The Conservative Soldier

Michael Hirsh has written an excellent piece for Newsweek in which he boldly observes that Barack Obama is “being turned into John Kerry”. Obama “may be mostly right about national security but … will lack the Red State street cred to carry his point — and the election.”

Hirsh then explains why.

While (Democrat) candidates are urging an end to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, they are terrified of questioning the larger premises of his “war on terror” or John McCain’s redefinition of it as the “transcendent challenge of the 21st century.” Today’s Dems are, in other words, proving unequal to the task of reclaiming the party’s mostly honorable heritage on national security.

This view is sadly out of touch, today more than ever. To little notice, Obama’s tough, clearly stated position on Bush’s war—that it was disastrously misdirected toward Iraq when Afghanistan was always the real front—is becoming conventional wisdom, even among the Bush administration’s top security officials, like Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

To which I say …

What if Obama and his advisors, and Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen, are right about Afghanistan and Pakistan? It won’t matter if Obama is elected President. First, he’ll try to pull our troops out of Iraq, rapidly and recklessly. Then, he’ll certainly take a page from the Bill Clinton playbook by reducing military spending and scaling back the size of our military forces in the name of economic policy. He’ll try to convince the American people that funding removed from the Pentagon’s budget is needed for a variety of social entitlement programs, such as health care, etc. Thus, we’ll be right back where we started pre-9/11, all but begging Islamic Extremist groups to attack us and undermine America’s legitimate leadership role in the War on Terror.

That’s one of the many scenarios that frightens folks of all political persuasions about Barack Hussein Obama, candidate for President. There is certainly the pattern of questionable judgment when it comes to picking ministers (Wright), political supporters (Rezko) and fellow board members (ex-domestic terrorist Ayers) that’s unsettling as well.

There is the fact that his foreign policy philosophies attracted the attention of the terrorist organization Hamas. A chief political adviser to the Hamas Prime Minister has been quoted saying, “We hope he will win the (U.S.) election.”

Others are troubled by Obama’s pledge to raise the capital gains tax from 15% to 28% even though — as The Wall Street Journal pointed out in its Friday editorial — tax revenues historically have diminished when the cap gains rate goes up. A lot of middle-class investors would be nailed by such a tax hike.

And then there is … The Words According to Obama?

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.

I received an email containing a “true story” about an Arkansas high school teacher who went above and beyond to make a point to her students without using a textbook, a chalkboard or a stern lecture.

Turns out the true story is true. It has been vetted by a credible web site called snopes.com, and there is YouTube video of a Mike Huckabee speech in March 2007 in which he tells the story of a teacher named Martha Cothren. It is unlikely the mainstream media would have let Huckabee slide if he’d shared the story based only on urban legend.

What Martha Cothren did was courageous — removing all of the desks from her classroom to deliver a nuanced message. But the school district superintendent and principal who approved her request deserve credit, too. The world is overpopulated these days by spineless, p.c. police among the ranks of teachers and school administrators. Everything is potentially offensive, so the Christmas Concert becomes the December Sing, and Good Friday becomes a Special Holiday, on the school calendar.

I know of which I speak. The aforementioned examples appear on my daughter’s grade school calendar.

So one can only imagine the debate in most school districts about whether it is a good idea to open students’ eyes to the sacrifices made by America’s military servicemen and women, and to make them stop and think about how that sacrifice affords them the life they lead, a life of a prosperity, health and education.

I suspect there are quite a few school districts in which Ms. Cothren’s idea would have been flatly rejected on the chance that one or two extremist parents might object to children being encouraged to respect our nation’s “warmongering, torturing military”.

Here’s the story in its entirety:

Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a social studies school teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock, did something not to be forgotten.

On the first day of school, with the permission of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she removed all of the desks out of her classroom.

When the first period kids entered the room they discovered that there were no desks.

Looking around, confused, they asked, “Ms.! Cothren, where’re our desks?”

She replied, “You can’t have a desk until you tell me what you have done to earn the right to sit at a desk.”

They thought, “Well, maybe it’s our grades.”

“No,” she said.

Maybe it’s our behavior.” She told them, “No, it’s not even your behavior.

And so, they came and went, the first period, second period, third period. Still no desks in the classroom.

By early afternoon television news crews had started gathering in Ms. Cothren’s classroom to report about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of her room.

The final period of the day came and as the puzzled students found seats on the floor of the deskless classroom.

Martha Cothren said, “Throughout the day no one has been able to tell me just what he/she has done to earn the right to sit at the desks that are ordinarily found in this classroom. Now I am going to tell you.”

At this point, Martha Cothren went over to the door of her classroom and opened it.

Twenty-seven (27) U.S. Veterans, all in uniforms, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. The Vets began placing the school desks in rows, and then they would walk over and stand alongside the wall.

By the time the last soldier had set the final desk in place those kids started to understand, perhaps for the first time in their lives, just how the right to sit at those desks had been earned.

Martha said, “You didn’t earn the right to sit at these desks. These heroes did it for you. They placed the desks here for you. Now, it’s up to you to sit in them. It is your responsibility to learn, to be good students, to be good citizens. They paid the price so that you could have the freedom to get an education. Don’t ever forget it.”