General Discussion

In It to Win It

(8,285 posts) Sat Jun 4, 2022, 07:03 PM Jun 2022

[DeSantis] can't trust teachers with a lesson plan, but let's make them carry guns

Fifty-two years ago, I was completing a required high school course called “Americanism vs. Communism” at my segregated high school, Forest Hill in West Palm Beach. I now read that our governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill into law recently that mandates teaching about the “victims of communism.” I guess that Mark Twain was right when he said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

In hindsight, and at a less impressionable age, I realize the course I took was nothing less than naked propaganda due to anti-communist hysteria at the time. It was taught by a man, now deceased, who was ignorant of his subjects but charismatic. He spoke with such authority and without equivocation that most of his students thought he was omniscient and should run for president. He brought in the leader of the local branch of the John Birch Society and once told us he would not sell his house to a Black family because he “wouldn’t do that to his neighbors.”

Our governor wants our children to learn of the “hundreds of millions of individuals who have suffered and continue to suffer” under communism. “Honoring the people that have fallen victim to communist regimes and teaching our students about those atrocities is the best way to ensure that history does not repeat itself,” the governor said last month.

This is rich, coming from a man who doesn’t want children to learn of the horrors of our history of slavery.