Flashback 2012: If they go to school, kids will know who Pulaski was

     There are so many tragedies manifesting themselves right now — a deepening war, a shuddering economy, a corrupt and cruel American government bent on its own enrichment and establishing permanence in power, for starters — this one might seem far down the tree of disaster.

     But seeing how vibrant young immigrants come to America and become the same hidebound haters and status-starved revanchists found among the native born, the subject is important enough to merit a reminder. The Italian old-guard claws at the vanished majesty of Columbus, and embraces stone cold haters like Trump when he supports them in their self-destructive folly. 

    It is natural that both strands would come together, as Trump placed a statue of Columbus on the White House grounds Sunday, to show his hand. You'd think it would chill the bones of any conscientious immigrant. No doubt they dug it. As for Poles...

    This ran when Rahm Emanuel suggested that Chicago Public School children go to school on two make-believe ethnic holidays. Spoiler alert: CPS dropped Pulaski Day as a holiday in 2012.  Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day in Illinois in 2017, and CPS decided not to make it a school holiday in 2019. Now if we could only work on summer...

 

    On the base of the Dante Award that the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans gave to me at a lovely luncheon two years ago is the inscription, “Never be a timid friend to truth.”
     Those words appear, more or less, in the 17th canto of Paradiso, the middle of the third book of the Divine Comedy, a particularly beautiful chapter containing Dante’s famous lines about exile: “Bitter is the taste of another man’s bread, and hard is the way going up and down another man’s stairs.”
     The motto on the award ­— a life-size bust of Dante — isn’t exactly what Dante wrote. He is torn whether to speak the truth and risk angering his friends or keep quiet and risk oblivion. “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth,” he tells his patron Cangrande, “I fear that I shall not live on.”
     Which is a fair summation of the thought that went through my head when I saw that representatives of Chicago’s proud Italians and equally proud Poles were objecting to Rahm Emanuel’s plan to send kids to school on Columbus Day and Pulaski Day.
     “Part of an ongoing campaign to diminish ethnic recognition in the city,” said my pal and lunchmate Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee.
     “A slap in the face,” said Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Polish American Association, whom I don’t know but I’m sure I would like if I did.
     The polite thing to do would be to cough into a fist and ignore them, confident the mayor will not cave under pressure. If he can frog-march the teachers union, he can handle the old guard ethnic guilds too. In the delicate kabuki of ethnic and racial politics, caring is best left to those with credentials.
     “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth. . . . ” A "timido amico." Dante doesn’t add “regarding my own people,” does he? Besides, I’m sort of an honorary Italian already, due to the award, and my ancestors came from Poland; my grandfather was born in Bialystok, and even though some Polish readers seem to be unwilling to accept that a Jew can be Polish, I don’t see the conflict.
     So here goes . . .
     Our school system betrays the children it’s supposed to teach in many ways, but the worst is the abuse of low expectations. It’s always easier for a teacher to show a film.
     All sorts of secondary side values undermine education, from our state’s messed up finances to meddling parents to antique customs that should have been scrapped long ago. Why do we kick kids out of school every summer for nearly three months? So they can go into the fields and help bring in the crops. Only guess what? They don’t do that anymore. We dismiss them anyway, for a summer of Nintendo. Not all bad, of course; there’s also Little League and family vacations. But it isn’t a rational system.
     Columbus Day and Pulaski Day are similar relics, inserted into the calendar as a sop to large ethnic communities that craved honor and belonging. And that’s fine. Human nature. Have a parade, close the Recorder of Deeds office, put on a hat with a feather and go enjoy a glass of grappa or Slivovitz.
     But school is serious. Poor education is both a major cause and serious symptom of half of our problems. If you want to put a finger on why America lags further and further behind the rest of the world, you’d have a smorgasbord of reasons: broken health care, crumbling infrastructure, knee-buckling debt. But a wheezing, feeble education system designed to babysit the lowest achievers would be the ice sculpture in the center.
     We’re not supposed to make ethnic generalizations anymore, though everybody does. But if I had to use one word to describe what I consider being Italian means, its essence, I would say, “boldness.” I wish my pals at the Joint Civic Committee would have asked themselves: What would Galileo have done? Add a day of school or keep the day off so kids can hang around the mall? How about Columbus? Would he let the crew sit on deck playing cards because it’s a saint’s day, or would he have them hoist the sails and get moving toward the New World?
     And for Poles, the word I use is “hard-working.” We get up in the morning and plow. If you’d told my grandpa it was Pulaski Day and so he should sit on his butt, he’d have laughed and said, “No work, no pay.”
     Dante is advised — spoiler alert! — to “forswear all falsehood,” vex the shameful, and “then let him who itches scratch.”
     Good advice. So if you want my Dante Award back, I’ll box it up. But kids aren’t going to learn about Columbus or Pulaski or much of anything else while on vacation. Send them to school, and let the adults slake their thirst for honors somewhere else.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 19, 2012