Jay Bookman - Town hall protesters forget the lessons of kindergarten

Remember kindergarten and first grade? You may not think you remember — for some of us that was a long time ago — but you do. The lessons are engrained in all of us, or ought to be.

If you want to speak, you raise your hand and take your turn. If you’re talking loudly while the teacher or other students are trying to discuss something, if you disrupt the class, you’ll be told to leave. It’s pretty simple, basic stuff. Literally, kindergarten-level. It also happens to be the bare minimum standard of civil behavior required in a civil society.

And if you cannot behave by those rules, you forfeit your right to participate.

Again, it’s all simple, basic stuff.

The people who are marching into town halls across the country to chant and shout down other voices have not forgotten those rules. They’re just frightened. They’re scared not by health care reform, but by the free and open and civil exchange of facts and opinion. They want their voice — but only their voice — to be heard. It is, they have been told, the only valid voice, the only “real American” voice. They are trying to impose their own point of view through volume and force of emotion and numbers because apparently they do not trust their ability to carry the day in a civil discussion.

The real irony is that many in those crowds believe themselves to be saving America, a holy cause that somehow makes them exempt from the usual rules. Well, America is not defined by how it decides to deliver health care to its people. It’s an important issue, but it is not fundamental to who we are.

From the very beginning, America has been defined by the way it governs itself, by the ability of its people — all of its people — to express their opinions openly and to listen to and speak to those whom they elect to represent them. That is the fundamental thing. That is the thing that must be and will be defended regardless of the outcome of this particular political battle.

The behavior we’re seeing at town halls across the country is childish, petty and destructive to the basic civil contract by which self-government operates. And that petulant childishness is never more apparent than when someone tries to actually enforce the basic rules, when figures of authority or even other Americans insist that the rules of discourse — the rules we all learned as five- and six-year-olds — be honored.

Suddenly these aggressive, loud agitators are transformed, at least in their own minds, into victims of censorship and repression.

Well, two words, ladies and gentlemen: Grow up.

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