“The Fine Print”, by Michael Schrader

GOVERNORS ARE PEOPLE TOO!

(Written 02 December 1998. Published in the Neighborhood Journal. Posted 25 August 2009.)

One of the interesting things I am discovering about substitute teaching is that sometimes you never really know who it is that you are "teaching." Since your assignment is to pinch hit where needed, you see so many different students that they start to become mere names on a piece of paper. (In fact, sometimes it is downright challenging just being able to take roll, because you really can't put faces with names.)

Right before the Thanksgiving break, I filled in for a couple of days at Central High School. (Yes, THE Central High School) Reading through the rolls almost sounded like a Who's Who of Central Arkansas. Almost. You see, to my cynical mind, the familiarity of the names was mere coincidence. Influential people, after all, do not put their kids in public schools, especially schools with a history of racial problems like Central. At least, not in my experiences growing up in Saint Louis. In Saint Louis, names like McDonnell and Busch are found at very elite, expensive, and exclusive private schools, private schools so exclusive that to this day I cannot tell you exactly where they are located, and my family has been in Saint Louis since the Civil War. Yes, that exclusive.

I found out, however, that things are not that way in Arkansas. I found out that students with names like Huckabee and Tucker are actually the children of the famous Arkansans, or should I say governors, of the same name.

When I found out the children of governors and former governors would be attending "my" classes, I thought that it was pretty cool that a governor would send his child to the same school that the ordinary common citizen sends his child to. Yes, governors are people, too. After all, being the governor, you could send your child to any school you wanted to--what school would turn away the prestige of the having as one of it's students the governor's child? I think it's a credit to the governors past and present that they choose not to isolate their children from the world around them, but choose instead to allow their offspring to experience the world as everyone else does, both good and bad.

Let me just say that from my limited personal interaction with Huckabees and Tuckers, no matter what you think about the governors' politics, they seem to be doing a bang-up job as fathers. I half-expected kids who would be strutting around, saying "Look at me, I'm hot stuff". After all, I grew up with the children of the owner of a football team, children of a local television personality, children of hot-shot doctors, and that is exactly what they did. And, as everybody knows, kids tend to be their "true" selves for substitute teachers, because they can. (They know that there really is not much a sub can do about it, either.)

Instead, what I experienced were decent, polite, thoughtful children; not really what I expected. I'll be the first to admit that, all in all, I do not care for the governors', past and present, politics that much. but, is it fair to make blanket generalizations about the men themselves based on their political philosophies? Which is more important--some political philosophy that will be forgotten in a decade or being a good parent?

We seem to place too much emphasis on politics. A governor is much more than his politics. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

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