What kind of adults are we teaching our children to be?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what imprint the Trump era will leave on today’s children, their outlook on the future and their behavior going forward. Art offers some clues.
There are very few films that I have seen that have left searing images so indelibly planted that I find them difficult to shake. “The White Ribbon” is one such film. Written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, the 2009 film depicts the residents of a northern German village, dominated by a baron, sometime around 1914, before World War I.
The inhabitants of the village, young and old, are sliding down a slippery slope of moral decline. A number of men in leadership positions are particularly reprehensible in their treatment of women and children. Several preadolescent children appear to be budding sociopaths who perform serial acts of cruelty.
Movie critic Mick Lasalle remarked that in the film, “no child is trained to become a martinet, and no one says anything about a master race. Rather, the kids, from their elders, get quiet lessons in moral absolutism, sternness, emotional violence and heartlessness.”
The film suggests the children were unwittingly being primed to carry out the atrocities that would later come to characterize their lives as young adults in Nazi Germany. As children they lived in a forbidding environment in which they practiced the brutality
they were routinely exposed to.
It leads me to wonder what present-day America might be a prequel for.
We live in a time when thousands of migrant children, mostly asylum seekers from Central America, have been separated by the U.S. government from their parents at the southern border, hundreds of them still not reunited.
It is a time when, thanks to body cams and social media, we have collectively witnessed multiple killings of unarmed men and women of color at the hands of police. What had been long suspected is now confirmed.
It is a time when white supremacists demonstrate in the streets of America carrying swastikas and Confederate battle flags and wearing t-shirts with 6MWE (Six Million Wasn’t Enough) printed on them, awaiting a call to arms after being told by their leader — the U.S. president — “stand back and stand by.”
It is a time when the most powerful man in the world has pardoned war criminals convicted of mass murder, corrupt congressmen and others who committed felonies by lying to protect the president from criminal exposure.
Lasalle mused about what “The White Ribbon” foreshadowed: “It didn't have to be Nazism that took hold a generation later. It might have been any ideology that encourages blind devotion that flatters people's vanity by telling them they're intelligent for not thinking and that they're virtuous for believing themselves better than their fellow citizens.”
Today we have tens of millions of Americans who believe that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” simply because they have been told repeatedly that it was, despite all evidence and judicial findings to the contrary, including by the Supreme Court.
These millions of true believers account for multiple millions more American children who breathe in the same air that they breathe every day. Voltaire remarked, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” So what will become of the children of the Trump era as they move from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood, after having ingested a steady diet of grievances, disinformation, falsehoods, conspiracy theories and fractured fairy tales?
President Franklin Roosevelt held fireside chats over the radio to reassure Americans during a perilous time in our history. His manner communicated self-assurance during times of anguish and uncertainty. Trump uses social media and mass rallies to spin yarns and cajole and win over his base like a deranged Dale Carnegie.
For me, the lesson of “The White Ribbon” is not so much what it foreshadows about WWII Germany, but the question it raises now: What is today’s America making our children morally susceptible to?