Enough about “parental rights.” I want to talk about nonparental rights.
I want to talk about the fact that a public school, identified that way for a reason, doesn’t exist as some bespoke service attending to the material wants and political whims of only those Americans with children in the science lab and on the soccer field. It’s an investment, funded by all taxpayers, in the cultivation of citizens who better appreciate our democracy and can participate in it more knowledgeably and productively.
Each of us has skin in the game. And each of us, even those of us without children, has the right to weigh in on how the game is played.
But you wouldn’t know that from the education conflagrations of the moment — from the howls of protest from parents about what their children are or aren’t exposed to, what their children are and aren’t taught.
You wouldn’t know it from the arguments for Florida’s recently enacted ban on talk of gay and trans people with young schoolchildren. That measure, nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” initiative by its opponents, was called the Parental Rights in Education bill by its promoters — as if it were restoring and safeguarding some fundamental prerogative that should never have been challenged, as if parents’ sensitivities and sensibilities hold extra-special sway.
They matter, definitely. But one parent’s sensitivities and sensibilities don’t reliably align with another’s. Or with mine. Or with yours.
And raising the banner of “parental rights,” which is being hoisted high and waved with intensifying passion these days, doesn’t resolve that conflict. Nor does it change the fact that the schools in question exist for all of us, to reflect and inculcate democratic values and ecumenical virtues that have nothing to do with any one parent’s ideology, religion or lack thereof.
If the prevailing sensitivities and sensibilities of most parents at a given moment were the final word, formal racial segregation of educational institutions would have lasted longer than it did. There’d still be prayer in some public schools, and I don’t mean nondenominational.
I’m not equating those issues with current fights over L.G.B.T.Q. content in curriculums. Nor am I pushing specifically for that content, whose prevalence and emphasis remain murky to me, as they do, I’d wager, to most of the Americans who have vociferously entered the fray.
I’m sympathetic to the perspective that there’s a time, place and tone for such discussions. Too much too soon can be a clumsy, politically reckless provocation. So can vaguely worded, spitefully conceived, intentionally divisive laws, like the one in Florida, that encourage parents specifically to file lawsuits if they catch the scent of something they find unsavory in their children’s classrooms.
Parents do and should have authority over much of their children’s lives. No quarrel from me there. I’m in genuine awe of the responsibilities that parents take on, and I feel enormous gratitude toward those who approach those responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.
But public education is precisely that, and it’s both inappropriate and dangerous to treat the parents who have children in public schools as the only interested parties or as stakeholders whose desires are categorically more important than everybody else’s. The spreading cry of “parental rights” suggests as much. And the wrongness of that transcends any partisan affiliation.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, plenty of parents disagreed with the mores that they attributed to the schools down the street. But many of them, at least in my imperfect memory, responded not by screaming at school boards but by rerouting their children to parochial institutions. If they wanted overt religion in their schools, they patronized overtly religious schools.
More than a few of them turned to home-schooling. I don’t have a whole lot in common with home-schoolers, but I respect their acknowledgment of what they can and can’t ask a taxpayer-funded institution to do. They seem to recognize the line between public and private. I hear too little about that line when people quarrel over schools today.
None of us get from public schools the precise instruction and exact social dynamics that we’d prescribe. That’s because they don’t exist to validate our individual worldviews.
They’re public schools, and I and most of the other people I know, whether we have children or not, are happy to fund them, because we believe in education and we believe in democracy. What we don’t believe — what I don’t — is that “parental rights” take precedence over civic ideals.
For the Love of Lyrics
Almost from the moment I announced this feature, the newsletter’s inbox has been a merrily teeming arena of competing voices, rival passions, the Bruce Springsteen fans in one section, the Kris Kristofferson mavens in another. When will you get to Paul Simon? Don’t overlook Mary Chapin Carpenter! Elvis Costello deserves his day!
He’ll get it, in time. So will many of the others you’ve nominated. But today goes to the songwriter who has arguably been the focus of the most ardent appeals in my inbox — and has perhaps prompted more of them than any other. (I haven’t done a definitive count.)
I give you Leonard Cohen.
Or, rather, you gave him to me, citing, for example, these famously elegant lines from his song “Anthem”:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
Kathryn Lodato of Monterey, Calif., and Patrick McCloskey of Canmore, Alberta, drew special attention to that song. David Dorinson of North Fork, Calif., and Chris Crosman of Thomaston, Maine, trained a spotlight on “Bird on a Wire,” with its gutting confessions, including the line “I have torn everyone who reached out to me.”
Kathleen Glaus of Oberlin, Ohio, and Noreen Herzfeld of Collegeville, Minn., praised “You Want It Darker,” with its haunting mention of “a million candles burning/For the help that never came.”
In the November 2016 obituary in The Times, Larry Rohter noted that Cohen, who died that year at 82, was a “poet and novelist who abandoned a promising literary career to become one of the foremost songwriters of the contemporary era.” An article in The Times two months earlier by Nick Murray pondered the particular ubiquity of Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” covered by so many other singers and tightly embraced by contestants on television vocal competitions like “The Voice.”
“The poet of brokenness” is what Mikal Gilmore called Cohen in an appreciation in Rolling Stone just after Cohen’s death. It’s one of many paeans to his lyrical gifts, the magnitude of which means that I could quote many more songs and hundreds of lines. The sky is the limit.
But I’ll keep things earthbound, by which I mean brief, and direct you to this additional tribute to Cohen in Slate and to another in The New Yorker. They give the man his ample due.
“For the Love of Lyrics” appears monthly(ish). To nominate a songwriter and song, please email me here, including your name and place of residence. “For the Love of Sentences” will return with the next newsletter; you can use the same link to suggest recent snippets of prose for it.
What I’m Reading (and Watching)
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I have long had a soft spot for all things “Law & Order,” including the short-lived “Law & Order: LA,” and I noticed recently that episodes of the show, which ran from 2010 to 2011, are available on Amazon Prime. To my surprise, I hadn’t seen more than half of them. It’s an uneven production, but the cast — which includes Corey Stoll, Regina Hall, Rachel Ticotin and Alfred Molina — is terrific, and the 20th episode, “El Sereno,” has an ambitious, carefully fashioned subplot about the interplay and overlap of homophobia and racism. It works as a stand-alone. I recommend it.
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Did Tucker Carlson really promote testicle tanning? Yes, yes, he did, and Dana Milbank, in The Washington Post, has the details and some aptly caustic and insightful words about it.
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Some of us get to live down and move past our foolish choices, and some of us don’t. Jennifer Grey, the star of “Dirty Dancing,” spent many of her years in the latter camp. She had cosmetic surgery to minimize her nose — not really such a foolish choice, given the values of Hollywood and prevalence of such procedures there — and the results tanked her acting career, turning her into an object of sustained mockery. But she apparently tackles that head-on in a new memoir, “Out of the Corner,” as Elisabeth Egan’s excellent recent profile of her in The Times made clear. I loved Liz’s article, because it spoke to one of my favorite themes: the sweet liberation that comes from living openly and honestly, from embracing your vulnerability and from not fleeing the truth or keeping secrets. It’s both a fun read and a profound one.
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It’s imperative that we not turn away from the horrors to which Ukrainians are being subjected, from the ruthlessness of what Russians are doing. To that end, read this account in The Times by Michael Schwirtz, Cora Engelbrecht and Andrew E. Kramer about the thousands of Ukrainians trapped in a steel mill in Mariupol.
On a Personal Note
I recently flew from North Carolina to Arizona and back on jammed planes with sweltering cabins, and the masks I wore, for hours on end, came to feel less like protective barriers than like instruments of torture. Sweat eddied beneath them. My face turned borderline crimson. And for more than a week afterward, the skin just below and above my jawline was inflamed, itchy, repulsive.
“What’s going on?” a fellow professor at Duke asked me. While he meant to communicate empathy, he couldn’t muffle his horror. He was looking at a gorgon. I urged him to hurry along before he turned to stone.
Without time to visit a doctor and with most doctors taking appointments for nine months from now, I turned to various ointments with diverse promises, then used them in rotation, employing a trial-and-error method that probably had little more impact in the end than the mere passage of time did. I’m no longer in discomfort. I’m more or less presentable.
I’m also so, so ready to ditch these masks.
That’s not a political position. It’s not an epidemiological assessment. I’m not pushing any one policy or single course of action. Quite the opposite: I’m noting that we’ve all been through a lot over these past two-plus years of pandemic. Many people are worn out. Nerves are seriously frayed. And we need to be mindful of that. We need to be patient with one another.
That’s been true from the start, but the period we’re entering now is especially fraught. It’s one of “mask muddle,” to cite a phrase in a headline in Tuesday’s Axios PM newsletter.
Most airlines just ditched mask mandates, but some cities still require them on mass transit. Many stores have removed signs that beseech customers to wear masks. Many stores haven’t. Covid hospitalization rates are well below what they were at many points past; coronavirus infection rates are still high in many places.
There are conflicting signals, setting up conflict. Let’s please, please step away from it.
That man over there who’s wearing a mask in a setting where it’s no longer compulsory and nobody else is? He’s not some example of excessive and perilous deference. He’s not opening the door to — or propping up — tyranny. And he’s not necessarily judging you. He’s making a personal decision, born of factors (including, possibly, a special medical vulnerability) that you can’t know. Respect him. Even give him a six-foot berth if you can.
That woman over there who’s not wearing a mask in circumstances that allow her to make that decision even though a powerful argument for masking remains? Don’t glare at her. She’s not targeting you. And perhaps the only statement that she’s making is that she has really struggled with masks — has really struggled with this whole pandemic — and very much needs a moment of release.
I follow mask rules. When there are none, I frequently take my cues from the people around me or outright ask them if they’d like me to put on a mask. Sometimes I don’t ask — but am receptive to any request that they make along those lines.
And on planes? I’ll probably continue to mask, at least as long as infection rates are significant, given the human congestion of those particular environments. But I might give myself little pauses and breaks, lest the crimson gorgon return. We’ll see.
We’re in a case-by-case, moment-to-moment chapter of this challenging story. It calls for calmness, consideration, courtesy. I fear that those qualities are in diminishing supply these days. But I’m eager to be proved wrong.
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April 21, 2022 at 11:01PM
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Opinion | Parents Aren’t the Only Ones With Rights - The New York Times
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