We had Mr. Obama’s speech today and a lot of people didn’t come to school. The teacher acted real weird and wouldn’t answer any questions, so I asked my dad to explain it and he did.
First he yelled at my mother for letting me go to school. Then he said the speech was very dangerous and wasn’t for me anyway, it was for the kids in the other schools across town and it could be a lot of trouble for us. Mr. Obama said a lot of stuff about staying in school and studying, I guess like I do with my nice tutor, and Dad says that’s fine for me, as long as I don’t miss sports practice, but if those other kids do he won’t be able to hire them at his business and we won’t have anyone to clean our pool and mow the lawn and stuff. He says they can’t really learn, most of them, and anyway if he needs people who go to college and all he can hire them in India or someplace else where they’re grateful and don’t make trouble.
I said, was I going to college? and he said sure, and then said was I getting any better throwing the football he gave me. I asked him about where the president said you could be a mayor or senator if you study hard and he banged his coffee cup down, he was so angry. He said somebody was taking his country away from him and one was enough. Then he went on the phone and yelled at a bunch of people about paying taxes to teach other people’s kids and foreigners who were going to take my place at Duke when they should be getting a job or maybe going to state, and then they’d try to organize his company. I don’t know what that means, or what state he meant. I know Duke is a college where Dad went; he says it used to be a school for people like us but isn’t sure now.
He was really mad.
Is this the kind of thinking that inspired all the otherwise incomprehensible panic about the President’s speech?
Did the examples of parallels in education speeches by Pres Reagan and Bush I come from the White House, or some enterprising journalist? I doubt it was invented by the Canadian newspaper that reported it on Tuesday. The parallels were pretty effective, at least for someone who does not find the current president a threat to his way of life.
Human compassion at its finest, eh? I wonder if the father would be thinking the same thing if his company went bankrupt and then somebody told him, with a smug smile, that his son should really just “get a job” at Burger King rather than dreaming about college, and then angrily protested about him taking “my money” when he said his son still wanted to go.
He sounds like one of those “good ol’ boys” dreaming about the days when Yale kept the women and blacks at arms length.