Small loves, in the right place, help us have great loves at the right time.
The little boy looks up and sees the great man towering over him in bronze. He is impressed for a second, though he quickly moves on to something else, not being here to “learn a lesson.” And yet if one keeps putting before the boy the best in men, then he might wish to be like them.
He might not and that is a condition of liberty and love. People can choose. Nobody should wish to make children weapons in a culture war or even force them to believe anything. If the Good God in the garden let us choose, then good parents must do so as well. Naturally we teach the truth, as we see the truth, knowing to our horror that we are often wrong. Centuries in the future other people will judge us. Sometimes they will judge our virtues, since people in the future also will not have a lock on the truth. The progress of history is in the hands of God and our progress is not smooth.
History is complicated and our nation is not eternal. We will have our glorious moment, perhaps even a few moments in time when we are the greatest example of some goodness on the globe, but we will also have our sordid failures. We are like all the rest and yet this is our home. We are of this people, loving our fathers and mothers, those who have gone before us for the good they have done. Thus we start with the moments when we are an image of the City of God, shining on a hill, and turn, never averting our gaze as adults, to the other times.
We showed the little boy a man who brought down a brutal Empire. He learned that bringing down brutal Empires was good and to praise this virtue. We did this without denying that our own imperial conquests had been brutal. No errors were ignored, we praised the good without excusing the bad.
Surely, though it is better to say at first: “We honor this man, Admiral Nimitz, for his foresight, his courage, and for his defense of our homeland.” We should, naturally, also say that he like every man was imperfect. In the end, all the imperfections can be made plain as the boy grows to be a man. Never tell the boy lies. Teach him to admire the good, George Washington refused to become King of America, and do not excuse the bad, George Washington owned slaves.
Complicated truths defy a sanitized history that all was well in the United States. They also forbid false moral comparisons between regimes like the Soviet Union and the United States. People fled from the Iron Curtain not into that regime. We need not pretend our own evils are not evil to say the gulags were a monstrosity. We need not make our own treatment of Jewish people any less bad than it was to show the unique horrors of the Holocaust.
One thing we must never do is to leave him to honor pixel heroes by failing to teach him to love flawed real people. These fictional people can be perfect, even change with the times, because they have no souls and are rewritten to suit the establishment. The real women and men, actual heroes, are complicated. They ran into burning buildings on 9/11 to save lives, but may have had serious faults on 9/10. Like Frederick Douglass they fought to get Black men the vote, but failed to work for First Nations. These real heroes require mercy, because nobody can retcon their errors. A good way to judge is to ask if we could have matched their virtue, when we almost surely could match their vices.
We admire our heroes, but like the little boy walk away knowing the bronze man is only one image of real men.
So it goes.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In