Guest Post: Red diaper baby

"Teach your children well
Their father's hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by"

     Graham Nash, "Teach Your Children," 1968

While I am at my college's 55th reunion of the class of 1971, I am presenting guest posts by classmates. I wanted time to revisit old places where I formed permanent memories. I want go back to Emerson Hall, where presidential scholar Richard Neustadt told us in 1967 that JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly brought a nuclear war in 1962, and that LBJ was that very week deciding to escalate the war in Vietnam. 

Classmate Rod Kessler's guest post is a reflection on the politics and values he learned from his father. I don't have a photo of the dinner-table conversations my family had about school budget elections. I do have this photo of my father, teaching my brother and me how to grow melons.

Rod Kessler told me he enjoyed his 31-year career in the English Department of Salem State University, where he taught writing classes and workshops, as well as courses on the history of the English language and on grammar and style. While his book Off in Zimbabwe won the Associated Writing Program's annual award for a short story collection back in 1984, his 600-plus page novel, Edelman, Unsung, was deemed lacking in commercial appeal, and remains unpublished. His most recent work is Self-Portrait with Trees, a book of poems. 

Irving Kessler, 86. Rod Kessler, 60

Irving Kessler, 92. Rod Kessler, 66

Guest Post by Rod Kessler

Thinking about my thinking -- and yours.

Imagine posing this question to a ten-year-old: Suppose a hard-working cab driver has eight children and a hard-working doctor has only two children. Shouldn't the cab driver earn more than the doctor?

My father, a dedicated Communist, didn't hesitate to ask me that. One is never too young, he probably assumed, to hear, "To each according to his need; from each according to his ability" [Note: The cabbie and the doc were both hard-working.] As it happens, it was my big brother who received the brunt of my father's political teaching; unlike him, I didn't read The Communist Manifesto as a sixth grader. I escaped the heavy indoctrination. Lucky me.

Today I'm a liberal—a typical well-educated, white-haired, septuagenarian Massachusetts Trump-hating progressive, but I'm no Communist, no true believer. I vote for Democrats. That said, I haven't escaped parental influence. My parents regarded religion as the opiate of the masses and raised us accordingly. I'm an atheist to this day.

What's on my mind is how we Americans come to the stands we take that define us— but also that divide us. Most obviously, we bear the stamp of our parentage, not that this stamp is necessarily determinative. But if I had been the child of Republican evangelicals, might I be cheering Donald on and hoping to keep mifepristone out of the mail? What proportion of the electorate votes for the same party as Dad? What percentage of Americans prays in the church of Mom (or shares her disdain for praying at all)?

What's maybe more pernicious and pervasive than how our parents voted and prayed are the often-unarticulated cultural messages we absorbed as kids—the taken-for-granted truths that are never put into words. One such message in my back pages is that it's the government's role to provide for all its citizens. The government is like an extended family, and we're all in this together. Just as a good parent will sacrifice and provide for children, so must every good citizen contribute to everyone's welfare.

You know the saying, Fish are the last to discover the existence of water? That conception of government was the water I was swimming in.

Other people grew up in a very different ocean, I've learned. At Salem State University, I occasionally had students so gifted and so qualified that they could easily have been accepted at campuses far more elite and selective. But they came to our campus because it was the least costly, explaining that their families insisted that they pay their own way once they turned 18. The world didn't owe them a living, they believed and they'd be better people if they didn't rely on handouts (including government handouts).

There are plenty of people out there whose tacit understanding of government is of a mistrustful "they," not of a communal "us." We'd be better off, they take for granted, if Uncle Sam stayed off everyone's back so that industrious, enterprising souls could succeed in life. According to their world view, that cabbie, if he couldn't pay his bills, shouldn't have produced so many children in the first place and maybe he should have gone to medical school himself!

The point I'm hoping to make is that the political viewpoints that we consciously espouse and the values we uphold might derive from perspectives or schema so taken for granted, so internalized, that we're unaware of their power. Consider: What truths do you unconsciously assume are self-evident? I'm sure racial attitudes fall into this category, and so, too, probably the gender roles some consider "natural."

If we could somehow stand apart from ourselves and, like that fish that finally discovers the existence of water, start to perceive our preconceptions, maybe our confrontations with one another would be more civic, more productive. Maybe we could even start some rethinking.

My father died at the age of 98, still regarding Fidel as a hero (likewise Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie, Harry Belafonte, and—to give him his due—just about every composer of classical chamber music.) He never lost faith that the arc of history would ultimately bend toward social justice. I'm not sure these days if I'm optimistic enough to go along with that, but I hope we can grow wise enough in our divided nation to better understand where each of us, consciously or not, is coming from.

  

 

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