Tag Archives: current events

Hillary Clinton and the advent of email

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With Hillary Clinton being criticized over inaccessibility to her email, I’m left wondering if, under similar circumstances, my reputation would be in jeopardy. I depend on email for nearly all personal and professional communications.

The National Archives and presidential libraries contain hand-written letters of former government officials. The British Museum has hand-written manuscripts by famous authors who wrote a draft, then scratched out and added words to produce a masterpiece. Letters and manuscripts were painstakingly written in the cursive style formerly taught and admired, in many cases so pretty that it’s illegible today. With no access to whiteout or ink erasures, people gave thought to most every word they wrote.

The advent of email brought with it a carelessness. At first we were told it wasn’t necessary to worry about capitalization or grammar; just get that message out there. Email invites hurried responses, spur-of-the moment thoughts. Not infrequently do we post curt messages with the potential of hurting someone’s feelings; spout off words we’d never say face to face; write something mean-spirited, because that’s the way we feel at the moment. Sarcasm and irony don’t necessarily come through.

I’d be humiliated were all my emails scrutinized and exposed: a jealous comment to a friend about M’s appearance; a complaint that all R can do is brag about himself. A grammatical mistake here, a word of profanity there. I probably write more messages/letters in a week than my literary forebears wrote in a lifetime.

So I take issue with the assumption that all email messages sent by public officials are the property of the people. Though I disagree with John Boehner on most issues, I want to allow him some privacy when it comes to his email. Surely he has expressed frustration, anger, snide observations, private, spur-of-the-minute thoughts he doesn’t want on the public record. A word of affection to his wife back in Ohio is none of my business.

The Clinton’s no less than Obama have been targets of the opposition’s scrutiny ever since they appeared on the national scene. Surely Hillary was aware early on that she needed to keep tight control over what Republicans were certain to expose. This is not secretive; it’s savvy.

Sure, many of us older citizens wish for a return to civility and care in communications. It’s time we accept that it’s not going to happen.

The Day Kennedy was Shot

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On the same day newscasters were asking “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” I got a message from the past on Linked In: “Did you teach at B’water Elementary School 50 years ago?” It was from one of my students the first year I taught: Cecille.

In the week leading up to the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination I’d been thinking about that year. Feeling guilt ridden. It was the first year I taught. I’d been trained to teach high school history, but the only job I could find was working with fifth graders. I knew nothing about reading or math instruction. To make matters worse, I had a class of thirty-six ten-year-olds.

I sent the “bad boys” to the principal’s office. I didn’t know what to do for those who couldn’t read except plug them into phonics workbooks, again and again covering rules about short and long a’s, consonant blends. I doubt that they read any better on the last day of the year than they had on the first.

Thinking back on the events of November 22, 1962, I also was thinking, given what I now know about children’s need to talk about traumatic events, that I’d let my class down in the days following the assassination. I don’t recall discussing it with them.

My memory is that on that Friday afternoon, a few minutes before school was dismissed, our class Student Council representative returned to the room and said, “The President’s been shot.”

In my mind, it couldn’t be. “I doubt that,” I said. “Let’s not worry.” School let out a few minutes later and all the kids went home.

But Cecille wrote that she remembers that afternoon differently. She says that as one in the last group to board buses each day, she was still in the room when the janitor came by and told me, “The President has died.” Cecille says I cried and that for her my crying turned out to be an important lesson in compassion: how important people are, even if we don’t have personal connections to them.

Her memory is a reminder of how attuned children are to adults’ emotions. A father who’s angry at his boss, a mother upset over a marital quarrel, a teacher who cries over the death of the President. We must not assume that because they are young, children are oblivious to our feelings. As Cecille demonstrates, a child’s observation and the message she gleans from it can last a lifetime.