At a critical point in Arthur Miller’s great play “The Crucible,” the imperious presiding judge at the Salem witch trials tells the accused that “a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between.” It is either-or, black and white, guilty until proven innocent. If you’re not one of us, you’re one of them. And them get hung.
Well, I guess I’m one of them. No, not an unlucky Puritan. I’m an ugly Anti- American.
It seems that these days, as it did in the time of Salem’s courts, those who criticize our leaders, especially the current administration, are the new witches in the form of de facto anti-Americans. Never have I heard such vitriol and statements demonstrating a mob mentality as on the conservative talk shows calling for Jay Bennish’s termination and figurative dismemberment.
How dare the Overland High School teacher criticize America? How dare he spew such dangerous ideas, such subversive filth? How dare he use the classroom to introduce viewpoints that tarnish our ideals, everything we stand for?
This is what I heard repeatedly: Because he hates America.
Well, then, Thoreau and Whitman and Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison and Mencken and Upton Sinclair and Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and Ralph Nader and countless others who dissented in various and often repugnant ways must have hated America, too. But, they managed to become famous Americans. How did that happen?
It happened because dissent is just about the most American trait going. This country was founded by the Puritans, “Non-conformists,” they were called in England, who were persecuted viciously for their differences with the Anglican Church. Slavery was stopped by unpopular and maligned dissenters, as were child labor and segregation. The fact is, dissent gets people talking, issues mulled, wrongs righted. People find out where they really stand and what they really believe in. Is that a bad thing?
Apparently it is, especially if you’re on the “them” side these days. You are then labeled a liberal, a lefty, and anti- American. Labeling is the perfect argument, because it pre-empts argument. Case closed. You’re an anti-American.
And if you’re Bennish, you’re a very ugly one. True, Bennish pushed the envelope too hard and out popped Der Fuehrer. He also said some very provocative and even outlandish things. I’m not the one to say whether they were true or not. They may or may not be. But I do know this: We have all said things we believed in passionately, at times in ways we probably later revised in private. And then we stopped doing it – until the next time we became passionate about something.
I’m not getting into the argument over whether Bennish’s views are right or wrong, truth or lies, or whether the 16-year-olds in his class were temperamentally and intellectually capable of handling his challenge to think for themselves. Again, they may or may not be. But I can assure you of this: They are now talking about these issues in more passionate ways and real terms than can be found in a textbook. I’ve been in Overland’s classrooms this past week, and heard them firsthand.
So let’s get rid of this anti-American nonsense. Bennish and the people who support him do not hate America. They question it, yes, prod it, force it to examine itself. Perhaps it is the tenor of the times that questioning is equated with disloyalty or that self-examination is seen as subversion. In a time of war and terrorism, that’s understandable. But these trying times are even more reason to see Bennish’s speech not as that of a dangerous, intractable despot but a genuinely concerned, albeit limit-pushing, American. A melting pot by definition needs stirring.
In 1692 in Salem, Mass., they hung 19 “thems.” One they “pressed” to death with stones. Ten years later, special courts awarded the families of “them” restitution for their suffering, and restored the excommunicated to the church and God. Perhaps the lesson 1692 Salem whispers to us now is a mournful plea for “we.”
Bennish is not “them” and neither am I. “Them” and “us” are merely the ugly specters conjured up by those who would selfishly divide a nation derived from and defined by dissent.
Mark Moe (brktrt_80231@yahoo.com) is a retired English teacher.
