On the issue of an 8-year-old Rhode Island student “inappropriately” wearing to school a military camouflage baseball cap, on which was embroidered the American flag and festooned with plastic toy soldiers. The boy’s intention was to honor the military. The school principal’s intention was to declare the boy in violation of the district’s “no-weapons policy” because the tiny toy soldiers were . . . carrying tiny guns.
Leftists, and the countless leftists of every red hue in between—plus the useful idiots—continue to push the political envelope. Here is yet another indication of what they’re up to. Overall, they seek to turn our American laws and traditions upside down, inside out, or destroy them. They're "testing" the nation, to see just how far they can go, even if the move appears over the top. There’s a sense that they’re thinking, Well, just throw it out there and see whether it sticks; if too much opposition, retreat and go silent, and move on to the next targeted institution, value, and other “things American.”
There’s nothing new here. The left’s ninety-year-old battle plan has always been about control of, among other areas, our print and electronic communications, labor/labor unions, education systems, and now, virtually every daily aspect of an American's life.
Sometimes, leftist actions are very public and at other times so subtle as to overlook them. We used to think, for example, that only college-age kids undergo the Socialist-Marxist ideology woven into their “higher learning” instruction. A kid with “conservative” values goes off to college, and, lo, exits the campus stage left. Mom, Dad, we’re a greedy country; we’re the main cause of “Global Warming” and so many other problems in the world . . . yada, yada, yada.
But notice how the left has moved downward, to high school teachers, to grade school teaches, and now, to kindergarten teachers--even to teachers in the remotest of schools in the heartland to schools in larger communities and cities. Here, we find the continued infusion of the leftist political curriculum in calculated and weighted doses. (Marx and Engel, after all, are little too much for the American First Grader.)
Still, into this effort goes the goal to eliminate our national symbols from our children’s daily lives; to subordinate or eliminate the parents’ stewardship and make the school the dominant “guidance counselor” in the academic life of the fledgling kindergartner and of the now world wise university graduate. The Flag suddenly disappears from classroom display. What nascent student would notice the disappearance of the Flag or hanging pictures of our founders, or replicas of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution? Consider that a growing number of schools no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance. All this and more, against a national backdrop where an ordinary citizen now sues his or her neighbor because of the neighbor's noisy, irritating flapping American flag. We also read of the growing trend in litigation, where property managers prohibit residents from displaying the Flag in any form, on a pole or draped in a window. Wipe national symbols and icons from the national view.
Rhode Islanders, you should be up in arms. Take back your schools! You were the last of the 13 original colonies to ratify the Constitution, demanding that the Bill of Rights also contain the guarantee of individual liberties. Despite the media’s politically tendentious manipulation and suppression of news, this kind of alarming story emerges with increasing regularity. Every parent whose child attends the Tiogue School in Coventry, every Rhode Islander, every American, should summarily ignore any such proscription by a school principal—a public employee who serves at the pleasure of a people whose freedom remains ensured through the real barrel of the gun, not through the “concept of the gun.”
S. Strauss
NYC
