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School Days: Propaganda
Something on Ricochet recently reminded me of an event that happened when I was a schoolgirl.
I must have been in 3rd or 4th grade when my class watched a video at school about the inevitable destruction of the world coming soon where we would have no food because all the plants and animals would die due to humanity’s neglect. Then we would die from acid rain, complete with a vivid little enactment of people dying from acid rain. The only way to stop this Certain Death was to start telling grownups to tell people to stop cutting down the rain-forests. I went home bawling to Mom about acid rain death and rainforests. It took her some time to calm me down and I’m fairly certain she got a hold of someone at the school over that.
This got me thinking that most people my age are environmentalist/activists to some degree. I get weird looks or lectures for not recycling. I’ve had people remove me from Facebook for making a comment to the effect of “You might want to get all the facts before quitting your job to go protest for NoDAPL”. I’ve had less educated friends act like I’m a complete idiot because I didn’t “get” the rhetoric behind the Women’s March, or vote for Bernie Sanders, or attend the Science March as a woman in the STEM field.
Why is this?
I remember after school programming and Saturday morning kid shows that included Captain Planet, The Magic School Bus, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. We had movies that preached about environmental issues and animal rights such as Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Rescuers Down Under, and Free Willy. We celebrated Earth Day every year at school with each class doing a skit about humanity’s rampant destruction of the planet and we took pledges with teachers to “fight against environmental destruction” for the “good of the planet”.
When I was in school and all this was happening, it didn’t seem out of place to me. I also didn’t buy in hook, line, and sinker. There were a few times I came home to ask Mom if Dad was really a bad person because he burned off fields after harvesting or sprayed fertilizer on his crops. Why? Because Mrs. So-and-so said that farmers were contributing to the destruction of the planet. She would always assure me “No, your daddy’s a good man who works really hard to make sure his family doesn’t go without.” How could I possibly think any less of my dad when all he’d ever been was a good, hard-working man who loved me? The short answer was: I couldn’t. All my family were farmers and I, myself, helped out on the farm. I knew I certainly wasn’t a bad person, so they couldn’t be bad people either. Any time some teacher at school said farmers were bad, it just contributed to my ongoing problem with authority because I thought to myself well, she’s a liar because farmers are good.
The environmentalist propaganda started when I was very young, but it didn’t get me in the end. I truly believe my primary saving grace was growing up in a strong nuclear family uniquely full of love, honesty, and responsibility with bonds that couldn’t be broken by lies. I hope to provide that same home environment for my future children.
Published in Group Writing
Obviously by Raising Awareness ™ they managed to prevent it before it happened.
Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, The Rifleman … all those birds were running into quicksand all the time. There were patches of quicksand on the farm in Ohio — you had to watch your step out back.
And Blazing Saddles. Quick sand in Blazing Saddles!
I concur. Seemed like quick sand was going to get us all. And I used to have nightmares about the Six Million Dollar Man fighting Bigfoot.
Me too. Stuff of nightmares.
I forgot about killer bees! I was so scared of those. I’m grateful I moved to a private school before any more nightmare-inducing schemes were perpetrated on us.
Great call. I forgot about that scene… it’s been a few years.
The idea of killer bees makes my skin crawl. I’m allergic to regular bumblebees and wood bees.
Heck, I went to Catholic school until fifth grade, and I still got an earful. I thought acid rain was actually happening, not something that might happen. I also remember when the ozone hole was going to irradiate everybody unless we stopped using hairspray.*
*To be fair, this was the 80’s, so society could have done with a bit less of that anyway.
What these people don’t understand is that what they really need to be protesting is the agricultural revolution.
There’s a perfect aphorism on this topic from William Blake:
“The cut worm forgives the plow.”
Has much wider significance as well.
Wood Beez?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIb53kn9fC4
Hehehe. I just watched it 2 weeks ago for the first time. Fresh in my mind.
There really was acid rain. We saw the effects of it high up in the Smoky Mountains. It weakened the spruce and fir forests and made them vulnerable to insects. Then non-native insect invasive species arrived in the 1980s and decimated the forests.
The air was already on the way to being cleaned up from the Clean Air Act of 1970 (signed by Nixon). Of course, the Environmental Protection Agency went to work developing all sorts of regulations to extend its reach, but one thing they did was make TVA burn lower-sulfur coal. The allowable sulfur content got dramatically reduced by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.
Acid rain is still a little bit of a problem for sensitive ecosystems in the higher elevations. The forests are recovering in areas where the rangers spray for insects. But the mountaintops don’t look anything like what they looked like when I was a boy.
When I was a boy scout you could hike the Boulevard Trail to Mt. LeConte and be in shade so deep that it was gloomy at noon, all the way up. Now you need your sunscreen and big floppy hat for protection. The young trees shoot up to about fifteen feet high or so, but by the time they reach that age they get killed by the insects (balsam wolly adelgid is one of the culprits). There is no deep shade to be found.
I was thinking that acid rain had something to do with high-sulfur coal but wasn’t confident in my memory and didn’t have time to look it up.
Right on.
A couple of questions:
a) Who talked You into watching it (I’m guessing Husband or some other dude)?
2) What did You think? Funny?
I imagine it is a rather different experience with today’s sensitivities.
If memory serves, soft coal can cause it. I recall something about damage to the Statue of Liberty due to acid rain with the centennial restoration effort. I haven’t heard of an instance of acid rain in the United States since the late 80’s.
It was in a tangent topic in a thread. I can’t remember who, but I didn’t “get a joke” and the guys told me it was from BS. “It’s twoo, it’s twoo.”
I thought it was good, funny. Very slapstick. So many references to other parts of culture. Some of the racial comments were strikingly inappropriate for our time. It was definitely a snapshot of an era now gone.
Ms. Snapp,
Your original post is exactly on target. Public schools have screened out religious content and replaced the students’ religions with their own Environmentalist Panentheism. They teach our children to worship Mother Earth through the sacraments of recycling and activism.
OMG, actual thinking. Proof that it runs counter to the enviro dogma which intends for you to simply react.
I always enjoyed my per-capita statistics when my household exceeded 10 in headcount. 30 mpg is great, but if you have to make 2 trips to haul everyone it’s like getting 15 mpg. So all who groaned about my 15 passenger van were subjected to torrid questioning to determine their impact on the environment per person. House square footage, $ per month in food, gas mileage, electrical consumption, they took their consumption and divided by 4. I took mine and multiplied times .1 and won in almost every category.
My evil intent was not to shame them for their consumption, I’m a free market guy, spend any way you like. I was trying to get them to mind their own business. It generally worked.
You’re right. But if one was seven years old and religiously watched “Tarzan” every Saturday morning, one might become convinced that quicksand was gonna get you sooner or later. Not that it ever scared me, though… Not me. No sir.
I wondered at the time why Church Point, Louisiana seemed to be the one place where none of these awful things existed.
Well, now that I’ve been thinking about it, I’m kind of shocked that even this much would happen in a small town public school in a Southern red state. I can’t imagine what that time period was like for students in more liberal communities. Did you experience anything like this over in Pokey?
I wondered the same thing about Northeast Arkansas. The worst thing we had was mud and bumblebees. Well, and tornadoes.
No, but Pokey was a long time ago. Environmental awareness only made its initial appearance when I was 10th grade, which was after we had moved to East Tennessee.
With my sons in West Tennessee schools it very much depended on the teacher and principal of the school. The books and materials they got were awful, but good teachers simply skipped the worst of the fearmongering stuff. But recycling was a more paramount commandment than anything other than ‘no tolerance for anything sharp.’ It was not environmentalism but other things that pushed us into homeschooling.
I compared notes with some friends at church and they say that the textbooks are actually better than they were ten years ago. I attribute that to the positive influence of the Texas State Board of Education on textbook publishers. The schools still get a ton of environmentalism stuff.
A few years ago an engineer friend retired and took a retirement gig as a substitute teacher for middle school science. He was great and became the go-to substitute very quickly. He reported his distress at the way the school principal made all the middle school kids watch AlGore’s movie.
I haven’t seen his movie but I’ve heard it’s atrocious.
They are pHunny!
As for the quicksand, I ran across this a while back:
Yep. Today, if a Muslim student is holding a knife to a Christian student’s neck and the Christian is saying the Lord’s Prayer, the Christian will get a detention for prayer in school. A posthumous detention.
When I was in middle school, we were shown The Day After, but what really frightened me was Fire Prevention Week in the 2nd grade. Gave me night terrors and laid the foundation for some much-needed lessons on perspective.
My favorite bit of attempted indoctrination (in retrospect): that fraudulent Disney movie about lemming mass suicide paired with a film about human overpopulation.
This conversation is part of a Group Writing series with the theme “School”, planned for the whole month of June. If you follow this link, there’s more information about Group Writing. The schedule is updated to include links to the other conversations for the month as they are posted. If you’d like to try your hand at Group Writing, consider signing up for July’s topic, Family!