Some Memorial Day thoughts on the importance of love:
Children don’t need to be taught to love their parents. From the moment they come out you are everything to them. They seem to arrive with a certain amount of love built in and fix it on the mother who holds them and looks into their eyes and the father who delights them by making them laugh. It really is something, this natural force that comes prepackaged. (In this corner we believe God did this, implanting the love; we believe God in fact invented love, for his and your pleasure.)
But after parents, family and nature—children are especially sensitive to and undefended against the idea of the miraculous within nature—children have to be taught to love certain things. Such as their country.
Parents, teach your children to love America, either as an extension of your own love or as a simple kindness to them.
We live in an age—I’ll say this part quickly as we all know it—in which children are instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice. And we never meant it about the Declaration.
Ideology and idiocy imposed this view, shallowness too. It began some decades ago but has speeded up and became more extreme the past 10 years.
What does this atmosphere of unlove for America do to kids? To little ones 5 and 10 but also 15—what is its impact on them?
To kids from difficult circumstances it means there is no hope; you won’t escape a violent or unhappy family into a better place, the world outside, because it isn’t better. The world outside is America, which brutalizes the minority, the woman, the different. Inside is scary, outside is scarier. What a thing to do to vulnerable kids.
To kids from easier circumstances it does nothing good and carries a subtle bad effect. It means the thing you’re part of is, at its heart, corrupt, so you might as well be corrupt. The ugliness of America becomes a permission structure: We are amoral and you can be, too.
Kids live on dreams. Have the adults who’ve created this atmosphere forgotten that as they pursue their own resentments and make their accusations?
To kids in all circumstances, it denies a dream of a good thing you can make better. It undercuts the idea the people you came from were brave and hardy and did marvelous things. It robs you of a sense you’ve got this within you, and can go on and be a marvel too.
It denies kids a secure sense that they’re part of something sound and healthy. It subtly discourages them from trying to make things better—you can’t right something whose sicknesses are so structural. This isn’t a good way to bring up the future.
You have to start kids out with love. Irony and detachment will come soon enough, but start with love, if only to give them a memory of how that felt.
I’ve spent the past few days reading an old book, one that couldn’t possibly be published today because it’s so full of respect for America. “Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York,” runs 461 pages of text and was published in 1900. The flag that illustrates this column is from its frontispiece.
The manual was written after the Legislature passed an 1898 law requiring public schools to display the American flag and “encourage patriotic exercises.” Organized veterans of the Civil War and of the Women’s Relief Corps, who were nurses on the battlefield, pushed for it to “awaken in the minds and hearts of the young” an “appreciation” for “the great deeds” of their nation.
Memorial Day meant a lot to those old veterans, but more was needed. Their generation was passing; they’d given everything to hold the nation together; they wanted the young to understand why.
Unsaid but between the lines: America at the turn of the 20th century was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is and means to be, so they would love it too.
What a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic.
How do you encourage love of country among schoolchildren? You let them have fun. You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events. This need not be costly: “An old-time coat or dress found in a garrett or unused drawer at home may serve all needful purposes.”
Tell the story of the American flag. The Continental Congress in 1777 said we need a national banner. Here enters the heroic Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia, known as Betsy, who, on the personal request of General Washington, started sewing. The stars and stripes from her hand, “were unfurled at the battle of Brandywine, in 1777. . . . They sang their song of triumph over defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga. . . . They saw the surrender of the enemy at Yorktown; they fluttered their ‘Goodbye’ to the British evacuating New York.”
Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Have them enact the battle of Lexington and Concord and read aloud Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Tell the story of the Mayflower, of the making and meaning of the Compact, of the landing on Plymouth Rock: Quote an old poem: “Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, / Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; / Began the making of the world again.”
Remind children, as Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.” America wasn’t just some brute force that pushed up from the mud; we announced our birth with a Declaration that was “a revelation”: All men are created equal.
The manual includes a lot of opinions on historical events. One I liked was the assertion that the Civil War ended the day Ulysses S. Grant was buried in 1885. Why? Because America saw who his pallbearers were: “Johnston and Buckner on one side of his bier, and Sherman and Sheridan upon the other.” The first two were generals of the Confederate army, the last two of the Union Army. Henry Ward Beecher wrote that their marching Grant to his tomb was “a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery, and peace war.”
You come away from that vignette thinking not only “what men,” but “what a country” that could tear itself in two, murder itself, forgive itself, go on.
Parents, help your children love this country. It will be good for them, and more to the point this country deserves it.
Also when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen.