Our daughter is 8 years old. She's a sweet kid with a big artistic streak, just like her mother. She knows very little about politics and understands even less, which is just as it should be. But today's divisive politics and media hysteria is causing trouble in her young life. She's still too innocent to fully understand what's happening; she only knows that her feelings have been hurt for reasons that have nothing to do with her.
Join me below the fold to hear her story.
A couple of years ago my daughter became good friends with our neighbors' daughter, whom I'll call "Teri." For a while the pair was inseparable. There was an entire summer filled with sleepovers, movie marathons and days of going back and forth between houses. We were pleased that our daughter had found such a good friend.
But Teri's parents always acted strangely. They never answered the phone if we called. If I knocked on their door, the mother would always shut the door in my face and send Teri to talk to me. We had to make inter-family plans by proxy, with their daughter as a go-between. The father has never spoken a word to either of us. Mrs. Duck and I speculated that maybe the mother was agoraphobic, or maybe one of them was sick; but nothing we came up with answered all our questions. Since they wouldn't speak to us directly, we were forced to conclude that they were simply weird. But Teri seemed like a pretty nice girl; plus, she and our daughter loved playing together, so we put up with the weirdness.
Last summer, we invited Teri to go with us to an amusement park some two hours away. It was our daughter's birthday, and she really really wanted Teri to come with us. Teri's parents gave us an outright "No" straight away. But Teri begged and pleaded for days on end, and her parents finally relented. My wife even got a few terse phone messages from Teri's mother--but she still wouldn't talk to us face-to-face. This is when we began to think that Teri's parents had a problem with us. We didn't know what the problem was, but it seemed to us not to be terribly unusual: I'm an aging long-haired hippie and Mrs. Duck is a tattoo artist, and we live in a very conservative part of the country. We could understand why some parents around here might think twice about us. Not that we ever had a chance to defend ourselves to these people.
When the school year started up, our daughter was excited that she and Teri would be in the same class. About a month or so in, things took a turn for the worse. Suddenly Teri was no longer allowed to come over to our house; soon they were forbidden to talk on the phone. Then Teri started picking on our daughter in school. After that, she pretended to be our daughter's friend only to get her into trouble a little while later. We were dumbfounded, which was made worse by our inability to get Teri's parents even to talk to us. We spoke with the girls' teacher, who said that she had never met Teri's parents either (something else we thought peculiar).
This has been going on all year. So many days our daughter has come home crying because of something Teri has said or done to her. Finally we had to advise our daughter that sometimes we just have to write some people off. It was, and still is, a tough thing for her to understand.
But something happened this week that seemed to make everything crystal clear.
The girls had a special Valentine's Day project at school: to make a kind of bas-relief sculpture/portrait of some famous person that their parents would love. Our daughter made an impressive likeness of Paul McCartney (we--and Mrs. Duck especially--are big Beatles fans). Out of nowhere, our daughter made a frowny face and said, "Teri made a sculpture of Glenn Beck."
Mrs. Duck and I looked at each other as realization dawned on us. We were shocked...but now everything started falling into place. We have Obama stickers on our cars; Teri's parents are apparently big Beckheads. For two years now (about as long as Teri and our daughter have known each other), Beck has been demonizing people like us. Over and over he's called us communists, socialists, fascists, marxists, and anti-Americans. He's called us liars. He's called us terrorists. He's called us evil.
And it seems as though Teri's parents have bought it all so completely that they refuse to speak to us, refuse to let their daughter play or even talk to ours. We suspect that they may have even poisoned their daughter's mind to believe outrageous things about our family, and about our daughter. Learning that Teri's parents are Glenn Beck disciples made everything we've been going through make perfect sense. It angers us and outrages us; we would never forbid our daughter from playing with a childhood friend because of her parents' politics. But evidently Teri's parents do.
Now we're left thinking back to last month's debate over what kind of influence Fox News and their media crackpots might be having on our society. I know that when I was a kid--in the '70s--I played with friends whose parents were politically (and even racially and religiously) diverse. In those days, it either didn't matter at all or it didn't matter when it came to the kids. Maybe Fox and Beck convince people to shoot opposing political figures; maybe not. But what they do in fact, as we have directly experienced, is to cause unnecessary strife among everyday Americans.
Fox and Beck's fear-laced and often hateful rhetoric sows distrust among neighbors. They turn Americans against each other. They turn otherwise normal well-meaning people into enemies. And in the end, they even sour innocent childhood friendships.
We are amazed that they can sleep at night.