AND IT SHOULD BE: Salena Zito: School board meetings show only that freedom is messy.
Twenty years ago, Paul Carson said he never would have hesitated speaking out at a school board meeting about any issue affecting his children’s education.
But one day, that changed. “I just don’t do it,” Carson told me. A physician who practices medicine in an urban Pittsburgh hospital, Carson said it has nothing to do with his being 20 years older. “It has everything to do with the culture we are navigating.” . . .
School board meetings have been around forever, and they have always had the potential to become raucous. I remember attending them with my mother as a teenager, then as a mother myself when my children were young. I also had to attend a few as a reporter for the local newspaper I worked for at the time. Emotions often ran high, as they should when children’s welfare is involved. Good parents never lose sight that the people who educate their children spend more day time with them in a classroom setting than parents themselves do. Emotions also ran high when new buildings were proposed, which always eventually meant higher taxes.
I have often told young reporters that if they want to see firsthand the most important political process in the U.S. system, turn off cable news, get off the iPhone, turn their eyes away from Washington, and cover a local school board meeting.
No one should accept threats or physical violence at a school board meeting or anywhere else. But such conduct is fortunately rare. The problem today is, can we trust our government to distinguish between the actual threat of violence and the passionate expression of viewpoints by parents?
No, we can’t. Which is why Merrick Garland should resign. Plus:
Eighty years ago, dairy farmer Jim Edgerton stood up at a town hall meeting in his hometown of Arlington, Vermont, to voice his disagreement with the town councilors’ decision to build a new school. Edgerton was the only person at the meeting or in town who objected to the proposed building.
His opposition was mostly unremarkable, but he held his ground nonetheless. No one would have known about it had not Norman Rockwell, a newcomer in town, been there.
As he watched Edgerton exercise his freedom of speech, the famous illustrator of Americana could not stop thinking about the State of the Union address President Franklin D. Roosevelt had delivered on Jan. 6, 1941, in which he warned that the values and liberties the public took for granted were under attack. Rockwell would go on to illustrate that moment, making Roosevelt’s words relatable by depicting them in use in small-town America.
It is inconceivable that the federal government today wants to squash that freedom through vague rules and intimidation. Garland seems to be making the calculation that the Jim Edgertons of this world will cower under the concern the government is watching them.
He hopes for that. I expect he’ll be disappointed.