Until two of my daughters announced a night-before sleepover for their children, I couldn’t wrap my head around the Women’s March on Chicago.
Then I discovered that other family members planned on joining them Friday evening for a Sabbath dinner. After the traditional blessing of the wine and bread, the grown-ups would explain to the kids why they’ll carry signs Saturday protesting the inauguration of an American president.
The very idea turned me red with anger. Not toward them, but him.
How dare Donald Trump impose such an impossible task on my daughters!
Girls and women prevail in my brood. Of my 20 children and grandchildren, 14 are female. That makes us hypervigilant about inoculating the younger ones against the female stereotypes my generation grew up with. We correct boys who think that anatomy makes them superior to girls.
I was raised on the inverse proposition. “May my father’s memory be for a blessing,” as we say, but if a car cut him off, he’d yell: “Woman driver!” He never looked to see if that was true.
Children see the world in black and white. Explaining to them what a president does is easy. From their perspective, he’s the teacher. We are his students. He is a good guy. That’s why he is in charge.
So how do we tell them that, in this case, it’s more complicated?
They’ll see a man on television with his hand on a Bible, swearing to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.” We might hope that they won’t recognize him as the same man who bragged about grabbing a woman’s private parts.
Good luck with that. Little kids are like sponges, and my grandchildren are surrounded by news freaks. Their elders might muffle their response to televised images of Trump saying or doing outlandish things. But the little ones take note.
Our 10-year-old grandson draws political cartoons satirizing Trump’s antics. So his cousins know the slurs and ethnic put-downs with which he littered the campaign trail:
Mexicans, being rapists and criminals, have to be contained behind a great big wall.
Muslims should be subject to extreme vetting.
John McCain endured an enemy’s torture, but he’s not a hero, because he was captured.
By Trump’s example my grandchildren might think that there is nothing wrong with berating a beauty queen for putting on weight.
Or that it’s OK to parody the jerky movements of an impaired reporter. Why not? Trump refers to journalists as “scum.”
Children know it’s wrong to tell a lie. What are they to make of Trump, who claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and shouldn’t be president?
Trump only dropped the patently false accusation for the sake of his political ambitions. But I didn’t hear him say, “I’m sorry.”
When they were toddlers, I drilled my children in those two little words. They did the same with their children, also passing along “please,” “may I,” “excuse me,” “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”
Those phrases don’t seem to exist in Trump’s vocabulary. It’s rich in praises — for himself: He knows more about ISIS than the generals. He is so smart that he doesn’t need intelligence briefings.
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Other people he dismisses as “losers.” And this from a guy who has declared bankruptcy several times. Who stiffs contractors who build his casinos. Who shelled out $25 million to settle lawsuits by alums of Trump University who felt they were ripped off by bogus courses and pie-in-the-sky promises.
My daughter-in-law is Dominican-American. How can she explain to her two sons why Trump would nominate for attorney general a U.S. senator who said: “Almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming because they have a skill that would benefit us and indicate their likely success in our society.”
Those boys know that their mother is an electrical engineer who worked as a nanny while in graduate school. She helped put her brother through college, and sent money back home so her mother could own a home.
It’s no wonder that one of that woman’s sons puts his anger into political cartoons. One has Trump saying: “All I got from my father was a measly million dollars.”
Don’t get me wrong: This doesn’t mean I hope Trump flops as president. I wish him all the good luck in the world. If he can bring back jobs that have been outsourced, I’ll say: “Thank you!” Ditto if he can better protect us from deadly terrorist attacks.
But first, he has to face up to the burden he put on my daughters. He needs to acknowledge what they went through explaining to their children his misdeeds and foul language.
Doing that couldn’t be simpler. All it would take is saying: “I’m sorry. Please excuse me.”