This has slowly become the norm in my state, where schools have opted to have school on Veterans Day, instead of having the day off. My sister was born on Veterans Day, and never missed a chance to hold it over my head, because she always had the day off for her birthday. One thing I find entertaining about this shift is how liberals can’t make up their fucking mind about it. On one hand, you’ll have Vets and their supporters ranting about the loss of a holiday, and how we’re no longer “honoring” their “sacrifice” by forcing kids to go to school. On the other hand, you’ll have Vets and their supporters ranting about how its actually great that kids are going to school now, because students get to learn about veterans. I’m here to tell you, the kids are absolutely learning about veterans.
Before my political awakening, the only thing I cared about, the only thing that was great about Veterans Day, was that I got the day off. When I was a kid, I got the day off. When I was an adult working a real job I got the day off because I worked in schools. When that changed, I was annoyed, because I didn’t get the day off, or instead I got a floating holiday. Now that I’m deep in my political awakening, I’m actually fucking mad that it’s not a day off. Because the liberals who are pro school day, are 100% correct that kids are now “learning” about veterans. This has been slowly ramping up over the last week. It starts with my oldest coming home and telling me that Veterans Day is coming up. That’s fine, I knew it was coming up. I also knew that they will have lessons about veterans that might ask the older kids to learn about veterans in their family. She isn’t in that group of kids yet, but we have veterans in our family, my wife’s parents. Her whole life her parents told her and her brother “Do not join the military”. They made it very clear it was a dumb place to be, and that you shouldn’t join it. My wife’s mother experienced sexism and racism during her time in the Navy. These are things that my kid is not getting taught at school, obviously. However, my wife’s parents are also not ones to bad mouth the military as an institution, they are liberals, and would very likely speak in neutral terms about it with our kids if it came to it. Well, maybe Grandma would talk some shit, she did not have a great experience. I still don’t think it would run against the grain to much though.
The next time Veterans Day came up, my oldest was talking with my wife about it. I asked my kid “What is a Veteran, do you know?” and she told me that her teacher told her that “They are people who defend us.” I had to think about how to rout around this, since she’s only 6. So I asked her “Do you know what a war is?” and she said it’s when people fight each other and they get hurt. Which I told her, that’s correct, but I added that “You only become a Veteran by taking part in a War.” My wife mentioned that Grandma and Grandpa were Veterans, but they never fought anyone, they did other things that “helped the war” (which is true, you just have to be doing something material to support whatever war is going on to be considered a Veteran of that war, they are Gulf War Veterans, having never left the USA).
Today, after dropping her brother off at Daycare. I tried to find a way to talk with her about Veterans again. Now, I can’t help my self but explain things completely. I like to think doing so ensures nothing is misinterpreted, that probably isn’t a clean strategy with a hungry 6-year-old at 8AM, but I did it anyway. I think the most effective thing I did though, was pull up a globe we have. I said to her “Your teacher told you that Veterans defend us?” and she said “yeah”. So I pointed to the US on the globe. “Were here, and to the north of us and the south of us we have Canada and Mexico, do you see how close they are?” I continued “If these countries wanted to attack us, it would easy right? Because they’re right here.” then I spun the globe around to almost the complete other side and said “Over here, in places like Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, and others, we had wars with these places.” I said, “If someone came up to me, and got close to me, and tried to fight me, I’d be defending myself from them… But if I had to get from here [spins globe to the USA] all the way to HERE [spins again, points to Iran] it feels weird to say that I’m defending myself. It feels like I’m traveling here to pick a fight”.
Now, she was actively listening, but she’s also self-aware and told me “I’m just going to forget all this you know!” and I laughed. Obviously, she’s right. I told her “Sure, but I’m not going to stop telling you these things, so maybe it’ll stick”. When she came home today, and we were brushing our teeth at the end of the night, she told me that she learned that " Veterans protect us". I could not keep my thoughts to myself and simply said “I don’t agree with that. Let’s brush our teeth”. It’s hard when your kid comes home, excited to tell you something they learned at school, and that thing is straight dogshit propaganda, and you have to navigate telling them “that’s nice” but also “that’s not correct”. It’s doubly hard when what she’s being told isn’t a deliberate lie either, but something someone really believes is true.
As I write this, I’m considering having her take the day off on Veterans Day going forward, and developing a way to talk about veterans to my kids on the day, that doesn’t leave her walking away A) with overtly “negative” opinions about Veterans while also recognizing that B) Veterans do not defend or protect us in the way that her school clearly wants her to think they do. Obviously, that’s something me and my wife need to discuss together, but I imagine she’ll agree. It’s clearly uncomfortable for both of us. My wife has a very different experience with the military from me, because it directly impacted her life growing up. At some point both her parents were going to be shipped off on boats, even though someone had to stay and watch her and her brother. That is what drove her mom to leave the Navy (on top of everything else).
The reason why I state A) is that I know kids are parrots. If I provided my unfiltered opinion about the wars America fights, that shit will get repeated in the least nuanced way possible. My kid also told me that her friends dad is a veteran, and the last thing I need is her getting the idea that it might be fine to tell her friend that her dad is a bad guy or something. There is a fine line to walk here, that we all understand as adults living in a nationalist capitalist hellscape, that you have to keep your opinions close to the chest in some settings, and kids don’t get that shit.
So, all this to say, you might think “Who cares if they don’t get Veterans Day off, fuck Veterans”, but having it become an integrated part of the school year, where kids are explicitly taught about Veterans in this way, is honestly way fucking worse. Between this, and saying the Pledge of Allegiance in kindergarten, there is a war of attrition happening in the mind of my kid that I can’t ignore. It’s been gnawing at me for at least a week, but it’s going to keep coming back year after year.
Not that it matters, but as a veteran myself, I can fully attest that nothing I did “protected” anybody. In fact, my presence, in the places I was at, actively made the world less safe.
I have the day off, because the CIA has great benefits, but my kids are in school. Thanks for the good effortpost.
it’s a laudable goal to try and prevent USA brainworms from being injected into your kid’s head, without making them a pariah or your family a target. that is a hell of a needle to thread.
i know a lot of people that imagine their own political development as having a consistent and coherent through line. i think that is far rarer than reported and that most of them that claim the title are self-deluded snobs. basically, my point is that it’s ok to give yourself grace because certainly some junk is gonna get in there. what will matter is if your kid develops the tools to do their own cleaning.
i grew up absorbing all kinds of shitty jingoistic garbage ideas and thought-terminating heuristics through participation in our shit-tier civic institutions. it absolutely irritated the shit out of my lib parents (also educators), but their strategy was just to not agree with me and reorient the lesson towards values about being kind, protecting others, etc, rather than to argue me out of whatever BS political ideology i had worked myself into due to my social mileu.
my 20s were a series of constantly expanding revelations that upended my politics in an inelegant way. it wasn’t all at once, like a tree being knocked over. more like a dumpster falling down some stairs, resting for a while, then crashing through a floor, then another…, until certainty became rare and usually accompanied a sense of being fooled.
and what helped me more than anything was the will to be curious and internalize “learning” as a life-long pursuit. i certainly credit it for driving me to the left, because that’s where digging into history and investigating power leads. especially when phenomena fail to live up to ideologically driven expectations. it also let me go beyond my parents political development and notice the limitations that had been instilled in them when they were young (anti-communism).
Yeah me and my wife are very pro-learning. There are people who just stop at adulthood but I’ve told my kids often I used to hate reading and now I love reading and it’s because I’m always learning something new. Thanks for your comments about giving myself grace. It’s a good reminder!
Obviously. Of course!
One of the core memories that I have in shifting leftward in politics was getting into jiu jitsu and thinking about it in terms of violence. I felt powerless pinned underneath someone. Then a buzzer goes off, the round is over, and the person laughs and helps me up.
Then, with my big adult brain, I said “damn, that was someone who generally wants the best for me and isn’t going competition pace and it didn’t feel good.” I extrapolated that to scenarios of increasing intensity like someone who doesn’t like me, someone who doesn’t like me going all out, doesn’t like me, going all out with MMA, an amateur/pro/champion going all out with MMA, someone with a knife, a knife expert, a person with a gun, 2 people with guns, a death squad, and finally, a fully supplied army that will blow up a building when they suspect you’re in there. It was in that context I saw a picture of the (then) 56 military interventions in central and south America since WW2. I went “holy crap, these people are ridiculously violent!”
I tell this story because without the experience of being helplessly pinned by someone with a year of BJJ training as a hobby, the 56 military interventions would have been abstract and hard to conceptualize and feel moved by. I think you’ll find every time a Republican doesn’t care until it happens to them and more generally someone who’s effected by something and can finally listen that something abstract finally became real. In that sense, even if you dissect the notion of “defense” with a globe, I doubt your 6 year old has any semblance of what war could mean.
She might very well have experienced someone being shitty and someone else intervening. So defense and protection might feel real enough to her. Imperial aggression and unrelenting cruelty are luckily absent from her psyche. You can’t exactly put her in Gaza or Ukraine to prove a point. I doubt she can handle the Star Wars prequels and the concept that someone could believe something that is not wholly true and thereby cause suffering.
But I am partial to getting children into wrestling, BJJ, or other combat sport as a constructive introduction to violence as a concept you can feel instead of something you just read about or god forbid get your warped perspective on from media. Don’t know if I can actually recommend it but it sounds not-embarrassing to me. Not to mention a few layers abstracted away from the lesson you actually want to impart!
Turns out there really was something to be said about liberal indoctrination in public schools.
