The Conservative Soldier

No one is a larger proponent than I of telling it to kids straight.

Tell them that grownups lie sometimes. Tell them that the world can be a dangerous place. Tell them exactly what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, including what happened inside those airplanes as they were hijacked, and what happened to people caught on the upper floors of the World Trade Center towers. Tell them what the 9/11 terrorists did with their cheap box cutters. Tell them where the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field was headed.

Tell them what happens to people infected with AIDS. Tell them about Darfur. Tell them all about Osama Bin Laden. Tell them what a nuclear blast can do to a city, to millions of people. Tell them about Adolf Hitler.

When a car, packed full of teen-agers (and then some), crashed early one morning, driven into a roadside tree by its drunk driver, my daughter and I gathered over breakfast and discussed the tragedy in vivid detail. Some of the kids were not wearing seat belts as there were too many of them jammed into the ill-fated vehicle. Some accepted the ride from an older person at the party they’d all attended merely to avoid calling home to face parental scolding at 2 a.m.

My daughter was 10 at the time, but I wanted her to understand that a seemingly harmless choice resulted in several teen-agers dying horrific deaths that morning.

While we must be straight with our kids, we can not protect them from everything and we will ruin their lives if we try.

So today’s story from a suburban Chicago high school is particularly alarming. Here’s the overview from the Southtown newspaper:

Rich South High School’s band isn’t going to China after all.

Citing security concerns related to the (August 2008 Beijing-hosted) Olympics, Rich Township High School District 227 Supt. Howard Hunnigan announced the decision at Tuesday night’s school board meeting.

Scheduled were three (performances) at Beijing, Tianjin and Qinhuandao between June 10 and June 21 by the Richton Park band. The band was set to play (in) the country’s pre-Olympics bash.

These kids raised $90,000 for this trip, according to one of the band’s student leaders who appeared this morning on the local FOX affiliate station in Chicago. This was going to be an unbelievable opportunity. But, said the young man interviewed by FOX, it was called off because of “certain uprisings in the China area.”

In the China area? Has anyone talked to these kids about the sheer land mass that comprises China, or the fact that a high school band is a grain of sand amid a 1 billion-plus population?

Obviously, a group of parents watched the recent disruptions around the Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco and decided that grave danger looms throughout China with that same torch headed there later this summer. Never mind that the weapon of choice among torch protesters was … the evil water balloon.

So here is the straight talk for the kids. Yes, China is a nation run by oppressive leaders who do not recognize fundamental human rights, who allow poverty to flourish in the countrysides while prosperity surges in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and who have allowed air pollution to spike out of control everywhere. Yes, China has killed adversaries who are native Tibetans or support Tibet’s struggle for independence. Yes, China has been complicit in aiding and abetting genocide in Darfur.

But China is a country populated by human beings who love music and arts and sports the same as we do. China has invested $30 billion to make sure it offers one of the greatest Olympic Games environments, pollution aside, in history. Leading to the Games, it likely will be one of the safest destinations on earth. Times like these are when thuggish federal police units come in quite handy for keeping the peace.

If a group of American kids in a band had to detour around an angry mob or two on the way to a concert, or had to exercise the same caution any American tourist must always exercise when traveling abroad, now more than ever, it nonetheless would not have detracted from the once-in-a-lifetime journey awaiting them.

We must teach our kids to recognize the pitfalls and evils that exist in the world, and we must then encourage our kids to boldly go out and face them with caution but without fear.

The school administrators and parents in this case have made a terrible mistake.