Speeches I Never Gave--#3--Applying Our Own Teflon

(This has no dateline attached to it, but must be, as you'll see, somewhere in the vicinity of 2005 or 2006--when there was a conversation, however brief, on how the NEA should deal with the Iraq War in terms of applying it to our work. I believe that I cannot divulge the gist of that conversation, having had it behind closed doors, but I can divulge how I thought about it then--and what I wrote about it--again, revealed here, for the first time.)

Where does the war fit--where is it supposed to fit--in terms of what we're supposed to be about?

The voice of reason, of perspective, but most of all--of calmness.

We aren't going to get anywhere by outscaring the rest of the world--or ourselves. It's way past time to begin a new conversation about national politics--not in an absolutist sense, but in the sense of degrees of engagement in the things that really matter to all of us--that give us security with confidence and without fear.

The best way to conbat fear is to demonstrate imperviousness to it--that we have heeded the angel's advice not to be afraid, that the news is good, that there is an opportunity to be had if we would just embrace it. We must heed Lee Iacocca's admonition to apply our own Teflon to what we say and do--to stop worrying, as it were, that as he put it, "some bobblehead at Fox News will call us a name."

If you're right about what you're advocating for, you'll have all the Teflon you'll need.

The connection of the immigration issue to the fear of the unseen, the foreign, the boogeyman who may easily have slipped into the country--when in fact the incidents that caused as least as much trauma, the ones from which others have committed acts at least as senseless if not as destructive, were domestically-based and took place before 9/11--Oklahoma City and Columbine.

We have exerted nearly as much control over a repetition of 9/11 as we can, absent a total compromise of our civil liberties (which has been attempted, to some avail, temporarily); not perfectly, for it is likely to take place again. But our greatest enemies, the greatest forces for discouraging the promise of America, continue to lurk from within--the insistence upon ultra-right wing groups to spread hate and intolerance; the stultifying substitution of religion for any substantive inquiry, stopping scholarship and research (on stem cells, for instance) at its door.

All of this continues to speak for the need to reinstitute a conversation on national priorities. And that is why the NEA can and must lead that conversation. We are uniquely positioned to do so because:

1. We are the largest union in the country.
2. We represent those thinkers who are greatly respected: Teachers.
3. We represent an undeniable priority ourselves: Public education.
4. We can, by initiating such a conversation, position ourselves as being other than self-serving--though, admittedly, the window will be open to being accused of being exactly that.

But that is the moment that we must be certain of the justifiability of our actions, to create our own Teflon by leveraging the support that we know exists out there. It is, in short, time that we stop wringing our hands with worry about criticism that we know clearly exists, and just do it. If we're in jail, it's only one of our own making.

The gatekeepers of a new legacy, of a new tradition, of a new America--are in this room. They're counting on us, and we are getting ready for the challenges.

That's what we're doing here and what we're going to be doing once we return home: to create, once again and as long as we're here, a great public school for every child.

Mister Mark