Don’t Know History?
Citation Needed! Children might get a better education from Wikipedia…
I had this op-ed pointed out to me by my wife, who took a history class in high school taught by the writer.
First, we have a brief screed about the “clown” who *gasp* wore a gun to hear Obama speak. Apparently, not seeing anything wrong with this means that I’ve forgotten my history and don’t remember JFK.
I don’t remember JFK first hand, of course, but I’ve heard enough about him to remember him in the sense she means. I also remember Ronald Reagan, another president at whom shots were fired. Neither of these historical events means that I have to be outraged by the idea of someone carrying a gun at an Obama event, any more than I have to be outraged at people wearing shoes to an Obama event just because George W. Bush once had a shoe thrown at him. Nor do I have to be outraged at an individual’s possession of a knife in New York City just because of Kitty Genovese’s death.
Guns, like shoes and knives, are tools. Specifically, they are tools that are often owned by law abiding citizens who would never hurt another human being who wasn’t actively trying to hurt someone else. Of course, that thought never enters into the mind of Ms. Claymore, who is obviously a member of the Guns Are Evil camp (i.e., a GFW).
Then, she veers into attacking a woman who was interviewed by MSNBC[a]. Based on a single statement, she decides the woman is an idiot who “stopped learning anything” from her history lessons[b].
From there, she focuses on a fear of change and an ignorance of history. She mentions that we’ve forgotten “the blacklists of the fifties, the commie witch hunts that ruined families wholesale,” and that this forgetfulness meant that we “didn’t turn a hair when the Bush/Cheney act began spying on everyone at home.” She asserts that “[a] nation that doesn’t remember the ‘tiger cages,’ torture chambers used by the North Vietnamese, didn’t get too exercised about what happened at Abu Gharaib [sic].”
Apparently, society has forgotten all of 20th century history, but Ms. Claymore has forgotten all of her 21st century history. There was, in fact, a huge outcry about domestic spying (which was not on everyone, but that’s the common leftist meme). There was also a huge outcry about the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which much of the (left half of the) country conveniently forgot that CBS didn’t break a huge scoop – they simply revealed details of mistreatment that the Pentagon had already discovered, investigated, and punished. It was news because we didn’t approve of it, which is a far cry different from the “tiger cages” she references.
This article made me think of something from 2004, when my youngest sister was still in high school. She’d tell me about things that her history teacher had said. When he’d get off topic and start giving rants about current events. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the substance of those rants in detail[c], but I can remember trying to give her counter examples to most of his “facts” and being disturbed by the fact that most of his students didn’t have anyone to point out his lies errors. The fact that Ms. Claymore here is also actively teaching sends chills down my spine.
I don’t honestly mind the fact that she has political views that run counter to my own, but the fact that she can’t express those views without name calling (I can’t say I’m above that here, but I’m not doing this professionally, nor am I educating children) or with facts makes me worry about the sort of education her students are getting.
- MSNBC, of course, couldn’t possibly have chosen this woman in order to give the right a bad name. Just because they get tingles up their legs when listening to Obama doesn’t mean they’re not biased. Only Fox is biased! [↩]
- The actual quote is, by the way, inaccurate, unless the woman really was talking about herself in the third person. Maybe the title of this piece should’ve been “Don’t Know English.” [↩]
- From what I do remember, his rants included such things as berating the students because President Bush had won the Channel One mock poll (“We’re just lucky that high school students can’t vote”) and then attacking their parents when Bush won the general election (“If your parents voted for Bush, they’re idiots.”). [↩]