A Parable

Tony Kushner, in his remarkable screen play for Lincoln, wrote words that display President Lincoln’s talent as a humorous storyteller whose stories laid bare the foibles of human behavior.  One of the stories from the movie was about a lawyer from Jefferson City, the capitol of Missouri.  Hearing Daniel Day Lewis speak as Lincoln added to the nudge to the side of the head delivered by the story.

It seems in this story that there was a lawyer in Jefferson City who owned a parrot.  The parrot was given to announcing each day that this day would be the day that the world would end.  Always annoyed, the lawyer tolerated this daily drone until he could stand it no longer.  Upon reaching his limit the lawyer drew his revolver and ended the parrot’s life and, as Lincoln then said, thus making the prophesy true at least for the parrot.

Now having spent a couple of decades in Jefferson City working with the legislature and the state board of education, I couldn’t escape the parallels and metaphors of the story.  Thinking back, it would be easy to name legislators who droned on day after day repeating nonsense.  They would hang rigidly to positions whose truth and worth had as much value as the parrot’s warning about the end of the world.  But like a broken clock that is correct twice a day, the parrot who says something often enough can cover specious words as facts conjured in a magicians cloak.  None of us must look far to see that parrots spewing scripted talking points are far from extinct.

Clearly the story could give rise to lots of easy jokes at the expense of lawyers.  There’s no need for me to join that pursuit.  However, it is interesting that the story made a point of the annoyed shooter being an attorney.  Why not an engineer, a homemaker or a horse thief?  As a lawyer, Lincoln may have seen himself facing a few score of parrots in the House of Representatives chirping their various rigid positions.  He wanted to convince them, through reasoned argument, of a better vision for the future of the nation he so loved.  But in the process, there were probably times he simply wanted to silence the chirps, to make the droning stop.  He resorted to politics making use of some of its basest tactics hoping to silence the parrots and cause the right thing to be done.

Last evening, an opportunity to discuss education policy with a powerful person presented itself.  Quickly into the discussion, she related a complete change in her understanding of the role of public education in serving kids with special challenges.  She was quick to acknowledge that her new insight was driven by being personally confronted by the challenges of our system as she tried to assist her daughter in getting appropriate services and placement for her grandson. 

After years of attempting to craft public education policy, I remember too many times when the chirping drowned the mission.  An effective search for policies that balance the interests of so many people and institutions is a complicated, rough and tumble task.  Serving the needs of kids with special challenges in the public schools always ranks as one of the nattiest of issues.  No parent or grandparent of a special needs child wishes that every policy maker to have a child on the spectrum but any policy maker who chooses to remain blind to the realities for this group of citizens will become one of the parrots whose message is weak and false.

When it comes to the big issues, there is too much waiting for an all-knowing savior to appear.  Many believe that our failure to find resolution to our problems is because there are no Lincolns emerging to lead us out of our wilderness of laws and rhetoric.  Lincoln was a storyteller.  He was steeped in stories from the Bible and from his life experiences.  In so many ways, his legacy has endured because he was ordinary, human, homely and humble.  His doubts and his demons were real.  He immersed himself in reality by smelling the blood spilled by soldiers, both Union and Confederate, and by consoling the families of the fallen. He knew all people mattered and that the people must stay together, work together and be together as one nation.  He believed in "malice toward none, with charity for all."

Let’s call this blog the parable of the parrots.  Lincoln chose to listen to an inner voice and surrounded himself with people who were not parrots.  He could not kill the parrots but neither could he let their rhetoric become the law.  He had the fortitude to dismiss the chirping and focus on the work to be done.  His stories helped many others to be stronger than they thought they could be.  Those choices are available to each of us in all pursuits.

--td