Does the President Have the Right to Address the Nation's Youth?

I am trying to keep my dismay at bay.  For the past two days I have been listening to the reasons why the President of the United States should not be allowed to address the students of the nation, and wondering what country I am living in!  Has anyone bothered to check out the content of this proposed speech before they accuse Obama of being a Marxist Communist who pals around with terrorists and wants to harm our children?  He wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school, for God’s sake!. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps to show how radical and maniacal conservatives have become.

I know the objection is that students are a captive audience, but to accuse the man of trying to create a slumbering mass of mind-numbed children in the service of the ‘Exalted Leader’ is ludicrous.  I guess promoting success, achievement and perseverance is somehow too radical for our children to assimilate into their brains without being brainwashed!

Where does this absolute visceral hatred for this man come from?  As Joan Walsh from Salon has expressed: “The hysteria Obama inspires in his far-right foes is primeval, primordial. From the Birthers’ obsession with the facts of his birth — which lets them obsess about his origins in miscegenation — to the paranoia that he’s coming for the children, there’s a deep strand of irrational paranoia that can’t be anything other than racial. These people don’t merely disagree with him, they distrust and dislike him viscerally. He’s not merely wrong, he’s scary; even terrifying.”  Or as Jim Shaw of the Huffington Post said yesterday, “Beyond all the ’state indoctrination’ and even Hitler Youth analogies being propagated by Obama’s school chat, I’m wondering how much there is (or is also) a racist meme at play. It’s something along the lines of: You can’t trust your children alone with this man … knowing how black men are. Wink, wink.”

When has this ever happened in this country?  I cannot remember ever feeling the pressure from this kind of opposition on the part of a large group of our countrymen.  Maybe during the McCarthy era in the early 50’s there was this kind of fear and paranoia, but not for the President and a major party in our political system.  McCarthy was paranoid about Communists.  Here we have a major political party paranoid about our leadership in a way that is destructive, seditious and maliciously false.  That seems new and frightening.

It takes my breath away.  This is not the America I once knew as a boy.  This is not the country I idolized as a child when I raised my hand over my heart to pledge allegiance to the flag to One Nation Under God.  We are living in a strange and unwelcoming place where the voices of hate trumpet visceral, irrational innuendo and lies.  Where does our precious America go from here?