Too Many Trophies, Too Many Smiley Faces, and a Changed Nation

                   Too Many Trophies, Too Many Smiley Faces, 

                               and a Changed Nation

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 20, 2016

            Who among us doesn’t need affirmation?  Affirmation?  The very question reveals how far we have come in our need for praise.

            Consider the following names and ask yourself if these leaders/changers needed affirmation: Lincoln, Mark Twain, FDR, George Patton, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Steve Jobs …

            The list is endless.  Do we seriously think that people who have changed the world worried about whether or not they would be affirmed?  OK, Elvis did ask his mother at one point early in his career, “Mama, do you think I’m obscene?”  Apparently, the criticism of his much swiveling – so new to the entertainment scene – reached him, but it didn’t stop his altering style.  He kept swiveling, but also blessed us with “How Great Thou Art” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

            Lincoln could be melancholy, though not from lack of affirmation, but from the weight of his office.  That weight led him to remark, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”  That’s how millions of Americans feel about abortion.

            Mark Twain was considered a literary renegade because he spelled words the way people pronounced them.  Unfazed by the rules of English, he brightened the lives of readers on at least three continents.  FDR and Reagan?  Those two cheery men were going to be happy, affirmed or not.  Mother Teresa, Thatcher, Billy Graham, and Steve Jobs?  Focused people like these aren’t thinking about affirmation. 

            Patton and Churchill?  These two didn’t need anybody’s trophies or smiley faces either.

            But today’s children, teens, and college students do need them.  Why?  Because that’s what we’ve handed them for decades.  We have trained them well to seek and to need affirmation.  Not all of them, but enough to fill the streets with “protestors” who need “safe space,” who can’t seem to grow up or to understand that “free” means somebody besides them pays for it.  Who don’t know that peaceful transfer of power after an election is one of the chief distinctives of democratic America.

            Unearned affirmation and self-esteem emphasis have produced bad fruit.  That fruit is one nation under therapy, a nation of people who are not as tough as our parents and grandparents were.  No wonder.  We’ve swallowed all the books that push affirmation instead of accomplishment.  That’s why we award “participation.”

            Everything has a history, and the Great Age of Coddling in which we find ourselves is no different.  I sensed this age easing in as far back as 1970.  Just five years into teaching, and at a well respected high school, I could tell that educational priorities were shifting.  A social-psychological agenda was displacing the time honored knowledge-based agenda.  At faculty meetings, conferences, and in educational literature it was clear a new day was dawning, a day in which learning was taking a back seat to “the learner.”

            Some things in the shift, such as more help for slow learners, were good, but learning decreased and “the learner,” with all his “needs,” became education’s central purpose.  Even so, in every class I’ve ever taught it’s knowledge that excites students.  Introspection depresses.  Students need far less affirmation than knowledge and character development.  Knowledge and character point students upward and outward.  Excessive affirmation points inward to the self.  

One mark of the Great Age of Coddling is the demise of substance.  Recently on a popular Christian radio station, I suffered through a song with 12 “Wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s” before anything of fact or argument was given.  Mid-song, there were 2 “wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s,” and at the end of the song, 10 “wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s” as the song mercifully faded away.  Little content, but affirming sounds and feelings, I reckon.

            Just as so much contemporary music is low on words and high on rhythm, so are the actions of anti-Trump protestors void of idea.  Despite a national election that turned politics-as-usual on its head, college students are merely chanting vulgarities and personal attacks.  No lucid expression of their purpose; just “Adolf Trump,” “Racist Trump,” and a refusal to acknowledge the unambiguous results of a stunning election. 

            Inauguration Day may not be pretty.  Pretty or not, it will be the beginning of a four-year conflict between President Trump and his protestors who will enjoy the support of the media.  For eight years President Reagan endured the same.  For eight years President Obama, the media’s darling, had smooth sailing.

            Pampered college youths have made it clear that they want satisfaction and that they deserve it.  They’re special.  Don’t you know that?

           

Roger Hines

11/16/16