Some time after 9/11, on the now defunct CBC TV program counterSpin, a young law student launched a virulent diatribe against America. By a very odd coincidence, at a recent social gathering I had heard the same tirade, word for actual word, spewn out by a militantly left-wing academic—the law student’s professor, as it turned out.
That political Stepford Wife was a reminder of how intellectually vulnerable even 20-something young people can be to charismatic mentors. I was reminded of this truth by John Geiger’s commentary in these pages last week, in which he recounted the story of an adolescent B.C. boy, Luke McAndless-Davis, who urged a boycott of McDonald’s restaurants over “U.S. bullying in the ongoing softwood lumber dispute.”
Luke’s boycott idea was exploited by NDP politicians and unions, not to mention the CBC, on whose airwaves the young man proudly exhibited a rote anti-Americanism: “The U.S. is just being a bully to us and keeps punching us … It’s just sick and wrong.”
From all accounts, Luke’s parents are proud of his initiative, actively encouraging his youthful plunge into activism. I don’t know whether Luke’s project inspired parental involvement, or vice versa. Perhaps it’s a saw-off. But it’s unlikely Luke would have taken this route if he weren’t growing up in a politically engaged household.
Whenever I see kids involved in political activism, I wonder how much influence has been exerted over them by their parents’ ambitions. I wonder if those adults respect the line between encouragement of their child’s instinct for fair play, which means values-building through discussion of all the factors at work on a given issue, and appropriation of the “empty vessel” so tantalizingly willing to be filled with their wisdom.
Some children fulfill their parents’ hopes and expand on them. Preston Manning and Stephen Lewis, whose fathers were political zealots, continued in their diametrically opposed footsteps. Justice Minister Irwin Cotler ascribes his career in human rights activism to his immigrant parents’ unremitting emphasis on tzedakah (justice). Others, like Naomi Klein, rebel against a fervently ideological home in youth—her parents are actively engaged PC leftists, while she, by her own admission, was a materialistic “mall rat” as a teenager—then return to the fold with super-sized dedication as an adult.
On the other hand, chickens can come home to roost in unexpected ways. An excellent example is Pulitzer-prize wining biographer and public intellectual David Horowitz, once a diehard socialist, who transformed himself into a muscular neo-Conservative and the scourge of the academic Left from his pulpit at the Web-based opinion journal FrontPageMagazine. Horowitz’s Stalinist parents had dragged him as a child to Communist-organized May Day parades, and constantly drilled him in the finer points of Marxism.
In his memoir Radical Son, the prosperous Horowitz recalls with amazement from his beautiful California coast home the purity of his father’s rigorous Marxism: He refused to buy a house when prices were rock bottom, as he shrank from being a “capitalist” property owner, then watched with bitter disillusion as his “comrades” capitulated to the lure of home ownership—and financial security—while Horowitz pere remained a forever-nervous tenant.
It took Horowitz many years and the hard realities of life amongst his radical Berkeley peers, such as the murderous, anti-Semitic Black Panthers, before certain truths about the Left he had for so long uncritically supported sank in, and with that the depressing realization that he had been robbed of his youthful right to freedom of intellectual inquiry.
As an adult, he exorcized his past with a vengeance: “I understood that my parents’ political religion was really the center of their moral life.
This meant—without their necessarily intending it—that the condition of their parental love was that I embrace their political faith.”
Who knows? Twenty years from now, Luke McAndress-Davis may rebel against the pious certainties of his childhood milieu, and end up as a marketing maven at McDonald’s head office. Parents who feed their kids Happy Meals made only with ingredients grown in their own back yards may find their adult children developing a palate for formerly forbidden, that is, genetically modified fare.
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