Having come from a homeschooling family where everything is a "teaching moment", especially moments like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, or Clinton's inauguration, or the Olympics, I couldn't in good conscience ignore the news yesterday. So I called Moses - the oldest, age four - and began to explain to him in a haphazard way why what we were watching was important. To begin with the positive, I said that this was the first black man ever elected as president (you know, the important man who tells everyone what to do). This is a big deal, I said, because all of the other presidents have been white.
Suddenly I realized that my "positive" was introducing my son to a very negative concept - that skin color matters. If we have any chance at being a "post-racial" country then I think that we need to protect our children from this "historical moment" - just let them think that it's perfectly normal and expected that a black man can rise to the highest office in the country.
Not to mention that then I had to, much to my own sadness, explain why we can not be perfectly happy with this particular man - black, white or blue. I certainly did not give the 4-year-old details but it broke my heart a little bit to have to begin to introduce to him the concepts of hate and selfishness that run so deep in the human heart - through both racism and abortion.
Now it's off the the March for Life. And so begins ' introduction to "the morally defining issue of his generation," as my father puts it. Race defined the moral-battle for the country two generations ago and yesterday we witnessed a major victory in that battle - now the battle ground lies in the protection of the unborn. God bless America.
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