An Educator’s Lessons for the New Year

I am not going to start with any platitudes.  Instead, I am going to start with what I have learned as an educator and a person in the 2016.

Lesson 1:   People are often not  who you think they are.

I belong to a fraternal organization that was founded with the ideal of bringing people together.  I will not name the order, but it was founded in the 19th century and was chartered by an Act of Congress to heal the wounds of the Civil War.   It has a non-sectarian history, although it did discriminate racially up to the mid 20th century  and it is supposed to be dedicated to benevolence, friendship and charity.  I was given the honor of a high position in this organization last year.  However, this year I discovered that the supposed friends I had in my lodge were no friends when someone revealed to them my very public personal and political beliefs.  These people ended up saying horrible things about me and my family because one, I am critical of the future president, two, I believe in protest and civil disobedience and three, my son is a married gay man with a family.  When I was supposed to be honored for the work I was doing for the organization, many members of my own lodge planned to boycott me.   They demanded that I apologize for something I wrote on Facebook.  I basically wrote that if the government passes an unconstitutional or unjust law, people have the right to protest that law and engage in civil disobedience.  At first, I have to admit, I succumbed to their act of bullying based on the advice of some good friends who wanted peace. Without really apologizing, as several brothers really wanted me to do, I clarified certain ideas to make my statements more palpable to my supposed brothers.    Then I thought about it. At first, I thought about leaving my lodge, but then changed my mind.  Why should the victim leave? Instead, I became angry that I betrayed my ideals because of threats and bullying.  As an educator, I have been trained to teach students how to deal with bullying effectively and I didn’t.    As a Doctor Who fan, I always think of this quote, “Never give up, never give in.”  Therefore, after my lodge had a holiday party in which several brothers chose to be disrespectful by trying to ostracize and ignore me, I decided to write them a letter telling them I will not stand for bullying.  In addition, I told them who I was, what I believed in, and that I expected a private apology before I would make a motion for a public apology at the next meeting I planned to attend.   The perpetrators have so far ignored what I wrote.  But why should I be surprised.  They voted for their role model.  

Lesson 2:  Only people who truly love you are your real friends.  

On Facebook, I had 25 people who unfriended me because of my beliefs and opinions.  One was even a cousin.   When someone denounces me completely out of ignorance, I will call him or her out.   Here are some things said.  “The fact you support Bernie Sanders proves you are a godless communist and hell fire awaits.”   When I tried to explain the difference between totalitarian communism and democratic socialism as well as certain religious perspectives on my part, such as the fact that in the name of religion countless millions have died, I was blocked.  I also was blocked when I stated, “Any law passed banning people from burning the flag is unconstitutional”    I was told I should be shot for treason and that I am wrong, it is illegal to burn the flag.  When I told one person to look up the Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. Texas in which none other than Antonin Scalia stated that burning the flag is symbolic speech and has to be protected by the first amendment, I was cursed, denounced and blocked.  Again, what should one expect when people mimic their new role model who will occupy the White House on January 20.  And this leads to . . .

Lesson 3: Many believe in free speech only for themselves.

Many who are angry that I will not support the new president have called me a hypocritical liberal.   They claimed that liberalism supposedly allows free speech for everyone to air their ideas equally.  Therefore, why do we constantly denounce the words of Trump and his supporters.   I love it when they set up straw men and state what liberalism supposedly believes in.  Guess what?  Free speech is not absolute.  Micheal Shermer and Alex Grobman in their writings about issues surrounding Holocaust deniers discuss extensively free speech issues surrounding people and institutions who claim that the murder of 6 million Jews did not happen.  Because the background and motivation of many Holocaust deniers are often anti-Semitic and can be labeled hate speech, the purpose of their proven lies are meant to cause harm and should not be completely protected once their ideas lead to criminal action.  The same can be said of the words of the future president.  His words have lead to the criminal endangerment of many people in American society.   Therefore,  there is nothing wrong in prescribing his words within the confines of a free press. What I mean by this is that he should be allowed to say what he wants, but there should be equal time given to the public refutation of his ideas. This is where the mainstream press has failed if you apply Shermer and Grobman’s concept of free speech to the president-elect.   With every word he said, there should have been given equal time to those who would use reason to refute his ideas with facts.  Our present concept of free speech comes from the Enlightenment, and according to many enlightenment philosophers, rational reasoning “trumps” the idea of free speech.   Our supposed mainstream free press really did not give equal time to a public refuting to the ideas expressed by Trump and his cohorts using reasoning and evidence in the last year.  I did not see any front page articles or 10 minutes of airtime on CNN showing that  statistics disprove that most illegal aliens were rapists and murderers.   I did not see mainstream articles describing that if he appoints to the Supreme Court several people who plan to overturn marriage equality, it will be overturned no matter what Trump says.  And this leads to . . .

Lesson 4:  Freedom does not mean freedom to express hate within the greater society.

Many Trump supporters talked to me about hating political correctness and felt proud in making myriads of racist comments against Obama.  Interestingly, if they really believed that people were punished for not being politically correct, how come they were able to curse Obama without consequence?     And yet, a  person screamed at me how Obama forced people to serve and bake cakes for gay weddings against their religion while musical entertainers are refusing to play at the inaugural without consequence.   First off, Obama cannot force anyone to do anything, but the laws of the United States does. These people do not understand that a business is only allowed to exist through state incorporation laws and once incorporated, the business becomes a public accommodation and thus cannot discriminate.  On the other hand, an entertainer is a private citizen and is an individual who has a right to entertain or not entertain whenever or whoever they want.  In terms of your own domicile or house, one is free not to allow someone who is black, blue, gay, green, or Klingon inside.   Inside your house, with people of like mind, you can scream every racial epitaph you want.  If you have a totally private school and take zero money from the government, unless a state prescribes some minimum curriculum requirements, you can teach that Fred Flintstone and Dino really existed or that the Jewish people whose calendar states it is the 5777 existed before some supreme entity created the world 5500 years ago according to someone on Trump’s transition team. A totally private school even has the right to ban a male student who wears a yellow poker dotted shirt if it wants.  But once you take a penny of my money, I, through my government, have the right to call you out. And if we reach the point where the government refuses to obey its own laws, people have the right to go to the court and get what is called a Writ of Mandamus, which is an order forcing the government to do what it is supposed to do.      What does this all mean?  You do not have the freedom to publicly hate or discriminate because of anti-discrimination laws and the fact that hate almost always lead to violence. And present hate crime statistics against Muslims proves this out.  On the other hand, I have the freedom to call out your hate and use whatever legal constitutional measures to stop you.  As the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers basically said, your liberty cannot infringe on my liberty.  Therefore, government exists, through both our consent,  to be a mediator so that we can reach some type of accommodation so that we can both exist peacefully within a given society.    

My one true wish is for the New Year is this.  These lessons should be understood and respected by those who have different ideas.   Why?  Simple.  Millions of Americans live our daily lives by lessons such as these.   And to disregard these lessons, puts this approximately 240 year experiment in freedom and justice in grave danger in the year to come.  I hope you are listening Mr. Trump.