I recently asked my Sonoma Valley High School French students whether they were optimists or pessimists. One hundred percent of them declared themselves to be optimists. It was hopeful and promising to hear the confidence in their voices despite my present state of mind.
These days, I can’t get away with asking them such questions before they turn the tables on me and wonder where I stand. And so they did. I hesitated to reveal my position, for fear that I might sway their youthful enthusiasm. However, they gleaned my response.
Just an existential crisis? Perhaps. But as I turn 56 years old, I’m struggling to remain before my students that beacon of hope for the future -- the understood oath to which I agreed before entering the classroom 20 years ago.
I’m struggling to defend and champion our aphorisms:
Justice is blind
One man, one vote
Liberty and justice for all
No man is above the law
For as long as I have been paying attention, our leaders have been comporting themselves antithetically to all of the above American truisms. The fact that only a minority is outraged has only encouraged, endorsed and normalized such behavior. Furthermore, it’s the economy that comes first, right? Everything else is secondary.
Justice has never been blind. We continue to unjustly incarcerate non-whites at a disproportionately alarming rate.
More energy has been spent suppressing the vote than guaranteeing that it takes place at all.
The thirst for power and party domination, as seen in the recent Supreme Court nomination, has superseded justice for all.
The murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, an example of realpolitik on steroids, has confirmed that, indeed, some are above the law.
Do our students have the bandwidth or interest to read in-depth articles outside of class – in perhaps the New Yorker or the Atlantic – which connect the dots and expose the recklessness and hypocrisy among our leaders? I was sure not paying close attention to our elected officials’ behavior when I was a high school student. But I dutifully read and annotated my history book replete with the usual mottos. I don’t recall any of my teachers suggesting that I should read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, for example, in parallel to broaden the narrative. Alas, that would have to wait until later in life.
Will my students - our next generation - tell me that my pessimism was misplaced and that I hastily surrendered? Will they tell me, when I see them as an octogenarian shopping at the local Safeway, that history is cyclical? That as a teacher, I should have known better that there would be crests and troughs in the political sea as we wade through it?
I suppose time will tell.
I hope, for our future generation, that my former students will be my teacher.
Devin Daly teaches French at Sonoma Valley High School.
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