The President’s Speech

I am disappointed to discover that my former high school has found a pretext not to air the President’s speech to school children this week. I should not be surprised, after all, Bucks County is a predominately Republican county, and Central Bucks School District is not the kind to take a stand on what is right.

Still, I’m highly disappointed. The past few weeks have been filled with bloviation and ignorance coming from the right. Hysterical charges of “socialist indoctrination” have filled the airwaves, with little substance, and ignoring that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to school children during their respective terms. Ignorance and hypocrisy. And it’s ugly.

All this before we even get to the substance of the President’s speech, which was published today.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Work hard, finish school, fail better, and when you fail, work harder, be responsible and accountable. Socialist indoctrination indeed. The right has gone off the deep-end, and it’s unfortunate that they’re being taken seriously by anyone at all, much less a school district. It’s good to know that Central Bucks School District values partisan politics and hateful ignorance over rational discourse and a message encouraging children to work hard and stay in school.

Below the cut is a Wordle word cloud of the President’s speech.

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