We DVRed the speech.
We watched it this evening with Katherine.
Neither of us parents felt compelled to leap up and stop the speech at any time.
Afterwards we talked about it together, about our favorite parts, about the bits that were memorable. I really liked the part about how we shouldn’t let our failures define us.
And after that, Katherine went to bed. Strangely enough, she didn’t threaten to kill us in our sleep as obsolete reactionary elements of the past, express a desire to join ACORN (a/k/a the “Obama Youth”), or feel compelled to stand on the driveway and bounce her ball / skip her rope in exactly the same time as every other child on the block.
It’s a darned shame that the only way her fellow students at her school will have heard this speech is if their parents went to the same effort we did. Wouldn’t it be cool if kids were actually able to talk about this, about the president’s message? Imagine what more they could all have gotten from it?
Imagine what it would be like if so many people didn’t think it necessary to question what the President of the United States might want to say to their children.
Nice “A Wrinkle in Time” reference.
Thanks. It is, to my mind, one of the scariest scenes in the book — scary for its very ordinariness, a “banality of evil.”
I will note that it’s certainly okay to question what the President might be going to say, and I’d certainly have advised anyone concerned (or anyone not) to have listened / watched the speech, too, and talk with their kids about it.
It was the hyperbole and paranoia that got me.