In America, our actions don’t always follow our rhetoric, nor does our rhetoric always match up with our actions. But God bless us, anyway.

I love my country, but I cannot recall a time when parents were actually afraid for their children to listen to the president of the United States talk to them for fear of indoctrination. President Obama has skills, but even he isn’t that captivating. What in the world is going on?

Indoctrination is a strong word. It means to program or propagandize. Some say it means to brainwash. I don’t know of anyone with the ability to do that by delivering a single speech. Indoctrination is a process that takes time and repetition; certainly more than 18 minutes. Some of our greatest orators as presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., couldn’t indoctrinate people with one speech.  None of them were able to drive home a message in one shot that redirected everybody’s thinking.

I was shocked to learn that parents were afraid, first of all that the president would actually say something harmful to children. And second that he would be able to deliver a speech so convincing that elementary school kids would be so attentive and so mesmerized that they not only would remember his remarks over the next 12 years, but would actually take heed to them. The thought of children so enthralled by a speech given by anybody that would persuade them to fall in lockstep immediately is amusing to me. If so, we need to bottle those comments and place them everywhere.

The worst that could happen would be that students might actually be inspired to stay in school, work hard and graduate. With one of the highest school dropout rates in the nation, I’d hoped Mississippians would be pleased if the president or anyone else could inspire children to stay in school. It is a message that bears repeating by all and was launched by the Mississippi Department of Education in the “Get on the Bus” media campaign last year.

Parents assuredly are the greatest influence in the lives of their children. They’d be wise to remember that and act accordingly. No one can replace parental inspiration, unless children are neglected and parents fail to provide proper guidance.

I strongly believe parents should have the right to decide what their children are exposed to in school. However, to think that the president of the United States would actually try to bend the minds of children to his own will is farfetched. For what purpose? Children are too young to vote.

We need to rein in our paranoia or whatever it is that’s really bothering us. If as they say, an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, parents have nothing to worry about. Your children will be just as you want them to be, like you.

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Debra Anderson, a former Vicksburg resident, lives and works in Jackson. E-mail reaches her at debra800@hotmail.com.