An Army of One AMITY SR. HIGH S
What it's like to be the only Republican in your high school. An Army of One
I GO TO AMITY SR. HIGH SCHOOL in Woodbridge, Connecticut--a liberal public school in a liberal state. Conservatives are scarce around here and outspoken ones are scarcer. I am so ''unusual'' that people (friends and even some I don't know) call me ''Dan, Dan, Republican,'' which is a good-natured joke, sort of.
These days, I never go to school without my Election 2004 battle kit--a hefty red folder that I carry in my backpack titled (on account of my infinite humility) ''Proving People Wrong.'' I always have my folder with me, so that when I get into a political discussion (which might happen a dozen times a day and is likely to happen even more often as Election Day approaches), I can confront my opponents with the facts. They hate facts. They prefer to take refuge behind a slogan: Bush is Dumb.
The teachers are predictable liberals; the students are more worrying. One boy says he'd just as soon live in Canada.
They can't understand why I should be so enthusiastic about our country. Isn't it more or less interchangeable with a few dozen other rich western democracies?
. He asked what my article was about. To put it briefly, I said, ''It's about kids who don't love their country.'' He answered: ''Do they have to love their country? Is that a requirement?''
Why do students talk and think this way? As computer geeks used to say, garbage in, garbage out.
We are taught U.S. history out of politically correct textbooks. The books are boring and tedious and, what's worse, extremely misleading..
My textbook last year, for example, was the 12th edition of The American Pageant by David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and the late Thomas Bailey. Its chapter on World War II has more than a page on the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor and one sentence on the Bataan Death March..
The book dramatically describes how Carter, in the summer of 1979, ''like a royal potentate of old, summoning the wise men of the realm for their counsel in a time of crisis,'' went up to Camp David (''the mountaintop'') while his people awaited ''the results of these extraordinary deliberations. In other words: He did a great job, and the awful things that happened during his administration weren't his fault.
The Reagan chapter starts by describing Reagan's high hopes and goals, but quickly deteriorates: ''At first, 'supply-side' economics seemed to be a beautiful theory mugged by a gang of brutal facts'' as the economy went downhill. Then there was a ''healthy'' recovery. But ''for the first time in the twentieth century, income gaps widened between the richest and poorest Americans. The poor got poorer and the very rich grew fabulously richer, while middle-class incomes largely stagnated.''
This is how the authors describe the largest peacetime economic boom of the 20th century, a period in which the average income of all quintiles from poorest to richest increased. The book then quickly moves on to discuss the deficit: ''The staggering deficits of the Reagan administration constituted a great economic failure. . . . The deficits virtually guaranteed that future generations of Americans would either have to work harder than their parents, lower their standard of living, or both, to pay their foreign creditors when the bills came due.''
By The discussions warped, incompet
