The Junior Republican
My six-year-old son has acquired an
interesting nickname in the office of his elementary school. Apparently he’s known as the “Junior Republican,”
which is pretty funny because he doesn’t even know what the heck a Republican
is.
How he earned that nickname is another
funny story, if not also disturbing. My
son has a medical condition that requires him to take medication when he eats,
so at lunchtime, he goes to the school health room to take his medication. It seems some people at the school were
concerned because he hadn’t been eating much of the lunch my wife was packing
him each day.
So one particular day, when he was in
the health room and not eating much, the health assistant told him to eat, and
when he didn’t, she said, “President Obama would want you to eat your lunch.”
My son responded, “President Obama is
on the naughty list.”
“No,” argued (with a first-grader) the
aide, “He’s good.”
“Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are the
good Presidents,” my son said, “President Obama is the naughty President.”
Now I’ll admit he didn’t have his
civics quite correct, but he got closer than she did.
I don’t want to make a big deal out of
the issue, but it seems very strange to me that when my son wouldn’t eat, the
first instinct of this school official was to appeal to President Obama.
I was in first grade in the early
1980s and I don’t think anyone would have encouraged me to do anything “because
President Reagan would want me to.”
I’m the child’s father and I would
like him to eat his lunch. That’s a
pretty good reason. Or how about
appealing to my son’s teacher, whom he adores?
No, we only know the child and participate in his life on a daily
basis. Our relationship to him isn’t all
that important. But, if President Obama
wants someone to do something, we should be honored to do it. (You listening, Catholic bishops? This is what the President has been trying to
tell you.)
I’m not going to make a big deal out
of the incident. I think they were
embarrassed about it when it was mentioned to my wife. Hopefully it will be moot after November 6
anyway. But it is an odd commentary on
our public schools, if not our culture, that the natural first inclination is
to ask children to do something, “because President Obama wants you to.”
We’ll be homeschooling our son again
after this year. (That was already our
plan; it’s not due to this incident, although it would definitely have moved us
in that direction regardless.) I think I
will keep teaching him to be virtuous, and to do so because Jesus wants him
to. We’ll let the public institutions do
the fretting about what Mr. Obama wants.
