention. We need to talk to our kids.
We need to talk about how to practice justice.
We need to talk about how in this country, you can disagree with elected leaders and act on those sentiments.
We need to talk about how sometimes fears come to fruition, and sometimes they don’t.
We need to talk about how the president is in charge of a lot of things, but in America, regular people move mountains all the time.
We need to ask: How do we become the best versions of ourselves? What small thing can we do today to make the world better, and what big thing could we work toward with our friends?
I hope more people are having these conversations with their kids this week. In truth, we should be having them no matter who’s in the White House.