In the days and weeks ahead, as we struggle with these issues ourselves, many of us will find that our children are struggling with them as well. The questions my daughters have asked are the same ones that many of your children will have – and they don’t lend themselves to easy answers. But they will provide an opportunity for us as parents to teach some valuable lessons – about the character of our country, about the values we hold dear, and about finding hope at a time when it seems far away.
We can teach our children that here in America, we embrace each other, and support each other, in times of crisis. And we can help them do that in their own small way – whether it’s by sending a letter, or saying a prayer, or just keeping the victims and their families in their thoughts.
We can teach them the value of tolerance – the practice of assuming the best, rather than the worst, about those around us. We can teach them to give others the benefit of the doubt, particularly those with whom they disagree.
Ann Althouse sums up the winger response to this message of tolerance:
Shouldn't we learn to be perceptive, analytical, and aware that some of the individuals among us are, in fact, mentally sick and need something other than tolerance and wishful thinking about how good they might be? So why is the First Lady telling us to teach kids the opposite?
If you're still puzzled by such a cynical reaction as this is, this makes perfect sense if you remember wingers like to look at liberalism, with its basic tenets of tolerance, inclusiveness and togetherness, as a mental disease. And as far as building an America that Christina Taylor Green would have been proud to have contributed to through civil service, Althouse takes a steaming dump on that notion, too.
It would make more sense to teach creationism instead of evolution than to teach these wishful lies about government since children need to learn how to be effective citizens and lulling them into passive admiration of the government undermines the democratic process. Believing or not believing in creationism, by contrast, isn't going to change what happened in the grand expanse of evolutionary time.
The First Lady is teaching our children wishful lies about government! Remember when Laura Bush was attacked for the same thing after 9/11? Oh wait, didn't happen. Wonder why. Tolerance: more dangerous than creationism.
Instead, we should teach our kids to focus on the differences, identify those who possess those differences as possible threats, and to keep a "critical eye" upon them. Other people aren't to be trusted, government sure as hell is not to be trusted. Look out for Number One, just watch out you don't step in number two, as Rodney Dangerfield once said. That of course brings up this now infamous observation about Galtism and kids from Rogers at Kung-Fu Monkey:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Meanwhile, the wingers keep insisting the best way to put an end to "the climate of hate nonsense" is to attack the First Lady of the United States for her message of tolerance.
Nice guys.
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